Klonoa: Empire of Dreams
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Klonoa: Empire of Dreams is a platform video game developed by Now Production and published by Namco for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. It is the first of three Klonoa games for the GBA.
Plot
The game takes place sometime after the events of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. One morning in the Kingdom of Jillius, Klonoa is awakened by the emperor's royal guards and is dragged to his throne room. Emperor Jillius himself informs Klonoa that he broke the sacred law of his kingdom by dreaming, which he views as a worthless endeavor and a total waste of time. However, he suffers from insomnia himself, and decrees that if he cannot be allow to dream, then no one can. Rather than punish Klonoa outright, he instead offers him a challenge, where he must defeat the four great monsters that are wreaking havoc on the land. If he does so, Klonoa will be set free. Klonoa is then joined by his friend Huepow and has no choice but to travel to the surrounding lands and do battle with the monsters living there, hoping to earn his freedom and bring peace to the kingdom at last.
Why It's Dreamy
- The graphics are colourful and awesome for an early GBA game. Each background looks well detailed, the sprites in the cutscenes are impressive, and the sprites overall are nicely done with fluid animations.
- The soundtrack is fantastic, and features many great songs that just deserve a listen to. Ghazzaland and Priamill's themes, for example, are very calm and relaxing, while the boss music sounds more intense, showing that it could be challenging unless you'll find a strategy. The music autoscroll levels, while not as intense as the boss music, is also not that calm, especially in the sixth levels.
- The level design is pretty great, with also having some great puzzle moments. Every few levels, something new is introduced and it can be carried to later levels, such as the switch blocks or arrows that cause the thing you threw to go to the direction the arrow is pointing.
- Unlike most games with autoscrollers, where the autoscroll levels are required to be beaten to unlock the next levels, the autoscroll levels in this game are optional, so you can skip them if you hate autoscrollers. Despite this, finishing them will cause something new to be accessible.
- Each sign in the game (with the note how something works) is very useful, since it easily describes something, such as water being a hazard (which the sign in vision 4-1 says that Klonoa cannot swim), the blue arrows' directions being possible to change, or describing basic gameplay stuff.
- In every level that is not an autoscroller, you have to collect three Moon Stones to finish the level. These can be tricky to get, with having a possibility to offer some very slight puzzle to solve to collect it, although they aren't too difficult to get in the first levels.
- Dream Stones, something that you can collect in every level, are optional, just like the autoscroll levels, so you don't have to collect all of them, especially if they're quite tricky to get. Additionally, in the levels where you ride the Air Board, each Dream Stone is optional, and no matter how many you'll collect, the level will still be finished when you reach the finish. However, collecting all of them is required for unlocking a certain level.
- The EX visions are a nice addition to the game, with them being notably more challenging than the regular and autoscrolling levels, such as having many tricky parts. They also require a certain thing to be done before being possible to access with them being finishing the main game to unlock EX-1, finishing every level (and bonus level) to unlock EX-2, and collecting all Dream Stones to unlock EX-3.
- The game's plot is very well done, as it is notably a bit similar to Door to Phantomile's plot, where Klonoa's adventure in the game is all a dream. In Empire of Dreams, it is revealed in the end that the game's plot is actually served for Emperor Jillius' dream, similar to how Klonoa's adventure in Door to Phantomile were fake memories that Huepow gave him.
- Tight and responsive controls, much like other Klonoa games, and here they are even better since they are even more responsive than Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa will never ever be unresponsive, thank to how great the controls and overral programmation of the game are.
- The box art, especially the Japanese and PAL ones, are great since it is well drawn, the NA cover isn't as good but still decent and it's had a 3D style unlike the other covers as the other are in 2D.
Undreamy Qualities
- The game is way too easy for the most part, as it sometimes tends to throw in some extra lifes at you, although they can be useful for the boss fight in the fourth vision due to it being RNG-based and if you don't memorise its pattern due to it being random.
- However, likely due to it, the EX levels are notably more challenging due to various tricky parts that can challenge the player somewhat.
- Some Moon Stones can be quite tedious to get, as well as some puzzles where you must solve them to reach the Moon Door to finish the level, unless you use a walkthrough, especially when trying to unlock vision EX-3.
- Although not much of a deal, there's a scene where Klonoa says a word that may be a bit inappropiate for a E rated game. The word he says in one scene is "damn".
- This moment also occurred Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, which came out in the same year.
- Making 100% in the auto scroller levels is somewhat hard, as you had to be fast in the platforming one to get all of them and you must know most of a level for the surf phases.
- The game is a bit too short, as you can beat it in less than 2 hours if you're really good at the game, and considering that there's only 5 worlds and the game being too easy, it's doesn't help either.
Reception
Klonoa: Empire of Dreams received a positive reception upon release. On Metacritic, the game received a 85/100 rating from critics, as well as the 8.0/10 score from users.[1]
Videos
Trivia
- There's data for a sixth vision of the game, which has a map that has 8 doors, which are levels. Three of them were instead used for the EX levels, with levels 4-7 going unused.
- The game was released in September 11, 2001 in the United States, which was the exact same day of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, this might also possibly being one of the reason of the commercial failure of the game in the USA.
- This is the only Klonoa game on the GBA that was released in Europe, as Klonoa Heroes wasn't released outside Japan, and Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament was not released in Europe.
References
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