THE BEST WAY TO UNDERSTAND MODERN BRITAIN IS TO ROLL IT UP IN A KATAMARI
England is a car park full of wine
We Love Katamari (2005) is one of the best video games of all time. In this Japanese classic, you play a tiny prince who is responsible for rolling a ball - a “katamari” - which collects everything it touches. Rolling up items makes the katamari bigger. The bigger the katamari gets, the more stuff it can roll up.
Ants! A hairclip! A whole roast pig! Snowmen! A ghost in a well! An excessive number of screaming schoolgirls! An entire Formula 1 race! A rainstorm! Mount Rushmore! The Universe!
Along the way, you can roll up the United Kingdom – and in doing so truly understand what it means to be British. Well, sort of.
When We Love Katamari (PS2) first got a UK release in 2006, I was immediately obsessed. Mostly because it was obscure enough that nobody else at school had a copy. This meant that, unlike literally any other game, I could beat my friends at it.
But I also loved We Love Katamari because it was properly nuts. What other game would encourage you to roll a giant magnetic ball through a zoo, absorbing all 300 fleeing animals? Or let you play every level as a sentient bowl of soup?
In addition, the silly game mechanic was wickedly satirical. Plenty has been said about how the kleptomanic katamari is an allegory for the worst excesses of capitalism. Every level is motivated by the supermarket sweep death-drive to simply Get More Stuff. Indeed, at a conference in 2009, creator Keita Takahashi explicitly stated it was “a game about the consumption society”.
The game hinges on the logic that an object’s only value lies in its size. Everything else is irrelevant. Whether it’s a stick of gum or an entire city full of people, its only function is to bloat the katamari. And the more that you accumulate, the more you can accumulate - in the process absorbing all the world’s resources.
All that is solid melts into katamari.
If I’m making We Love Katamari sound like a high-concept game where you play as Capital itself, that’s because it is. The game’s clutter of collectible household goods and catchy, chaotic sountrack mean that We Love Katamari offers a dizzying representation of the tacky, addictive and - above all - destructive pleasures of consumerism.
Earlier this year the game was re-released in remastered form for the PC. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to escape from housing-crisis endtimes London into the technicolour world of my katamari-fixated youth. Except I’d forgotten that London is itself in the game…
A late level of We Love Katamari features a loose interpretation of the Earth, incorporating famous landmarks from various continents. Britain is part of a European area which lets you roll up items like the Eiffel Tower, The Parthenon, The Colosseum and Parisian-style houses (“croissant buildings”).
Next to the motorway into the European quarter, you can also see Stonehenge - you know, just in front of the Alps.
So far, so inaccurate. But to my eye, We Love Katamari’s blocky 2005 depiction of London perfectly describes how Britain feels today.
A PIECE OF ENGLAND
It’s always interesting to see a foreign-made caricature of your own nation. What was recognisable enough about the UK to include in a comic representation for a Japanese audience? My favourite katamari-roller Miso and I were about to find out.
On first impression, the developers have got London absolutely banged to rights: you can see Big Ben, Tower Bridge, a huge ugly train depot, and concrete. A lot of concrete.
Ok yes, there ARE also giant magic toadstools, but compared to the rest of the game, this slip of land is anti-psychedelic: a dreamless zone of grey rectangles and mud.
When my katamari was big enough to roll up the actual ground, the game confirmed that this concrete island (apologies to my boyfriend J.G. Ballard) is indeed a “Piece of England.” However, the Loch Ness Monster (“Mystery Creature”) swims in the body of water nearby, meaning that this area represents the whole of Britain. Sorry Scotland, you’re just a picturesque pond next to Railway Hell.
Katamari-Britain is London centric, despite the fact London has little to offer. But how else is this level a perfect map of the British unconscious?
HOUSING: Accurately, unlike nearly every other country in the game, Piece of England has a chronic shortage of housing. There isn’t a single residential building in the country. But don’t worry, it does have two massive car parks.
CARS: In fact, nearly the entire landmass of Piece of England is taken up with car parks, motorways and chimney stacks. The sole public transport option is an army of red London buses. This is because these are the only buses in the country that have received any funding.
Like the real England, Piece of England is a theme park for cars, the roar of the highway only ocassionally interrupted by a freight train. Here’s a sample of the objects in my katamari just after I entered the area:
As you can see, the only unrealistic part is how many trains are actually running.
INDUSTRIES: A large group of red-brick buildings surround the Houses of Parliament. Perhaps they are schools? High street shops? Nope, we don’t have those on Piece of England. We have three Wine Cellars and a Winery. And it’s all subsidised by the taxpayer.
Don’t despair though, on the other side of the river are several buildings labelled “Chocolate Factory”, so we’ve got both the key food groups covered.
The other industry in Piece of England are the numerous buildings labelled “Auto Factory”. By now I was really enjoying my role as acid-trip asset-stripper (assett tripper?), so I ploughed right through the two industrial zones, absorbing the factories into my already-enormous katamari.
After the factories were gone, I noticed there were big crowds of people standing around in the streets, but since there were no homes or workplaces in the way, it was easy to roll them up too.
DEMOCRACY: Eventually I’d absorbed so many of the UK’s industries that I was big enough to capture the Houses of Parliament. At this point the katamari-Capital metaphor became overstretched, and I had to have a lie down.
We Love Katamari perfectly represents the experience of Britain today: we live in a weird tourist postcard country. We can see all the outlines of the old institutions - The House of Commons, the railways, and the factories - but we know that to those in power, these resources exist purely as commodities, objects to be rolled up by the biggest katamari.
By the end of my play-through, Piece of England was completely barren, and my katamari was enormous. I was an oligarch made of soup.
If you enjoyed this edition of HRG&GV please share it on social media. Nearly all of my subscriptions come directly from readers sharing my posts so I really do appreciate it! You can also leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page: here. Or you can hire me to write for you via my agent Kate Haldane at PBJ Management.