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

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.