Credit: Bandai Namco.Īs you play through Klonoa: Door To Phantomile, you’ll discover there are a lot of different places to check out. It’s a great way to get around the levels and find some previously hidden sections. Once held onto, players can then use the inflated enemy like a balloon, helping them propel into the sky and essentially perform a double jump. By doing so, he inflates any enemies and grabs onto them. He has a magic ring that is able to fire a Wind Bullet in front of him. You control Klonoa (don’t ask me what he actually is) as he runs, jumps, and uses his magic ability to negotiate various platforms. New to the remaster is a choice of a normal mode or an easy mode with the latter making things a breeze at the start thanks to offering infinite lives and a few other advantages. Playing the game starts out incredibly simple. Purists may prefer to see the original’s visuals compared to the Wii version, but it looks pretty good – albeit distinctly of a time. Technically, the version of Klonoa: Door To Phantomile within this package is a remaster of the Wii remake of the game. The remaster delivers a hit of nostalgia, but also that same sense of challenge.

Well designed, it drew you in before challenging you a ton in the later stages. Klonoa: Door To Phantomile was a fantastically compelling example of the latter. There was the Super Mario 64 way of doing things with large open worlds to explore and the Crash Bandicoot method offering up 2.5D worlds to traverse. The original game – Klonoa: Door To Phantomile – came out in 1997 at a time when platformers were going through an identity crisis.

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The name doesn’t help with the title making little sense to anyone new to the games, but push through, and you get a good duo of platformers, even if there’s a lack of fan service here. That’s why a remaster in the form of Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series might seem unusual. The Klonoa platforming games are a series of games that will be instantly familiar to anyone of a certain age and utterly baffling to everyone younger.

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