katamary damashii/damacy is, aesthetically, one of the best games designed. it has been pointed out that this game could have centered on a featureless sphere picking up featureless cubes that increase its size, but the aesthetic that has been married to the gameplay of katamari damacy serves it so well that it is almost as valuable as the gameplay itself.
the game is basically williams's arcade game bubbles (though it controls more like marble madness), a game in which the player is a bubble in a sink which avoids enemies while collecting small tokens that cause it to grow in size, until eventually it becomes large enough to absorb the enemies that had previously harassed it. since the game was conceived as pac-man with an open playspace, size became the mechanism which paced the player's prey-to-predator relationship with the enemies (rather than the time and effort of navigating to a power pill, as in pac-man).
bubbles and katamari damacy are essentially the same game; the above gameplay description could have been used word-for-word to describe katamari. except for the "bubble in a sink part." exactly. on an arcade platform (in which a similiar scene repeats until the player runs out of coins or decides to no longer spend them) and with the limited graphical and sound resources available to the developers at the time, it was not prudent to allow the bubble to leave the sink and begin scrubbing the rest of the house, and then the town, and then the globe. now, it is.
what katamari damacy adds to this model is character. this is a huge thing. we are rolling very sticky balls across the surface of the earth, picking up things: thumbtacks, matchbooks, shoes, cats, schoolchildren, cars, elephants, trees, ships, ferris wheels, giant octopi, islands, cities. each of these things moves, makes noise. mice squeak as you capture them, flailing their legs uselessly. eggs hatch into birds. you can see these thingson your sticky ball, the bubble doesn't just get bigger. these huge, living balls of stuff become stars in the sky.
we are replacing the stars with stuff; with human stuff, all the little minutia that litters human environments in abundance. the game suggests that the whole of the vast, dark cosmos contains as many interesting things as the surface of the one small planet earth. the game simultaneously celebrates and mocks the sheer amount of stuff that has come to collectively embody human culture. (to play this game, you need access to: a copy of the game, a playstation 2 system, an av cable, a power adapter, a television, a memory card, a controller - not the grey ps1 controller, the black one with the dual sticks!)
there is a sobering loneliness to this game. in the game's climactic scene, the player is asked to create the earth's moon. to create a large enough sphere, the player has to roll up everything on the earth's surface - cities, continents, clouds. eventually the player assembles a ball which contains everything that comprises the human sphere. that ball, essentially the player (the 1 cm-tall prince that has been marked as the protagonist has disappeared long ago), has literally become the earth, and the vast and featureless ocean that stretches around it is the enormous empty cosmos which for its hugeness has contains far less of interest to the human being than the smallest things on the earth's surface.
this is the incredible catharsis that bubbles could not accomplish (largely because the resources did not exist when it was made), the last in a series of containments of containers: first the table the katamari begins on, then the house that contains the table, then the sub-urb that contains the house, then the city that contains the sub-urb, then the island that contains the city, and finally the planet that contains the island. this theme perfectly complements and augments the gameplay aesthetic of both bubbles and katamari, and this (in addition to renewing the gameplay in a three-dee environment on a contemporary platform) is the major accomplishment of katamari damacy.
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