Retronauts - Retronauts Micro #039: Klonoa

Episode Date: May 30, 2016

Jeremy reminisces on the appeal of Namco's Klonoa, a PlayStation game whose existence defied the odds. Simple yet memorable, its ethereal atmosphere make it a timeless 32-bit creation. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more podcasts or whatever. And if you'd like to support the show, that can be arranged through our Patreon page.

This week in Retronauts, Wadi do. As a hit-driven industry centered around the new and popular, video games don't lend themselves to big releases that cut against the grain. The rise of independent publishing has created some leeway for iconoclasm, but even so you're never going to see a major publisher sink tons of marketing resources into a game that defiantly marches in opposition to trends of the times. That was true even in the more adventurous 90s, when retail releases were far more varied and numerous than they are today. And the advent of CD-ROM game distribution lowered production costs and encouraged publishers to take even greater creative risks with their game creations. Even super weird niche releases for PlayStation

enjoyed pretty respectable advertising in the pages of game magazines of the day, even if those ads weren't quite sure what to say. A sweet, colorful, 2D platform game starring a furry animal mascot character in 1998. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a game more poorly suited for the trends of the American console games market right about then, as the industry had chosen the latter 90s to double down on the hardcore bad attitude marketing Sega had initiated with its Genesis ads a few years prior. PlayStation era ads were all about zombies and S&M queens and dismemberment, not fuzzy heroes romping through candy-colored fantasy worlds.

Namco's ad agency naturally had no idea how to sell Americans on such a chronically unhip game, so they came up with a solution whose post-mortem I'm absolutely dying to see someday. They sold it as a sexually transmitted disease. It's okay, I want Klonoa, says a wholesome-looking clip art dude to his girlfriend as she confesses that she's been afflicted with Kloa herself. I can only assume the throughline that led to this magazine ad spread began and ended with the fact that Klanoa sounds vaguely a little bit like chlamydia if you squint your ears really hard. I'm not at all sure who this ad was meant to appeal to, fans of penicillin presumably, but

I can only imagine the disappointment that settled over the handful of venereal disease enthusiasts who were spurred into action by this promotion only to discover that picking up clanoa didn't result in miscolored genitals and enigmatic discharges from unspeakable orifices, but rather in a dreamlike, 2D platformer appearing in their PlayStation. In an era In an era where rumor swirled that the gorgeous, innovative Castlevania Symphony of the Night was too dated looking for Sony to allow it for a U.S. release. A time when Capcom allegedly had to leverage the success of Resident Evil in order to get its 2D Mega Man games through SEA concept approval, Klanua was basically box office

poison. It was the opposite of anything the vast majority of PlayStation owners could ever have wanted, a game so straightforward you could play it with only two buttons. About all Kloa had going for it on the surface, besides his enticing ad campaign obviously, was the fact that its 2D action wasn't entirely sprite-based. On the contrary, it took a great mini-cues from Sega's Knights into Dreams, not only with its storyline in which the hero himself turned out to be, in effect, a dream, but also with its aesthetics. Klinoa, the game rendered its world almost entirely in polygons, with old-fashioned bitmap

sprites appearing only for the characters and certain interactive objects. The environments, the bosses, the backgrounds, all appeared in a sort of false 2D, with player movement being restricted to rails through that polygonal world. world. This wasn't some amazing new design concept. The 2.5D action game had been around for a while. There was Knights, of course, but also Crystal Dynamics Pandemonium, treasures mischief makers, and even Crash Bandicoot to a certain degree. Clanoa outclassed them all. Its designers played to the console's strengths by constructing simple, colorful level geometry with minimal textures, and minimizing the use of visual depth. This neatly circumvented the PlayStation's biggest visual failing, the compromised Z-axis buffering that caused the infamous, jumpy, swimmy, graphical effect the

consoles become known for, and kept everything looking so clean and crisp that it holds up incredibly well all these years later. If anything, Clanoa is one of the rare playstitching games that looks better today than it did back in 1998. Running the game on an emulator causes the environment to look much better, and higher resolution and texture interpolation improved the character sprites, which tended to appear muddy and indecipherable on the original hardware. Even at PS1 resolutions, though, Clanoa is a gorgeous game. Its worlds don't simply feature great art design, but also great cinematic work, free to the limits of fixed bitmaps. Kloa's creators were able to add cinematic flair to the adventure, despite its 2D structure.

The camera is designed to swoop low for impressive vistas, arc around curved platforms, and pull back or zoom in close as the situation demands, whatever works best for each scene and situation. Bosses took on a particularly impressive appearance, moving into and around the scenery with impressive fluidity and turning showdowns into visual treats. Grand as the world he inhabited appeared, though, Klonoa himself was the very definition of simplicity. He could only run, jump, and grab enemies. Snatching a foe allowed for a little added depth of play,

a captive monster could be tossed in four directions, including into and out of the screen across 2D planes of action. Alternatively, Klonoa could use his foes as a sort of makeshift platform from which to launch a double jump, which could be further extended by a Yoshi's island-like flutter effect that gave the hero a small amount of added lift at the end of a jump. But that was all Klanoa could really do. And even then, the game didn't fully explore the potential complexity inherent in the capture and jump mechanics. That wouldn't come until the portable sequels, which focused on platform puzzle elements, the PlayStation game only briefly touched on in its final areas.

The minimalism of Kloa's interface stood in stark contrast to the 3D platform games that were in vogue at the time, and Namco's game sacrificed complexity for the sake of a focused, visually-striking experience. The game's visual sophistication made sense, though. Klonoa wasn't the work of a bunch of aimless amateurs, but rather served as a return-to-form for a master of classic game design. Hideo Yoshizawa, the director of the NES Ninja Guidein games, served as the mastermind behind Kloa. It was, in effect, his attempt to take another swing at creating a cinematic platformer. Where the limitations of the NES require Ninja Guidon's cinematic elements to manifest primarily through cutscenes between sequences of action, Klonoa allowed Yoshizawa to make the action itself feel immersive and movie-like.

Ninja Guidin's famous mid-game vistas, where Riu would pause to take stock of a distant castle or fortress that would be the home of those game's final stages became a part of the core game here. Instead of resting control away from players in order to show off a breathtaking viewpoint, Kloa's camera work instead transformed the player's control over the game into the instrument by which those moments were revealed. It was often a subtle effect, and for most people it all felt decidedly backward when other games were allowing players to move around inside immersive 3D spaces. But Klonoa represented a different philosophy of game design, one steeped an authorial intent. It was less about letting players discover a world on their own, and more about the creator revealing his work on his own terms.

The fact that Kloa became relegated to cult favorite status rather than becoming a breakout hit hints of the changing nature of games and player expectations, which we see in full effect today as open-world game design has all but edged out guided linear experiences. Yoshizawa and his team put the limitations of Kloa to great use, though. Not only did they produce a game full of beautiful sights and equally stunning sound, they led the player through a deceptively childlike tale, a story that in true fairy tale style took a dark turn toward tragedy at the end. It's a moving wonderful game, one that was frankly too good for this world,

in the games industry in general. That it ended up being made at all was remarkable, that it somehow got multiple sequels? That's a miracle. Granted, none of Kloa's follow-ups quite recaptured its magic, and that includes the Wii remake from a few years back. Kloa's ethereal dreamlike feel had much to do with its technology, as the low-resolution sprites and uncluttered polygons that defined its world

left much to the player's imagination, and heightened its sense of taking place in a dream world. Yoshizawa regretfully declared the series dead a few years back, a victim of the remake's miserable sales. And that's a shame, but the series' spirit hasn't been totally abandoned. On the contrary, it lives on through games like the newly released Kirby Planet Robobot, which carries forward many of Clonoa's memorable ideas. Huge boss set pieces, visually arresting camera movements, and leaping across multiple planes

of action. His Sprites on 2.5D Polygon presentation style seems like a format that's just on the cusp of being adopted wholesale by indie developers as they begin to poke around with PlayStation nostalgia. The games industry may make it impossible for a major publisher like Namco Bandai to produce something like Clanoa as a sustainable concept, but these days the big guys are hardly the only game in town. For Retronauts, this is Jeremy Parrish.

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