Me and My Katamari

As a portable interpolation of Katamari Damacy, Me and My Katamari pretty much makes good. With hundreds of unlockable items, plenty of new challenges, and some downright zany environments, the Katamari series is surely going out on a good note.

At the beginning of Me and My Katamari, the King and the rest of the royal family go for beach-blanket fun, splashing about in the ocean. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of a chain of small islands nearby, the King gets a little too rambunctious, causing a tidal wave that wipes the islands off the map. He then makes amends by sending his son, the Prince, out to collect matter out of which to create new islands. This is where you come in. The opening cinematic sequence for Me and My Katamari establishes the delightfully irreverent and mildly insane tone that the series is best known for, though the game is pretty lean on cinematic sequences through the rest of the game, which is a little disappointing.

The game uses an island interface that allows you to view the islands you've created while also allowing you to see what needs to be done. Animals will start popping up on Prince Island asking the Prince for help. Every mission you receive on said island has the same objective; you'll have X amount of time to get a katamari X meters wide. Even though it seems like this would get repetitive and boring, the diversified environments generally help the game stay fresh. The Prince can also travel to the Volcano Island, where creatures will present him with strange requests. Instead of constructing a katamari of a certain size, these missions require you to build a katamari containing the right products. For instance, one gorilla needs enough energy to fuel his rocket, so it makes much more sense to run over power plants than trees. Even so, it doesn't hurt to build up a large katamari simply because you'll be able to obtain more objects, which therefore adds a whole new element to the game. The final isle is the Beanstalk Island, which allows you to switch between characters you've collected throughout the levels.

While it might not have as many wonderful cinematic sequences as the Katamari games for the PS2, Me and My Katamari nails the overall look and feel of the series almost perfectly. The environments, which start you off inside a tiny room in a tiny Japanese home and eventually reaches the scope of a decent-sized metropolis, feature purposely blocky designs and a random selection and placement of items, both common and exotic, and often straight-up imaginary. The game has an incredible color palette of bright primaries and subdued pastels, and its unique sense of design saturates everything from status screens to the bear that walks around wearing a T-shirt that says "bear" on it.

While it almost perfectly captures the Katamari style, it makes also a few technical sacrifices in the form of midlevel load times, but are never more than a few seconds long. During these loads the game also kind of fudges the scale of the katamari to its surroundings, making the ball itself bigger while shedding much of the complicated geometry of the items stuck to it. Me and My Katamari's sound design matches suit, providing a catchy and eclectic soundtrack for the surreal action. A lot of the music is identical to that found in past Katamari games, which makes it an easy fit, though it would have been nice if the game featured a little more original music. Though the soundtrack is largely dominant, it's regularly punctuated with the confused, panicky cries of people and animals that you pick up with your katamari, which can be hysterical.

If you know what you're doing, you can play through Me and My Katamari in just a few hours, and it feels slightly shorter than its predecessors. Part of the sense of brevity can probably be attributed to the fact that there just aren't that many different environments, and they get recycled often, so that by the time you get to the end, you've pretty much had your fill. If you're looking for a reason to go back, there are gifts from the King hidden throughout the game that you can pick up and outfit the Prince with, as well as a small army of cousins that you can pick up and then choose to play as. There's also a pretty simple multiplayer mode, in which up to four players, each with their own copy of the game, can play a competitive game in which everyone tries to collect more items while knocking items off the other players' katamaris. Or, for the less competitive, you can exchange royal gifts with the other players.

The paltry number of levels in Me and My Katamari proves to be its biggest shortcoming, as the game otherwise does a pretty phenomenal job of re-creating the Katamari Damacy experience on the psp. The game's refreshing aesthetic, fun and simple gameplay, and its unhinged sense of humor is unlike anything else on the psp. If you've never played a Katamari game before, you owe it to yourself to try this one out. For fans of the series, this is a must-have.