Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

While the overall 2D platformer scene died down in the advent of polygonal rendering in the late ’90s, Klonoa quietly inherited the mantle of Yoshi’s Island and brought its slower pace, nuanced character abilities, and high-concept level designs into the fifth generation. Much like how Yoshi can ingest enemies to create throwable eggs, Klonoa can capture and inflate enemies, although he can only hold one at a time. This restriction directly feeds into Klonoa’s puzzle design: every obstacle in the environment requires Klonoa to immediately interface with surrounding enemies to get past, unlike Yoshi’s Island, where a persistent “inventory” of eggs trailing Yoshi and a plethora of egg generators let players decouple storage from puzzle solving.

In Klonoa this dynamic is unavoidable, not just for the usual throw-based use cases (killing ungrabbable enemies, hitting switches) but also to double-jump by throwing an enemy downward in the air. Although Klonoa retains Yoshi’s flutter jump, it kills his momentum, making much of his traversal based around using enemies in the environment. With this in play, clearing any high ledge or wide gap benefits from holding an enemy, but actually obtaining an enemy in the first place may not come easily. Beyond enemies with unusual movement or that weave between static hazards, some enemies use armor to prevent being grabbed, which can only be removed by hitting it with another enemy. By placing regular enemies on separate planes from armored ones or by using a chokepoint to prevent access to the armored enemy’s spawn point (Klonoa can’t carry enemies through small gaps, which the designers enthusiastically exploit), the player must execute a chain of grab-throw or grab-jump combinations to get to the next area. Spooling this out and seizing on both the execution (navigating around enemies, making jumps) and reasoning (figuring out which enemies should be used where) aspects gives the designers room to build up the simple foundation. Enemies such as walking bombs that begin ticking down once grabbed or large enemies that turn into platforms when hit help mix-up the fundamental interactions, and per-level gimmicks elevate the basic enemy/mobility interplay even further, such as in Vision 5-2. This level cyclically alternates between a day state with fewer platforms and grabbable enemies and a night state with more platforms but ungrabbable or invincible enemies.

This room from Vision 6-2 is its first timer-based puzzle, where each blue switch here must be hit in quick succession. The standard method here is to grab an armed grey enemy from the bottom level, throw it at the right switch, use the flying enemy to quickly jump up and hit the top switch, and then fall down to hit the left switch. [src]

In another similarity to Yoshi’s Island, Klonoa’s levels gradually eschew a left-to-right structure in favor of interconnected stage designs that feature loopbacks and stage-wide object effects. This is aided by the game’s 2.5D level layouts, which obscure linearity and provide ways to interact with later parts of a level from afar, such as in this section of Vision 5-1 where platforms in the background can be used later if knocked over. None of it is truly exploratory, but it actualizes the locations beyond mere vessels of challenge. Vision 6-2 in particular shows a keen awareness of parallelism as an effective way to present a series of challenges in an authentic environment. This level involves a single large cylindrical tower with a long column-filled room that contains different pathways. Successive pathways are locked behind timed switch puzzles at the end of the pathway before it. These switch puzzles inside the tower must be accessed by removing a block located outside of the tower behind a super-sized version of a common enemy. Reaching these sections exterior to the tower require a climb sequence from within the tower, and before each of these lies a precision platforming section over a perilous drop. Each cycle of these scenario patterns escalates in difficulty, not only highlighting your character’s progression towards the final boss ahead but also avoiding a myopic focus on a single element of the design space. It’s an exceptional display of design chops that illustrates Klonoa’s mechanical mastery without straying into more rigid design philosophies that would render the artifice more apparent.

What really cements Klonoa in the overall 2D platforming pantheon is its attention to aesthetic detail. No aspect feels cheap or rushed, from each boss’s rotating pentagonal prism health bar, gorgeous level start splashes with unique names and subtitles for each, oscillating polygonal flourishes when the cast uses their magic, particle effects when Klonoa runs across certain surfaces, and cinematic swirling camera angles as Klonoa rounds corners and breathes in monumental structures. The story fully integrates into the gameplay, with everything handled in-engine using unique, well-animated sprites. Its narrative strays little from a vague light and darkness dichotomy, which suits the compact pacing of the game perfectly. While the infamous final twist may seem shockingly abrupt, the cutscenes before quietly foreshadow it, and it adds enough of a wrinkle to the story to let it linger in one’s mind. It’s evident that this is the culmination of Hideo Yoshizawa’s vision of an action game that marries unvarnished gameplay to cinematic qualities.