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.
I have a feeling there's probably more to uncover about Rodea the Sky Soldier, Yuji Naka's final (?) game at Prope.
The story there is that Naka was hyping it up as his next "Sonic the Hedgehog", a career-defining new character and gameplay style, and signed a publishing deal with Kadokawa Games. Kadokawa was going to produce a 3DS version based on the Wii version that Prope was developing (and, at the time, the 3DS was so new we didn't even know what the hardware was capable of, I don't think). The game then basically fell off the face of the map for like five years, with Kadokawa always maintaining that Rodea was still in some form of development.
When it finally released, it was on the Wii U and the 3DS. The Wii U version, bafflingly, was a cheap and dirty port of the 3DS version. But the Wii U version also came with the original Wii version, which had apparently been finished and ready to ship for years.
Part of me has always wondered if Yuji Naka was being a diva behind the scenes and somebody at Kadokawa refused to deal with him, putting the game into purgatory (and keeping him locked in his contract) until he was ready to play nice.
Part of me has always wondered if Yuji Naka was being a diva behind the scenes and somebody at Kadokawa refused to deal with him, putting the game into purgatory (and keeping him locked in his contract) until he was ready to play nice.
Naka was absolutely being a diva, but I don't think the game was ever shelved as a fuck-you to Naka: my understanding is that Kadokawa simply didn't have confidence in it selling on Wii at that point in the Wii's lifetime and that they specifically didn't feel it was "core" enough, so they wanted to hedge with a 3DS version and redesign the game with more RPG elements and so on, but Naka adamantly refused to participate with the production of the other versions (nor was Prope contractually obliged to work on them), and also would not co-sign those other versions, so they not only had to redesign the game for 3DS/Wii U on their own but also had to negotiate a path to release that'd satisfy Naka because they were banking on his name as marketing for the eventual release (which basically meant putting out the Wii original, and even then Naka's participation in the marketing was to stress that people should play the Wii version and only the Wii version).
The Wii version's a much better game, by the way.
