Once Upon a Katamari has done something the series hasn’t managed since Touch My Katamari: it put the Prince back on a home console with a full new adventure. RENGAME developed it, Bandai Namco Entertainment published it, and it arrived October 24, 2025, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. A Nintendo Switch 2 version follows on October 8, 2026. It is the first original console installment since Touch My Katamari in 2011.
The published critical score sits at 8.4/10 across five outlets. That number is fair. Once Upon a Katamari isn’t a reinvention. It’s a reminder that this series’ core idea — roll a sticky ball, absorb everything smaller than you, grow — still works, and that the people making it understand why.
Trailer, via Bandai Namco Entertainment Southeast Asia.
A Scroll, a Bored King, and a Ruined Sky
The setup is pure Katamari. The King of All Cosmos and his family clean the castle together. They find a strange scroll. Bored once the cleaning is done, the King tosses the scroll into the air, and the Earth, Moon, and stars are destroyed. He then orders his son, the Prince, to fix it.
The Prince uses the scroll to time travel to specific dates. That’s the hook: the katamari rolls through the Jurassic Period, the Ice Age, historic Japan, and other eras. The goal is to rebuild the starry sky.
It’s a thin premise, and it doesn’t need to be more than that. The Katamari series has never been about plot. It’s about the absurd pleasure of rolling up a continent and watching the counter climb. Once Upon a Katamari understands that the scroll is just a reason to send you somewhere strange.
The Katamari Still Rolls the Same Way
The mechanics are unchanged at the foundation. You control the minuscule Prince. You roll a katamari to complete objectives assigned by the King. Objects smaller than the katamari stick to it when you roll into them, which makes it grow, which lets you roll up larger objects.
Objectives vary by level. Sometimes you need a katamari of a specific size. Sometimes you need to roll as much of one specific object as you can. That variety has carried the series since the beginning, and it carries this entry too.
The third-person perspective keeps the scale gag intact. You start small enough that a thumbtack matters. You end large enough that the thumbtack was never the point.
Power-Ups and Crowns Change the Math
Once Upon a Katamari adds two systems to the standard loop. The first is power-ups: special items that temporarily grant abilities. A radar shows the location of collectible objects and certain level objectives. A magnet pulls nearby objects toward the katamari automatically.
The second is crowns. These are a new collectible type, and they appear in each level. Roll one up and you unlock extra levels.
Neither addition is radical. The radar and magnet are quality-of-life tools more than they are new ways to play. But they matter, because the Katamari series has always had a friction problem: hunting for the last few objects you need to hit a size target can turn a joyful game into a chore.
| Feature | What it does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Power-up: radar | Shows location of collectible objects and certain level objectives | Cuts the aimless search time |
| Power-up: magnet | Automatically pulls nearby objects toward the katamari | Speeds up growth in dense levels |
| Crown | New collectible found in each level | Rolling one up unlocks extra levels |
The crown system is the more interesting of the two. It gives each level a second reason to be replayed beyond the score. That’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that keeps a game in rotation.
Time Travel Is a Setting, Not a Mechanic
The eras are the marketing hook, and they’re the weakest part of the pitch. The Jurassic Period, the Ice Age, and historic Japan are backdrops. They change what you’re rolling up. They don’t change how you roll.
That’s fine. Katamari has never needed its levels to mean anything. A dinosaur is funny because it’s a dinosaur, and because it’s enormous until it isn’t. The comedy is in the scale, not the history.
But it’s worth being clear about what Once Upon a Katamari is. It is not a game that does something new with time travel. It is a game that uses time travel to justify a new set of object tables. The scroll is a level-select screen with a story attached.
Single Player, Multiplayer, and the Long Wait
The game supports single player and multiplayer. The source doesn’t detail how multiplayer works, so there’s no way to say whether it’s split-screen, online, or competitive. What’s clear is that the mode exists, and that the series has always been better with a second player in the room.
The gap between console installments is the real story here. Touch My Katamari came out in 2011. Since then, the series has been largely absent from the places where most people play. Once Upon a Katamari ends that absence on five platforms, with the Switch 2 version still to come.
That’s a bet. Bandai Namco is releasing a niche, deliberately strange series on hardware that mostly rewards scale. The 8.4/10 aggregate suggests the bet is landing with the people who played it.
Keep the good times rolling with a new entry in the Katamari Damacy series!
What the 8.4 Actually Measures
Five outlets is a small sample. An 8.4 from five critics is not the same as an 8.4 from fifty, and it shouldn’t be read as a consensus so much as a signal. The signal is that Once Upon a Katamari does the thing it set out to do, and does it without embarrassing itself.
That’s a lower bar than it sounds. Reviving a dormant series is hard. Reviving it without sanding off what made it weird is harder. Once Upon a Katamari keeps the King’s arbitrary cruelty, keeps the Prince’s silence, keeps the katamari’s physics, and adds two systems that make the back half of a level less tedious.
The power-ups are the part worth watching. If RENGAME builds on the radar and magnet in a sequel, the series could fix its oldest problem without losing its identity. If it doesn’t, the additions will read as patches rather than design.
The crowns are the smarter move. They’re a collectible that rewards exploration in a game that has always rewarded size. That’s a genuine shift in what the game asks you to care about, even if it’s a small one.
The Verdict on Once Upon a Katamari
Once Upon a Katamari is the best possible version of a safe sequel. It doesn’t try to reinvent the katamari. It rolls it through new eras, hands you a radar and a magnet, hides a crown in each level, and trusts that the core loop is still good enough to carry a full-priced release.
It is. The loop was always good. The question was whether anyone would build a proper game around it again. RENGAME did.
The 8.4/10 is earned, with the caveat that five outlets is a thin jury. The Switch 2 version arriving in October 2026 will bring a new audience, and that audience will get the same game: strange, funny, occasionally frustrating, and unlike almost anything else on the shelf.
If you’ve waited since 2011, this is the one. If you’ve never played a Katamari game, this is a clean place to start — the mechanics are intact, the additions are gentle, and the King is still throwing things into the sky for no good reason.
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