Klonoa movie officially announced (Thoughts added)

Yeah, journal entry this time due to how significant this is.

Talk about coming out of nowhere. O_o variety.com/2016/film/asia/hen…

As Variety reports, a Klonoa movie has just been announced and will be made by U.S. based animation company, Henshin. Rob Pereyda, who was the head of ShiftyLook some years ago, is the head of the company and joining him on the film will be Hitoshi Ariga, the artist who did the Klonoa webcomic on ShiftyLook. There also seems to be a new piece of concept art as well, which depicts Klonoa wearing a rather badass yellow trenchcoat and a pair of yellow shorts. Wow, Klonoa wearing a trenchcoat of all things. That is unexpected.

No further details have been reported, and the movie seemingly hasn't started production yet, so it might be a few years down the road before we can watch it.

As for my thoughts, give me some time to process this. I will update this journal.

EDIT 2:
Okay, so here are my thoughts on this.

Wow, and I mean, wow. This literally came out of nowhere. Klonoa, an obscure character that I and many other fans have been trying to keep alive for years now, is getting a movie of all things. (And an anime movie, btw, according to Ariga) You were expecting him to get another game or something, not an unlikely movie. But alas, here we are. And as a Klonoa fan since 2001, I have to say that this is a rather brilliant and smart move here. Probably the smartest move Namco has made in a while, really.

Why? Well, let's face it. If you frequent NeoGAF or just about any gaming news site/forum, then you'd have heard a bunch of horror stories about several gaming studios/publishers such as THQ and this year's Evolution Studios (developers of Driveclub) shutting down due to their games bombing in sales and other reasons. And then there's game development budgets ballooning into the multi-millions, the so-called "AAA" part of gaming itself so that they'd look great, play great, feel like interactive movies, etc. It's why you see such sometimes awful practices such as paid DLC, F2P-style microtransactions (want your NBA player to have a 99 rating? Buy 75,000 VC and similar stuff like that), season passes with half the value that you paid for the pass, etc. All so to keep this "AAA" part of gaming sustainable, giving gamers what they want such as awesome graphics and gameplay.

Given all that and how the Klonoa Wiimake bombed badly when it released due to a lack of advertising, I began to see that making another game would be a very risky move today. Imagine a Klonoa game on PS4 with the graphics of Ratchet and Clank 2016, only that it bombed again like usual. It would do some rather extreme damage to Namco Bandai. So much that maybe that they'd never do another AAA game again at all or something. And given the fact that I was really disappointed to see Evo Studios shut down earlier this year (Driveclub was one hell of a racing game), it'd kill me to see the likely permanent death of Klonoa like that. And admittedly, it felt like that after 2002 when Heroes was last released. Fortunately, they kept him alive throughout this last decade and a half by putting him in their other games such as the Tales series and Soulcalibur 5 as a cameo (man, he'd be badass in Soulcalibur with the Wind Saber). And of course, the Wiimake and the Noctis Sol webcomic.

So that's why it's a smart move on their part. Doing movies, anime ones, is cheaper than doing a game (correct me if I'm wrong, btw). And it's one that will likely be what finally causes Klonoa to be the worldwide icon that he deserves to be.

Did I mention that his trenchcoat is badass? Seriously, I never expected him to wear such an awesome thing. Kinda funny since I'm the one doing badass things to him, really.