Negative Gamer Review: Klonoa (Wii)

Remakes fall into one of two camps. On one side there are the cynical cash spinning remakes of games that enjoyed undeserved success several generations ago or have barely been out for a few years, for examples see Tomb Raider Anniversary or Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. The other camp is home to remakes which offer a genuinely useful set of updates or give a region often ignored back in the old days a chance to finally play the games they never got, key examples here are Disgaia: Afternoon of Darkness or the DS Final Fantasy remakes.

Klonoa is a remake of the PS1 game Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, at the time Klonoa was expected to become Namco’s new mascot in a time when every company worth their FMV had a cuddly animal mascot ready to be horribly violated by the onset of rule 34. Bearing Pac-man on his hat he scampered through a colourful 2.5D platformer selling just enough copies to justify a PS2 and GBA sequel, however the original game became damn near impossible to find very quickly and as a result I’ve never actually played it. So this is more than a remake for me, this is a chance to meet a gaming hero.

Klonoa uses wind as a weapon. Much like Wardrox.

The story is suitably fluffy and silly for the era in which it was originally released. The evil Lord Ghadius has kidnapped the Songstress Lephise in order to prevent her from restoring the planet using the Song of Rebirth. That’s pretty much it, Ghadius also screws a lot of stuff up in the various kingdoms that make up the game’s 14 levels (split into 7 stages) leading to a lot of jumping around from one setting to another. These problems are explained by characters you’ll run into usually in the middle or at the end of levels in some astonishingly bad voice acting that is 100% unskippable and therefore guaranteed to piss you off long before any actual gameplay problems do.

The controls are about as simple as it’s possible to get. As with a lot of Wii games there are many schemes offered from the sideways Wiimote to the Gamecube controller yet they all use the same basic buttons. The d-pad or analog stick moves Klonoa left or right while one button jumps and another button fires his wind gun to inflate and grab enemies. It’s the inflating of enemies that forms the game’s main gimmick, when grabbed they can be used to perform double jumps or thrown as weapons. Using the right enemies for the right thing forms the basis of the puzzles that make up the levels, however constantly regenerating enemies dulls the effect of these puzzles as there’s not really any need to actually think about what to do.

That’s the biggest problem with Klonoa, it has the same problem as the famous 2.5 platformer Crash Bandicoot. It’s just too easy. Extra lives are given out at a rate of at least 1 a level, checkpoints appear at the start of almost every new section and deaths are only ever likely to happen during the game’s boss fights. Even then, obvious weak points and easy to dodge attacks make death an unlikely occurance. It’s this lack of challenge early on that makes an insane difficulty spike in the last few levels all the more annoying.

A few more things

• While it is very easy, the game has some replay value in the form of rescuing villagers in each level. However even these aren’t exactly hard to find.
• A boss time attack mode also tries to add replay value, but with no online leaderboards there’s not much to be seen there.
• While the credits list the original Japanese voices, weeaboos (and people with ears) will be disappointed to hear that there’s no option to activate them.

It’s hard to not like Klonoa. The bright blocks of colour that worked well in the PS1 original still work today and look very good on the Wii. The controls don’t try to be any more complex than they need to be and the one bit of waggle doesn’t need to be used unless you really want to. The only real problem I have with the game is the difficulty and that’s hard to really feel aggrieved by when you consider the game’s target audience. The difficulty spike near the end is annoying, but not enough to ruin the fun.

You should buy this game if…
…you want a simple, fun plaformer.

Final Score

A fun platformer with little going against it other than unskippable cutscenes, bad voice acting and a nasty difficulty spike.

(What does this score mean?)