I was feeling a few pangs of guilt about all the games I still have unfinished, especially since I haven’t really finished any recently but have purchased several more since. So, I figured I’d better get back to some of them, and tonight I picked up where I left off in We Love Katamari and got a fair bit done.

(cut for looooongness)

Most of the levels tonight were of the impossible-to-fail variety, where you just had to get as big or do it as fast as possible, but without a specific restriction. That takes some of the pressure off, but it’s not much of a challenge either, and it’s hard to judge how well you really did. These levels included one where you had to pick up as many paper cranes as possible, an underwater stage where I kept wasting time by getting caught on a fisherman’s hook, and a cloud level that was interesting just because it was from a different perspective, and you could run through most clouds you weren’t big enough to pick up yet. I wound up using the dash in that last one a lot, since I didn’t have to worry about running into them.

There was another repeat of the campfire level, with a bigger campfire goal, and again it took me a few tries to get it right. Again, I’d either fall into some water or leave big gaps where I’d be unable to find new fuel before the katamari burned out. There was a stage like one in the first game where I had to get the katamari as close as possible to a specific size, but without the size meter displayed. I kind of cheated on that one, though — at the start, the King briefly displays an example of what the right size looks like, and I stuck a couple of post-it notes on the TV screen around the edges…

It made me do the tutorial level again for some reason, and I can’t remember if anything was different from when I first did it at the start. And, of course, there was the ultimate start-small-and-end-huge level, where by the end I was picking up office towers and ripping islands out of the ocean.

By the end, I’d finally done enough levels to retry the roll-up-the-sun stage that the game forces you to fail early on and succeeded this time, causing the credits to roll and technically ending the game. As with the first game, you continue playing through the credits, though this time you’re fleeing from the King as he uses the sun to roll up people from the stage select meadow.

I say ‘technically’ because, even though the credits have rolled and the save game is marked with a crown to indicate it’s been beaten, there were still more stages I could do. Of particular note is one similar to the credits of the first game, where you have to roll up the countries of the world, though this time it’s to stop an oncoming meteor.

And there are still a bunch of more requests from the King’s fans to fulfill, although after trying a few of them they seem to mostly be variants on stages I’ve already done. Plus there’s supposed to be an unlockable stage obtained by finding all the cousins, but that would take a while.

So, there’s still more to do in the game, but I might halt it at this point and call it done. As much fun as it was, it’s technically over, and I’ve got to move on if I want to continue making a dent in my waiting list of games.

Since I was on a roll anyway (har har), I figured I’d try to finish off Switchball tonight as well. That was easier said than done though, and I only managed to finish off the Cloud World, leaving the Lava World still to go. It’s definitely getting a lot tougher, in both the puzzling aspects and getting the timing right. Not to the point of being impossible, but it does often take a lot of profanity-inducing retries.

The last stage in Cloud World was particularly…involved. At the end, it looked like the path split and I could do it with either the magnetic power ball, or the air ball. After a couple tries with the power ball where I fell off a narrow walkway, I tried with the air ball instead, and a couple tries later I made it close to the next checkpoint. Except then, as I was approaching the checkpoint, a fan I hadn’t noticed blew me off the platform. Argh. So I tried again as the power ball, made it back to near that checkpoint again, but noticed I was below and there wasn’t really a route to the upper platform and checkpoint. But there was a switch which…turned off the fan. I suddenly realized that not only did I completely waste my time on those air ball attempts, but I now had to take the power ball all the way back to the start and then go through the air ball path again, and any mistake would require redoing both paths all over again. Augh!

I did actually manage to finish that run without having to restart again, but that stage wound up taking me over 22 minutes, when it has a bronze medal time of only 8 and a half minutes.

Maybe I’ll finish Switchball tomorrow. I’m just not feeling that itch anymore right now though.