Jim Zub

Shiftylook was a webcomic site created by Namco-Bandai. Namco was trying to reinvigorate some of their older game properties and a team within the company felt a good way to do that would be to serialize free content online and see which ones grew in popularity. I was a project manager at UDON at the time and our studio was hired to contribute to many of those webcomics.

When the possibility for us to create a new Klonoa story came up, I jumped on it. I was a fan of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil and always felt the character hadn’t gotten his due. Bringing manga artist Hitoshi Ariga (Mega Man Megamix) on board to illustrate our new webcomic story made it even more exciting.

We had an ambitious plan to merge the many different versions of Klonoa that had been created for his various games into one core story line, keeping each dream place distinctive while also allowing characters from any of the games to mingle and team-up. 

That was the plan, but unfortunately we weren’t able to see it through to the end. Management changed at Namco and the new people in charge decided that Shiftylook didn’t fit with their plans. The site was phased out before we had a chance to finish the Klonoa webcomic, leaving our hero with an unfinished cliffhanger.

As far as I know, there’s no one at Namco interested in having us or anyone else complete the story. It would be nice to see it wrapped up, but with 4 years now passed since the webcomic abruptly stopped, I doubt it will happen. When you work on corporate properties you have to resign yourself to the reality that sometimes these things aren’t under your control.