We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie review

I’m all for a dense RPG with lots of systems to dive into, but sometimes the simplest games are the best. I’m sure we’ve all lost a few hours chasing high scores on Tetris or Pac-Man, and that doesn’t have to stop just because the days of spending any spare change on arcade machines is over. The Katamari series has been mixing simple gameplay with pure and unfiltered ridiculousness for almost twenty years now, and has brought a lot of joy into my life. It turns out there’s one of these colourful titles I missed though, and that’s fortunately now been rectified thanks to We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie.

If you haven’t played a Katamari game before, the concept might sound a little unusual. You play as a little green fella called The Prince, and the aim of each stage is to push a ball (the Katamari) around the environment and roll up as many objects as possible. As the Katamari grows due to the amount of cakes, bottles of super glue and small children stuck to it you’ll be able to assimilate bigger objects, usually to a fairly ridiculous degree. It’s an extremely satisfying process, only made more entertaining by the silliness of the environment, lovely (updated) visuals and wacky soundtrack.

Controlling The Prince and his big ball of bits is rather unusual too, but once you get used to it the control scheme really works. To move forwards you hold both sticks forward, and can steer by releasing a stick or turn sharper by pushing the sticks in opposite directions. There are a few fancier manoeuvres too, like a dash done by pushing the sticks in opposite directions repeatedly. I know it sounds a little odd, but in the end it gives you a great deal of control over your Katamari.

You might be wondering why The Prince is so dedicated to rolling up objects. Well once a Katamari reaches a certain size it can be sent into orbit to become a planet obviously. This time around though The King of All Cosmos isn’t sending you on missions with the purpose of making planets, in a very meta twist you’re actually just taking requests from fans of the series and the planets are more of an afterthought. It’s nonsense at its finest, and the King especially is a truly wonderful character to interact with.

Once you’ve found a fan to help, you’ll be sent to a level to roll up some bits and bobs. Your standard stage of We Love Katamari Reroll sees you dropped into a location like a school, bedroom or zoo, and given a time limit to reach a certain size. It almost always feels like there’s easily enough time to accomplish this task, but at the end of each level you’ll set high scores and be generally moaned at by the King of All Cosmos for your poor performance which might make you go for a replay.

As someone who hadn’t played this particular game in the series, I was surprised by how many stages of We Love Katamari Reroll strayed from this tried and true path though. There was one stage where I had to light a campfire with my Katamari which meant avoiding water and constantly moving to keep the fire burning, in another stage my Katamari was replaced by a slender sumo wrestler who needed to bulk up for a fight so had to be fed as many kilograms of food as possible. My favourite stage though is set on a racetrack, and although it seems like a regular “get big” challenge you move ridiculously fast and do laps of the course while absorbing all the other racers. The variety is fantastic, and no matter what you’re doing it’s always a whole lot of silly entertainment.

There’s one part of We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie that’s entirely new too, and that’s the Royal Reverie bit. This mode takes you into the memories of The King of All Cosmos, when he was just another small dude pushing a Katamari. These five brand new stages are all pretty challenging, with some wild conditions to fulfil if you want to beat them. Personally I thought the difficulty of these made them the least enjoyable part of the game, but if you’re a long time fan starved for ball rolling content then you might feel differently.

It’s the little things that make We Love Katamari Reroll special. Things like when you finish a stage and can find out how big your Katamari is by comparing it to everyday objects. I absolutely want to know that my big stupid ball is as big as 54,609 pencil sharpeners, and the fact you can keep spinning a slot machine to change the comparison object is genius. I also love dressing up my little prince in unlockable accessories, and taking selfies mid level for no reason whatsoever. We Love Katamari Reroll knows it’s completely daft, and embraces it with gusto.

There’s not a whole lot to complain about in We Love Katamari Reroll, but one aspect of the game did irritate me a little. The King of All Cosmos likes to pop up and talk while you’re in the middle of a mission, and when he does this he blocks the whole screen. Honestly it’s not a particularly big issue, but it was enough to interrupt my good times a little.

We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie is a lovely remaster of my new favourite game in the Katamari series. The nonsense the series is known for is here in full force, and the variety of missions is fantastic. The new content isn’t incredible, but if you missed out on this game on the PS2 then you’ve got a hell of an opportunity to rectify that.