Suddenly inflating with Klonoa

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile was even more random of a pick of what to play next than Beautiful Katamari was. I was in somewhat of a hiatus and I didn't feel like much of anything, so I started throwing ideas around my head. One of them was Klonoa, which I noticed had recently become one of the PS1 games available on the Playstation Store. I really didn't know much about Klonoa. The only way I knew the character and its games existed was due to some sort of cameo he made in one of the Tales games. I'm not even sure which one, but it may have been Tales of the Abyss. Anyway, I wanted to try it out eventually considering that from what I could gather it was a critically acclaimed 2D platformer.

As much as I liked the game, I don't think it has left a terribly strong impression on me, but I can certainly see why it is liked. Strong graphics, strong music and strong gameplay is a good combination. The story and the characters were a little inane, but at least the characters all have gibberish voices in the semi-frequent cut scenes (the voices could have been much, much worse). The game also has two main drawbacks. First, it's short. As good as it is it really didn't last long and I ended up getting the majority of the optional stuff with very little backtracking (the collectible is rescuing random characters). Second, I encountered glitches. This may be only for playing it on the PSP, but the game froze up in several cut scenes and without fail during the end level fanfare of 2-2. After doing some checking online it seems I'm not the only one to have had these problems. Eventually I just learned to always skip the fanfare as soon as possible to avoid any chance of the game freezing after I finished a level. So, it wasn't insurmountable, but I did end up repeating 2-2 about five times between it freezing during a cut scene and then systematically after I completed it. It nearly ruined the game for me because I was about ready to put it down in frustration.

Fortunately I didn't because I encountered few problems through the rest of the game. The gameplay mechanic of inflating enemies and either using them as weapons or a double jump is fairly unique, although it also never really stopped feeling a bit odd. I wouldn't mind playing the Wii port of the game to see how they updated the graphics and I'd also like to hunt down Klonoa 2 on the Playstation 2 eventually. Considering the glitches, I wouldn't recommend playing the game on the PSP like I did assuming there is a widespread problem, especially if you can play it on something else.