Review #226: Touch my Katamari

 The king's bad day.

 You thought Katamari was gone, well, you thought wrong. Touch my Katamari is the latest, and last(so far), installment of the Katamari Damacy series, and it actually introduces new mechanics into the mix!

 As per usual, the King of all Cosmos is up to his usual antics, this time around people have made him feel as if he isn't what he used to be, so he is gonna prove them wrong. How? By sending his son, the Prince, roll up stuff into his Katamari and turn it into stars. There's also a sub-story surrounding Goro, an otaku trying to improve himself. The art direction has changed a bit, it's a bit rougher and looks like a hand-drawn cartoon. All in all, I liked it. The art and the dialogue mix very well into some truly hilarious cut scenes, I actually found myself laughing out loud!

 For the uninitiated, in the Katamari Damacy series, you play as the Prince as he rolls around his Katamari, rolling over stuff smaller than the Katamari will make stuff stick to it, eventually increasing the size of the Katamari and allowing him to roll up bigger stuff. This new game actually has a couple of new things that I really liked. Firstly, controls, you can either play with the classic dual-analog rolling controls, or the new, simplified controls that relegate moving to the left analog stick and the camera to the right analog stick. The new settings make rolling around the Katamari a breeze, it's gonna be hard to go back to the classic setup! There's also optional touch-screen controls, but they are imprecise, so I didn't even bother. The one, one thing I had issue with was jumping, which is done, supposedly, by tapping on the upper half of the screen. I couldn't get it to work consistently, but at least it never was a necessity.

 The new features, which seem like gimmicks at first, are really fun and a great addition to the series. By using the touch screen or the touch pad behind the Vita, you can stretch or squeeze the Katamari. Besides covering more area, they also have different speeds, stretched Katamari is slow but covers a huge area, while the squeezed Katamari is very fast, at the expense of a lower, ground-level coverage. Using these mechanics is never a necessity, but not only are they fun, they are useful.

 As much as I liked the new controls and the new mechanics, the game has a handful of drawbacks that really play against it. For instance, cousins and presents are back, but these only appear on a level after you replay it once and twice it respectively. In previous games, both the Cousin and the present would be hidden on a level from the get-go. It seems like a minor nitpick, but they used this to pad the game. I finished the game, and then immediately, because it was so fun, played it again to unlock every cousin and then.... I immediately played through the entire game again to unlock every present, because it was so fun! Where's the problem? These three playthroughs, some that had repeated attempts on certain levels since I couldn't find the present... totalled to 4 hours. FOUR. HOURS. And on these four hours, I came across just 9 Fan Damacis(More on this later). It's a short game, there's 12 stages, which also amount to only 12 other Cousins. And since I'm on the topic of Cousins, there's no way to know if you found a level's Cousin and/or present, so I hope you have a good memory.

 The game has two forms of currency, Candy and Fan Damacis. Candy I approve of, you earn it after every successful level, and it can be used to purchase Eternal(no time limit) and Katamari Drive(Sped up!) variations of every stage, as well as music tracks or clothes for the King of all Cosmos(If that's your thing). Candy is a good way to add replay value to the game. But then there's the Fan Damacis.. these may, or may not, spawn on a level, and they are used to access the 'free' DLC. There's about 10 DLC missions, and from what I saw the add new areas and what not, but in order to open up these levels you need 10 Fan Damacis. Yeah, I couldn't be arsed to grind these bastards, particularly when you can buy them for 0.99 a piece. Microtransactions in a handheld game, no thanks. Maybe one day a tenth Fan Damacy will spawn and I will actually try one of the many DLC levels, but I'm not gonna encourage this practice. On the other hand, there's paid DLC for old music tracks, that DLC on the other hand is a better practice, it's optional and it's just aesthetic, and fans of the older soundtracks will get a kick out of it.

 There's a few other things about the game that bothered me a bit. The draw distance is a bit... short. You'll see objects pop in and out of view fairly often, and fairly close to the Prince. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's something that's hard not to notice. Other Katamari games would feature a 'Collection' book, that would catalog every single thing that you rolled into your Katamari, that has been reduced into the 'Curio Book', that only accounts for rare items. And lastly, and more personal, levels feel a tad smaller than what I'm used to. I liked how there are no loading times for when the Katamari grows, but no stage reaches the huge scale that Me & My Katamari would reach on later levels, heck, it doesn't even get as small as Me & My Katamari would get on the earlier levels!

 As far as the presentation is concerned, it's top-notch. This is the best looking Katamari game I've ever played(Not that it matters in such a minimalist game!). The Cut-scenes deserve to be mentioned again, they are gorgeous. The soundtrack isn't as strong as the other games I've played in the series, but even then, it's still really good. Voice acting is excellent as well, what little there is.

 As a whole, Touch My Katamari is disappointing. The new control scheme, the lack of loading times when transitioning sizes and the new mechanics are all welcome additions to the series, I'd say that they make the game even more fun that it's ever been... but it lacks in content in which to make use of it. The game is over before you know it, stages aren't as impressive as previous games, and the microtransactions are plain disgusting. At least, even at its worst, a Katamari game is still a pretty fun game.
 6.5 out of 10