Re-release this: The Munchables

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Wii sometimes gets a reputation as a console that lacked anything but first-party offerings, but that’s simply not true. People deciding against buying non-Nintendo games was a real problem, sure, but the system had everything: incredible first-party content, some real banger third-party games in a variety of genres, its fair share of stuff to avoid, and plenty in between. One thing that would also happen on the Wii at this point in time — given the lower development costs of a system that wasn’t outputting above 480p and the fact that digital distribution wasn’t quite in its the future is now phase yet — is that you’d get the occasional budget release worth looking into. Sometimes the releases were $20 or $30 instead of $50 because it’s the only way anyone might buy them in a very crowded market, and sometimes it was because that was the only way they’d be made in the first place.

The Munchables is much more the latter than the former: like Namco Bandai’s Katamari Damacy series, The Munchables wasn’t sold at what was considered full price for a console game at the time, but was instead a budget $30 release. There’s plenty of game here, and it’s good enough, but this was also the era with the real push toward downloadable content, online multiplayer even in places you didn’t previously expect it — reasons to stick with a game beyond seeing its credits the first time. The Munchables didn’t really have any of that, and was setting itself to face the same kind of criticisms as Katamari Damacy. “Quirky” and short: the horror.

I keep mentioning Katamari, but it’s not an accident. Not only did The Munchables also come from Namco Bandai — they’re Bandai Namco now, but they weren’t back in 2009 — but the developer was the same. The developer for Katamari Damacy, the first Katamari title, is listed as “Namco,” but it was actually co-developed by Now Production. The team was headed up by Keita Takahashi, who developed the idea of Katamari in the first place, and was made up of about 20 employees, some from Namco, some from Now Production.

Katamari Damacy was a Playstation 2 game, but Katamari itself would quickly become a franchise that appeared on multiple platforms: the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and even pre-smartphone mobile versions. Nothing appeared on the Wii, however, and it’s a little unclear why that is. Beautiful Katamari — also developed by Now Production, but with Jun Morikawa directing instead of Takahashi — wasn’t supposed to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, but ended up being one because the versions for the PS3 and Wii were both canceled. While the PS3 ended up with the Genki-developed Katamari Forever in 2009 (which shares some stages with Beautiful Katamari), the Wii would get The Munchables… developed by Now Production.

It’s likely you’ve played a Now Production title at some point, even if you haven’t played any of their Katamari games. They were one of the studios putting out Adventure Island titles after the original released on the NES, and were often put to work either porting existing games over to consoles like the NES, Turbografx, or Genesis, or coming up with sequels to existing franchises like with their portable Klonoa games, or Deadly Premonition 2. They’ve been around for decades, and have done everything from Katamari to shoot-em-ups to Splatterhouse ports to Bomberman to Mario Superstars Baseball. Namco in particular has an exceptionally long relationship with them: Now Production converted arcade titles Ms. Pac-Man to the NES and Dragon Saber to the Turbografx, developed Splatterhouse 2 and 3 for the Genesis, put together a couple of the Namco Museum volumes on the Playstation, and in the present, are still converting Bandai Namco’s works to modern consoles, such as with 2022’s Pac-Man Museum for the Switch. In between all of that was their time with the original work, Katamari.

Now, Katamari and The Munchables only share so much of the same DNA, but it’s still more than most games share with Katamari. The basic concept is similar: you must travel around a level, getting larger and larger, which allows you to consume even bigger obstacles. In Katamari, the obstacles are objects, people, animals, ships, islands, whatever you roll into so long as you’re large enough. In The Munchables, the obstacles are always enemies, and the enemies are edible. Yes, where Katamari games see you rolling around a sticky ball to make it bigger and bigger, grabbing anything you roll into of a specific size or smaller, The Munchables is based on how quickly you can grow your character through eating everything that comes into sight.

The basic story of The Munchables is that space pirates named Tabemons have invaded your planet, Star Ving. These space pirates look a lot like various foods, and so, to defend Star Ving, the Great Elder decides to send two of his hungriest citizens after them. The best offense is a hungry defense? Either way, a whole bunch of aliens are going to be eaten whole and then eventually pooped out as orbs that determine how well you did in a given stage, ranks C to S.

Gameplay is pretty simply. Move near an enemy using the analog stick on the Nunchuk (or the Wii’s Classic Controller, or a GameCube controller), and then press A to swallow them whole. So long as your level is equal to or higher than that of the space pirate in question, you — meaning, the cute but sharp-toothed Chomper or the cuter but similarly deadly for walking meals Munchy, whichever of the two protagonists you decide to play as — will eat ‘em up. If they’re a higher level than you are, then you can attack them with the B button to break them up into smaller versions of the same foe. So long as those smaller versions of them are the same level as you or lower, you can swallow them up, but if they’re still too high of a level, you need to find some other pirates to munch on in the meantime.

Your character grows size a few times per stage, depending on what level you are, which also changes their look: you always start out cute and small and round, but you look a bit more menacing by the time that third evolution rolls around. Still cute! But a menacing cute. Your chosen character will grow in level depending on how many meals you’ve eaten, and the meals keep going up and up with each enemy swallowed depending on a couple of things. First, the meals counter isn’t a one-to-one thing: if you swallow a whole bunch of enemies quickly, it creates a combo, and combos give you bonus meals which help you level up faster. Second, if you take damage, you lose some meals: while you don’t revert in size or level after losing meals, you still have to earn those meals back in order to climb to even greater heights in those arenas. Avoiding damage isn’t overly difficult or anything, but you’ll eventually take a hit by guessing wrong on the timing of an attack, or getting caught up in something or somewhere you probably shouldn’t be.

When you take damage, you not only lose those meals, but you’re also susceptible to dying. You’ll have a brief window of time where you shrink down and flash red, and with enough Wii Remote waggling, you’ll come out of that state and be safe. If you take damage a second time while you’re still like that, however, it’s a Game Over, and you’ll have to start the stage over again. As there’s no timer, you can be pretty patient and not have to rush things, and since you’re going to be trying to setup combos, you’re likely to be going for a sure thing pretty often instead of interrupting those stretches with attacks on bigger pirates who are trying to attack you instead of just mulling around or running to avoid being swallowed up.

Each game world has three stages: a simpler introductory stage with some objective or another (grow large enough to swallow the spaceship, to eat the radar blocking towers, and so on), a larger one that will see you grow to a much larger size and have to take down some kind of leader pirate who you have to grow and grow and grow to be able to eat, and then a straight-up boss fight with one memorable foe or another. The boss pirate of each world is powered by the Legendary Orb, which very much looks like a poop emoji rather than an orb, only in a variety of colors. These battles are a highlight, since the bosses are all superpowered food items that take more work and thought to figure out than the standard enemies. Simply getting bigger isn’t enough here: you have to recognize patterns, find weak points, and successfully attack while draining these foes of their immense size until you can finally take them out for good.

The Munchables isn’t difficult by any means, but you can still get a bit of replay value out of it. For one, getting S ranks on the stages is enjoyable enough, since all that’s required is that you (1) grow to the maximum level (2) collect all of the glowing acorns strewn about each level and (3) don’t take too long doing all of that. The stages aren’t long enough for replaying them to a huge pain, and you might find yourself wanting to find that extra acorn or figure out what you missed that kept you from attaining the maximum level on your first playthrough. More enjoyable than this, though, is the Mirror Mode you unlock when you complete the game. This imposes a time limit on what had been, S-rank hunting aside, a pretty stress-free push toward the goal of each stage. So if you want to challenge yourself by playing mirrored versions of each stage that you have to complete within a certain length of time, you can do so once you complete the game the first time.

Whether you want to play again is an open question, though. The Munchables is good, but it’s not great. It didn’t pull in any truly negative reviews, but instead it had some folks who thought it was a pretty good time, and those that thought it was at best an inexpensive diversion. You probably aren’t going to care about a tougher Mirror Mode if going through the first time was just alright, but for those of you who are into what Now Productions was doing here, there’s more where that came from in-game.

The Munchables isn’t a perfect game, but it’s one that should probably see a digital re-release in the present. It wasn’t overly reliant on motion controls — you didn’t even need to use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo to play it on its original hardware — and the industry has moved beyond the time period where basically everything had to be given a physical release. It’s got a cute vibe, and the artwork, which is loaded with anthropomorphic vegetables running for their lives from you, is still pleasing to look at all these consoles later — look at the video embedded above that’s upscaled to 1080p through the Dolphin emulator, and try to tell me this game’s design-forward, non-realistic look hasn’t aged well. It’s not Katamari, no, but not even all the Katamari games manage to be crowd pleasers. The Munchables is just a solid game that’s been forgotten about, but like with any other game, that doesn’t have to be the case.

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