I hope, within the next several years, we’ll get a look at the bigger picture behind Balan Wonderworld’s failure. A lot has been said about this subject already, but it’s all incredibly surface-level and based primarily on hearsay.
Naka’s criminal indictments mean that people already seem poised to blame him for literally everything that went wrong* but I feel that Square-Enix themselves, as overseers, deserve some shit as well: if they saw that the game was testing poorly and needed more time in the oven, they should have stepped in and delayed it. There’s a lot more at play here and I want to hear about it, because it takes plenty of cooks for a clusterfuck of Balan’s magnitude.
Also worth examining is how, despite everything, there’s a happy little fandom out there for the game and the world it made. Balan did resonate with some people in a big way, and looking at why is another deep dive worth taking.
- The worst thing about that whole mess is that Sonic X-Treme fans now feel justified in thinking its cancellation was an injustice, instead of saving us from a present day where amateur YouTube analysts discuss it as Sega’s lousy attempt to counter Mario 64
I really don't think there'd be much to uncover—I did a JP press run before and after the game came out and nothing I found gave any indication whatsoever that people were being coerced into making dumb design choices, and Ohshima in particular was very gung-ho about a lot of the elements that received the most immediate criticism. Arzest made yet another middling game; life goes on.
