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Klonoa director on series’ origins, game was initially based on another IP

Posted on January 29, 2023 by (@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Switch

Klonoa origins

Klonoa series director Tsuyoshi Kobayashi has provided new insight into how the franchise came to be. Kobayashi spoke about this in a recent issue of Lost In Cult.

Interestingly, Bandai Namco was originally working on a game that would have been based on a different IP. However, after that didn’t work out, they had to replace the characters. That led the team to hold an internal competition to create a new character that would eventually become Klonoa.

According to Kobayashi:

“There is a story about how Klonoa’s concept came about. I can’t say which IP but we [were working on] a game around a certain IP. As it turned out, we couldn’t use this particular IP, so we had an internal design competition to create a new character for this new game that we had created, but needed to replace the characters. [Yoshihiko] Arai’s character design won that contest and that was the birth of the Klonoa series. But, at the time, [we weren’t thinking about] Mario or Sonic, much less developing Klonoa to be the mascot of the PlayStation system. If anything, we were [just trying to create] a new mascot character for Namco.”

Kobayashi would later go on to say that things changed when Bandai Namco was making the sequel, Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil. By that point, the team was actually thinking about Mario and Sonic.

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