The satori of Katamari Damacy

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The game’s mechanics are simple. A tiny character (the Prince) pushes a sticky ball around (the katamari, which translates as something like “a clump”). The Prince’s aim is to collect any and all objects that he can keep attached to the katamari. As the Prince rolls, anything significantly smaller than the ball sticks to it. In this manner the katamari gets bigger and more able to retain larger objects, and so forth. In the various iterations of the game there’s always a fairly perfunctory storyline to justify in some vague way the Prince’s various missions. These make even less objective sense than Japanese narratives normally do, but they usually revolve around some kind of silly but vaguely Oedipal crisis precipitated by the Prince’s father, The King of All Cosmos (i.e. God).