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Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

Format: GameBoy Advance
Published by: Namco
Based on: Klonoa, Klonoa, Klonoa

Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
Media: Cartridge
Date: September 2001

Return of the skunk... cat... bunny thing

Handheld games have long served as the urban ghetto of gaming, a crowded slum filled with violently bad titles, criminally mutilated ports and games too impoverished of originality or quality to break free to the uptown world of TV-based consoles. And this is understandable, thanks to the physical limits of handhelds. Be it the blurry green incoherence of the original GameBoy, the monstrous battery-draining wrath of the Game Gear, or the reflective darkness of the GameBoy Advance, portable systems' inadequate hardware dooms the games they support to a sort of inner city projects status in the shadow of console suburbia and the wealthy nightclub territory of the PC. It's really sort of sad, and aside from work by the occasional Jimmy Carter-esque goodwill ambassador who erects the virtual equivalent of a Habitat home (say, Zelda Oracles, Metal Gear Solid, that sort of thing), gamers generally perceive portables as a scary place better left as someone else's problem.

Yet while the character Klonoa may hint at a sort of junior ghetto mentality with his backwards Pac-Man cap and big baggy shorts, his latest game - Empire of Dreams for GameBoy Advance - in no way resembles the usual sort of gutter trash that comprises handheld gaming's urban blight. In the midst of myriad careless ports and awful licensed platformers, Klonoa: EoD is the young kid who lived with his blind grandmother in a home so poor that the poverty line was a distant dream of a better life, a kid who succeeded in school solely through dint of serious effort while all his classmates shot each other with handguns and shot up with cheap heroin, a kid who overcame all the disadvantages of his upbringing and managed to become President. Well, maybe not President, since that's something the Japanese-born Klonoa can't legally accomplish. But definitely Secretary of State.

You see, ever since developers realized that the NES-level horsepower of the GameBoy Color meant cheap and easy NES game ports with NES-calibre graphics (without stopping to consider that maybe there was a reason GameBoy games used to have different visual proportions than the newer games they were making), complaining about poorly-handled console-to-portable translations has moved beyond "cliché" to "utterly tiresome." How many times has it been an issue in the games I've reviewed? Certainly enough so that regular ToastyFrog visitors are thinking "Would you shut up about that, already?" every time I broach the subject. Yet despite incessant complaints and the chorused curses of millions, developers keep ripping sprites designed for 320x240 screens and dropping them into 160x120 play areas, expecting us to suffer through great games hobbled with severely compromised gameplay and keep coming back for more.

Namco did not commit this crime of incompetence with Empire of Dreams.

In fact, there are a number of things Namco failed to do wrong with the GBA version of Klonoa, and the game is vastly better for it, easily ranking at the top of GBA's already impressive library. Not only do the visual proportions in the game allow for a perfect match of gameplay and graphics in a way most other games can only dream - see sidebar - but Namco went a step beyond simply tailoring their visuals for general handheld gaming. They went to the trouble of perfectly customizing their graphics for the limitations of the GBA itself. The poor contrast and annoyingly reflective nature of the GBA's screen have already made the system infamous for the bizarre contortions gamers are forced to adopt to see the screen clearly in anything less than perfect sunlight. But a tiny little detail of graphic design in Klonoa EoD neatly sidesteps an Internet's worth of anti-GBA tirades: the cel-shading style of outlining which lent Klonoa such a crisp appearance on PS2 is adapted here to make the characters and foreground objects perfectly visible on the GBA's screen no matter what lighting conditions a gamer is forced to endure. There's also a great grasp of visual contrast and depth on display here; the backdrops sport muted colors which allow Klonoa and his adorable little foes to pop right out. While the GBA hardware limits graphical dynamism to traditional scrolling parallax planes rather than the fully-3D backdrops of the series' PSX and PS2 titles, the game makes the most of what it has with aplomb. The result is graphics which are more crisp than the PlayStation original, have better depth than Moonlight Museum on WonderSwan, and offer more precise visual platform definition than Lunatea's Veil.

Obviously, graphics alone don't make a game great, or else Working Designs' rather simplistic-looking lineup would be in deep sheep dip. But the masterful marriage of graphics to format turns a very good game into a truly great game. It's the little things that do it, you know.

In terms of gameplay, anyone who has ever spent five minutes with a Klonoa game knows what to expect, unless those five minutes were spent watching cinemas in Klonoa 2. "Our pal Klonoa" (as Namco shamelessly refers to him) runs, jumps, grabs enemies and tosses various objects in interesting and clever ways to complete the increasingly complex puzzles which comprise levels. But don't let the word "puzzle" here or in most previews of the game throw you off; EoD is only a puzzle game in the sense that you have to perform certain sequental actions to make progress from place to place. It basically boils down to a platform adventure that occasionally requires a small outlay of brainpower and often a touch of thumb precision as well (or a lot of both, in the case of the three magnficently challenging EX levels, which are unlocked by performing various feats throughout the game).

Those rare import-crazy veterans of the entire Klonoa series will find that EoD is ultimately a massive overhaul of the previous handheld adventure, Moonlight Museum, with everything improved or refined to almost mindboggling degrees. There's the obvious graphical refinement that comes from changing from a blurry passive-matrix B&W screen to a color TFT, but EoD also offers new puzzle elements (such as "grab" blocks that reach out and touch other bricks as well a timer for the mouse bombs to build in more variety to the puzzles which involve them). Additionally, a snowboard and an auto-scrolling stage feature in each of the five worlds. I violently hate that sort of thing, considering "minecart" and auto-scroll stages to be among the most annoying platformer "conventions" (i.e., tired and overused clichés) in existence, but in this case I have to give them their due: they actually work well here. For one thing, they prevent the "find three stars and 30 gems" gameplay present in the other 25 stages from becoming stale and boring. Even better, if you happen to foul up in one of the later sections of the auto-scrolling areas and miss one of the 100 gems each stage offers to be collected, you can restart that section without returning to the beginning of the entire stage or sacrificing a life - something that would have been a welcome addition to Klonoa 2's snowboard stages. But most importantly, these areas are absolutely optional. That's right, like a good RPG's minigames, you don't have to complete these extra levels in order to beat the game, only to unlock the game's extra secrets. It's almost like Namco was picking my brain and built a game around my ideal design concepts.

Of course, even the most impressive tale of triumph and success needs its share of tragedy to be a truly compelling story. And yes, young Klonoa, who battled his way from the jaws of poverty into a career on the President's Cabinet, has seen his share of sadness. At age 17, he lost his beloved grandmother when she succumbed to athlete's foot. In college, his tenure as freshman class vice president was cut short when he was accused of being instrumental in offering kickbacks to the campus dining services manager in exchange for fluffier meringue pies. And worst of all, his PlayStation 2 game was decried far and wide as being entirely too short and too easy. Though this was nothing more than false slander, the allegations came back to haunt Klonoa when his GameBoy Advance installment actually was entirely too brief and far from challenging. Gamers were disappointed to discover they could clear the main levels in a mere six hours, and that even after facing down the surprisingly challenging final boss and scrolling level were likely to have 30-40 extra lives in reserve.

But Klonoa is doing great deeds, and making lots of influential friends. There's a tremendous chance that his sheer charisma and impressive good looks will be sufficient to weather protests about the various shortcomings of Empire of Dreams. Yes, our pal Klonoa has a long, happy career ahead of him. You could do much worse than jumping on his bandwagon now, going mobile with GBA so that every game is like a stop on his campaign trail. Klonoa's constituency is still fairly small, but a few more games like this and the Great Klonoa Empire will be more than just a dream....

Karmic Balance

Of course it's all well and good to make broad comments about how great Klonoa's visuals are and what a perfect handheld game it is. But being the intrisically swell guy I am, I've gone one step above and beyond and am offering no less than an example of what makes Klonoa: Empire of Dreams better than other GBA platformers, courtesy of Ubi's Rayman Advance. At first glance, Rayman is a brilliant, beautiful port of a 32-bit game that suggests the GBA has nearly the same rendering horsepower as did that beloved font o' 2D strength, the Sega Saturn. Unfortunately, the graphics in Rayman Advance, big and beautiful as they are, are absolutely piss-poor in terms of suitability for a handheld system.

First of all, the graphics are huge, with enormous sprites and detailed background. A good thing, right? No, actually, it's not. As with so many console-to-handheld ports, the sprites which looked perfect on a TV screen are cumbersome and awkward in half the pixel space. What was a perfectly playable platformer on PlayStation becomes a nerve-jangling exercise in leaps of faith and countless resultant unfair deaths.

To make matters worse, everything in Rayman Advance is rendered in vibrant shades of pastel. This looks nice in theory, but with the GBA's notoriously dark and reflective screen, it means that discerning the difference between background and foreground objects is often impossible, and it's entirely too common to take a flying leap onto an animated backdrop that looked deceptively like a platform.

Or to put it in layman's terms, click here for a side-by-side comparison of what Klonoa succeeds where Rayman fails. Which doesn't look so bad, really, but then these games weren't meant to be played on an emulator - so click here for a dazzling simulation of real-world conditions. And send a small donation to Namco to express your gratitude that they understand handheld game development, even if Ubi doesn't.