We Love Katamari Hacking

If you are aware, I am a huge fan of We Love Katamari. I can't get enough of it! Sometimes though, I wonder what is it's limits. Here, I'll discuss somethings I decided to do on We Love Katamari with some help of a memory editor and an emulator.

Ah... The load screen. Probably one of the most creative ways of making a load screen I have ever seen. Did you know you can actually add na-m-co-R to your collection? You have to roll them up before loading your save file, and then they'll be in your collection! This load screen is played pretty much exactly like a regular level, only there's a few things that prevent the regular UI from showing up.

I believe the Katamari is 1m flat. It's possible to modify the size to be bigger or smaller than that, however, it's extremely finicky. Too large and the game softlocks, too small and the game softlocks. It's possible to roll up every segment at the same time. It doesn't softlock the game, as it gives priority to the far right item rolled up. (ex. If you roll up na, m, and co, it'll ask if you want to load co.)

Preparing...

Strike?

A funny thing that happened is that you can also activate the camera zoom out effect here, and it will affect the prompts!

In AFAP4, you have to roll up a 20m Katamari as quick as possible, starting from 12m. I locked the starting size from the Roll up the Sun stage and now the stage is impossible to do. I wonder if it would be possible to complete one of these stages starting from a size smaller than usual. I think it would be pretty fun.

In ALAP5, the final As Large As Possible mission, you will have to reach 500m. During the stage, the game will have to pause for a moment to load the next segment. It's possible to make the game load every segment at once, at a cost. The game expects you to have rolled up a lot of stuff and the game to free up memory by the time it will load the next segment. Since we start off with a huge size and we didn't unload anything, the game forces us to unload stuff, which means WE get unloaded!

This means we are pretty much unable to do anything. The game isn't softlocked, as things still move and the pause menu still works. You can only switch sides. You can't roll, change direction, or bring up the Prince Look or Royal Look.

Roll up the Sun! The end goal of the game! You roll up the planets and stars you made! Hell, if you imported data from Katamari Damacy, you can roll up stars from that game aswell! It's so cool, seeing your work all come together and make your final goal achievable. Of course, why not mod the size there? Too big and the game will freeze, yawn. Though, I think the size in this stage is actually pretty small. In the collection, all the planets' size as listed as "We can't really say..." but the starting size for the Earth is exactly 1m big. Not that big...

It's possible to roll around without crashing, but it breaks the stage. The sun will always be on the top of the screen, taunting you. You can't roll it up until the very end. If you mod the size though, you can make it disappear! This is where it breaks the stage. If we try roll up the Sun after the Sun is gone, the Katamari will endlessly roll towards where the Sun is supposed to be. It's not a total softlock though, you are able to pull up the pause menu and leave the stage when you head towards the Sun.

If you set it to a safe enough size, you can roll up the sun with rolling minimal amount of stars. If possible, you can make the King complain about being ignored, and then roll up the sun while he's talking. It'll block most of the screen but he'll keep talking even after you rolled up the Sun.

The stardust counter is used for the Roll up the Sun! stage to count how many stars you have rolled up. It's not really useful. The game doesn't let you roll up the sun once you roll up 500 stars, the Katamari size is still relavent in this stage. Here I locked the size to ~2 meters, nothing I rolled up would impact the size. As you can see, I rolled up practically my entire solar system, and I still lost.

Stepping away from size modifications for a bit. What's the highest count that the stardust counter can take? It's not 10,000. It's not 1,000,000. It's not 10,000,000. It's 999,999,999. Any higher and the game will crash. I set the number to 999,999,999 and tried rolling up 1 star and it crashed. I believe it's impossible to reach that amount legitmately. The game is fighting for me not to reach 10,000 stars. It has to cap out somewhere.

The rain stage. A girl wants to go to her school's field trip, but she fears that the rain will cancel it. She asks you to roll up all the rainy clouds. I tried an approach that won't crash the game. I rolled for a bit to get to a high size, froze the values that deal with size so the game doesn't touch it, and restart the stage. Doing this will restart the stage, put more items down, and keep my size. I kept doing this until the game refused to let me get any bigger. This stage's peak is 900m. After I hit it, it wouldn't load that many clouds and I couldn't go any higher.

Normally, there would be only 500 clouds in this stage. However, it would only spawn 86. This stage is also much more darker than it should be.

The game has two different two-player options. You can do co-op or a versus mode. I tried doing versus with the size mod and it wasn't too interesting.

It rolled up a good amount of mushrooms and got me stuck. The King doesn't actually yell at you if you roll before he finishes speaking. Probably cause you were never supposed to.