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though for those who just want to solve action puzzles, every one of the "twitch" stages (except the boss races) is technically optional. Dream Champ Tournament packs a lot of variety into its design, offering the occasional breather from all the puzzle-solving. Even more interesting are the boss "battles," which mostly play out as races against your opponents across seemingly normal game stages rather than as a direct head-to-head conflict. The more traditional auto-scrolling platform stages feel like Mario "athletic" levels cranked up to 11, forcing you to scramble not only to make all the tricky jumps while avoiding (and exploiting) enemies but also to collect all the various gems within the stage for a perfect score. Thankfully, practically everything else about Dream Champ Tournament works as advertised. Their inconsistent edges and the glitchy shadows they cast make the forward-scrolling sequences into exercises in frustration and memorization. Granted, not every visual trick worked as well as intended - the fast-paced over-the-shoulder race stages feature some impressive scaling effects, but the objects pasted into those scenes don't fit well. It features some of the best original sprite work ever to appear on GBA, bold and colorful. While the first few stages may seem like nothing more than run-and-jump business as usual, the game quickly ramps up the intricacy of its level design to force players to think carefully about their actions, navigating their way to the end of each stage by making use of both enemies and interactive elements in the environment (and making sure to collect the three keys to unlock the end door along the way).Īnd, truth be told, Klonoa 2 didn't look too shabby, either.
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Like its portable predecessors, Dream Champ Tournament trains its sights on complex puzzle platforming challenges. Why just read when you can also watch? Enjoy the video companion to this feature. Being a handheld game, it lacks the dazzling camera tricks of the console Klonoa games - those NiGHTs-inspired pans and pulls and swoops that made Phantomile seem so grand - but what it lacks in visual panache it more than makes up for with great puzzle design. Dream Champ Tournament feels like a culmination of the Klonoa games, bringing together half a decade of great platforming and level design as a grand farewell to the series.
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Nobody cared about a GBA sequel to a series that they had repeatedly passed over on other, livelier platforms.
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The Nintendo DS was already out the PSP was weeks away. Though it debuted in Japan back in 2002, Dream Champ Tournament didn't make its way west until 2005 - well past the GBA's prime years. Poor Klonoa.Īnd that brings us to the last original Klonoa game to make its way to America: Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament for Game Boy Advance. His first GBA adventure, Empire of Dreams, had the lousy fortune to launch on September 11, 2001. His first portable outing, Moonlight Museum, only showed up on WonderSwan, a platform that never came west. When protagonist Klonoa turned his hat backward to boogie-board down a river for the PlayStation 2 sequel, that looked like a throwback to the "edgy" teenages days of the original PlayStation. At first glance, the original game looked like a relic of the 16-bit era.
#KLONOA DOOR TO PHANTOMILE ADS HOW TO#
Namco had no idea how to sell it to Americans their inexplicable solution was to present it as if it were an STD. Yes, from the very beginning, the odds were stacked against Klonoa. It had its complexity and darkness, but those features revealed themselves only to those who dared take a chance on its bright colors and saccharine cute characters to play the game beyond its cuddly opening stages.Įnemies in this game aren't so much there to be dangerous as to serve as fodder for puzzles: Grab them, inflate them, toss them, double jump off of them. While the games industry marched in lockstep toward big, complex, immersive 3D adventures with hard-edged characters and themes, Klonoa put a sort of naïve sincerity front-and-center in its low-key 2D world. The series' debut, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile for PlayStation, had no business being greenlit in Japan, let alone coming to the U.S. Rather, we should experience wonder that the games ever existed at all. When we think back on the Klonoa games, it shouldn't be with sorrow that such a great series has been deemed terminal by its own creator.
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