Yuji Naka's Balan Wonderworld

One thing that stuck out to me in the days leading up to release: how is this a 'spiritual successor' to NiGHTS? I never got that, because it's not remotely the same genre of game and only shares the most surface-level aspects. It feels like they knew something more faithful would have been near-impenetrable to a wide audience so just kinda-sorta imitated it on a superficial level for "look we got that guy who made that old game you like" points.

The odds were stacked against it, especially given how hard they were pushing the NiGHTS angle despite it very clearly not being that, like they knew what it really was was going to be middling at best.

Edited by Chortleous on Apr 29th 2022 at 9:27:39 AM

Balan Wonderworld's a spiritual successor in the sense that it's a game where some mysterious magical being helps out a boy and girl by taking them to a strange magical land.

My guess is that it's kind of a combination of like, Naka not being a seasoned director and not really knowing what he's doing, Arzest being really poorly suited to develop the game and Square Enix getting increasingly nervous about the state it's in.

Like, I could see stuff like how the costumes only have one move each and all the face buttons do the same thing being the result of Square Enix demanding the developers to wrap things up, the weird mobile game field to it being the result of Arzest being primarily a mobile developer and not realizing the problem and the wonky and incoherent plot with no dialogue being Naka's idea. Because Naka has only ever directed two games. This, and Chu Chu Rocket in 1999. Everything else, he's either programmed on it or produced it. Which isn't nothing, but producing works pretty differently from directing.

I have said for a while that most of this game's ideas aren't bad per se, but they mesh horribly and at its core has a lack of cohesion. The gameplay itself is an example. Having to switch between abilities to tackle a level could be interesting and encourage different approaches to the game's obstacles, and having your power-ups as your life points has worked well for Mario. Balan mixed the two in such a way that the game becomes frustrating and a chore.

I don't think all of this is Naka's fault, obviously Squeenix has its fare share of the blame, but Naka came up with the concept and quite possibly the core gameplay too, and those were fundamentally flawed.

The game was meant to be a phone game and never should have been moved onto console without a total ground-up overhaul. You can tell it was a phone game too, between the limited button use and how the costumes only really do one thing. They were clearly meant to be microtransactions or somehow purchasable.

Naka really should have realized things weren't working out way before 6 months before launch, though. The whole development cycle seems like a mess.

Also, the trailer was the most misleading thing ever.

Edited by PhiSat on Apr 29th 2022 at 12:06:11 PM

It being originally planned as a mobile game explains a lot.

I think a part of the question is who pushed for a console game. Square Enix loves mobile games, so a flashy mobile platformer from "the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog" would have been a really easy sell to them, most likely.

I am absolutely comfortable blaming Naka for the game being bad. His fingerprints are still all over the core design (the "one button does almost everything" mindset has been present in many of his projects as far back as the original Sonic), and 6 months isn't enough time to do any major overhauls.

I suspect he pushed for it. Mobile games don't have a lot of prestige even if they're lucrative.

We do know that he's the one who pushed for the game. Square Enix wanted his division to help out on other titles and he was pushing hard to get the right to make a platformer and they gave it to him as his one chance. He said as much in interviews.

That, combined with how Square Enix started putting it on sale pretty much immediately, are pretty good hints that the execs started panicking at the state of the game, kicked him, made Arzest wrap up development and pushed it out as a write-off.

I'm kinda wondering how would the game have been fixed in 6 months. I mean 6 months isn't really enough to basically go through 80 costumes, decide which ones should stay, which ones need to go, what abilities to give them, redoing the controls, redoing the levels, and then bug testing. You would need at least a year.

Also not liking how he threw Arzest under the bus since if I recall correctly wasn't he the one that chose them.

This feels like Yuji Naka is just throwing everyone under the bus and makes me wonder if the suit didn't go as well as he had hoped.

Yeah, looking it up, the interviews before that falling out, whatever it was, were like "it was all meeeeee. Square Enix didn't want me to make my own game, but I convinced them! They didn't want me to hire Arzest, but I convinced them! It'll be amazing you guys, I'm the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog!" It makes it look like it was mostly a him problem in hindsight.

Apparently the opening cutscene is a big part of the portfolio for the CGI animation division (the part that does the big pre-rendered cutscenes and stuff), but otherwise, the company just doesn't want to talk about it.

I mean, they let this big name guy talk them into letting him do something he wasn't hired to do, hire a company they were very iffy about (apparently he pushed for them for the sole reason of being friends with their founder?) and then he creates that disaster? No wonder they wanted to get him out of the way as quickly as possible, he proved that he was unreliable at best and a raging egomaniac at worst. You don't want someone like that doing support development on your other projects.

Edited by Zendervai on Apr 29th 2022 at 3:59:49 PM

Naka and Ohshima have probably burned bridges over all this huh

I don't believe Square is completely not to blame for the state of affairs given so many of their big recent titles have either been dumpster fires (like Avengers and Babylon's Fall) or been absolutely invisible in terms of marketing (Neo TWEWY, Babylon's Fall again), but yeah, Naka likely did not help the situation.

Perhaps they didn't market Babylon's Fall much because they anticipated that it was going to flop.

Remember guys, this is a man who steal credit for when things go right and then throw people under the bus when things go wrong.

Also can we change the forum title to remove Yuji Naka? lol

It's never really a surprise for SE to fuck things up, so I have no idea where this mindset of "him exposing SE" unless those people have been living under a rock.

Also very on-brand on Naka to shit on Arzest (which is deserved due to their known output) even though it was him who definitely chose them due to ties with Ohshima.

Edited by Ookamikun on Apr 30th 2022 at 8:47:32 PM

Square Enix is a pretty shitty company that makes mistake after mistake, but here, it looks like their mistake wasn’t keeping Naka on a very short leash.

Edit: misread nevermind

Edited by NoName999 on Apr 30th 2022 at 6:28:59 AM

Yuji Naka arrested for insider trading.

Well, there.

What the hell?

Allegations of him forcing the dev team to crunch and other deplorable things popped out.

Not shocking in the slightest. It's well documented that Yuji Naka is a huge jackass.

Oh, and he got arrested for insider trading again.

This is truly the reason this is to Sega what Mighty No. 9 was to Capcom.

Man should have escaped from the city when he had the chance.