Customer Reviews:
Great PSP Game
I have played the other katamari games and enjoy this one just as much. The gameplay is addicting. The controls are simple, though they take a while to get used to. I enjoyed the game and the bonus for beating it. I highly recommend this game to all psp owners

Poor Camera, Poor Controls
Me and My Katamari PSP brings the fun world of Katamari ball rolling to the PSP. You would think this would be the ultimate, non-violent fun game to play on your handheld for hours. The developers just didn’t do their job properly, though.

The basics, if you’ve never played a Katamari game, is that you’re a young prince rolling a “sticky ball” around. You are surrounded by objects of various sizes and types. So let’s say you play a level that’s a kid’s room. There will be little lego shapes, big pencils, and all sorts of other items. When your sticky ball is small, it can only grab onto the little things. As you roll it up and it gets bigger, it can now grab onto larger things.

It’s a simple concept, but in practice it’s great fun. One creature might only want “hard” objects so you have to avoid sticking the non-hard things and only go after hard things. Your aims usually involve a combination of what to get, how big to get your ball, and how much time you have.

There are different characters to get to, and different costumes, but really, it’s all about ball rolling and fun, catchy music. This game is a huge hit on other platforms. Just how could they have not made this a fantastically fun game to play while riding on the bus?

The answer is in the camera and controls. First, the camera. Really, the game only involves ball rolling. There aren’t fast paced action battles or complex graphics. You would think if the only task developers had was to show you rolling a ball, that they could do this properly. Unfortunately, the camera is just awful. There were numerous times that the camera swung around into a position that had a wall blocking my vision, and I had to try to figure out how to move my character to get unstuck. With a timer clicking, this could easily mean the difference between success and failure.

So, you’d think, if all you do is push a ball that the controls would be simple, right? Wrong! I had SO much trouble with both the controls and with the placement of key commands. I kept hoping that practice would get me used to them. After all, I play a ton of PSP games and never really have this issue on other games. When it became obvious that the longer I played, the more sore my fingers got, it really became clear that the control layout was just poorly done. If it was a PSP inherent thing, I’d have this problem all the time. I don’t - it’s just this game.

There really was so much potential here for fantastic fun, and I feel very disappointed. Maybe Katamari is simply not a game meant to be on the PSP and I’ll have to stick with my other PSP games. I’ll give it a 3 for great concept - but very poor implementation.

bad control scheme, difficult objectives ruin an otherwise fun game
This was the first game I bought for my PSP system and I wanted to like it so much. I enjoyed the first PS2 Katamari Damacy, despite the flaws in that game. I would have expected that by the third installment in this series, some of the kinks would have been worked out… and that this version would be better customized to the PSP’s unique control scheme. BUT, this game has the worst, most counter-intuitive controls of almost any game I’ve played. Seriously, they suck. I have tried playing it a dozen times, and still can’t really remember the exact key combo to just move forward, back, left and right! You have to press both a directional button and the right side control buttons (and sometimes a trigger) simultaneously to do most any basic movement in this game. This makes no sense. This game should be so simple, but the controls are needlesly complicated. The camera also really gets in the way. It is a royal pain to try to maintain rolling in a straight line, or to do a simple turn, and often you end up with a wall or object between your character and the camera, and you can’t see what you are doing at all. This is something that easily could have been remedied by the developers after 3 games, by making these object go transparent or automatically moving the camera past obstacles.

I also find that the instructions given in the tutorials and the actual missions are frustratingly vague or just badly translated. This is a additional challenge since you can’t figure out which items fit the needs you are meant to fulfill until after you’ve picked them up. You’ll find yourself cursing trying to figure out what items are considered ‘bright’ or ‘hard’, etc. to fulfill the missions.

On the positive side, if you do figure out the controls, and do know how to gather the proper items, and progress through the game, I imagine it is pretty fun. I love the opening and cutscene graphics, the music, the quirky style of it, and (bad controls aside) the levels design is pretty good, and they have alot of unique objects to collect. But I am unsure how many people will have the patience to completley master this game just in order to play even a little way through it.

I do recommend the PS2 Katamari games over this one. The controls on those are not perfect, but much better than this PSP version. Hopefully a PS3 Katamari game is in the works, and the developers will address some of these issues plaguing the series so far.

This game is at least worth renting to check it out. If you like wierd Japanese games and really like a challenge, you might enjoy this game more than I did.

I hate this game…
I really hate this game, it’s just a waste of money

Katamari for the Super Small Screen
I think I’m in the same boat as the reviewers with mixed feelings about the game. I loved the two PS2 versions of Katamari Damacy and I enjoyed how simple the game was and how easy it was to play, once you figured it out. You could literally sit there and try to master levels better… faster, etc. Seeing that the PSP was going to release a version of the game, I was curious to see what it would offer. In fact, it’s one of the big reasons why I ultimately got a PSP (in addition to travelling for my job). As for the game, the concept’s the same as the PS2 versions, but te “plot” is a little different. On holiday, the King, Queen & family accidently destroy the homes of loads of animals and it’s up to them to give them new homes. Or, it’s up to the Prince. So once again, you go through different levels and challenges to build up the ball of stuff.

There are plenty of pluses. New challenges, new levels, some new scenery and new items to pick up. And of course there’s the return of the King of All Cosmos’ off-beat humor. There’s even a neat new challenge involving finding things in the desert. But there are some negatives with this game too. Maybe because it’s portable and smaller, you have some things that are left out of the game that were great in “We Love Katamary”, like the item list (rainbow means it’s new) for one. And then there’s the controls… like most, I’d consider myself a pretty good player but the controls made this a bit hard to master. And like another person mentioned, your fingers get tired woefully fast since some of the commands aren’t so responsive. I figured it was just me ‘getting old’, so it’s refreshing ot hear other people that have had the same problem. So ultimately, you can’t really get into the game as much as you might’ve liked to, and trying to overcome the challenge of the game is met with also overcoming the challenges of impending CT syndrome.

Otherwise, this is a pretty good game. I’d recommend it. I only hope that maybe with the PS3, you could play it then with the controllers from the bigger system. But… not holding my breath on that one.