I remember importing the Japanese version of Katamari Damacy in 2004, and now, over two decades later, we finally have a new game, and it’s mostly good.
The premise of Katamari Damacy has you, the Prince, roll a ball (the aforementioned katamari) and collect objects to grow the ball bigger so your dad, the King of All Cosmos, can repopulate the sky with stars.
Most of the early levels have you start out tiny, but by the end of the game, you were rolling up countries into a giant ball of everything.
It was a unique functional premise, and it worked really well. Controls were via the dual analogue sticks and laid out like a tank’s.
So, both sticks forward moved you forward, and flipping them in opposite directions would make you turn. You also had a boost, where you would flick the sticks in opposing directions quickly.
Broadly speaking, that’s all true for this new iteration. However, there are a lot of new elements here, some good and others not so much.
This time around, the King has seemingly destroyed the Earth, so now you have to travel through time to rebuild each era by, you guessed it, rolling a lot of stuff into a ball so your dad can turn it into a new star.
The good news is that you have all manner of power-ups, like magnets (shown above) and rockets, that make collecting everything a lot more straightforward. Slowing down time is also another useful little power-up that’s included.
As for the bad news, well, in a functional sense, it’s somewhat two-fold; the first issue is that the King is now super chatty. I thought this was just the hint system, so I turned it off, but he still kept popping up constantly.
The reason this is an issue is that when the King speaks to you in-game, he takes up most of the middle of the screen, and you can’t really see much of what is going on. He also doesn’t actually say much in the way of anything helpful, either, so it’s just quite annoying.
The second issue is that in the older games, most of the levels were pretty chill and about growing the size of your katamari. Occasionally, you’d have a more specific objective where you’d have to gather certain objects. The timer was also a lot less strict and afforded exploration, which was fun because all the levels were completely bananas in terms of their content.
Here, though, almost every level is about capturing certain types of items, with the initial amount the baseline grade for each objective (topping out at a typical S rank). Much of the chill fun of just rolling along has been lost in a mad dash to find certain items quickly. This is also compounded with golden crowns, which you also need to find to unlock later levels.
Thankfully, this approach calms down later on, and there are some genuinely fun levels tucked away, but I feel that much of the charm of the initial games on the PlayStation 2 has been somewhat lost.
The other issue, and this one is thankfully optional, is that the new music just isn’t all that great. It’s a bit too anisong-esque, and while that has its place, the soundtracks to the older games were amazingly eclectic. The good news is that you can select the music you want, including tracks from the older games, so this is far less of a problem.
This may all sound rather damning, but there’s still a good game here, once you get into the groove of each level and start opening up different eras to travel between.
Overall, Once Upon A Katamari is a big expansion over its earlier iterations, but with the added complexity and stricter time limits, some of the charm and fun of just exploring has been lost. This is still a solid entry in the series, but certainly not one of my favorites.
Once Upon A Katamari
Platform: PlayStation 5 (Reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Developer: Rengame
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Released: 24th October 2025
Price: $39.99
Score: 7/10
Disclosure: Bandai Namco sent me a copy of this game for the purposes of this review.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
