Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil

Splitting the majority of the puzzle gameplay off to Moonlight Museum puts Lunatea’s Veil in a position to carry forward the original game’s action elements, but Lunatea’s Veil seems uninterested in reprising the quirks from the original. Where Door to Phantomile emphasized levels that curved in on themselves, obstacles that crossed between playable planes, and enemy variety, Lunatea’s Veil hews much closer to prototypical 2D platformer elements — featureless running and jumping within the plane. Basic checks on one’s ability to wield Klonoa’s enemy-based double-jump are absent when not contextualized by one of the few new gimmicks, such as with giant worms that appear out of walls to eat Klonoa unless fed prior with an enemy, which appear long past their expiration date late into the game. When these won’t suffice, a trite 3D snowboarding section fills the void. Oddly enough, this ends up highlighting the puzzles that dot each level; the proper platforming is only grist between them.

Unlike Lunatea’s Veil new-look action gameplay, the few new puzzle elements have real potential. Boomies return with an expanded role, no doubt influenced by their use in Moonlight Museum, with a new variant that has proximity-based detonation rather than grab-based. The absolute highlight, however, is the Likuri, which charges up into new colored forms when thrown at other enemies. Once charged, they eliminate barriers of the same color upon contact. Most importantly, they slowly fly back to Klonoa while charging after contact, which opens puzzles built around using this brief application of storage to run under low ceilings or grab other enemies for jumps. The designers stretch this further than any individual gimmick in Door to Phantomile, giving it an appropriately difficult ceiling in its EX stage appearances, but it also becomes so omnipresent in the late-game stages that its presence only bandages over the meager offerings elsewhere.

Maze of Memories points towards the remnants of Door to Phantomile’s design paradigm, through geometry contorted towards puzzles visible from many angles. [src]

The core of this appears in the game’s middle section, which attempts to revitalize the light search-action trappings of Door to Phantomile’s late game. Maze of Memories does this most successfully by completely disregarding the premise of the rest of the game. Multi-room puzzles and warps make an appearance, and the use of Boomies and Likuris intersect with another new enemy — the Erbil, which charge a long, electric jump for Klonoa — in a skewed, unusually fragmentary area much unlike the rest of the game. The Ark’s two visits attempt something more similar to the internal loops of its predecessor to more mixed results: simple Likuri puzzles tied to each reactor in the first visit give way to awkward, truncated Boomie ones in the second thanks to the cramped space, and a lack of actual threats for Klonoa make his frequent moving-platform rides bland downtime. And once these stages are over, the game peters off in a far cry from the ending crescendo of the first game. An attempt at a poisonous area barely registers to any loosely competent player as compared to the transformative Eclipse from Door to Phantomile’s Vision 5-2, and the penultimate level is yet another snowboarding level.

As the game’s level design wilts in the back half, its narrative takes more of a focus. Without time to flesh out said characters in the first half, however, it lacks weight. Aggressively functional dialogue fills out much of the plot early on with a couple key themes lingering in the background: dimensionless hedonism, conflict, and inquiry quarantined to nation-states roil without sorrow to round them out, but the time-share is inelegant. A lack of investment into the denizens of these kingdoms, effectively background NPCs at best, results in comic relief Popka intoning directly on its thematic relevance, in a rather blunt maneuver. In that second half, each character’s arc is cheerily fast-tracked from start to end, except for Klonoa in some sense, who effortlessly snuffs out his own sorrow to reinvigorate necessary sorrow in the world, and as to satisfy the convention of a final boss battle.