Scuba Cat (We Love Katamari)
Released: September 07, 2025
Tags: Pepakura, Reverse Engineering
The internet is obsessed with the Scuba Cat from We Love Katamari. I'm not sure why this character from the game's entire wacky roster seems to be the main standout, but clearly people love him enough to make multiple tattoos and fan art. I love the little guy too though, so why not allow people to bring this little fella to their homes?
This summer, I went to a Japanese restaurant which had a ton of Pepakura inside. I had a nice chat with the owner, who made the models herself, and I quickly realized that I hadn't done a pepakura in a while and suddenly I was getting a big itch to do so. I have two unfinished Pepakura to do (A Heatran and Regigigas model), but these are complex models that would take a long time to make, so instead I opted to design and put together this little guy in about three days of work. Outside of the mouth and mask (in the small variant) it's a relatively easy model to assemble.
When I designed the model in Pepakura Designer, I was under the impression he was going to be a bit bigger, but turns out I just don't quite understand what 12.5cm means. The small size does make certain pieces super fiddly to assemble (the mask especially), so I have included multiple sizes of the model. The variant in the picture is the "small" one, and you can see he is about the size of the palm of my hand.
In the game, some parts of the model have hard edges while others have smooth ones. If you want to mimic the in-game look as much as possible, take a look at the included Blender file, where I marked all the hard edges as cyan in Edit mode. Avoid creasing or folding the paper everywhere except in these marked positions (meaning you should ignore most dotted line folds in the pieces themselves). For the most part, these marked edges are in glue spots, so the hard edges will show up naturally. Also in the game, the mask isn't actually touching the cat's head. That's a bit hard to replicate in real life, so what I did was I added in an extra piece (marked with ADD GLUE HERE) that you are supposed to glue to the inside of the top of head with the flap sticking out. You can then insert this flap into the marked position in the scuba googles (between the two triangular glue folds) and glue it from the inside. This should give you the same diagonal mask position as the game without having to glue the goggles to the face itself.
Originally, Namco's Katamari website (which is mentioned in one of the game's loading screens) used to have a ton of pepakura you could download. I remember making a Prince one! Unfortunately, most of these builds seem to have disappeared off the internet...
