His first portable outing, Moonlight Museum, only showed up on WonderSwan, a platform that never came west. When protagonist Klonoa turned his hat backward to boogie-board down a river for the PlayStation 2 sequel, that looked like a throwback to the "edgy" teenages days of the original PlayStation. At first glance, the original game looked like a relic of the 16-bit era. Namco had no idea how to sell it to Americans their inexplicable solution was to present it as if it were an STD. Yes, from the very beginning, the odds were stacked against Klonoa. It had its complexity and darkness, but those features revealed themselves only to those who dared take a chance on its bright colors and saccharine cute characters to play the game beyond its cuddly opening stages.Įnemies in this game aren't so much there to be dangerous as to serve as fodder for puzzles: Grab them, inflate them, toss them, double jump off of them. While the games industry marched in lockstep toward big, complex, immersive 3D adventures with hard-edged characters and themes, Klonoa put a sort of naïve sincerity front-and-center in its low-key 2D world. The series' debut, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile for PlayStation, had no business being greenlit in Japan, let alone coming to the U.S. Rather, we should experience wonder that the games ever existed at all. When we think back on the Klonoa games, it shouldn't be with sorrow that such a great series has been deemed terminal by its own creator.
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