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Thank you. of one of our exclusive episodes. We are talking about Klonoa.

And before we get into the many Klanoa games for this short-lived franchise,

I want to talk about the origins of Kloa.

So I feel like we should lay down the context in which Kloa first existed, because even though the PlayStation was just a handful of years old, at the time, we largely understood that traditional 2D games were a thing of the past unless they were on a handheld system and even those

weren't taken very seriously at the time. We just naturally assume that there won't be any more

2D games and eventually when handhelds get more popular or more powerful, they will be phased

out entirely. That is sort of the way animation went. That's 3D animation was invented and it shoved

2D animation out of the way completely.

But in terms of video games, now we love 2D games.

I mean, Silk Song is a 2D game, and we're not far from the release of that, and it's a really huge deal.

So thankfully, 2D games came back.

But for, I would say, about a decade, I think we just assume that they'd be a very niche thing for the rest of time.

And that's... Kanoa niche thing for the rest of time.

And that's, Kanoa was one of the last guys of that. So yeah, I think that's one of the reason I picked it up right away is because just hungry for that. And it's actually a game with some 2D graphics because the character, most of the characters in it are 2D, even though the backgrounds and environments are 3D.

I remember squinting at the CRT and not being sure if like, is he really 3D or what? That's what Donkey Kong sold on. Yeah, the sprites, I think they are pre-rendered sprites. They're pre-rendered graphics, and they're very, very fuzzy. And then that's set against polygonal backgrounds, and that's being played on your SDTV. So everything is just like kind of a fuzzy nightmare. So you're not, it's never really clear back in the day what was 3D and what was not unless you were paying very close attention. But yeah, if you read the old reviews of Kloa, people, reviewers at least, were celebrating the idea, like they're making a new 2D

game. This is amazing. This is just like, oh, it's a blast from the past, even though

side-scrolling games weren't that long ago before 1987. So that is the world in which this

game exists. Yeah, I think it's important to reference, like, one of the last gasp of like

...