It's new to me: Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

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.

When Klonoa made the switch to handhelds with 1999’s Moonlight Museum on the WonderSwan, the gameplay also saw a significant shift. Gone were the action-oriented portions of Klonoa that people had experienced in the original Playstation title, Door to Phantomile, replaced with far more emphasis on the puzzle-platforming elements of that game. It was slower paced — which was saying something, since Door to Phantomile wasn’t exactly Sonic the Hedgehog to begin with — but the switch worked splendidly, as Moonlight Museum is a joy to play.

This was a very intentional design shift by the team that produced Moonlight Museum: series creator Hideo Yoshizawa explained to Jeremy Parish at 1UP back in 2013 that, “At the time of the Wonderswan game, I'd actually put together two teams, one working on Moonlight Museum and one working on the PlayStation 2 Klonoa 2. One was more focused on the puzzle elements and the other was more focused on action.” The Playstation 2 game, Lunatea’s Veil, was certainly more action-oriented, but also suffered a bit for having stages that were just far too long for the goals you had to accomplish within them. Moonlight Museum, in comparison, was a puzzle-based and breezy affair: you moved slowly in order to figure out your order of operations and what needed to be done, but the levels were short, tidy affairs that allowed you to keep moving and feeling like real progress was being made.

The problem with Moonlight Museum is that it was a WonderSwan exclusive, which means it only released in Japan — that’s not a problem for those in Japan with a WonderSwan, but given that the game utilized the system’s ability to switch from a horizontal orientation to a vertical one, from level to level, it was a difficult one to emulate. So, for many, the first entry in the series on the Game Boy Advance was their introduction to portable Klonoa. While Empire of Dreams lacks the orientation switches of its predecessor, it bumps up the action slightly from Moonlight Museum while still being very much a puzzle-platforming-oriented title.

It’s a great one, too — once again, with levels that feel as if you’re breezing through them without just walking from the start to the finish, given they require you figure out how to traverse them in the first place. While Moonlight Museum was developed by a team at Namco, Empire of Dreams was outsourced to Now Production, though, Yoshizawa remained on the project as one of the game’s writers.

Even if you don’t think you know Now Production, you do. They have been around since 1986 and remain in operation to this day, and primarily perform contract work for major Japanese publishers like Namco, Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Taito, Sega, and, decades ago, Hudson Soft. They were responsible for Adventure Island II and III on the NES and New Adventure Island on the Turbografx-16, developed some of the Namco Museum titles on the Playstation, were the development studio that co-developed Katamari Damacy, We Love Katamari, and Beautiful Katamari, as well as the Wii’s The Munchables, assisted Namco on the Mario Baseball games on both the GameCube and Wii, handled Sonic Adventure DX: Director’s Cut on the GameCube, and have handled ports of arcade games, remakes and remasters, as well as original sequels to existing franchises and portable editions of console series, most regularly for (Bandai) Namco. Now Production got the keys to Klonoa’s handheld titles for both Empire of Dreams and its successor, Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament, as an example of their being asked to continue existing franchises, and on handhelds. And they certainly showed off why Namco so regularly entrusted them with Empire of Dreams.

The setup is similar to Moonlight Museum, in that you have three required MacGuffins to collect in each stage, as well as 30 optional gems to pick up in each of them. Once again, you can play the entire game with just two buttons, which Yoshizawa saw as vital in his game designs. Per that same 1UP interview: “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 this, 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.” It’s a very old-school, arcade-style thought process, to limit a game to two buttons, but Klonoa does a lot with little in this regard: you never need to turn your hand into a claw to pull off a complicated move, or press a whole bunch of buttons at once, which makes it approachable for even less experienced players without compromising its overall depth of gameplay.

There are five worlds, each with five standard stages, another two of a set type in each, and, unlike with Moonlight Museum, a boss fight at the end. While the standard five are just Empire of Dreams’ regular platforming stages, which get more complicated and continually introduce new wrinkles as you go, those “set type” levels are (1) a snowboard level sans snow that tasks you with collecting 100 gems across three areas, and (2) a forced-scrolling platforming stage that continually forms bottomless pits and tests your platforming reflexes and understanding of Empire of Dreams’ systems, while tasking you with collecting 100 gems across three areas, as well.

Empire of Dreams — and Klonoa as a whole — can be distilled to this one thing: you grab stuff, and then you use it to jump higher. Snatch an enemy out of the air, hoist it above Klonoa’s head, then double jump by using said enemy as a springboard. Grab a block, do the same. After any jump, you can also float for a time, which lets you collect even more hard-to-reach bits or make your way up onto some platforms. You can also throw enemies and blocks, which you sometimes need to do to trigger switches both on and off-screen, the latter as a test of timing for whatever place you need to bring yourself by the time the object finds its destination. Some enemies are explosive, and have a timer letting you know as much: you have to get these living bombs to wherever they need to be, and yourself to where you need to be, before that timer goes off. Some blocks determine the direction these explosions will go in, allowing the effects of bombs to travel through walls or upwards or downwards toward switches, and others grab onto walls and allow Klonoa a new platform to jump on, or a way to vertically traverse a level from underneath. You need to grab enemies and blocks to cross bodies of water, or to block the flow of water from above to allow passage through a hallway, or as part of a complicated series of jumps where Klonoa is continually grabbing enemies or floating, grabbable objects to progress ever higher in a stage or to collect gems and key items. Including but not limited to actual keys.

The one complaint you could make about Empire of Dreams is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but also, you want more of it. Not that it’s lacking, necessarily, but that by the time you complete the game’s hidden EX stages, you just wish there were even more of them, because the game has truly hit its stride by then. Empire of Dreams never feels overly slow, but more like it’s slowly adding complexities to the experience that you need to master in order to progress through the levels: each room is basically its own puzzle box, and those boxes get larger and more intricate as you go. Case in point: the pause menu has a “Retry” option, but it’s not for the stage as a whole, just the specific room that you’re in at that moment. You can screw up a platforming puzzle in a way that forces you to need to retry, and you can also just realize, hey, I think I want to try that again now that I have a feel for what this room actually entails. There is no penalty for doing any of this, either, other than a need to collect the gems in said room again.

The way it drip feeds these new bits and platforming puzzles and enemy types helps keep Empire of Dreams feeling fresh throughout, and the snowboard/forced-scrolling stages help break up the… monotony isn’t the right word, as it implies a harshness I don’t feel, but you get the idea. Everything flows better because those levels — or “Visions,” to use Klonoa’s parlance — exist. The return of boss fights is also welcome, even if the game doesn’t ask very much of the player in them. They have a little bit of a puzzle and patience vibe to them as well, which fits the game as a whole: rather than shoving all of the action in here, bosses are simply a matter of noticing a pattern and timing — three hits from a thrown foe, and they go down. Related: Klonoa also takes just three hits before dying, but you are not in much danger of that in this game. Notice the above screenshot again: that “49” in the bottom-right corner is how many lives I had at the time. There are extra lives everywhere if you want to bother to pull off the double jump or float to them.

Empire of Dreams takes places in between the events of Door to Phantomile and Lunatea’s Veil, which you can tell because Klonoa’s outfit has been given its update to what he’s seen wearing in the latter of those. He and his floating orb pal, Huepow, visit the Empire of Jillius, and are brought before the emperor for the most heinous of crimes: dreaming. It’s outlawed in this empire, for reasons that aren’t clear at first, but it turns out — spoilers for a 24-year-old game follow — to be a combination of “the emperor is upset that he was forced to become an all-powerful ruler instead of like, becoming a singer or artist or whatever and has decided to take it out on everyone else out of jealousy” and “some evil demon dude decided to capitalize on the emperor’s selfish reaction to take power in the kingdom and turn everyone who does dream into a giant monster in his army.” Normal stuff, really.

As punishment for dreaming, Klonoa is sent off to take care of these monsters — the emperor is caught between his feelings of jealousy and his desire to break free from this bad-news wizard who took advantage of those feelings, so has to send Klonoa out into the world under the pretense of punishment when it’s really about solving this particular case and making his way back to the castle to go, “hey, wait a second, you did this.” All of the worlds are themed in some way, and have very distinct visual differences: Empire of Dreams, like every Klonoa game, is a real looker, and while this isn’t 2.5D like its 32-bit Playstation cousin, it’s also very clearly not 8-bit like the WonderSwan entry, with Empire of Dreams deploying some very detailed backgrounds and sprites throughout, full of deep color. The soundtrack, too, sounds better than most Game Boy Advance titles: the balance for volume and depth of sound here is better than what you too often find on this system, where turning up the volume often results in your ears paying for that decision in some way.

It still has a little bit of that GBA harshness to it, which is a bit inescapable, but overall the music and sound are pleasant and add to the proceedings — Klonoa’s “Wahoo!” remains as charming as ever.

As said, you will want more Empire of Dreams when it’s over, which is where the EX stages come in. There are three of them, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but they are the longest, most difficult, and most intricate levels in the entire game: it will take you time to both unlock them and to complete them, so that there are just three makes a lot more sense once you’ve experienced them. You unlock one of the stages simply by completing the game, and another by finishing it without skipping any stages — Empire of Dreams is setup so that you don’t have to finish every level in order to progress, just enough to get the boss fights to pop in each world. The last of them is unlocked if you collect every single one of the optional gems in the game: there are 30 in each standard level, and 100 in each of the snowboard/forced-scrolling stages, so there are quite a few. If you bother to explore just as part of a normal playthrough, however, then this isn’t as much of a lift as it sounds like: on my first go through the game, I completed just one stage without first collecting all 30 gems, and the ones I missed were entirely because I didn’t go as far in one room as I could have before I solved the puzzle and picked up what was required of me there.

Empire of Dreams is a lovely continuation of the Klonoa franchise, that, while lacking the screen-orientation mechanics of its portable predecessor, makes up for it with quality level design, the reintroduction of boss fights, and detailed 32-bit sprites and backgrounds that remind you of what the GBA was capable of. It’s also available, as of 2025, on Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers, through the Game Boy Advance portal — Empire of Dreams was previously available through the Wii U’s Virtual Console, but that shut down in 2023 and also no one owned a Wii U besides myself and a dozen other people, anyway. Given the size of the Switch’s userbase, this is now the most people who have ever been in position to play Empire of Dreams if they choose to do so… and they should.

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