Katamari Damacy is a difficult game to describe—it’s about rolling a ball around strangely earthly playgrounds to collect up a random and expanding assortment of stuff, starting with thumbtacks and paperclips and working your way up to crabs and buckets and cars and houses and entire skyscrapers. But it’s also about, like, love and joy and consumerism and maybe innocence? If there is one thing Katamari Damacy is definitely not, it’s subtle, which is why I was completely caught off guard by We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie’s release on Steam on June 1.
Bandai Namco sure wasn’t hyping this one up, but it should’ve been—out of the whole Katamari series, this is the one you have to play.
We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie is an HD remaster of the second Katamari game, first released on the PlayStation 2 in 2005. Namco made several more Katamari games after this without the involvement of series creator Keita Takahashi, but this was definitely the peak. It adds more mission variety and other playable characters and has a funny meta story about Katamari being so popular they had to do it again. Again, not subtle—if Takahashi was going to have to make a sequel, he was going to be cheeky about it.
This remaster claims that “the graphics have been completely redesigned, and the in-game UI has been revamped to make it even easier to play.” The remaster of the first game, released back in 2018, was well-received (we gave it an 85%), with the most common complaint I recall being: We Love Katamari is the better game, so why not remaster that one? It took awhile, but now we can roll around to receive the King of All Cosmos’ praise once more.
I am really disappointed to see, though, that this PC release of We Love Katamari has dropped the original game’s splitscreen co-op play. Splitscreen is tougher on PC, but it’s still possible—and with ultrawide support, could even be a way better experience than it is on a 16:9 TV. The Xbox, PlayStation and Switch versions of this remaster do thankfully retain the local multiplayer support, at least. Going above and beyond and adding online play would’ve been amazing, but alas, you’ll have to play this one on consoles if you want to roll with friends.