Tokusatsu, Video Games, and L.E. Hall’s Katamari Damacy Book
I had the pleasure of reading my friend L.E. Hall’s forthcoming book Katamari Damacy, an exploration of the wonderfully original and joyous game of the same name: the circumstances that led to its creation, the distinctive creative philosophies at its core, and, ultimately, what it all means. The book as a whole is a perfect pairing of author with subject matter. Who better to write about the celebration of play for play’s sake that is Katamari Damacy than someone whose work as a designer of puzzles and escape rooms also represents a championing of the need for play in all of our lives?
There’s one particular statement in the book that stuck with me. It comes from an interview with voice actor and Japanese pop culture writer Mike Dent. Dent sheds some light on the significance of Jumboman, a character who appears briefly on the TV being watched by the children of the Hoshino family, the focus of the game’s cutscenes.

The glimpse we get of Jumboman is a nod to the specific assortment of Japanese superhero TV shows collectively referred to as tokusatsu. If you grew up watching Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, which used footage from the tokusatsu show Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, you probably have an instinctive ability to identify tokusatsu when you see it: the overblown physical expressions of emotion by masked and costumed actors, the charmingly cheap production values. Of the genre, Dent remarks:
…There are tons of these shows where maybe it’s some quick editing and an exploding dummy of a monster to show someone getting killed, but you’re visually provided with enough information to understand what’s happening. And when you’re a kid watching, that’s the kind of stuff that sets your imagination on fire with excitement to fill in the blanks. The fact that it’s today and we still have men in giant robot costumes fighting monsters in miniature cities speaks volumes about how intact this idea is.
Hall then makes the connection between tokusatsu and Katamari Damacy, writing:
In addition to the literal reference to this era of Japanese culture, Katamari Damacy also embraces this philosophy of keeping things simple and exciting as a method of stimulating the imagination. By referencing nostalgia, it allows the player to revisit happy childhood memories as they engage in a childlike form of play.
I didn’t grow up with tokusatsu myself–I’m just a smidge too old to have been in the target audience for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and the only Japanese media I was exposed to as a youth was anime. I did, however, grow up with the Atari 2600, and this observation about tokusatsu stimulating the imagination rings true for my experience with those games as well. In my mind, the yellow square of Adventure…

became myself, a brave hero in a fantasy world who ventured into ominous, towering castles, slaying dragons and recovering the Magic Chalice.
In Asteroids, I felt dwarfed by the vastness and darkness of space, alone, fighting for survival with everything I had.

These adventures and many more continued in my imagination long after I stopped playing, my mind visualizing the interior of my doomed little ship, or the treasure-filled chamber where the Magic Chalice was kept. That was a huge part of the fun; it was, in fact, part of the whole experience of play the games offered. Now, games so often want to offer up every detail, creating a kind of immediate immersion at the expense of asking anything of your imagination. Something gained, I suppose, but also something lost.
Given the sheer number of objects in Katamari Damacy’s levels, and the limits of the PlayStation 2, of course the game had to rely on a simplified visual style. But a game of such whimsy and silliness is at odds with realism anyway. How great is it that Katamari Damacy, a game that served as a kind of rebuke to the grim shooters and crime epics dominating the market at the time, enthusiastically asked your imagination to meet it halfway, while so many other games were striving to fill in all the blanks for you?
(L.E. Hall’s book Katamari Damacy comes out on October 16th. You can preorder it here.)

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