His early designs have him wearing a blue hat with an amusing Pac-Man stationed on top – later, he wears it to the side with a tuft of his black hair (fur?) sticking out. Or maybe it’s also because Klonoa is, perhaps, a little too cute for his own good. Maybe it’s because Namco of America just doesn’t know how to market games properly.
Maybe this is due to the old school nature of the gameplay, when other smiling mascots like Crash and Spyro offered true 3D. But while he found some modicum of popularity in his native Japan, the rest of the world seemingly glazed him other. As a mascot, he’s a little late to the furry party started by Sega back in 1992 with Sonic the Hedgehog. But he’s a happy little bastard, and he’s happy for a reason – he’s one of the first games that actually pulled off the 2.5D act well.
One guesses he’s some kind of anthromorphic cat thing with gigantic floppy ears that would make any rabbit jealous. It’s hard to tell exactly what the the hell Klonoa is. Plus, while they represented a huge graphical leap forward compared to the 16-bit systems, the primary appeal of 3D games was that you could go in any direction – 2.5D was still confined to walking left or right.Įnter Klonoa. Due to the unfortunate fact that both of these games kind of sucked, this radical concept didn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire. These titles used 3D landscapes but maintained the classic 2D gameplay of the previous eras, a perspective that was dubbed “2.5D”. There were a few games here and there that bucked the trend, like Pandemonium and Spider: The Video Game. With the dawning of the 32/64-bit age, Super Mario 64 practically dictated that all games using polygons had to be 3D.
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