We Love Katamari is one very difficult game to review. If there was a game that could be called a "seeper hit"in 2004, it was Katamari Damacy. Its unique, highly-approachable and thoroughly-addictive gameplay was without equal that year. Now a year later, We Love Katamari is here and in many ways it is exactly the same game with just new environments and things to roll up. However, if you could not get enough of the original or still have not yet discovered what all the adulation surrounding this game is about, We Love Katamari is a must-play.

As in Katamari Damacy, you’ll play as the diminutive Prince of All Cosmos. Your royal dadness, the King of All Cosmos, has become quite the celebrity on Earth after restoring the night sky to its former luster in the original game. Of course the earthlings don’t seem to realize that it was the King’s intoxicated rampage that destroyed all the stars in the first place. No big deal I guess. With celebrity comes fans and of course the King wants to make his fans happy, so whatever they ask for he gets right to it … or rather he puts you as the Prince right to it. What they want is more Katamari rolling.

It is a sequel, but We Love Katamari has not lost any of the original’s surreal edge. It may have been said before but it bears saying again: whatever the guys have been taking to make a game this weird, I wish it came in six-packs. Nothing this strange could have been imagined without chemical assistance. But of course rolling up everything in your path, including multitudes of people, and sending them to a blazing death as the heart of a new star or the core of a planet is perfectly normal, good, clean fun, right?

Despite the weird trappings surrounding it, the gameplay is perfectly sublime. The control of the katamari (probably literally translated as "big ball of assorted crap") is again all accomplished by manipulating the two analog sticks. Push both forward, the katamari rolls straight forward. Push one forward and one back, the katamari rotates in place. Push both to the right, the katamari slides to the right. I think you get the idea. Added in are a quick reversing move activated by clicking the L3 and R3 buttons simultaneously and a dash activated by alternately pumping the left and right sticks forward and back quickly. When the katamari rolls, it will collect things smaller than itself. As it gets bigger it is able to pick up ever larger items. The Prince is given a set amount of time to build a katamari of a certain size or larger. It is exactly the same control scheme and gameplay as the first game, but it worked perfectly then and why mess with a winner.

Even though Namco did not mess with the core game, there are some small additions. The selection interface has been, in my opinion, vastly improved. Everything is now selected from one “Select Meadow.” Here are all the data save, options menus and mission selects. Walk up to one of the many King-chin-worshiping fans (don’t ask) inhabiting the meadow and talk to them. They’ll make a request for some katamari-related mission and off you go to roll it up.

The levels have been given a little more variety. We Love Katamari levels often have additional objectives thrown into the mix and one is even arranged like a race track where you roll up stuff at extreme velocity while hauling around it.

In addition to the superb single-player game, the multiplayer game has been given more weight. There is a much-improved versus mode with ranking ladder as well as a co-op mode that can be about as frustrating as it is fun. Play the co-op mode with someone you love and prepare to be punched dead in the face when you can’t read your partner’s mind and do exactly what she wants you to do without being asked.

On the quirky side of additional features is the photo mode, presents area and item collection. Photo mode allows the player to take up to three pictures during any mission and store them in an album. The Prince can also adorn himself with the presents his dad scatters around the mission levels. (Wearing cool stuff while you roll up stuff is a very important feature … not.) The collection area allows the player to view the different stuff he has collected in his rolling.

Graphically the game has improved only slightly. The bizarre nature of the game is perfectly captured in the psychedelic 1960s-style artwork of the cutscenes and the in-game graphics that look almost Kubrick-ish or perhaps like toys carved out of wood. I can never quite decide which it evokes in me. As anyone who played Katamari Damacy will readily volunteer, the musical soundtrack, with a weird mix of Japanese pop and other eclectic music, was the cherry on top of the game that just pushed it way over the top. In We Love Katamari, the music is again very catchy. I don’t think it is quite up to the standards of the first game, but others could disagree. It all still works to make hours of katamari rolling never get old.

So while We Love Katamari may not have the "WOW!" factor that its coming-out-of-left-field predecessor Katamari Damacy had in 2004, it is still more fun than the majority of games will ever be. Like all the classic games that are a moment to learn and long in the mastering, We Love Katamari will find itself spinning in many gamers’ PS2s and will be the center of attention at your parties long after other games are on the shelf collecting dust.