The secret to Katamari Damacy’s timeless design hit me 21 years later

“Play Katamari Damacy,” they said. “It’s weird; you’ll love it!” they said. They were right.

Katamari is weird, and I do love it, but it’s only now, 21 years after Keita Takahashi’s bizarre rolling-stuff-up game was released for PlayStation 2, that I realize why this quirky little gem stands out so vividly for me. The weirdness is part of it, sure, but the big reason is how Takahashi expertly crafted something so fun and deeply engaging with just a few basic ideas.

The gist of Katamari Damacy is that you, the Prince of All Cosmos, have to make new stars after your dad, the large-headed, tights-wearing King of All Cosmos, accidentally got rid of them all, and you do that by sticking a bunch of everyday objects onto a ball. Each stage has a minimum star size you need to hit, though you’re encouraged to go as big as you can get as well.

If you want to do better — and when “better” means “cramming a small town into a ball and yeeting it into orbit,” who wouldn’t want to do better? — you have to think closely about how you’re moving and how to do things differently. Or not. You can just disappoint your Weird-Headed Dad with sad little stars and unlock new stages and challenges. But if you do want to improve, Katamari Damacy makes you figure out how on your own. The game’s basic foundation is straightforward enough to where this process feels like a satisfying challenge instead of an overwhelming grind, as there’s only a handful of things you can do — roll one way, roll another way, and speed up to roll faster.

You eventually learn to roll up the house before heading into the garden. Boost your speed here, not there. Save all the fish in the sea for when the katamari is bigger so you can cover more ground faster. Katamari Damacy pushes you to understand every inch of its small handful of levels on a deep level and how to get the most out of its basic mechanics in a way I rarely experience in other games. There’s no extended tutorial section or set of guided challenges. You just have to look around the level and figure out a new strategy. I normally don’t care about getting the best rating or clearing something 100% of the way. In Katamari Damacy, I refuse to rest until I make the biggest damn star I possibly can and know every level inside out.

Image: Bandai Namco Entertainment

It helps that Katamari Damacy‘s reward incentive is similarly brilliant in its simplicity. The better you do, the more chaos you can cause by absorbing more stuff into your bigger katamari. It’s gently subversive, the kind of fun you get from knocking a house of cards down or spraying graffiti. First, it’s medium-sized objects like furniture and farm animals as you turn domestic life on its head. Then you roll into town and scoop up cars, trees, and buildings, and eventually, you’re breaking all the rules and wrapping practically the entire level into your katamari. “Winning” means almost literally breaking the game, and it feels so good.

I recently revisited Katamari Damacy for its anniversary and was struck all over again by just how well this simple design works. Maybe it’s the increased trend in seeing games rely on unnecessary complexity and opaqueness — the trend toward forgetting what fun actually looks and feels like — that makes this impression feel so strong.

So, reader, you should play Katamari Damacy. It’s weird and fun and you might love it. Even if you don’t love it, you’ll at least get to experience some of the best game design of the last 21 years.

Katamari Damacy: Reroll, a remake of Katamari Damacy, is currently available to play on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.