Klonoa Chronicles - Part 12

Hideo Yoshizawa, as promised, is going to tweet stories about when he was developing Klonoa games every Saturday in August. As much as I’d love to give a more accurate translation, I simply cannot. So for now a machine translation is provided with the original Japanese. What is here shouldn’t be too hard to understand but again, I apologize.

クロノアクロニクル 第１２回！ 社内キャラコンペの応募作のひとつのイラストの「夢膨らませる」という注釈が気になったのでした。

Klonoa Chronicles #12! I was curious about the annotation “dreaming big” in the illustration of one of the company’s character competition entries.







その時ひとつの心残りを思い出したのです。 それはテクモで最後に創った「ラディア戦記」というファミコンのゲームでした。 これが発売される頃、すでに世の中はスーファミが主流になりつつあり、ファミコン最後の大作と銘打って発売したものの、３万本しか注文が集まらなかったのです。

It was then that I remembered one regret. It was my last game for the Famicom (NES) called “Radia Senki”. By the time this game was released, the SNES was already becoming the mainstream, and although it was billed as the last major Famicom game, we only received orders for 30,000 copies.

ダメな子ほどかわいいじゃないですけど、私にとって「ラディア戦記」はとても愛おしい作品でした。 それは記憶喪失の主人公の話。ネームエントリーで「ひとつのなまえが浮かんできた」とメッセージが出ます。 プレイヤーは頭に浮かんだ名前を入力するでしょう。 その名前で物語はずっと進みます。



The more troublesome the child is, the cuter he is, but for me, “Radia Senki” was very endearing. It’s about a main character with amnesia. The name entry will give you a message saying “One name came to mind”. The player would type in a name that came to mind. That name is the name that keeps the story going.



そしてラストボスの直前、敵の黒幕が現れて名前を名乗るのですが、それはプレイヤーが付けた名前そのものなのです。



And just before the last boss, the enemy mastermind appears and says his name, which is the very name the player has given him.



プレイヤーが自分で思い付いたと思っていた名前は、黒幕の男が自分の名前をプレイヤーの脳に送り込んだものだったのです。 そこから「記憶の書き換え」というアイデアが生まれました。 つづく



The name the player thought he had come up with was a name that the man behind the mastermind had sent his own name into the player’s brain. From this, the idea of “rewriting memories” was born.

To be continued.



Some context: The story of Radia Senki and Klonoa: Door to Phantomile are pretty similar! Here’s the story of the game from the wikipedia article.