Genre Character of the Week: The Prince

For Christmas this year I got the PS3 game Katamari Forever, which has both an incredibly simple concept and a lot of back story. It also has our Genre Character of the Week: The Prince (pictured left).

The goal of the game is pretty simple, you (the little green guy), push a ball around the screen and everything you touch that is roughly half the size of the ball or less sticks to it, as the ball gets bigger, you can pick up more stuff, and eventually stuff can include animals, people, buildings, weather systems, you name it.

The story of the game (the fifth in the series) is as follows. While learning to jump his Katamari (a skill that cannot be underestimated in this game), the young prince's father, The King of All Cosmos displays a massive jump (he's kind of a jerk to his son - actually it might be better to replace "kind of" with always and "Jerk" with whatever NSFW expression you would prefer), and although he gets very high, he is also hit by a passing meteor, and immediately loses his memory.

Realizing that The Cosmos needs a King, The Prince and all of his cousins work together to create a Robotic King of All Cosmos; The Roboking, which turns evil and nearly destroys the universe (although to be fair, it does feel bad about it afterwards). From this point on The Prince must work to roll bigger and bigger Katamari balls which which to eventually replace all the lost stars throughout the Cosmos.

Honestly, what I like about the little guy is his willingness to try. He's got a pretty terrible dad (even the Robot version is pretty mean to the little guy), but that doesn't stop him from doing his job - rolling stuff up (see below). If you've never tried the game before, it is definitely worth a look.