Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

While the main Klonoa team finished up Lunatea’s Veil, Namco contracted out their frequent collaborators at Now Production to produce a sequel to Moonlight Museum for the brand-new Game Boy Advance. The result, Empire of Dreams, benefits from only minutely iterating on its predecessor, despite the addition of action-oriented auto-scrollers and bosses to break up the puzzle gameplay. The enemy roster, Moo blocks, and copious amounts of air vents all return, and the level structure retains the now-contextless moon fragments and doors that powered the winding inner loops of Moonlight Museum.1 Thankfully, Empire of Dreams compensates for this by speeding up the entire learning curve, cognizant that most will have not played its obscure prior entry but not beholden to that game’s agonizingly slow opening. Boomies, the cornerstone of these games’ timer- and storage-driven puzzles, appear by the third world, and the early stages lean more into interlocking room designs instead of barren…