Once Upon a Katamari

Once Upon a Katamari is a 2025 entry in Bandai Namco’s Katamari series, announced during Summer Game Fest on June 6, 2025. It returns the series’ central action: players control the Prince and roll a sticky katamari that gathers objects.

The setup is recognizably cosmic rather than realistic. The King of All Cosmos again gives the Prince a task after a catastrophe in the heavens, and rolling rebuilds the damaged cosmos. Its fairy-tale presentation spans multiple eras across its journey.

Bandai Namco’s announcement identifies the game as a new Katamari title, not a remaster of Katamari Damacy or We Love Katamari. That distinction matters because the project adds new stages, new challenges, and preserves rolling formula from the series itself.

The revealed setting is unusually broad for the franchise. Promotional material shows the Prince rolling through environments associated with different points in history, including a prehistoric landscape and a medieval-looking kingdom. The title’s “Once Upon” wording therefore describes its storybook.

As in earlier Katamari games, scale is the central joke and mechanic. A small ball collects nearby everyday items before becoming large enough to absorb furniture, vehicles, buildings, and eventually much larger objects. Growth changes available routes and targets dramatically.

Once Upon a Katamari also preserves the series’ playful tension between precision and excess. Players must match a stage’s size requirement, avoid objects that can knock the katamari backward, and decide whether to pursue a target or keep gathering safely.

The announcement specifically highlights multiplayer support, allowing up to four players to roll together. That expands Katamari’s familiar competition and cooperation: players can share the work of reaching a goal, race for objects, or interfere with one another in stages.

Beyond the main roll, the game introduces missions and score-focused challenges designed around the same accumulation system. The appeal is measurable: a run is not only about reaching an endpoint, but also about discovering the largest katamari and improving results.

Visually, the game remains committed to Katamari’s distinctive contrast between flat, colorful characters and richly populated spaces. The Prince is still immediately recognizable in his pointed green headpiece, while the objects selected provide humor: all clutter becomes meaningful when collected.

Once Upon a Katamari is significant because it treats the series’ established idea as a flexible framework rather than a one-time novelty. Its historical settings, four-player focus, and original campaign give the Prince a route through the franchise’s strange, cheerful universe.