We Love Katamari Hacking Part 6

I tried playing the cousin stage on a new save. I expected it to not spawn any cousins, but all the cousins were there. I rolled everyone and soon after, the stage ended normally. Except, here's the thing, I have not unlocked any of these cousins. During the results, the King pulls out Beyond, the last cousin I rolled up. It only unlocks Beyond and not everyone else I rolled up.

In normal play, it's impossible to unlock more than 1 cousin in a stage at a time. For stages that have multiple unlockable cousins, only 1 of the locked cousins appear in the game.

Continuing the trend of playing different versions, I tried out the European version of We Love Katamari. This was Europe's first Katamari game. Since they didn't get Katamari Damacy, it is not possible to transfer Katamari Damacy stars to the game.

As you might know by now, this means Europe had to miss out on Katamari Damacy constellations in their solar system... as they were replaced with Cousins' Planets. These were special planets that would unlock if you rolled up a few cousins.

One odd thing can happen with these planets if you try using save data from another region however.

In We Love Katamari, it saves each file as katamari_save01, katamari_save02, and katamari_save03. With uLaunchELF or other save data manipulation programs, You can copy these files to the other region's save data and they will work fine. The European version does have a bit of naming issues with files that have imported Katamari Damacy data.

That's the only issue I can point out though.

On the subject of save data, the game also saves photo data! If you have the camera, you can take photos of your surroundings or Katamari and save them onto your memory card. The file is pretty huge though, around 800KB. How does it save it?

Super Galdelic Hour, another game that can save photos, saves them as an extensionless JPG file. A simple rename and you can open it with any photo viewer. We Love Katamari is not the case though. It appears to save it all inside one huge file that doesn't use a standard file format.

Opening the file in a program that can load raw data can reveal the images. There's no color though. I wish I could somehow learn how this is rendered with color ingame. If I open the rawfile in a hex editor, I can see the image being made in text.