Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil sports some of the sharpest visuals you'll see in any game on the market nowadays, although it'll take you a while to realize it. You'll notice the character style immediately; it's somewhere between the cel shading of Jet Grind Radio and standard polygonal models, and it looks fantastic. Klonoa is amazingly detailed, and the other characters and enemies in the game are just as sharp. The environments at first seem a little plain, a little low-poly, but as the game progresses and the levels get more and more beautiful you'll realize that the beginning levels were just the warmup when it came to graphics. The Memories level--I'll leave it at that not to spoil anything--is perhaps one of the most gorgeous levels I've ever seen in a platformer, not to mention one of the most well designed. And the framerate never falls below 'blazingly fast'. This is a showpiece game, one that you can use to prove that the PS2 can pump out some serious graphics without breaking much of a sweat.

The sound in the original Klonoa was rock-solid, and Klonoa 2 doesn't fail to live up to those high standards. The music is fantastic, ranging from poppy to weirdly somber in the next-to-last level to amusing when Klonoa vocalizes on one of the racing levels. The interesting thing is that it doesn't feel out of place; you come to love the babble that the various characters speak, so when one of them starts singing it doesn't seem particularly strange. People who played the original Klonoa, or the more recent Banjo series on the N64, will recognize the sort of babble we're talking about here. I found it cute that Tat, a cat, always spoke with 'Meow'-sounding words. There's no super-high-pitched Huepow character in this game; whether that's good or bad depends on your tastes. The sound effects are goofy, but not tinny or overdone. They match the game perfectly.

And the gameplay is darn near perfect, when it comes right down to it. Klonoa 2 is, quite simply, the best platformer I've played since . . . well, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. And trust me--I'm a fan of the genre. While I wish the game were a little longer, and I did have one (but only one) lockup as I played it, Klonoa 2 matched and then surpassed my expectations for a sequel to one of the most brilliant platformers ever.

Klonoa starts off on another journey, this time to a world named Lunatea. There, four kingdoms control four bells that together keep the world running. Unfortunately, the fifth bell is due to appear, and the Chaos that comes afterwards is likely to destroy the world. This is where Klonoa steps in. Without Huepow inside of the ring, the honours of being Klonoa's weapon pass to Lolo, a priestess in training who we watch grow up as the game progresses. Lolo has a sidekick, Popka, that can be somewhat played with a second controller--it's intended to help younger players beat some of the harder sections of the game.

On the surface, Klonoa 2 seems even simpler than most platformers. There are two buttons: jump and shoot. When you shoot most enemies, you pick them up above your head. You can then throw them into other enemies, jump up and throw them down to get an added boost, and so on. If you hold down the jump button after you execute a jump, Klonoa will hover in the air for a second or two, which can often be a lifesaver on long jumps.

The real complexity of the game comes from the interactions between Klonoa and the world. While the puzzles start off easy--use the creature to boost yourself onto the ledge--by the end of the game you'll be trying to figure out just what order to activate the switches in, or how you need to throw the crystal enemies to set off the crystal blocking your way without dying. Indeed, puzzles play an even larger part in Klonoa 2 than they did in the original; stuff that you only saw in the last few levels of the first game you'll be seeing much earlier in this one.

One thing that you have to get used to in Klonoa 2 is the fact that it's a 2.5D platformer. Like Pandemonium! and Tomba, this means that while the world itself is fully 3D, you always follow a series of paths that wend their way through the 3D world. By simply pushing left and right, you can maneuver wherever you like. There are times that the path branches off and you get to choose which direction to go, and you have to press up to go into doors and the like, but for the most part the game runs on a linear track.

While the group of people used to games like Spyro the Dragon may find this 'rail' limiting, it ends up being one of the greatest strengths of the game. By staying on a linear path, Klonoa 2 lets you have much more control over your character. I can't imagine doing some of the 'jump and hold' puzzles in a fully 3D world; the angles that you have to make and the amount of information you'd need to successfully scale a cliff while using enemies would be boggling. So suffice it to say that the play style of Klonoa 2 is perfect for the game it's in.

However, the entire game isn't on rails. [Yes, I know I said that it was. Shush.] New in Klonoa 2 are a number of racing levels, done on a sort of hoverboard, where you'll find yourself zooming down a track that allows you to pull back, push foward, and even at times swing left and right. These levels are a lot of fun, although they're necessarily short, and the differing range of freedom makes for a nice change of pace from the rest of the game. It's not so much as to overwhelm you, but it's not so little as to make you think it's merely a gimmick.

In the grand tradition of platformers, Klonoa 2 has a number of big huge bosses. They range from the trivial to the diabolical, and each of them looks downright fantastic. While you may blast your way through the first few without any problems, be prepared to die a few times on the later bosses before you figure out their patterns and modes of attack.

The levels in Lunatea's Veil range from forests to caverns to factories and everywhere in between. There are a few levels that truly stand out as imaginative; the ship is very nice, with a high level of 'compactness', requiring you to backtrack and find new paths, and the aforementioned Memories level is without a doubt one of the most clever platformer levels ever pressed onto disc. Sure, a number of the gimmicks have been done before, but they've never been done this beautifully or entrancingly.

Indeed, the only flaw that I can find in Klonoa 2 is that it's over entirely too soon. There are sixteen core stages, plus the various boss fights, and while it's doubtful that you could beat all sixteen in one night, a heavy long weekend could definitely see you all the way through the game. Of course, like the original title, beating the game completely requires much more than just finishing every levels; you have to collect a number of 'stars' in each level to rescue some dolls which unlock secrets, and you have to get 150 or more gems in a level to gain a picture in the photo gallery. While the core game itself may be a little easy (other than a few difficult levels near the end), getting all 150 gems in each level is mind-numbingly difficult. This is the sort of replay value that games should have; Klonoa 2 stands on its own two feet without the added objectives, but they serve to enhance the experience.

The difficulty in Klonoa 2 ramps up gradually but steadily, starting out almost trivially and getting up to darn near impossible in the later levels of the game. There's a beautiful progression in the game as you play. The first few levels don't tax precision jumping and 'grabbing', but as you go on it becomes more and more important, until you get to the late levels which require sequences of precise jumps and impeccable timing. Despite this, the game keeps you with plenty of extra lives (I finished the game with 28, and that was without going back into easier levels and getting more), and health is liberally scattered around the levels. Fair warning to Klonoa veterans--while the heart meter looks the same, Klonoa can now only take three hits instead of six. This definitely ups the ante in the boss fights. Precision control in this game is necessary for success, which is why you'll be very glad that you're using the D-Pad as you get deep into the game.

You use the D-Pad to move around, a button to jump, and a button to shoot. These comparatively simple controls combine to make a rich number of moves, including a large number of 'grab and throws' that you can use to get across chasms and so on. The game itself plays fantastically, and I never had any major issues with the puzzles or the enemies. I did manage to lock the game once, when one of the crystal guys returned to my hands just as I picked up another creature; unfortunately, it was in one of the more difficult levels, but I managed to blaze through it again without a problem. The game has amazingly minimal load times, which is a big plus, and the menus and world map are easy to navigate.

Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil is as close to gaming perfection as I've seen the platforming genre come. The storyline is solid, the characters are endearing, the visuals are fantastic, the sound is great, and most importantly the game plays like a dream. Titles like this make my job worth it all; games like this make buying your PS2 a good decision instead of succumbing to market pressure. Every self-respecting PS2 owner owes it to themselves to get a copy of this game as soon as possible; missing out on its delights would be a travesty. And now that I've completed Klonoa's second adventure, I can only ask: When's the third one coming out? I, for one, can't wait. Until then, you'd be a fool not to have this masterpiece.