Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: from the past of PlayStation, the return of a unique mascot
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series
Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil are back as a duo remastered in the Klonoa Phaasy Reverie Series. In 1997, PlayStation had long been synonymous with video games, all over the world including Italy. On the first Sony console, the English games dictated rhythms and fashions, the American ones tried to reinvent themselves with some success away from the PC, and the Japanese ones marked technical and conceptual revolutions.Magical and unrepeatable years, where the medium was still predominantly creative craftsmanship and artistic automation, now so sadly in vogue, was only at the beginning and capable of projecting only positive influences. It is in this context that a very particular character was born and raised in the Bandai Namco workshops, halfway between a cat, a rabbit and a dog, immediately renamed Klonoa by its author Yoshihiko Arai. Klonoa and his eponymous adventure, along with the 2001 PlayStation 2 sequel, is about to return in a double remastered for all the popular gaming platforms, and here in L.A. we had the immense pleasure of previewing the Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series. The result? A journey through warm, pleasant and reassuring time like a brother's embrace.
A mascot is forever
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: our face when we heard about Klonoa's return The music, the graphics, and of course Klonoa himself, have contributed to making us travel in time to go back to where it all started: to that 1997 we have just told you about.We are talking about remastered versions, therefore without major technical innovations, but these two fundamental games of the PlayStation period have an unshakeable charm, which can only be ruined by remodeling it as you would in a remake.
The trees remain those of the past, rounded and devoid of details, the colors are perhaps too bright for today's standards, but this is precisely the beauty of Klonoa and many games of the same era.
We have seen this happen before: if you try to add new polygons on screen, replacing the gimmicks to get around the technical limitations of the time with brutal displays of power and flashes of photorealism, you are probably going to screw it up. In cases like this, a real remake would make Klonoa disappear to make something else appear that certainly aren't the games Bandai Namco plans to celebrate today.
Immortal gameplay
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: colors and lightheartedness, the two main ingredients of nineties games During the test we had confirmation that not even in the gameplay Klonoa seems to have suffered the passage of time. The game is in 3D, but it is not an open world, nor does it allow the same freedom of movement that is in vogue after the pixels have been permanently put aside in the name of the third dimension. Here we move mainly on two-dimensional planes, rarely in depth, not surprisingly when it was presented in the nineties it was spoken of as the first 2.5D platformer.As the genre dictates, precision in jumps is also everything in Klonoa, while enemies represent both a threat and a possibility, since they can be captured and thrown in all directions, to defeat other opponents but also to jump higher or solve the different puzzles that will alternate during the two adventures included in Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series.
A different difficulty…
Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: it's okay to touch the less possible, but the square sky has never been the best And a superfine gameplay that of the two Klonoa, today as yesterday, where the difficulty is not hidden in abstruse combinations of commands or punitive joints of blows and overhangs. The experience is gentler than what is usually offered in more modern platformers, instead it prefers a more cerebral, reasoned type of difficulty.At the turn of the new millennium, developers were certainly not afraid to treat their audience as sentient beings, instead of loading everything on the eye-thumb synergy as has been the case in recent years. This creates a strange and pleasant short circuit that demonstrates, if ever there was still a need, of how the games of the past can seem, net of graphics, more modern than what one would expect, especially from games that now have more than twenty years on their shoulders. (and the first Klonoa is twenty-five years old).
In this new two-in-one version of Klonoa we will be able to enjoy remastered graphics at 60fps and 4K resolution, new options to further customize the difficulty and a new game mode that will allow your friends to help you in the most challenging steps of the adventure (which we haven't tried yet). Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series will be released on Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PS5, Xbox One and Series X | S, on July 8, 2022.
