We Love Katamari

The premise of the sequel is that the first game was a hit. The King of All Cosmos, never one to undersell himself, receives visitors who loved rolling katamari and would like more, and each of their requests becomes a stage. A schoolteacher wants her students gathered up. A firefighter wants a blaze put out. A racer wants a course run. It is fan service in the most literal sense available, and it works because Keita Takahashi's team treated the joke as a design brief rather than a wink.

The loop is unchanged and needed no changing. Both analog sticks push a sticky ball around a world scaled to humiliate it, and anything smaller than the ball becomes part of the ball. Thumbtacks, then mice, then bicycles, then cows, then houses. The camera lurches, the mass wobbles, and the sound of a hundred absorbed objects clattering along behind you is still one of the best feedback systems the PS2 ever produced. What the sequel adds is variety in the win condition. One stage asks you to roll only hot things to feed a campfire, so a puddle costs you dearly. Another sends you underwater. Another drops the size target entirely and asks for speed.

Some of these experiments are better ideas than levels. The racing stage fights the controls it inherited, and a few requests amount to a reskinned time attack. The compensation is generosity: there is simply more of everything, including a two-player mode where a shared or contested katamari turns friendship into a wrestling match over the sticks.

The soundtrack remains the reason people still talk about this one in the same breath as the original. Yuu Miyake assembled scat, samba, choral pieces and a lounge waltz, all of it apparently unrelated to a game about garbage collection and all of it perfect. Visually the game is flat colour and hard edges, a deliberate refusal of the era's obsession with bump mapping, which is exactly why it has not dated.

Namco published a sequel to a cult curiosity and let the same designer make it stranger. That instinct is rarer now than the game itself. What lingers is the ending of a stage, when the King measures your ball and the world you spent ten minutes dismantling turns out to have been small after all.