It's new to me: Klonoa: Moonlight Museum

Klonoa's transition to handhelds and 2D happened in Japan only, on Bandai's WonderSwan.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

I’m no stranger to Klonoa — shout out to Namco for re-releasing the Wii remake of Door to Phantomile and its Playstation 2 sequel, Lunatea’s Veil, after I wrote a piece saying to do those things, making me appear very powerful and influential — but Moonlight Museum, that’s new to me. The reason for that is twofold: one, it’s actually known as Kaze no Klonoa, and was released only in Japan in 1999. An unofficial translation exists for it and has since 2022, but there’s a catch: Kaze no Klonoa was developed for Bandai’s WonderSwan handheld, and took advantage of that system’s ability to rotate, meaning, unless you had a piece of hardware that could emulate the game and its rotation while providing comfortable buttons to use (or at least map), it was a pain to play every few stages.

The game had been on my radar for some time even before that full unofficial translation, as it didn’t really require you to be able to read Japanese to play it: you’d miss out on the literal signposts giving you tips about how to play the game, but familiarity with past Klonoa titles and a bit of trial-and-error is all you really need in this platformer, anyway, so that wasn’t a real hurdle. No, the problem was that some of the levels had a horizontal orientation, and others a vertical one, and mimicking that was a problem I was never fully motivated to solve with any of my existing hardware options.

I ended up importing a WonderSwan Color from Japan in 2023, however — a surprisingly affordable option, though, one more than canceled out by how expensive the system’s games are on the secondary market given their comparative rarity. (Another solvable problem, but this isn’t the space for that conversation.) So, armed with the proper hardware for Klonoa: Moonlight Museum, I could give it a whirl. While the game isn’t going to sell anyone who wasn’t already into Klonoa on the series, there’s no problem with that result: it’s a game with a clear goal — to emphasize Klonoa’s relative slow pace and puzzle-solving — and it succeeded in delivering on said goal. Those existing Klonoa fans were and will be pleased.

Klonoa’s goal has always been relative simplicity. The director of Door to Phantomile, Hideo Yoshizawa, explained in a 2013 interview that, “The way I see it, human beings can only handle two buttons, when they're really concentrating. My policy is to use two buttons maximum for any game. When I was working on [an early version of Klonoa], it used three buttons, and it was annoying me, because I wanted to make it use two buttons in the first place. I think it's the most attractive way to do it. If there's only two buttons, the controls are very simple, but there's still a lot you can do with just two buttons.” The WonderSwan has four face buttons that mirror its D-pad buttons — they’re the same so that rotation feels natural as far as button placement and the expectations of your fingers goes — but, like with the Playstation’s controller and its many more than two buttons, Moonlight Museum takes advantage of just two of them at a time.

Whereas Lunatea’s Veil retained the core of Klonoa’s gameplay — methodical platforming with puzzle solving elements — it also ramped up the action, considerably, taking advantage of the more powerful Playstation 2 while hoping to attract the attention of fans of Sonic the Hedgehog’s 3D outings. As I wrote when covering that game, “Klonoa now has multiple snowboarding levels. He rides on top of a plane. The music has vocal tracks. The game is now flush with automated moments that take the controller out of your hands, too. Hop into a cannon, and watch Klonoa be fired across the landscape. Whereas in something like Donkey Kong Country Returns, the barrels that fire you into the foreground or background are pretty quick transitions that let you get right back to what you were doing, Klonoa goes the Sonic route of really milking these moments to show off how cool and stylish it’s all supposed to look. There’s… a lot of this, and it feels pretty empty, and shallow, actually, like it doesn’t need to exist most of the time, and is keeping you from just continuing on your way.” It was a nitpick, yes, but it was also a nit worth picking.

Moonlight Museum, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction and scaled back in a way that makes Door to Phantomile seem like Lunatea’s Veil in comparison, as it’s entirely made of those slow, methodical bits at the core of Klonoa’s gameplay. Yoshizawa explained, in that same interview, that he was overseeing two teams and their simultaneous development of Moonlight Museum and Lunatea’s Veil, and that these directives were very intentional. “I wanted both of them to be fun in their own way. For console, I wanted people to enjoy more of the action, a more interesting kind of action game, but for the handheld games, I wanted to get more into the puzzles. To have the same audience, but let them enjoy it in a different way.” It was a good call for a number of reasons — handhelds, especially the 8-bit ones from this particular moment in time, weren’t going to handle flashy as well as something like the Playstation 2. And having the design be on some levels of reliable length and escalating challenge, with clear break points, no boss fights, the ability to return to any stage you’ve previously completed, that all works for a more pick-up-and-play experience that fits comfortably with a portable device.

The look is a bit simpler, too, as this was Klonoa’s transition from the 32-bit Playstation and 2.5D to straight-up 2D with sprites. The backgrounds are still detailed, and they also move in various ways depending on Klonoa’s own movements — clouds and hills and forests and such, scrolling on by off in the distance at a different speed than the backgrounds closer to where Klonoa actually is — but you don’t enter them at any point. They’re window dressing. And if you have to fiddle with the WonderSwan’s contrast a bit too much to compensate for the lack of light where you’re playing, you can also wash these details out a bit, making Moonlight Museum seem plain. It’s not, though, as far as black-and-white 8-bit games of the time period go: window dressing, yes, but the view out those windows is pretty good.

In addition to the sprite and background details, Moonlight Museum also features a number of story cutscenes, which do not feature any kind of movement, but are huge representations of the game’s characters, with loads of detail. You can see examples of this in the above gameplay video, which shows the opening cutscene prior to moving into early gameplay. The kind of obvious effort and care put into designing the 2.5D Playstation world of Klonoa was also deployed here on the 8-bit WonderSwan, just scaled down for its new, less powerful home.

Moonlight Museum features Klonoa and his pal, Huepow, visiting the titular museum, and ending up trapped inside works of art by those who have broken the moon apart and hidden its pieces away in said art. Each of the game’s 30 stages features three pieces of the moon that you’re required to locate and collect before the exit to the stage will even open, and these 30 stages are broken up, six at a time, in five worlds. There are no bosses, though, the final level (or Vision, in the game’s parlance) in each world is a bit longer and more complicated, as it takes everything you had learned to that point in the previous stages and forces you to solve tougher environmental puzzles, orders of operation, and timing-based hurdles with that knowledge now in hand.

You’ll be finding keys hidden away that open up more of each stage, which can sometimes result in backtracking a bit, and other times just means overlapping with areas you’ve previously been to, but now through a different, previously inaccessible pathway. Besides the three moon fragments per stage, there are also 30 “dream stones,” which are flickering crystals, in each Vision. Collecting these is optional, but it allows you to piece together five works of art, and figuring out how to get all of them is a puzzle to solve unto itself. Many of them will be obvious or something you get by going where you should be going, but each stage makes sure to put some more out of the way, forcing a bit of exploration and planning to acquire.

You have three hearts for health, and lose a heart whenever you take damage, but that’s not happening very often unless you aren’t paying attention. And even if it does, there are loads of hearts to pick up, usually in areas where you might accidentally hurt yourself. The action has really been ramped down here, with enemies you’ve grabbed — as is the Klonoa way —rarely being used to defeat other enemies. Instead, they’re for pulling off double jumps, with the foe you’re carrying being used as a springboard, or to hit switches, and so on. You’ll also find heavy boxes that can weigh down spiked, floating enemies in your way, or be thrown against certain targets that’ll stop their movement to help them reach specific places in the level where you’ll need them, or to block off air vents that lift Klonoa up and sometimes, by doing so, impede his progress instead of aiding it. There are timed explosives which can hurt you if you mess that all up, too, but generally, the game is about testing your planning and thinking over your reflexes.

Each world introduces some new gimmick that enriches and deepens the gameplay and its puzzles, and it all builds up, albeit slowly, to some very satisfying puzzle platforming. If you complete the game, you’ll unlock EX stages, as well, which are meant to truly challenge you: they’re not required to complete by any means, they’re a postgame treat, but if you’re looking for more Klonoa and tougher, then you’ve got what you want. You’ll need to use everything you’ve learned leading up to this point in order to complete the EX stages, know every trick Klonoa has in the bag and how to use them. Moonlight Museum might just require two buttons, but the whole idea behind this is, as Yoshizawa put it, that there’s a lot you can do with two buttons. And by the time you get to the EX stages, you’ll certainly know that to be true.

The horizontal and vertical levels are pretty nifty, with my only complaint being that I wish a little more had been done with them. Those that are vertical tend to be designed with that taller, narrower screen in mind, and with more of an emphasis on climbing for progression, so it’s put to good use, but it’s hard not to wish that there had been a lot of switching back-and-forth between the two in some more complicated levels, instead of them being isolated designs. This is a nitpick, however: Namco didn’t have to do anything with the WonderSwan’s differing orientations here, but they made use of the feature, and in a way that stuck out both in the moment and now, over a couple of decades later.

This would be the lone Klonoa entry on the WonderSwan, as the next handheld release would come on the Game Boy Advance, aka Nintendo’s more-powerful-than-an-SNES handheld that put a stop to the WonderSwan as an alternative to the Game Boy ecosystem. Moonlight Museum helped influence the direction that these portable Klonoa games would take, however, so even if we didn’t end up with a bunch of orientation-swapping successors, the emphasis on puzzles and 2D sprites persisted because of the first entry to go that route. If you’re into Klonoa at all and haven’t experienced this game, you should give it a shot. It’s slow going sometimes, sure, by design, but it’s also not terribly long, and will eventually challenge you in some satisfying ways even if you’re used to what Klonoa’s gameplay is like.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.