Klonoa Phantasy Reverie is a wonderful release that combines the best and most well-known games of the series. Players will discover remastered versions of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa: Lunatea’s Veil. Both games sport improved graphics, optional local two-player support, and adjustable difficulty settings.
The Klonoa series has been in my backlog for a long, long time. I first heard about these games over two decades ago, and always remembered them as being something I would like to make time to play. The first Klonoa game was a PSX exclusive, releasing way back in 1997. The second game was exclusive to the PS2, and it debuted in 2001. A few Klonoa games actually came out on the GBA, and even one on Wonderswan, and I missed the Wii game in 2008 (though I believe it was just a remake of the original), but unfortunately none of those are included or given any mention in Phantasy Reverie. Hopefully Bandai Namco will release those at a later date. For now, though, anyone who enjoys a fun, straight-forward 3D side-scrolling platformer would do themselves a favor by playing through the two Klonoas included here.
When I first started up the game I was excited to finally be putting these two games on the front-burner, so to speak. I never forgot about these and always thought the screenshots and even the game names sounding appealing. I soon discovered that I was not to be disappointed. Both Klonoa games are a treat to play; their whimsical, old school, charming, and just very relaxing and enjoyable. I’ll discuss both games next, followed up by the three main features of Phantasy Reverie.
So both games star Klonoa, a sort of bi-ped cat with big floppy ears. He’s a likable little fella, and he carries with him a special ring. In both games, a supporting NPC will go in and out of the gemstone on that ring (think genie in a bottle style). The NPCs are only featured in the cutscenes, one of which plays before the start of each Vision. Visions are the names for the stages, and they’re called that because they’re akin to a dream, since both games take place in a dreamworld. The cutscenes are kind of awkward in their pacing, with sometimes long-ish pauses between characters talking or events happening. I’m not sure if this was done intentionally way back in the PSX days in order to let the disc drive read and load up more data or what, but in this release players can outright skip cutscenes or fast-forward them to speed things along.
Anyway, in both games Klonoa and his NPC buddies find themselves facing evil forces. The first game, Door To Phantomile, sees Klonoa battling Ghadius, the Dark King who wants to unleash the nighmares from the Moon Kingdom onto all of Phantomile. His minion Joka is a thorn in Klonoa’s side for much of the game. In Lunatea’s Veil, Klonoa is in Lunatea, which is comprised of five kingdoms. Klonoa and his two NPC friends must stop a sky pirate named Leorina and her cat sidekick Tat from obtaining power and bringing about sorrow to the world. So both games have Klonoa fighting back the bad guys aiming to bring nightmares and sadness in to replace peace and happiness.
While both games play very similarly to one another, the sequel has more gameplay elements to it and ultimately I found it a better game, though I really liked both. As Klonoa, players will side-scroll in a 3D environment that is largely linear, but there are some small diversions you can take to pick up extra gems or find other goodies like health or dream fragments. The camera is not-adjustable and the only buttons are jump and wind bullet, which is used to grab things (mostly enemies). Enemies are more the cute and plentiful variety as opposed to being particular dangerous, and really I found the most dangerous thing in these games to simply be the environment at times, such as just missing a jump and falling to the void. Enemies are combatted with your wind bullets (short-range, infinite ammo) that allow Klonoa to grab the enemies and throw them, or just them to double jump up to new heights. Klonoa can double jump and hover, a la Kirby, to help traverse the levels. Speaking of the levels, I thought they were very nicely designed; they’re dream-like and charming (yes, there’s that word again, but it’s so applicable to the Klonoa games). While the first game segments the game into about six levels each with three stages (including a boss fight stage), the second game is setup more like a Mario or Kirby game where you have a world map and areas open up as you beat previous areas. Players are even given a choice sometimes in Lunatea’s Veil to choose which of two stages they want to tackle next, before having to then do the other stage, too, and the cutscenes adapt accordingly.
Klonoa’s platforming is fun and never too hard or irritating, though to capture all of the dream pieces and all 150 stones in each stage is likely to take a few retries, even if just for the sake of accidentally missing some due to not making the jump in time, if that makes sense. I liked how the Klonoa games both explained their gameplay mechanics with a quick pop-up message, and these were also included with each boss fight to let you know what exactly you had to do to defeat them. While not really necessary, it was welcomed to have this simple ‘hey, here’s what you need to do’ message before going into the boss fights. I thought these boss fights were nicely designed — they’re short and simple, but often multi-faceted and just neat, utilizing a variety of platforming ideas.
Other differences between the two games include the cannons, chase sequences, launchers (not sure what they’re actually called) and trampolines found in the second game but not the first. The launchers are these little objects that you grab on to with a wind bullet and then you scoot over to an opening above you and they launch Klonoa way up, making for a neat visual treat. The cannons and trampolines that propel you to other parts of the stage have the same effect. Indeed, the second game has more gameplay elements to it, but it should, having come out four years later and on newer hardware, but I can’t say enough how much fun I had playing through both games.
In Phantasy Reverie, you get the optional to adjust your difficulty at the start of either game. I actually decided to play on Easy, because I liked what the new Easy mode had to offer. First, infinite lives — I consider myself pretty good at side-scrolling platformers, but I also don’t have the desire to deal with life limits and restarting stages a bunch. So having the ability to restart as many times as I wanted to do at the last checkpoint is just a modern convenience that I was happy to accept. This mode also gives players five hearts instead of three, and damage is reduced by 66% — it’s very generous to be sure compared to Normal and then eventually Hard mode that you can unlock, but I wasn’t here to test my platforming skills, I just wanted to have fun.
Rolling through both games took about 5, maybe 5.5 hours each, with very little dying or restarting. Easy mode is indeed easy, but, it was an absolute joy to playthrough this way. There’s reason to replay the stages, too. Each stage has 150 gems to collect, as well as six dream pieces. Collecting all of these unlocks an additional Vision. I got probably 80% of these collectibles playing through on my first run, but didn’t feel compelled to go back to try to gather up the rest (I simply have too much else going on right now). I was content to resort to Youtube for that.
I have yet to try playing co-op with Phantasy Reverie, which is something new that was added to the games, but, it’s a limited co-op mode in the vein of Kirby: Forgotten Land where player two is really just in a support role. A second player can help Klonoa jump higher, with a cooldown mechanic attached to that, but that’s it. Neat, but unnecessary and probably not very fun for the second player.
As far as the presentation goes, I thought the devs did a great job. You can optionally enable a pixel filter, but the default graphics are crisp, really showing off the game’s colorful characters and worlds. I can only imagine the wow factor playing this game on PSX at launch twenty-five years ago — it’s a really pretty game, very charming, and very creative. The sounds of the games are also good, but not on the level of the visuals, especially in Lunatea’s Veil which has a lot of fun 3D stunts like shooting out of cannons and jumping on trampolines that launch Klonoa sky high.
I’m so glad that Namco Bandai re-released these games during Klonoa’s twenty-fifth anniversary year. They hold up remarkable well over time and have aged beautifully. I sure hope we see more of Klonoa going forward.
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