Katamari Damacy: Still the most wonderful game of all time. I really hope they rerelease We <3 Katamari as well because I would like to play that game and compare it against the original, again.
I still feel like the original has better level design, but I do miss being able to play as the cousins and some of the Largeness of the sequel.
One thing I’ve noticed in some of the levels is that there tend to be loops to follow where, just as you get back to your starting point, you’re just big enough to pick up the stuff you couldn’t get before. Sometimes it happens 2 or 3 times, too.
There’s also a lot of beautiful repetition between scales. For instance, objects tend to be grouped by size in four ways: Paths, Circles, Columns, and Piles/Stacks. This repeats over and over from the smallest to largest sizes you can achieve. It’s remarkable.
And for completeness’ sake, here are what I am defining as groupings:
Paths: a line of similarly sized items
Circles: a circle of similarly sized items
Columns: Similarly sized items distributed evenly among items of other sizes - usually these items are tall, hence columns
Piles/Stacks: Just a big ol’ pile of shit that you can pick up all at once
The handling between Very Small and Very Large is so different, though, that traversing these repeating patterns feels different, and naturally more challenging. So even though you are repeating the same things, they become harder simply because the Katamari is so unwieldy.
It’s hard to really consider the level design of Katamari Damacy because it’s so free-form and strange, but I do think it’s very well considered. There always tend to be guiding lines that will build you up to the next size to follow even more guiding lines.
Last thing: Some of the jokes in this game are amazing. In one level, you’re small enough that people kick you around for most of it, so you just see their legs, but once you’ve gained enough size, you can see that one of the people kicking you around was actually, like, 5 people stacked on top of each other for no reason. What a good gag!!!
EDIT: Oh there’s one more thing, which is just Big-Ass Items That Stand Alone, Usually In The Center Of a Circle Of Smaller Items. These are almost always used as goals for the size one or two levels above the items in the circle - when you can pick up the big fucken thing, you’ve made it in life. It could be a ring of mice around a big cheese, or a series of whirlpools around an octopus the size of Manhattan.