We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie (PS5)

As part of Bandai Namco’s recent efforts to remaster old Namco games to bring back old and negelcted IPs, Katamari Damacy was reissued through Katamari Damacy Reroll in 2018, bringing the fun and addicting game to a new generation. Following this, a remaster of the second game in the series and the only other game to be directed by Keita Takahashi, We Love Katamari, was announced in the form of We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie (WLK Reroll), including extra content not found in the original release. Having played the original before, I was curious about the new content and went for a PS5 copy of the game, primarily because of how much I associate the brand with PlayStation, and found it to be the superior way to play the game.

Katamari Damacy Reroll (PS4)

 

With the increasing complexity of the gaming landscape at the time, director Keita Takahashi created Katamari Damacy with the intent of creating something simpler that was also fun, though he had difficulty getting it off the ground due to him being in Namco’s art department at the time. When the game first released for the PS2 in 2004, his efforts paid off, spawning a long-running franchise across multiple console generations, only for it to becomes largely dormant following Touch My Katamari on the PS Vita in 2012 before coming back into full swing in 2020 with Katamari Damacy Reroll, a remaster of the original game for then-modern hardware. When I first played the original game on the PS2, I was instantly hooked by its simple, yet addictive nature, leading to it becoming one of my all-time favorite series. Due to the large gap of time following the PS Vita game, I became instantly excited by Katamari Damacy Reroll (Reroll) when it released for the Switch, but ended up holding out until it received a PS4 release, as it was my preferred platform anyway since I more heavily associate the series with the PlayStation brand, though the timing of its release led me to not play it until recently when its sequel, We Love Katamari, received a remaster of its own. After having not played the game for so long, Katamari Damacy Reroll served as a great reminder of why I loved the series in the first place.