Let's Roll: A Review of Beautiful Katamari || by HOMAY KING

It's good to be the King. Especially if you own every gaming console out there like our special guest star, Homay King. Traumatized by too many insomniac viewings of War Games (with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy!), we at O!I tend to shy away from gaming unless it involves push-button guitars or seizure inducing dancing-by-arrows. That's why we're so lucky to have Homay in the house to break down all things Beautiful for us. Roll on... - (ALOTR)

Beautiful Katamari (2007, Namco Bandai, Xbox 360)
Rated E for "Everyone" (Alcohol Reference, Comic Mischief, Mild Fantasy Violence)

The story begins a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… well, actually, in the early 1980s, in Silicon Valley, CA. As a youth, I logged many hours at the family Apple playing adventure games like Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess. Until recently, though, I was more or less clueless about all that had happened in the gaming world over the last two decades (aside from a love-hate relationship with Tetris, and a brief but intense immersion in Myst). That changed when I encountered my first contemporary console: Microsoft's Xbox 360. After a quick learning curve on the new controls — like many using modern two-stick controllers for the first time, I watched my avatar spin around helplessly in place for a while— I was ready to revisit my inner gaming nerd.

Beautiful Katamari, the fourth game in the Katamari Damacy series by Namco Bandai, was one of the first demos I downloaded from Xbox Live. Gameplay consists of rolling a giant sticky ball (the katamari, which means "clod") around cute, cartoonish environments, picking up smaller objects that adhere to it as you go. In the game's opening levels, the katamari measures but a few centimeters, and the objects you collect are small: coins, pushpins, pieces of candy, and so on. As you unlock higher levels, the katamari grows in size, until finally you are able to roll up buildings, islands, continents, and finally stars and planets. The game is set to a soundtrack of catchy Japanese pop music.

Although the fun of Katamari lies in the fast-paced spectacle of rolling up objects — the hungry, accumulative mode of gameplay may remind some of Namco's Pac-Man — there is also a framing narrative. Your avatar is a small, green character called the Prince, with a head shaped like a croquet mallet (the better to roll with). An opening cut scene reveals that your father, the King of All Cosmos, has accidentally shot a tennis ball through the fabric of the universe, creating a black hole that has swallowed everything except planet earth. The katamaris that you roll on earth are meant to replace the missing planets and plug up the black hole.



As in the previous Katamari games, your father is critical and full of bluster. The relationship between Prince and King is strongly Oedipal, with the King serving as a harsh superego. When your katamari is too small, Dad goes ballistic: "Wha…? 6cm, 2mm? We did say 50cm, yes? Failure… Sorrow… Shame… Resignation… Wrath! Khaaaan!" He berates you and calls you names: "Poor, poor Us. Stuck with a L-O-S-E-R like Prince." Even when your katamari meets the size goal, though, the King isn't satisfied: "Is this on purpose? Like, for a documentary?…You're a party pooper. Learn to roll better!" Only when you roll a katamari that exceeds the goal by 200%, more or less depending on the level, does the King praise you with a faint "huzzah."

Beautiful Katamari exposes players to reproach, shame, frustration, and failure. The game has little regard for the player's self-esteem, and does not subscribe to the notion that effort or improvement alone deserve reward. In this way, it's reminiscent for me of early arcade games, which were hard, repetitive, and yet strangely compelling (Mario falls to his death over and over; still, I drop another quarter into the machine).

The addictive quality of Beautiful Katamari stems in part from the desire to win the elusive approval of the omnipotent father. The game's final level delivers on this wish. As we may have suspected all along, the King is a big softie underneath it all: he grows nostalgic, and tells you that you "rule." At the same time, there can be a perverse enjoyment in failing to fulfill his requests. As Jesper Juul has suggested, playing a game to win necessitates a lessened sense of immersion in its aesthetic world. The more closely you look at Katamari's vibrant game environment, the less likely you are to meet or exceed the size goal in the allotted amount of time. Give up on this goal, though, and you are free to explore a charming world stocked with thousands of hidden objects at will, each of which comes with a clever description and fills a unique slot in your collection. Now that's how I like to roll.

AUTHOR BIO: Homay King is Assistant Professor on the Rosalyn R. Schwartz Lectureship in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she directs the Program in Film Studies. Her Xbox Live gamertag is mentosnever.