Released for the Wii this past May was a remake of Namco Bandai’s classic 1997 Playstation side-scroller Klonoa. I had heard lots of good things about this game before I got a chance to play it, but I really had no idea what to expect going into it. Well I’d like to thank Namco Bandai for providing me a copy, because it was a blast to play. Klonoa is not your standard 2d side-scroller as it has some really cool design features that keep your gaming experience enjoyable. So if you haven’t yet checked it out, here are my thoughts on Klonoa.
The game begins in what I found to be a pretty creepy cut-scene describing that the nobody in the land of Phantomile can remember their dreams, except for our protagonist, Klonoa, who has the same dream every night where he sees a space ship crash into a nearby mountain and he meets a floating spirit ball named Hewpoe. One day that dream comes true, so Klonoa and Hewpoe head to the top of the mountain to investigate. It turns out that an evil being known as Ghadius and his companion Joker, have kidnapped a young girl who has something to do with dreams, and they are looking for a magical pendant. Well obviously it’s up to you and your friend to save the girl and stop the bad guys. I mean come on, you’re just a kid and a magical floating spirit ball thing.
Klonoa is a pretty short game clocking in at around 5 hours to get through the campaign. Once you complete that, several additional items are unlocked including a way to replay through all of the levels backwards, costume changes, a movie viewer, and a time-trial mode to see how quickly you can defeat each of the games bosses. For the most part, the levels are pretty easy, but the final level has a pretty significant difficulty spike, so be ready for that. The game is a single player 2d side-scroller with a twist. While you can only go forward and backwards through each level, the levels actually exist in 3d space, so some paths may wrap around and take you outside of the path that you were originally on, as well as interact with objects outside of that path. I thought this was a really cool feature and really gave the game some depth and kept things interesting.
Klonoa’s little friend Hewpoe is actually his weapon in the game. Hewpoe shoots out of a ring and can pick up enemies and shoot them back at other enemies. You can also perform double jumps while holding enemies which helps you get to otherwise unreachable portions of the levels. You can also hold down the jump button to fly for a short period of time. All in all, everything feels a little, dare I say, “old school”. There is a boss at the end of every 2 levels, but none of them really involves a gimmick or anything particularly special in order to defeat. In every instance, you pick up enemies and throw them at the boss. Easy Peasy.
Obviously the graphics have been improved over the original Playstation version of the game, but not by much. It’s kind of unfortunate that a developer would choose to remake a classic game on the Wii over the 360 or the PS3. Yes, this game was very fun to play, and the graphics were bright and cutsie, but they certainly were not mind-blowing by any means. There are cut-scenes between each of the levels that give you a bit of story that you can’t help but laugh at how cheesy some of the dialog is. Along the same lines, while mostly annoying, the voice acting is pretty decent.
Klonoa was pretty fun for what it was. It doesn’t have the appeal of something like Super Mario Brothers or the complexity of Braid, but it has its perks. It’s short and I enjoyed it, but I can’t help but feel this game was designed for and thus will be more enjoyed by children. Each of the levels are very well designed and present a variety of puzzles and challenges, and the enemies progressively get a little more difficult climaxing a final level that I personally feel may be too hard for the games primary demographic. None the less, if you like side-scrollers and have an extra 30 bucks sitting around, Klonoa might be worth taking a look at.
