LogFAQs > #979664853

#5. We Love Katamari - Blue Orb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YnwAWbeIbY

Out of the entire series, this is the song which I MOST strongly associate with the stage on which it plays (Roll Up The Sun, not to be confused with the Save Earth stage which also plays this song). I would never play any other song on this stage, and I dislike playing this song on other stages (when I played WLKR with random music selected, I'd usually restart the stage if this song played unless I was really in a certain headspace). I don't think that anything else in any video game does as good of a job at representing outer space as this stage. It's large, it's empty, it's minimalist, it's quiet, everything is all far apart from each other, there's a ton of stuff there but it's all tiny compared to the size of the stage and you're even smaller. All of that is represented in this song. It's not "happy" music like a lot of Katamari music, but it's not sad either. It's just nothing. The notes are sparse and there aren't a lot of sounds or instruments. The vocals are really light and airy. This song does for your ears what looking at the stage's layout does for your eyes; it creates very strong mental imagery. And again that's why I say that they're so good at what they do. It sets a mood that's entirely unmatched by anything in this series or outside of it.

I have looked up Kahimi Karie's other work because I enjoyed this song so much. I came across this quotation from some interview when she was talking about her first album from 1997: "I wanted to make really, really melancholic music, to be alone." Now I will fully admit to taking this quote entirely out of context here, as it pre-dates this game by nearly a decade, but I honestly feel like this description can be applied to Blue Orb as well. "Alone" is one of the best words to describe the song. You feel alone when you're a tiny speck out there in space watching all of these planets orbit around the sun. (Incidentally, not all of her albums sound like this, which is why the fittingness of the quote struck me considering the amount of time between them.)

I've also heard detractors of this song claim that it's "just random noises" or "isn't even a real song" or something (paraphrasing comments that I seem to remember reading back when this song was in VGMC). That makes me wonder if they only listened to the first 13 seconds before the main part kicked in. Or if they somehow didn't notice that the song had lyrics. I get that not everyone is looking for "mood music", but those particular criticisms seemed out of place to me.