Retronauts - 727: Episode 727 Preview: Klonoa

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

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And if you want to hear the whole thing, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up at the $5 exclusive episodes tier. Once you do that, you'll get access to all of our previous exclusive episodes and our future ones as well, as long as you remain a patron, and our exclusive episodes will launch every other Friday. Again, that is the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts, and I'll let you get to this free preview of one of our exclusive episodes. we are talking about clanoa and before we get into the many clanoa games for this short-lived franchise i want to talk about the origins of clanoa so i feel like we should lay down the context in which clanoa first existed because even though the playstation was just a handful of years old at the time we largely understood that traditional two-d games were a thing of the past unless they were on a handheld system and even those weren't taken very seriously at the time.

We just naturally assume that there won't be any more 2D games and eventually when handhelds get more popular or more powerful, they will be phased out entirely. That is sort of the way animation went. 3D animation was invented and it shoved 2D animation out of the way completely.

But in terms of video games, now we love 2D games. I mean, Silk Song is a 2D game and we're not far from the release of that and it's a really huge deal. So thankfully, 2D games came back, But for, I would say, about a decade, we, I think we just assume that they'd be a very niche thing for the rest of time. And that's, Kanoa was one of the last guys asked for that. So, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I picked it up right away is because just hungry for that.

And it's actually a game with some 2D graphics because the character, most of the characters in it are 2D, even though the backgrounds and environments are 3D. I remember squinting at the CRT and not being sure if, like, is he really 3D or what? That's what Donkey Kong sold on. Yeah, the sprites, I think. think they are pre-rendered sprites. They're pre-rendered graphics and they're very, very fuzzy. And then that's set against polygonal backgrounds and that's being played on your SDTV. So everything is just like kind of a fuzzy nightmare. So you're not, it's never really clear back in the day what was 3D and what was not unless you were paying very close attention. But yeah, if you read the old

reviews of Kloa, people, reviewers at least, were celebrating the idea. Like they're making a new two-d game. This is amazing. This is just like, oh, it's a blast from the past, even though side scrolling games weren't that long ago before 1987 so that is the world in which this game exists yeah I think it's important to reference like one of the last gasp of like 2D platforms games was on the Sega Saturn Sega released a game called a stall

which is supposed to be like the most amazing looking platformer ever it's incredibly short nobody remembers it it's okay but I feel like it's kind of amazing that we got something like Kenoa so quickly after that giant failure on Sega's giant failure. Yeah, and that was a Saturn game.

And from what I remember, people that love 2D games, love the Saturn because when you had the RAM cartridge for that system, it made 2D games look amazing. Like, I believe like Street Fighter versus X-Men was a big game for the Saturn, things like that. That sounds like something that never existed, but I can't say for sure. I'm not a fighting game guy. I remember I loved Dragon Force on that game.

Yes, Dragon Force. Yeah, we didn't import. So limited. No, it wasn't import working designs, man. Working designs brought over. No, no, no, but all the fighting games and the shooters. The fighting games, yeah, yeah. There was a big import scene.

But, again, you don't need to come to me for the fighting games. So that's not my bag baby. So moving on, Sony had a bit of a bias against 2D games because the console wars were heating up. And they didn't want uninformed consumers to think that their hardware was similar to old hardware, especially when they were competing against the N64 and the Saturn and, hey, the Jaguar, the 3DO, why not? So we have a really a bunch of secondhand stories about how they were pushing back against publishers. I don't think any official edicts have ever been discovered. I could not find any, but there is evidence at the time that Sony was resistant to having 2D games on their platform, at least initially.

Things like Lenoa and Symphony of the Night, they managed to slip through because I guess they were so well made. But in general, some games just never came over here because of their 2D status. Yeah, it seemed like Sony of America in particular was very skeptical of 2D games. Sony of Japan seemed to be much more allowing of it, and that did affect somewhat what we got, because that was, of course, an age before everything got poured over. Yeah, and I would say it wouldn't be until maybe the late odds where 2D games would share the same space as polygonal games. I'm thinking of things like Xbox Live Arcade, where suddenly you are downloading games like Braid, and Bionic Commando rearmed

and they are essentially 2D games and you're playing that on the same hardware as you're playing Bioshock and it doesn't feel weird. I feel like that and things freeware like Cave Story, that's kind of breaking down the door and making 2D games more of a popular formats and more

of an accepted format. But I feel like for a decade, maybe you guys can let me know if you did big to differ, but that feels like they were kind of on the back burner or considered a throwback or very niche. Oh, I definitely agree. even know that the PlayStation could do 2D graphics still symphony the night came out

so yes and I mentioned Jeremy Jeremy obviously has a connection with Clanoe he's on on this podcast but I remember at the time reading his Toasty Frog 2D website which was just a celebration of any 2D game that would come out

even if they weren't as high budget as Clanoa things on the Neo Geo Pocket color things on the game boy color but that is basically where 2D games were they were so niche and so rare that you needed like a specialist, hobbyist platform to celebrate them like Jeremy's website. So we're not seeing that now, but that is just really what the state of things was back in the late 90s.

You know,