I feel dumb for being so nitpicky, but I’m really bothered by the audio in Wii Klonoa. The voices in Klonoa are sort of a big thing to me, and “wahoo!” and “eepow!” are an integral part of my wife’s and my vocabulary. Also, Ghadius’s first line of “HOOOAA… JOKE!!” has always really stuck in my mind.

So, last night I checked out Klonoa Wii. I immediately noticed that the music was a little different; not completely different, but kind of not-so-good renditions of the original music. And then I was SUPER TERRIFIED when I started up the game and discovered that Klonoa was talking IN ENGLISH, and voiced by this Cam Clarke sound-alike. Now, I don’t have anything against Cam Clarke, and this guy sounds like he’d do a great job of voicing ninja turtles and cool teens, but he is NOT a good fit for a character who’s supposed to be saying things like “wapow, eepa polly-o!!” in the voice of an excited 8-year-old. I immediately quit, and found an option to change the in-game language from English to “Phantomile”, which improved things considerably. However, it’s STILL not the original voices, and although Klonoa and Huepow’s voices are close enough, Ghadius and Joka’s voices sound AWFUL and completely different.

So, I played through the first level, and then quit in despair. I feel dumb getting so upset about such a minor thing, especially since the gameplay is spot-on and the new all-realtime-rendered HD graphics are beautiful, but the voices are really like 2/3 of the charm of the original game, and with them redone half-assed I’d rather be playing the graphically-uglier original PS1 version.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 9:11 am and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.