It's not often that I review games that I can't pronounce; but on a recent visit to Namco's corporate offices in Tokyo, I could not get my lips around the name "Katamari Damashii."
Perhaps the problem was that the name is in kanji, which I can't read. Whatever the problem, Namco corporate communications team leader Shin Hasuya spent most of the day trying to get me to remember the name after he heard me bungle the pronunciation with no lesser persons than Manabu Ishii, Namco's group leader of corporate communications, Keiji Tanaka, the managing director of Namco, and Kyushiro Takagi, president and CEO of the company.
Other people are not having the same problem -- judging by the sales. Between March 15 and 22, Namco sold 32,000 copies of the game, placing it at the No. 10 slot of top-selling games in Japan, just behind Nintendo's latest Pokemon games.