New Bandai Namco Trademark 'Once Upon A Katamari' Spotted

Katamari 1 was fantastic. An amazing start to the series.

We Love Katamari was perfection and the highlight of the series. Introduced so many new environments and circumstances to make everything feel fun and varied.

Me & My Katamari was fine. Understandably limited by the PSP hardware, but it's good what they were able to pull off.

Beautiful Katamari has good gameplay, but lacks the same spirit - there are no cutscenes, and they decided to do on-disk DLC, which was... not appreciated. ugh. But the game aside from that is good.

Katamari Forever was mostly rehashes of previous levels, with like only two or three actual new levels. And you played with weird remixed music, and weird visual filters. The gameplay was there, but the presentation was kind of off.

Touch My Katamari is the laziest cashgrab of a Katamari game, with missing features such as no item catalogue, fewer cousins, and even more rehashed gameplay ideas. And the monetisation was even worse, with progression requiring you to purchase "Fan Damacys" from the PSVita store in order to actually unlock more levels. Disgusting.

Then there were the now delisted mobile games, I Love Katamari and Katamari Amore. As far as I remember, I Love Katamari was an extremely pared-down mess that only worked with gyro controls and was basically a nothingburger of a game.

Katamari Amore had actual touch controls and played decently well, but again, most of its content was expensive DLC, with very little actually available in the base game.

And the two modern Reroll releases - they're good, but Namco took the lazy route and didn't bother including the English voices. Just like their recent Baten Kaitos release.

Basically, every Katamari release after the original duo has had some kind of problem, and they've been getting worse and worse as the series continues.

Since it's been such a long time since we've had a new game, I hope they've actually been working on something worthwhile. But I don't have much faith in them to be honest.