• she/her

@imhkr on twitter

late 30s trans girl

Video Games, Retro tech,

anime and tokusatsu nerd

behind the scenes @cathoderaydude

FFXIV Daria Imhkr@Ultros
FFXI Imhkr@bahamut

Art by @dataerase

Abandoned
https://bsky.app/profile/imhkr.bsky.social


DevilREI
@DevilREI

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

gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

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.


blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog

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.


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in reply to @DevilREI's post:

I wouldn't doubt Naka being a reason it was the way it is (the one button idea should have had more thought put into it, for one), but people saying he was the sole reason it came out the way it did are woefully ignorant about gamedev as a whole. Square Enix I thought was pretty well known for meddling with games and Balan was very much a victim of it. It had to have been terrible on all sides behind the scenes, you won't just sue your own employer all willy nilly like that.

As for X-Treme, I've said this a few times but X-Treme's main cause of death was that it was too ambitious for it's own good, much less anything to do with Naka killing it off (he didn't, Chris Senn has gone on record twice saying that it was a rumor at best). It was a symptom of the problem of Sega's super terrible management of the time IMO and it was already marching towards its grave with or without Naka is being a diva.

I don't even like Naka that much (he is an asshole) and even I think a lot of his so-called horror stories are half-truths, if not outright lies. Balan's development as a whole could be worth looking into more in detail, even with me reading between the lines I think there's a lot more to it than what most people think.

Too ambitious + short deadline + fate of an entire console riding on your shoulders is a recipe for a complete clusterfuck. The leaked financials from a little while back show how much SoA was (misguidedly) putting hope in this game when it was clear that the ship had already sailed.

(I'm barley active here so its a bit late) I'm so happy that you've mentioned the fandom here because not a ton of people who've bashed on balan wonderworld gave the fandom some credit?? This game, despite everything that happened behind the scenes and the flaws it had, actually had a big impact in my life and i could never thank enough for this game 💖 It's not perfect, I'm gonna admit that I was a bit frustrated with it a little (but I enjoyed it nonetheless), but it helped me with my art style, my writing, and was just over all a confidence booster. Anyways tldr, the game isn't for everyone, but thank you for giving us credit