but this is certainly maybe my favorite drawing of this funny funny, and a so old one O_o

a collection of (almost) every klonoa drawing i ever done in (probably) chronological order starting from newest (top left) to oldest (bottom right)

I kinda wanna make an effortpost on the camera work in Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and how it's integral to the experience of the game in a way that few games at the time were taking advantage of.

I'm not necessarily qualified to do so but when I look online most of what I see focuses on the 2.5d system itself and doesn't emphasize things like using nonstandard angles to build anticipation towards a future destination, or the angles used outside of gameplay during cutscenes that aren't tied by 2.5d at all. It's all soo good!!!!

Honestly what really made me start noticing the camera work in Klonoa was watching gameplay of the Reverie remasters and seeing how much of it was lost in the translation, and I think that's actually the best way for me to illustrate how the original Klonoa uses the camera intentionally and creatively.

I'll be taking footage of the original PSX game from this longplay by ScHlAuChi and footage of the Reverie remaster from this longplay by Rubhen925.

Let's start with the intro cutscene, which is an FMV in the original and in-engine in Reverie. I'm gonna get really detailed with this first one just to help call out the types of things to start looking for if you've never tried looking at framing and composition before¹:

The original centers the flower and butterfly and shifts focus once the butterfly is disturbed, which frees up the top left part of the frame to show Klonoa climbing over the log. Reverie, on the other hand, doesn't have any focus shift² and opts for splitting the frame between the butterfly and Klonoa, who kinda just falls out of the sky since the log is much closer now.

Reverie opts to rotate around Klonoa playing with the butterfly, vs the original's static shot. I kinda think I'm nitpicking but also I kinda think the static shot helps draw attention to Klonoa and the butterfly's interaction more effectively, especially since the original has Klonoa walk into the butterfly.

The rest of the shots are fairly similar. Reverie has the camera pan up to view the ring falling, while the original is looking up immediately and tracks a bit as the ring falls instead. When the ring lands the original is way closer to Klonoa, which really highlights his ears flopping around in the wind to either side of the camera. The other thing I notice is the original having way less regular panning; Reverie feels like it's using simple tweens that move regularly and have smooth starts and ends, while the original speeds up and hesitates and has hard stops, specifically during the turn around.

I definitely prefer the original over Reverie here. The movement of the camera feels flat in Reverie and gives me a sense of being a 3rd-person floating eyeball, while the original's camera movement feels natural, and puts you into the scene with things like Klonoa's ears flapping past the edges of the screen.

Here's the intro to 1-1. Reverie adds a shot from the crashing ship's perspective that the original doesn't have, which is nice, but to me the big difference here is something that comes up constantly: movement vs cuts. The original Klonoa uses panning, tilting, etc. a ton in places where Reverie just hard-cuts to a different camera angle.

Here the original ends up highlighting a major event happening in the distance and then swoops our attention over to our heroes reacting the the event, moving through the house and outside, and finally giving the player control. It also times the shot of Huepow entering the ring with the title card so that the title is still up when Klonoa becomes controllable, whereas Reverie visibly halts a moment when the title disappears and it switches to being playable. Despite having more detail, Reverie's cuts give us a worse sense of the space around Klonoa's house and it's relationship to the hill in the distance.

Another common difference is camera tilt. The original uses it to emphasize vertical areas, high spots, etc. while Reverie will often instead zoom out slightly or not at all in the same sections. Arguably this helps highlight the extra background details Reverie has due to having a much farther render distance, but IMO the loss of those incredible cloud shots isn't worth it.

This scene bugs me because we lose so much between the original and Reverie:

• The dialog we hear before panning upward to see Ghadius and Joka adds suspense as we can't see the speakers, and emphasizes Klonoa and Huepow as eavesdropping.
• The original consistently portrays Klonoa as underneath the towering Ghadius to establish their relationship.
• The zoom in as Ghadius explains his evil plan, and then the EXTRA zoom in when he laughs! HES SO EVIL
• The quick zoom when they can't find the pendant highlighting the chink in his plan that will become super important later
• The sense of space in the original is just plainly better, like where the hell is Ghadius looking at in Reverie when he notices Klonoa³???
• We don't get to see the 🌌SPACE🌌 interior of Ghadius' cape in Reverie, and no one can convince me that shrinking into a cloud of darkness is cooler than TELEPORTING INTO THE SKYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

1. Like I said in the original post, I don't really have any experience with this kinda thing, these are all just things I see once I tried paying attention.

2. This and probably most of my complaints about the cutscene differences between the two probably boil down to "they committed to doing cutscenes in-engine for some reason and that severely limited their options".

3. Like maybe he's looking at them sideways with his weird bird eyes? It's still really weird and random.