Katamari Damacy and the celebratory apocalypse
How utterly delightful is Katamari Damacy? Between the trippy, absurdist premise and game mechanic, the bright, colorful objects waiting to be rolled up, and a soundtrack so fun it cannot help but make you smile, playing this game has been such a lovely break from the open world shooters I'm painstakingly working my way through. Published by Namco for the PlayStation 2 in 2004, Katamari Damacy (which apparently translates to "clod soul" in Japanese, how awesome is that??) tells the tale of a young prince tasked with picking up the universe. His father, the King of All Cosmos, basically got wasted one night and destroyed said cosmos; you, the tiny, hotdog-headed green prince, must now roll it all back up into massive "katamaris" that, when big enough, shoot up into the sky as stars, replacing the constellations destroyed by the King.
Your Katamaris start very small, 5mm, and you can only pick up relationally-sized objects. At the beginning, that means matchsticks, candies, ants, etc. As your Katamari grows, you are able to pick up slightly bigger objects which were, only minutes before, obstacles that you merely banged into—now, you can pick up match*books*, cookies, cassette tapes, etc. Each level gives you a slightly bigger Katamari, a new goal size, and a time limit. If you don't make it, your little avatar weeps on his knees while the King saltily calls you a failure and rain sounds soak the scene. But if you *do* succeed, you access new levels, bigger objects, and, by the end, the possibility of rolling up trees and skyscrapers. The objects rolled up in the Katamari maintain their shape, sound, and movement; one level, you roll up hundreds of crabs into one, disgusting ball of twitching legs, in another the many humans you've assimilated into your katamari shriek in fear and stick out of the ball feet-first.
It's so delightful to play a game that juxtaposes this uncompromising, burn-the-world ethic with such bright graphics. It reminds me a little of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in the sense of celebratory apocalypses. As the fandom repetitively asserts re: Zelda, Ganondorf (the villain) wasn't really in the wrong, he was just trying to keep the world from going underwater; but Wind Waker has you play as Link, the hero attempting to thwart Ganondorf, flooding the world with joyful abandon. I saw a paper at last year's MLA about this game, suggesting what the researcher called a particularly Japanese ecological ethic: the prospect of a world without humans is a joyful one, an outcome to be welcomed and celebrated.
How mind-bogglingly different is this outlook from western narratives of apocalypse! We've got The Road-level horror scenarios, or, when we try to be contemplative about it, the coldly morose World Without Us. And Katamari Damacy, make no mistake, is a literally post-apocalyptic game—the cosmos is destroyed, the stars have been obliterated, the moon is gone, it's our job to pick up the mess. It is different that there's a hopeful end—winning means you *do* pick up the mess and return the stars to their rightful places. But it's really fun how hilariously chill the game is about that premise. Win or lose, just roll roll roll.
Note for later: there needs to be a paper about lunar representations in games: Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Katamari Damacy, Portal 2, To the Moon, this whole wikipedia list of games set at least partly on the moon
