Beautiful Katamari...The Story So Far

The King and Queen of the Cosmos were playing Tennis with the Prince one day. Everything was going swimmingly until the King, who as we know is not only super duperly gorgeous but strong as well, serves up a powerful serve that goes wild and ends up opening a gaping Black Hole in the Universe which sucks up all the planets (even the fake planet Pluto). Now it's up to YOU, playing as the Prince of one of his cousins, to recreate the Solar System by rolling up as much shit as you possibly can.

That being said, despite me being a big Katamari fan, I have to admit that some of the fun of the series got sucked out along with the planets. I mean, there's still rolling up lots of shit to make the biggest katamari (or the fastest), only this time the King wants a certain category of your collection to be at the top to add to the spice. There's also still the silly sounds of folks saying, "Occupied," when you roll up a port-o-potty and random nekkid people running away from your Katamari. But the biggest fun sucker is...there's just ONE BIG STAGE with indoor and outdoor sections. There's nothing new. After completing the game (and it goes by fast) all you have is the same setting.

Anyhoo, a couple other things that peeve me:

1) Rolling seems harder to master (maybe because of the non-parallel placement of the sticks), and it actually took me a couple times to complete some of the touchier objectives (I accidentally rolled up a bunch of penguins in the 10,000 F challenge). I prefer the PS set up.

2) Lack of stages. You get normal and time attack (there's no reward for time attack--just a place on the Leader Boards) and the normal is the same ole' same ole' every time. In "We Love Katamari" some stages had up to 3 variants to test you.

3) You will be paying extra for stages coming out...NEXT WEEK. Sure the game was on the cheap side, but it was billed as a complete game. On 10/25/2007 we get to spend $10 more to download moar stages. And of course, all the stages I wanted to play, like the money collecting ones or the food eating ones, are supposedly packaged to download. *hiss hiss*

4) Online mode...is gay? It crashed like 80% of the time I tried it out.

5) NO SAVE THE PANDAS!?

6) All the music sounds the same. Although I do like the "Danketsu" parody song which a lot of anime fanbois/grrls will appreciate.

*sigh*

The verdict: Most likely, I will be paying for the extra stages after which I'll be going back to playing "We Love Katamari." :( Well, until rumours of a Wii/PS3 version come to fruition. *purr*