Klonoa Wii is a remake of the
original PS1 game. Using a 2.5D perspective, Klonoa has to travel the world of Phantomile to stop Ghadius from creating a permanent nightmare. While some glitches are removed from the remake (the most notable being wall clips) there are other tricks used to make this TAS 4 minutes faster than the RTA WR.
Sync settings
- Emulator used: Dolphin 5.0-16793
- ISO MD5: 0F6608247C6F96DE6DBD33D04E979033
- Dual Core: Off
- DSP Emulator Engine: DSP HLE emulation
- One GameCube Controller, zero Wii Remotes
Movement, Glitches, and Tricks
Klonoa can run, jump, flutter (for ~1s) and shoot his Wind Bullet. He also has a whirlwind ability that no one seems to remember exists. At the end of Klonoa's flutter, if he shoots his Wind Bullet he'll gain a little more height than if he didn't, which is called a perfect flutter. His wind bullet can also pick up enemies (i.e. Moo's) or activate switches. If he's holding a moo, he can throw it or use it to double jump in the air. He can face forwards and backwards (necessary for entering doors or shooting enemies into the foreground/background). Running down slopes gives you more speed than running on flat ground, and jumping up slopes is slightly faster than running up them. His speed on slopes (as well as rivers) can be preserved either by fluttering or double jumping.
Damage boosting is a strat used throughout the TAS, where taking damage on one side of an enemy will knock you further down the path. Taking damage also gives Klonoa invincibility for ~1 second. This can be abused in certain places, like in the Rongo Lango boss fight, or in 5-1 to damage boost through fire instead of waiting for it to go away. Taking damage also restores Klonoa's flutter after he uses it.
Klonoa is a 2.5D game, meaning that while Klonoa can only move left/right on a plane, there are occasionally overlapping planes that correspond to the visible paths Klonoa walks on. If the planes overlap, Klonoa can jump between them. In some cases, this is intended, but it can also be used to easily save time like at the end of 1-1 and the end of 2-1.
"Moo squishing" is a technique where you "squish" your "moo" under doors that it's not supposed to be able to go under. It's done by running left/right towards the place you want to clip, and then facing down before colliding with the wall. It'll preserve your momentum and not check for collision with moo, allowing them to "squish" under the door.
Vision 1-1
1-1 is a simple stage, not much to see here aside from a lot of damage boosting, and a plane jump at the end of the level to save a little bit of time.
Vision 1-2
1-2 is also a simple stage, the only exciting thing here is the minecart section. Sadly, there (currently) isn't a way to skip this one or the one in 3-1.
Rongo Lango
We have to grab moo's and throw them at Rongo's red back. He only does 2 things in this fight, which is jump and turn around. During his turn animation he's invincible, so we have to wait until his animation's finished before being able to hit him again.
Vision 2-1
The leaves here are on a pre-determined cycle set on when you enter the room, so we have to wait for them no matter what. Unlike PS1, there's no way to avoid grabbing the keys which would skip the door opening sequence.
Vision 2-2
In room 3 Klonoa "squishes" a moo into the next room. By double jumping and landing in a certain spot, Klonoa can skip a little bit of the spiral. At the end of both river sections Klonoa stays airborne to preserve slightly more speed.
Evil Seadoph & Evil Pamela
Throughout the run, we collect enough dreamstones to enter Pamela with 46. This is important as Pamela's RNG is dependant on your dreamstone count. Pamela has 3 attacks: Bubbles, Lunge, and Spike. By far the slowest attack pattern is to have one with bubbles in it, because of how slow it is. Whether an attack has bubbles or not is 6n+4. This TAS gets 6(7)+4, but technically 6(6)+4 could've worked as well. But the reason I don't go with 40 or something else is because between attacks she can do a twirl animation, which can lose ~4 seconds, so that also has to be avoided. This fight has you grab Seadoph off of Pamela's back when she lunges at you, or when he jumps onto a spike ball, and then throwing it at Pamela.
Vision 3-1
There's a lot of waiting in this level because of the gondola's. There's potential to skip the wait for the 2nd one after grabbing the key, but Klonoa's jump height isn't enough to throw the moo into the foreground and grab the checkpoint. At the end with the spring, we perfect flutter to get enough height.
Vision 3-2
3-2 has a fun case of "moo "squishing"" which allows us to skip the entire point of the level. We're supposed to continue progressing through the level until we reactivate the gears, and ride up a gondola to the upper area. But by "squishing" a moo into that room, we can double jump to the upper area. At the end we save ~2 seconds by fluttering towards the door instead of continuing to run up the spiral.
Gelg Bolm
There's a very funny story to how this boss got a sub 50s. Let's start with how you're intended to fight him. You're supposed to wait until he startes charging at you, and then use the springs to double jump and throw your moo inside his shells. Now, way way back
in the 1980s in November 2023, a casual player
accidentally double jumped without being on the springs, and managed to hit Gelg anyway. Because of this, I discovered you can skip one of his longest attacks: the jump. Right after his first meatball attack, he's supposed to jump and stay suspended in the air, until falling back down and allowing you to hit him. However, you can damage boost into his shell right after his invincibility ends (soon after his meatball is thrown) and attack him again, skipping the jump attack. This alone saves ~10 seconds. After that repeat hitting him when his invincibility ends.
Vision 4-1
Sadly the skip done in the PS1 version doesn't work here, because it takes longer for enemies to respawn in this version. So while we do have to run around the room, we can use moo's to not wait as long for the platforms.
Vision 4-2
This is what I like to call the "wind current" level, because there's a lot of wind currents. You can get to the ground sooner by fluttering as you leave the current, removing some of your upward momentum.
Baladium
Baladium is the only boss who can't be beaten faster without a new strategy. His swing can't go faster, so we have to wait and hit 2 of his crystals 4 times. The IGT time for this boss is 28.74, and unless we find a way to hit 4 crystals at once that's as good as it's gonna get.
Vision 5-1
Vision 5-1 is probably the craziest level so far. To beat it, you need to collect 4 orbs (red/blue, green/yellow) and place them on the pedestals to get to the next level. The path you take to get to one orb will lead you back to the hub, where you place it down, then go to the next path, and do that 4 times. However, we can skip 2 of these re-entry's.
On the right path, there's the green/yellow orbs. We grab the yellow orb and then double jump + perfect flutter to get under the invisible wall that fails to stop us from backtracking, then backtrack to get the green orb.
On the left path, there's the red/blue orbs. We take the blue route and then do the moving platform glitch to save some time. After landing on a plane, if that plane moves then Klonoa moves with it. These moving platforms are supposed to lock Klonoa inside of them, but by jumping at the right time we're aligned to it and not locked in, allowing us to save ~4 seconds by being able to move earlier than we're supposed to.
After entering the blue room, the developers sillily left a checkpoint that Klonoa can reach by double jump grabbing a moo, and throwing it into the background. We can then deathwarp to the red path and go back to the hub. At this point despite grabbing all 4 orbs, only 2 are placed on the pedestals. That's because each cutscene hasn't been played, and it'll only play once Klonoa leaves and re-enters the hub room.
Vision 5-2
This level is cycle based, after a certain amount of time spent in the room an eclipse will happen, turning enemies to their nightmare variants. At night Klonoa can't grab enemies, but we're able to land on night platforms. Unlike PS1, exiting a room will always make it daytime.
We damage boost + perfect flutter in the 2nd room to skip bringing out the block. In room 9, we're supposed to head right and hit enough switches to free a moo from its cage, and use it to double jump to the left. But we can skip that entire room by perfect fluttering. You can even see the switches we skip in the next room :)
Joka
Given that the level we just played was eclipse based, so is Joka (his name is JOKA btw. Not "Joker" despite what the HP bar says. silly remake.)
After hitting him enough (or after enough time has passed, we do the former) he'll turn into his nightmare variant and we have to revert all the blocks to yellow to pass the eclipse. The fastest way to do this is to alternate between 2 blocks that haven't been changed yet. Once we're done it's daytime again and we can keep hitting JOKA.
Vision 6-1
Similar to 3-2, 6-1 has an even larger skip that lets us beat a *normally* long level in less than a minute. We're supposed to break 4 crystals to get us onto the top path, where the yellow blocks are. But because of the moo """"squish"""", we can double jump straight to the end. I can see why the remake of this remake tried to patch this...
Vision 6-2
There are 3 corridors we have to solve before being able to enter the 4th, which takes us to the boss. Sadly there isn't a (known) way to skip any corridors like the PS1 version, so here we have to do all of them. At the end of each corridor you're supposed to go on a sandslide which takes you back to the main entrance (similar to 5-1). But this is slow. Instead we can deathwarp back to the hub if we die during the cutscene that raises the next pillar. In the 2nd corridor, we break an armored moo and inflate him with our Wind bullet. His collision pushes Klonoa further into the crystal, which lets us skip breaking it.
Ghadius
Ghadius' Wheel of Woe has an inside and an outside, you can enter the outside through the portals, but we don't do that here. After he throws out the enemies, we grab and throw them into the background to damage him. He has 3 phases, but we can skip the 2nd if we only hit him 3 times before he throws out his next line of enemies. In his 3rd phase, he puts 3 moos in a triangle and only by breaking one of the sides can they be freed. After doing so we can defeat ghadius!
Nahatomb
Nahatomb has 3 phases. The first phase consists of waiting for him to spew enemies for us to grab, and waiting for his hand attack to break armored moos. We have to fill the 5 cannons to simultaneously attack him. We can manipulate where he throws the moo by changing location, as it always spawns ~a quarter of the ring away from Klonoa.
In the second phase we're sucked into his belly and have to destroy him from the inside. There are 2 parts to this: the first is to break the crystals on the 4 quarters of the ring. Afterwards we break down a single crystal that moves around the area. It has invincibility after first spawning in which is why I have to wait before throwing my moo.
The 3rd phase has us do what we did in the first, except now the cannons are below the ring and we have to double jump to give them ammunition.
Special Thanks
CasualPokePlayer for making DolphinHawk. The Klonoa speedrunning community for their continued feedback (NeilLegend, MTP, etc.)
Potential improvements
- Finding a way to skip the minecart sections in 1-2 + 3-1
- Getting the deathwarp in 3-1
- Manage Vision 4-1 skip, similar to the one done in PS1
- Better boss fights (JOKA, Nahatomb)
