Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (2001)

The best Klonoa

No one would still be talking about Klonoa if it weren't for it's visuals.

When you have an easy platformer, and Klonoa is an extremely easy one, the visuals become absolutely essential to it's success. If I'm not concentrating on the jumps and timing the game needs to show the player something fun to look at, otherwise it's just boring.

The game's setting is a dream world which is used as a licence to throw you into a lot a of imaginative environments that manage to hit several different tones. There's the circus level which is exciting and festive and than slowly morphs into a goofy haunted house. There's the ominous and mysterious ruins, a more serious London-like level that's having bombs dropped on it. The most silly level is the surf boarding level that plays a ridiculous pop-song with nonsense lyrics (look up the soundtrack titled "stepping wind" on youtube. If something that silly and playful doesn't appeal to you this isn't your game). It maintains a cutesy vibe to everything up until the end where the final boss goes into JRPG melodrama which I thought was stupid.

The move-set for Klonoa is unique making it more of a distinct game than "cute easy platformer". You can grab enemies with his wind-ring and use them either to double-jump or throw them as a projectile (throwing them is often part of some of the game's frequent, mild puzzles). It's fun and mischievous using enemies against each other. There's sometimes some really unique platforming sections that involve catching an enemy, double jumping to another, and repeating the process, triple or even quadruple jumping. It's a great system but not fully pushed to it's limit because they rarely want to throw demanding screens at the player which is a real shame.

The level also flow really well and have that feeling where you want to run through it fast; which looking back. makes me think the game could have benefited from a dash mechanic.

What the game really needed to improve though was better collectibles. It's badly designed enough so I almost feel like subtracting another star. There are entire screens or platforming sections that exist soley for these dream stones and you'll find yourself in lots of situations where you have point in gathering them, making all these jumps and screens pointless. If you get 100 you get a 1up. Ok, that's fine. But since your counter resets to zero when you clear a level or die, that don't carry over to the next level like Mario's coins. So if you know you aren't going to get 100 before clearing the level, collecting them becomes pointless. Getting 80 does nothing. And once you get 100 in a level there's no reason to get more, as each level only has 150 (it does however give you some pointless unlock if you 100% a bunch of the levels). To add to it, unless you're someone who struggles with Kirby games, you'll find yourself not needing extra lives urgently. Which really makes those stone-collecting jumps and rooms just feel like empty space.