Once Upon a Katamari is the Joyful, Weird Comeback We’ve Waited 14 Years For
After 14 years of silence, Katamari Damacy is back to roll through time and grab your attention.
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Katamari Damacy’s chaotic little universe is spinning again — after a 14-year nap, Bandai Namco has announced Once Upon a Katamari, the first mainline game since 2011’s Touch My Katamari.
The reveal trailer, dropped in July’s Nintendo Direct, has the King of All Cosmos accidentally obliterating the sky (again) by messing with a mysterious scroll. Naturally, it’s up to the Prince to roll his way through time — scooping up dinosaurs, Edo-era lanterns, Wild West cacti, and whatever else gets in his path — to put the cosmos back together.
It’s out October 24, 2025 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and PC, with Japan getting it a day earlier. If you’ve got save data from Katamari REROLL or We Love Katamari REROLL+, you’ll unlock the Young King right out the gate.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The fan hype didn’t start with the trailer — it’s been quietly (and stickily) building for years. Katamari merch keeps popping up in “Japan haul” TikToks and YouTube unboxings: crane-game toys, capsule figures, plushies the size of a small dog. Village Vanguard’s 20th anniversary line of acrylic mascots, hoodies, and keychains sold fast, despite being Japan-only. Even Western merch drops, like desk mats illustrated by Keita Takahashi himself, have been fuelling a global rolling spree. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t scroll for five minutes without seeing someone clutching a Prince plush like a newborn.
Part of the magic is pure nostalgia. When Katamari Damacy landed in 2004, it was a bizarre, million-dollar PS2 project from then-newcomer Keita Takahashi. The premise was deceptively simple — roll up everything in sight, from matchsticks to skyscrapers, until you’ve got enough mass to rebuild the stars. It was absurd, beautiful, and totally unlike anything else.
The pastel pop-art visuals, Shibuya-kei soundtrack, and the King’s monologues made it an instant cult hit — and a meme factory long before we called them memes. Two decades later, the same energy lives on in fan playlists, endless art threads, and the occasional “I Love You, Dad” King of All Cosmos tweet.
Takahashi’s own story is just as offbeat. He famously only got to make Katamari Damacy after refusing to work on more “normal” Namco projects — pulling influences from sculpture, children’s playgrounds, and papier-mâché toys. Interviews from the time paint him as a designer who’d rather make a slide for a park than churn out a safe sequel — which explains the series’ commitment to silliness over seriousness. That DNA is intact in Once Upon a Katamari, with returning composers, a promise of a “fabulous” new soundtrack, and a design brief that might as well read: “make it weird, make it joyful.”
Gameplay-wise, it’s the dual-stick rolling you remember — now with a time-travel hook. Stages range from prehistoric fields to old mining towns to Edo-period streets, crammed with items to hoover up. A new magnet power-up lets you vacuum in objects without touching them, and customization options let you recolor and restyle the Prince’s 68 cousins. The new KatamariBall mode is a four-player competitive free-for-all — playable online or offline — where the winner is whoever’s orb swallows the most nonsense in the least time. Pre-orders are open, with a deluxe edition bundling music and costumes — because of course there’s a deluxe edition.
The internet reaction? Loud. Reddit threads filled with all-caps joy. Old memes were dusted off and repurposed. VTubers streamed frame-by-frame trailer breakdowns. TikTok edits mashed the game’s soundtrack with dance trends. Discord servers set up merch import tip channels. Even the Apple Arcade spin-off Katamari Damacy: Rolling LIVE, which dropped earlier this year, got retroactively rebranded by fans as a teaser for the “real” return.
Katamari was never about high scores or frame rates — it was about the pure, dumb joy of rolling up a watermelon, then a car, then a train, and then, somehow, the moon. That joy hasn’t aged a day. Whether you were there in 2004 or are just meeting the Prince for the first time via TikTok edits, Once Upon a Katamari looks set to be a love letter to everything that made this series impossible to forget. October can’t come soon enough.
Katamari Damacy’s chaotic little universe is spinning again — after a 14-year nap, Bandai Namco has announced Once Upon a Katamari, the first mainline game since 2011’s Touch My Katamari.
The reveal trailer, dropped in July’s Nintendo Direct, has the King of All Cosmos accidentally obliterating the sky (again) by messing with a mysterious scroll. Naturally, it’s up to the Prince to roll his way through time — scooping up dinosaurs, Edo-era lanterns, Wild West cacti, and whatever else gets in his path — to put the cosmos back together.
It’s out October 24, 2025 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and PC, with Japan getting it a day earlier. If you’ve got save data from Katamari REROLL or We Love Katamari REROLL+, you’ll unlock the Young King right out the gate.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The fan hype didn’t start with the trailer — it’s been quietly (and stickily) building for years. Katamari merch keeps popping up in “Japan haul” TikToks and YouTube unboxings: crane-game toys, capsule figures, plushies the size of a small dog. Village Vanguard’s 20th anniversary line of acrylic mascots, hoodies, and keychains sold fast, despite being Japan-only. Even Western merch drops, like desk mats illustrated by Keita Takahashi himself, have been fuelling a global rolling spree. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t scroll for five minutes without seeing someone clutching a Prince plush like a newborn.
Part of the magic is pure nostalgia. When Katamari Damacy landed in 2004, it was a bizarre, million-dollar PS2 project from then-newcomer Keita Takahashi. The premise was deceptively simple — roll up everything in sight, from matchsticks to skyscrapers, until you’ve got enough mass to rebuild the stars. It was absurd, beautiful, and totally unlike anything else.
The pastel pop-art visuals, Shibuya-kei soundtrack, and the King’s monologues made it an instant cult hit — and a meme factory long before we called them memes. Two decades later, the same energy lives on in fan playlists, endless art threads, and the occasional “I Love You, Dad” King of All Cosmos tweet.
Takahashi’s own story is just as offbeat. He famously only got to make Katamari Damacy after refusing to work on more “normal” Namco projects — pulling influences from sculpture, children’s playgrounds, and papier-mâché toys. Interviews from the time paint him as a designer who’d rather make a slide for a park than churn out a safe sequel — which explains the series’ commitment to silliness over seriousness. That DNA is intact in Once Upon a Katamari, with returning composers, a promise of a “fabulous” new soundtrack, and a design brief that might as well read: “make it weird, make it joyful.”
Gameplay-wise, it’s the dual-stick rolling you remember — now with a time-travel hook. Stages range from prehistoric fields to old mining towns to Edo-period streets, crammed with items to hoover up. A new magnet power-up lets you vacuum in objects without touching them, and customization options let you recolor and restyle the Prince’s 68 cousins. The new KatamariBall mode is a four-player competitive free-for-all — playable online or offline — where the winner is whoever’s orb swallows the most nonsense in the least time. Pre-orders are open, with a deluxe edition bundling music and costumes — because of course there’s a deluxe edition.
The internet reaction? Loud. Reddit threads filled with all-caps joy. Old memes were dusted off and repurposed. VTubers streamed frame-by-frame trailer breakdowns. TikTok edits mashed the game’s soundtrack with dance trends. Discord servers set up merch import tip channels. Even the Apple Arcade spin-off Katamari Damacy: Rolling LIVE, which dropped earlier this year, got retroactively rebranded by fans as a teaser for the “real” return.
Katamari was never about high scores or frame rates — it was about the pure, dumb joy of rolling up a watermelon, then a car, then a train, and then, somehow, the moon. That joy hasn’t aged a day. Whether you were there in 2004 or are just meeting the Prince for the first time via TikTok edits, Once Upon a Katamari looks set to be a love letter to everything that made this series impossible to forget. October can’t come soon enough.
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