I almost feel bad for building hype about my horrible, shocking confession – it’s only going to shock one or two people at most, and in the grand scheme of things it really isn’t *that* horrible. Still, this is me. I can’t get the mail without it being a big production. Seriously, ask me sometime what happened when I went to get the mail today.

Okay. Ready? Deep breath taken? Sitting down? Legs spread in case you need to place your head between your knees? Here we go, then:

I don’t like the new Katamari game.

God, that looks so stark when it’s actually written down.

I am probably one of the biggest Katamari fans out there, and I do not like Beautiful Katamari. There are some things I DO like about it, but the cons outweigh the pros – especially when the biggest con is gameplay.

But Kimli, you say. “Gameplay” in a Katamari game is pushing two analog sticks around with your thumbs. It’s exactly the same as it was in every previous incarnation of Katamari Damacy. How can you claim it’s changed for the worse?

You’ll never believe this, but I have a long-winded answer to that very question!

But first, I would like to be fair. Here are the things I like about Beautiful Katamari:

• The music is all new and all awesome. I am not up to speed on my Japanese pop stars, but apparently they got some pretty big names in the J-Pop world to contribute to the soundtrack. There is no news yet of an actual soundtrack being released, but I imagine it can’t be far away if they’re keeping true to the previous games in the series. I will buy it. I love me some happy Katamari music.
• The interactions between the King of All Cosmos and the Prince and his various cousins are just as quirky (and long winded, something I can truly appreciate) as ever.
• It’s pretty – the way you move from level to level is unique, and the gramophone in the middle of that one platform that does nothing except entice all the cousins to begin dancing in unison is pretty awesome
• The intro movie – always over the top, Beautiful Katamari does not fail to deliver

Okay, sounds pretty positive so far. What makes me say I don’t like the game?

• It’s hard. Okay, that sounds whiny – games are supposed to be hard, aren’t they? Except one of the main reasons I love Katamari is the whole “fun for EVERYONE!” mentality, and that is kind of compromised if the levels are damn near impossible to beat. And when you fail a level, the King calls you a loser. It hurts my wee feelings, it does.
• The controls are sluggish. I don’t know if it’s the new platform (PS2 vs. 360), the difference in the controller (the analog sticks are placed differently on the 360 controller making it feel slightly less natural to move around), or just the nature of this edition of the game, but you and your Katamari are nowhere near as responsive as you need to be to complete the levels.
• For such a simple game with simple graphics, it’s a fucking HOG – they crammed each scene with so much stuff that I find the game lagging just a little when you play. It’s also hard on the eyes; I just can’t focus on so much crap at once.
• THE KATAMARI IS SLOW AS HELL! This is my number one complaint, and it ties in to problems 1 and 2 – you and your ball o’ fun move around SO SLOWLY that you can’t reach the objective in time. They tinkered with the timing too, giving you outrageous goals in much less time than before. All fine and good if the movement remained true to We Love Katamari, but it’s not. You move so slowly and get stuck between so much crap that reaching 25m in 8 minutes is just laughable. The Katamari is slow, it feels like you’re moving through space molasses, and the time limits have been chopped in half. Katamari is the one game that should never cause as much swearing as it has in the past week or so.
• There is controversy! Additional levels are available for paid download through the Xbox Live Arcade. This was always supposed to happen, but the downloadable content was released less than one week after the game was launched. They couldn’t have included these levels on the disc in the first place? Sure, the game is only $40USD, but downloading the “expansions” will cost you between $5 and $20 depending on where you are and how many you opt for. Hello, money grab? You suck.
• I think they changed the FOV. In FPS games I play with a FOV of 120 because anything less would make me vomit, which is quite uncivilized. Playing Beautiful Katamari for more than 30 minutes at a time pretty much guarantees I’m going to be staggering around later trying desperately to keep all my Diet Coke inside my stomach and not on top of a cat.
• Lack of Autosave (thanks, Zeem!) – you have to manually save your game in Beautiful Katamari, and it takes FOREVER. I’ve very nearly forgotten to save before shutting off the console (but I wouldn’t have lost any game play, since I didn’t finish any damn levels) and it’s happened to Zeem more than once. Sure, the manual save is a throwback to the original games in the series, but aren’t we in the future now? Autosave should be a standard feature on ALL games. Hell, it’s standard on Puzzle Quest, and that’s little more than Bejeweled with skulls.

So, the game I was most excited for this year hands down makes me dizzy, frustrated, and angry. I am a sad, sad Kimli. I think I’ll go play Portal again – the cake may be a lie, but at least it didn’t BREAK MY HEART.

Oh wait, it did.

I miss you, Weighted Companion Cube.

My only solace is that I am not unique in feeling this way about Beautiful Katamari – out of the three non-portable Katamari games, this one received the lowest score on IGN.com (but still a 7.8 rating which is pretty good but they are nearly as emotionally invested in the series as I am). See, it’s not just me. Come back, Keita Takahashi! You are missed!