So an introduction huh, I'm rather new to the Klonoa franchise, or maybe not quite new, but I hadn't gotten quite acquainted with the series until very recently.
I played a demo of both the first and its sequel at a friend's house (never owned any of the Playstations until just a few weeks ago), back in the day, but at the time I just found both games just kind of strange but unremarkable. Fast forward to a few years ago I played Empire of Dreams (on an emulator) and felt that it was ok but a bit too slow paced, so I quit by the second world. So just until recently I hadn't played through a single Klonoa game. Then I got reminded of the character a few months ago prior to the release of Smash 3DS, in a 4chan quarrel of all places, about who should have been in the Smash roster.
Being a fan of platformer games, and quite starved for a good platfomer, and at this point more than disgruntled with the state of the Sonic franchise, which used to be my favorite game series, that was until I played Sonic Heroes, and with Sonic Generations being the only platformer game I had enjoyed besides Nintendo's Mario outings, and the throwback Megaman games, and gaming in general was getting quite stale for me, and I was kind in a foul mood with things in general in my life, even going as far as starting to question why I gave a damn about anything in the first place.
Finally I got around to finishing Empire of Dreams, but this time I was pleasantly surprised how well made the game was, and the fact that nothing felt too gimmicky, sure the bosses were a bit on the meh side, but it really felt like one of the old school platformers I used to love, sure it was a bit on the easy side, but I did have my fair share of deaths during the scrolling stages, and the music and art direction was quite good too, with none of the level themes being too generic design wise, overall the game left me quite satisfied, and it left me wanting more.
Then I got myself a Playstation 2... in 2014, and ordered Klonoa 2 and the Wii remake from Ebay, for the first time in a long while I was somewhat pumped to play a game and had high hopes for both games, Klonoa 2 arrived first in the mail, and I couldn't start playing soon enough, and holy crap if the game didn't blow me away, this was actually a game where I greatly enjoyed all aspects of it, the story, game mechanics, music and especially the art direction. It's a rare enough occurence when a game greatly surpasses your expectations, even rarer still when it blows your mind when you are already really hyped, of course there were some things that I was sceptical of at first, but it all came together as the game progressed, the thought put into this game is just mind-boggling, small details one normally would not care much about, and in a game that seems to be aimed at children of all things, this game really reminded me why I love video games in the first place.
Then the Wii remake arrived, and I enjoyed it too, not as much as the PS2 game, but it was very good, though this game almost sickeningly cute, but not overwhelmingly so, but after comparing both versions with youtube videos, I think the PS1 version is the better version overall, I think the tone of that version fit it a lot better with Klonoa looking younger, and the cutscenes handling the emotional scenes better, even the art direction seems better overall even putting the Wii version to shame in some aspects graphics wise. Though I'm still doing the reverse portal challenges, which were a nice addtion to the game in my opinion.
So here's the TL:DR version, I played Klonoa 2,
and it touched me inappropriately, and it was like my favoritestest thing ever.
