Game info: Katamaripedia
Music info (w/purchase links): VGMdb
Info
Time for another monkey’s paw bargain: there’s finally a new non-remake installment in the Katamari Damacy series, but it’s an Apple Arcade exclusive, so have fun not playing it.
Katamari Damacy is a series of colorful, quirky games where you roll up a bunch of random stuff on your ever-expanding ball, so it makes sense that the music direction for the series tends to be cute, quirky, and eclectic. It’s vocal-heavy, focused mainly on pop styles, though it gets jazzier sometimes and there are also instrumental tracks too. Even though this game was mostly handled by the newer generation of Bandai Namco composers who’ve never worked on a Katamari game before, they maintained the musical tradition, so I think it’s pretty easy to identify this as a Katamari soundtrack if you didn’t already know. Especially since, in series tradition, it quotes the main theme a lot.
Where it differs from previous soundtracks is that it has that modern digital fusion/DTM sound in the composition and electronic production, which isn’t surprising at all given that the lead composer was Shogo Nomura. Other composers got in on that action too, though! I mentioned modernization in my last post about Metroid Dread and this also feels to me like a pretty respectful modernization of the Katamari formula, to the extent something as eclectic as it as a formula. Fun soundtrack!
Recommended tracks:
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“Katamari on the Dream” (Shogo Nomura, vo. Cassie Wei) is a pretty standard Nomura maximalist tune, it also quotes “Lonely Rolling Star” a bit at 1:48
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“Katadoru Sandbox” (Kanaya Oki, vo. Kohei Hiromura) is very sparkly
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“Katamari of Ka/Ta/Ma/Ri” (Rihito Tsuboi) is composed entirely of manipulated voice samples from Bandai Namco sound staff, mostly just saying the word “katamari”
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“Coro Coro Cue” (Eriko Sakurai as trine) starts off the instrumental block of the soundtrack strong with some nice chords and cute instrumentation, sometimes it feels a little eShop like at 1:12
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“Prince and Woodwinds” (Shogo Nomura) is just real classy
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