Balan Wonderworld

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SSF2T Old User said:
I honestly don't get the savior complex people give this guy, it's almost as bad as Kojima. Everything he did after Genesis Sonic and Nights on Saturn has been a downhill of shit. FFS, his own company Probe after he left SEGA was a failure and that was him with NO restrictions. That's a GIANT hint that maybe he should call it quits and not be called upon for other projects.
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At least Kojima has made a couple of decent games in the past 20 years. Naka has been struggling to outrun irrelevancy the moment Sega retired the Genesis.
 
Vyse Inglebard said:
Not to mention how he purposefully sabotaged Sonic X-Treme because he wouldn't lend Sega Technical Institute use his NiGHTS engine, threatening to leave the company if SEGA did so....which he did anyway a decade later. This, in turn, caused two of the developers of X-Treme, Chris Coffin and Chris Senn, to literally fall sick during production:
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And a year later the asshole did use the Nights engine for Sonic Jam. What a pity, the game wouldn't save the Saturn since it was a bitch to develop games for it, Sega of Japan stopped giving a shit about the west, the PSX was booming and the game had nothing on Super Mario 64. Chris Senn did had some to blame and he did manage to work on another Sonic game which flopped and he went to working on board games, as for Coffin, she did have a better time working for Ubisoft and EA tweaking game engines before disappearing completely in 2012, maybe she would have it much better if the game was such a success.
 
"Second, according to court documents, [Naoto] Ohshima told producer [Noriyoshi] Fujimoto that the relationship with Arzest was ruined due to comments I made wanting to improve the game in the face of Arzest submitting the game without fixing bugs"
I can't tell if this is supposed to refer to Naka's relationship with Arzest or Square Enix's but considering the company's track record it doesn't amount to much at all either way.

Edit: Goddamn, the nintentolife article's comments section is almost half of nothing but men in their mid thirties and early forties still whiteknighting a man who hasn't made anything good in over twenty years. The heaven's gate guy was in the wrong business, entertainment addiction is where the real cultists are born.
 
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There was no way that the game would have been good even with six extra months. If it had a dedicated jump button it would have at least been okay, but because he never planned it from the start it would never be implemented.
I think square saw it comming that it would be a dud, and he Costed squeenix far to much, so they cut their losses.
 
Raiken said:
There was no way that the game would have been good even with six extra months. If it had a dedicated jump button it would have at least been okay, but because he never planned it from the start it would never be implemented.
I think square saw it comming that it would be a dud, and he Costed squeenix far to much, so they cut their losses.
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This game's single button tells me it never left its testing phase and the crunch time for the studio was doubtlessly only for fixing the largest bugs. I had always assumed it would be hard to fuck up a gimmicky platformer, but Goddamn was I proven wrong. What gets me is that Mario Odyssey already does this exact set up via the capture gimmick, the only difference is balan uses costumes as its theme instead of ghostly possession--its like having a map to a gold mine drawn by the frontiersman who discovered it and still getting lost along the way.

As for SE thinking this game would bomb, I assume they were impressed enough with the pitch to give it the requested budget--I say that based on how much went into the music with them getting that London choir who cannot have been cheap. It'll take a while for the whole picture to be revealed through the lawsuit, but I can only imagine the producers realized what a mistake they had made when naka's awful management practices started to became a serious problem. There's no way this is anyone's fault but his own, not with his reputation of being a massive douche with nothing to back up his ego.
 
RX-78 said:
This game's single button tells me it never left its testing phase and the crunch time for the studio was doubtlessly only for fixing the largest bugs. I had always assumed it would be hard to fuck up a gimmicky platformer, but Goddamn was I proven wrong. What gets me is that Mario Odyssey already does this exact set up via the capture gimmick, the only difference is balan uses costumes as its theme instead of ghostly possession--its like having a map to a gold mine drawn by the frontiersman who discovered it and still getting lost along the way.

As for SE thinking this game would bomb, I assume they were impressed enough with the pitch to give it the requested budget--I say that based on how much went into the music with them getting that London choir who cannot have been cheap. It'll take a while for the whole picture to be revealed through the lawsuit, but I can only imagine the producers realized what a mistake they had made when naka's awful management practices started to became a serious problem. There's no way this is anyone's fault but his own, not with his reputation of being a massive douche with nothing to back up his ego.
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SE liked the pitch enough to let Naka found his own sub-company, Balan Company. Heck, the cutscenes were originally supposed to be in-engine until Visual Works got interested enough in the project to pitch in and make all the CGI stuff.
 
If you read his blame list it becomes painfuly clear that no-one liked working with him to begin with.
 
Dunkey's video on this was hilarious

The moment the farmer descended from the sky and started breakdancing to eurofag pop music was my favorite
 
Raiken said:
If you read his blame list it becomes painfuly clear that no-one liked working with him to begin with.
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There's that old saying, if you meet an asshole on the street, oh well. If you keep meeting assholes on the street everywhere you go, you're the asshole.

Not saying it's impossible that SE screwed him over, but it sure sounds like there was a consensus that he needed to go.
 
Block Me said:
There's that old saying, if you meet an asshole on the street, oh well. If you keep meeting assholes on the street everywhere you go, you're the asshole.

Not saying it's impossible that SE screwed him over, but it sure sounds like there was a consensus that he needed to go.
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It will always be a little bit from collum A and a little bit of collum B.
 
RX-78 said:
What gets me is that Mario Odyssey already does this exact set up via the capture gimmick, the only difference is balan uses costumes as its theme instead of ghostly possession
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At least with Mario, you won't get softlocked by not doing stuff in an specific sequence, though. But as far as I can tell, most of the costumes in both games aren't exactly useful outside of the immediate areas that you find them.
 
Gamepad said:
SE liked the pitch enough to let Naka found his own sub-company, Balan Company. Heck, the cutscenes were originally supposed to be in-engine until Visual Works got interested enough in the project to pitch in and make all the CGI stuff.
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I forgot that Balan Company existed as a sub-company and not just as a developer moniker. I also didn't know about Visual Works jumping in like that. It really paints a clear picture of how terrible naka is at his job if squenix is that enthusiastic about the project and an uninvolved division wanted to get in on the action just because they liked the ideas so much. The stars aligned perfectly for this title, and naka pissed away his last chance at relevancy due to decades-old hubris that killed his own company years earlier, holy shit is this man a joke.

Thinking about it further and re-reading naka's statement on that nintendolife article, it sounds like Arzest wanted to get this thing off their table asap and did not want to perform any bug fixing at all. Even for a D-list company, that's astoundingly unprofessional and makes me wonder if working with naka was such a pain that the group was willing to sacrifice what little reputation they had and burn their bridge with SE just to be rid of him. That might have been what got the five upper management suits on naka's ass in the first place.

NerdShamer said:
At least with Mario, you won't get softlocked by not doing stuff in an specific sequence, though. But as far as I can tell, most of the costumes in both games aren't exactly useful outside of the immediate areas that you find them.
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I meant the broad theme of putting on a suit to get a new power. Odyssey's possession is fun as hell just for the sake of messing around with an excellent physics engine, and there's so few moons necessary to unlock new areas that there isn't any pressure on the player to hurry up and stop having fun.
 
I was looking for this thread, so I'm gonna drive-by my thoughts. If Naka was getting that much pushback from his superiors it means they were holding off kicking him out and it has to be bad. Also, I do not know how people can say Naka being kept in would fix anything. From what I've read into it, he got severed some six months before it would be considered finalized and shipped. 6 months is not the time to fix the level design and terrible game design. Honestly, what he shoulda done was map a costume to each of the face buttons and given us 4 if he demanded Jump be a power.
 
albert the programmer said:
I never would have thought that Yuji Naka would be blaming his own employees for the fact that his game is considered his worst to date. Of course, then again, a title like Balan Wonderland looks and sounds more awkward than the game itself.
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Nigga, it’s Balan Wonderworld.

Every fucking time I’m reminded of this game, it rekindles my passionate hatred; Yuji Naka you fuck, it should’ve been Balan Wonderland.
 
Mnutu said:
Nigga, it’s Balan Wonderworld.

Every fucking time I’m reminded of this game, it rekindles my passionate hatred; Yuji Naka you fuck, it should’ve been Balan Wonderland.
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>Wonderworld
>not Wonderland

:thinking:

Yeah, it gets even more awkward the way I talk about it.
 
The game seems to have been fundamentally flawed, but with potential. I never liked the character design and from what I've heard it does dumb shit like not including a jump button and forcing repetitive shitty quicktime event minigame things.

I think it could be salvaged with some mods, but who would want to, just play something better.

I don't even know what the last notable thing he made was, looks like either "Ivy the Kiwi" or "Rodea the Sky Soldier", which seem okay, I guess but not anywhere near what you'd expect from the Sonic guy.
 
LullerDerbyRollin said:
From what I've read into it, he got severed some six months before it would be considered finalized and shipped. 6 months is not the time to fix the level design and terrible game design.
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The way Naka seems to be selling it to the public is that he claims the ring mechanics of the original Sonic game (as in holding at least one will let you survive an attack) were not finalized until two weeks before the game was completed. He seems to be hoping that gamers don’t understand that making a modern 3D platformer is drastically different than making a 2D platformer three decades ago.
 
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