1. #1

    Yuji Naka sued Square Enix over Balan Wonderworld disaster

    https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status...56479657242624

    By the looks of it things went very differently to what people thought behind the scenes. Naka was removed as director half a year before release with talk of strange orders from Square Enix that they were not allowed to like fan artworks prerelease and someone got in trouble for sharing a youtubers cover of some of the music prerelease.

    The trial is now over and the contract is ended and he is pretty vocal that square "does not care about the quality of the product or the fans" stating Balans infamous release state was known and the team wanted to fix it but was told ship it for the fiscal quarter.

    Certainly paints him in a better light and is just one more case of modern Square outside the isolated bubble of Noaki Yoshidas creative business suite 3 being a slowly burning down nightmare.

  2. #2
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    Im not defending se, but if the team knew the game was terrible why did they make it terrible in the first place?

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Video Games View Post
    Im not defending se, but if the team knew the game was terrible why did they make it terrible in the first place?
    I think its fuck ups on both ends but the strange part that has people talking is Square not wanting any interaction with fan art or works before release. For a new IP that seems like a strange kind of downplay.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by dope_danny View Post
    I think its fuck ups on both ends but the strange part that has people talking is Square not wanting any interaction with fan art or works before release. For a new IP that seems like a strange kind of downplay.
    That sounds really on par with Square Enix... that could be interpreted as marketing and it'd be a shame if anything not Final Fantasy mainline game or Dragon Quest could get any recognition anywhere

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by dope_danny View Post
    I think its fuck ups on both ends but the strange part that has people talking is Square not wanting any interaction with fan art or works before release. For a new IP that seems like a strange kind of downplay.
    Its possible they knew the game was awful and wanted to bury it before it came out

  6. #6
    Yeah... The problems with that game aren't things that would be fixed without scrapping the entire game and starting over. So can be salty about it but his game was going to be crap no matter what.

  7. #7
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    Half a year before release? So does that mean he is still responsible for the weird decision to stick the games narrative in a novel and have level completions feature extremely creepy synchronised dance cinematics? I can get how he can blame SE for not allowing him and his team to fix his terribly designed game but I doubt stopping them from doing so was responsible for all it's weirdness.
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Video Games View Post
    Im not defending se, but if the team knew the game was terrible why did they make it terrible in the first place?
    I believe most games are pretty terrible until right up to the very end. The example he gave was in Sonic where they decided at the very end of the dev cycle that even having just 1 ring would allow the player to be able to continue if hit. Thinking about it, the game would be completely different without that concept.

    That said, I do get your point. Even if the game isn't finish, the VISION for the end of that game should not be terrible, haha. Sounds like they didn't really have the vision perhaps, but they could have still made the mechanics a lot better in the last 6 months leading up to release, so I kinda see both sides.

    Real question is, did SE do this because they knew it was gonna be a flop 6 months out, or did them doing this cause the game to flop? One way, SE is actually probably the good guy, the other way not so much. I'm not sure which side is correct.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zenfoldor View Post
    I believe most games are pretty terrible until right up to the very end. The example he gave was in Sonic where they decided at the very end of the dev cycle that even having just 1 ring would allow the player to be able to continue if hit. Thinking about it, the game would be completely different without that concept.

    That said, I do get your point. Even if the game isn't finish, the VISION for the end of that game should not be terrible, haha. Sounds like they didn't really have the vision perhaps, but they could have still made the mechanics a lot better in the last 6 months leading up to release, so I kinda see both sides.

    Real question is, did SE do this because they knew it was gonna be a flop 6 months out, or did them doing this cause the game to flop? One way, SE is actually probably the good guy, the other way not so much. I'm not sure which side is correct.
    The difference is back then the industry as we know it now was still in its infancy with all sorts of brand new hardware where as now theyve had 30 years of action platformers to see what works and doesnt work. Theres a reason why there has been less of stuff like drake of the 99 dragons and we just call medicore games like far cry 6 bad because the floor has been raised. Balan is a good modern case study

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Zenfoldor View Post
    I believe most games are pretty terrible until right up to the very end. The example he gave was in Sonic where they decided at the very end of the dev cycle that even having just 1 ring would allow the player to be able to continue if hit. Thinking about it, the game would be completely different without that concept.

    That said, I do get your point. Even if the game isn't finish, the VISION for the end of that game should not be terrible, haha. Sounds like they didn't really have the vision perhaps, but they could have still made the mechanics a lot better in the last 6 months leading up to release, so I kinda see both sides.

    Real question is, did SE do this because they knew it was gonna be a flop 6 months out, or did them doing this cause the game to flop? One way, SE is actually probably the good guy, the other way not so much. I'm not sure which side is correct.
    Uhh games are very broken and buggy until the very end(some even after release) but if a game is terrible some last minute polish isn't going to change the fact its terrible. Balan could of been the most polished game known to man and it still would of been shit, there was nothing they could of done "at the very end" to fix that because the core design of the game was shit.

    The last part of your post makes 0 sense. Why would Square deliberately want a game they funded and published to flop? They aren't stupid and they knew this shit was garbage so just sent it out to die, they would of loved for that not to be the case but it is what it is. Similar to Babylon's Fall Square knew that shit was garbage and sent it out quietly in the middle of elden ring hype so people would forget it ever existed.

    If Balan or Babylon where even meager 7/10 type games Square would of pushed them a bit and not sent them out to die, but they played the products they knew it was shit and there was no saving those projects.
    Last edited by Tech614; 2022-04-29 at 12:06 AM.

  11. #11
    Very interesting to see a Japanese game dev bring up their grievances with their workplace in public. They're usually pretty hush about it (ie, Yoshitaka Murayama leaving Konami, Sakaguchi being ousted from SE, Matsuno leaving FF12, Nomura being booted off of Versus XIII, etc).

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by dope_danny View Post
    Certainly paints him in a better light and is just one more case of modern Square outside the isolated bubble of Noaki Yoshidas creative business suite 3 being a slowly burning down nightmare.
    Square has been burning down since 2001 when Yoichi Wada hijacked Square Enix and turned it from a games studio into a corporation.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Val the Moofia Boss View Post
    Square has been burning down since 2001 when Yoichi Wada hijacked Square Enix and turned it from a games studio into a corporation.
    Ah yes, the Square before 2001 that green lit the spirits within and almost went bankrupt because of it was surely just a "game studio". If anything after 2001 they where turned back into a game focused studio after focusing on nonsensical movie projects and other garbage. You're over here spewing bs for people that don't know their history I guess trying to fan boy for Sakaguchi but that man literally almost bankrupted the company by trying to turn them into Japanese pixar. After his ass got the boot and they went back to focusing on games like FFX, KH the company was saved literally the exact opposite of what you're claiming here.
    Last edited by Tech614; 2022-04-29 at 03:14 AM.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Tech614 View Post
    Ah yes, the Square before 2001 that green lit the spirits within and almost went bankrupt because of it was surely just a "game studio".
    There is a myth that Spirits Within nearly bankrupted Square. It didn't. What happened was that Final Fantasy X was delayed to the next fiscal year. FFX in raked in bonkers amounts of money. Had it released in the same fiscal year as Spirits Within, Square would have still had been fine on paper. FFX sold 2 million copies within the first week and made back well over the money spent on Spirits Within. There were corporate forces working to usurp Sakaguchi for control of Square and they were looking for an excuse. If it wasn't Spirits Within, it would have been something else. In this case, the excuse was that FFX was delayed to the next fiscal year, that on paper the company looked like it was in trouble, which allowed Yoichi Wada to kick out Sakaguchi and hijack the corporation, and actually run Square into the ground. It was corporate politicking.

  14. #14
    Eh. if the demo was any indication, that game was gonna be a dumpster fire no matter what. Him being fired that late into the game's life means it wasn't good from the beginning.

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