This is the fifth in a series of reviews covering the Boss Fight Books Humble Bundle. If you missed the bundle, fear not! They’re all available on bossfightbooks.com/, from $4.95 each.
“The following is a contributor post by the Bookwarm Mage.”
Katamari Damacy, by L.E. Hall, hews to the game as closely as the Prince running after his rolling Katamari; whether the finished product will pass muster and become a star will depend on the regal dispensation of the particular reader. For me, it’s so-so: stardust, somewhat forgettable, but a charming romp through the world of Katamari for all that.
Hall is true to the expansive and variable scope of the game, at times zooming in on the smallest details, at times pulling back for the cosmic view. The opening of the book is strong on the minutia of the opening sequence, but while each of the brief chapters that follows adds a certain amount of illustrative context to go along with its evocation of the joy of playing this unique title, none of the actual levels gets the close-reading treatment of the opening. Covering topics from a bio of creator Keita Takahashi and the origins of the gameplay concept, to the catchy music by Yuu Miyake (with a shout-out to Harumi Hosono), to the demanding production process and the teamwork that carried Katamari from vision to completion, the book ends up lacking any overall structure of narrative or subjective experience to hold it all together. Still, a few throughlines give the writing a pleasing overall shape: simplicity, integrity, quality. That this game manages to exist at all in the welter of marketing and mindless sequels that characterize most of the industry is nothing if not inspirational.
Pac-Man provides an unexpected touchstone for comparison, but the emphasis is rightly on Katamari’s incommensurability with anything but itself. We hear reports from a couple of “postmortems”–which was a new term for me in this context, and whenever I see it used for this I can’t help but think of the line from The Princess Bride, “I don’t think it means what you think it means”–as well as glowing reviews from shows and conventions, which help recapture the sense of wonder the game unleashed on its first appearance. Hall skillfully limns the role of the Experimental Games Workshop (EGW) and the circuit of trade shows in celebrating innovation and stoking demand for those few games which truly deliver it. She gamely tackles the bizarre cutscenes which follow the Hoshino family as Katamari’s story progresses, drawing connections to Japanese popular culture and campy aesthetics which are apposite, if not fully able to explain what they are doing in the game. The same goes for the record-scratch-voiced King, whose tough love gets a thoughtful appraisal. The final chapters do a creditable job of assessing the ambiguities of Katamari’s message of nonviolence and anti-materialism in the waves of merchandising and cult status the game has spawned, from bespoke weddings to a MoMA design exhibit, besides the more mundane t-shirts and sequels.
Hall’s frequent reliance on block quotes from other commentators and her use of second-person narration, in fact, saturate the book in the language of advertisement. Perhaps this was intentional and meta, but it left me feeling like I’d read an extended marketing ploy rather than a vigorous analysis or substantive interpretation of one of my favorite games. I flatly disagreed with many points which Hall does raise–assertions about playing Katamari along the lines of “It’s like building a tower of blocks for the sheer joy of pushing it down,” miss out on the latent challenge of the game for less anarchic players, who would need to carefully plot their entire level’s run and then execute it flawlessly in order to attain the more difficult and rarified of the game’s accomplishments. Still, I wished there were more here to raise the book to the level of argument. Even if it might seem odd for such a delightful, lighthearted game, it seems important so as to engage more deeply with Katamari’s own implicit challenges to the video game industry and consumer culture.
8/10 – If you’re curious where Katamari Damacy came from, and maybe need a push to see what its creators are up to now, give it a read.
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