The man who rages against the storm.
You may be familiar with the, uh, reception of Balan Wonderworld. The game, ostensibly a concept from and directed by Yuji Naka, released in 2021 to… infamy, I guess you’d say? I’m pretty sure it landed in the bargain section at a number of stores faster than usual. Anyway, an NDA seems to have expired, and according to Naka, he wasn’t even the director for the half-year leading up to release.
Oh, right, he Tweeted this out in Japanese. Well, thankfully, Twitter user Cheesemeister translated the entire thread.
I was removed as the director of Balan Wonderworld about half a year before release, so I filed a lawsuit against Square Enix. Now that the proceedings are over and I’m no longer bound by company rules, I’d like to speak out.
Yuji Naka
As he went on, it doesn’t seem he has much to say about Square Enix and Arzest that’s positive, either.
I think it’s wrong of Square Enix not to value games and game fans. According to court documents, I was removed as the director of Balan Wonderworld for 2 reasons. It was done by the producer, head of marketing, head of sound, managing director, and HR.
First, when a YouTuber’s arranged piano performance of the game music was released in a promotion instead of the original game track, turning the composer into a ghostwriter, I insisted that the original track be released and this caused trouble.
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.
Yuji Naka
He goes on to mention that transparency between the dev team and the public was discouraged by Square. As he puts it:
Retweeting, liking, etc. on SNS and such was banned, so I don’t think Square Enix values game fans. There were many comments and wonderful illustrations about Balan Wonderworld, and I’m really sorry that I couldn’t react to them.
Yuji Naka
He also notes that the submission of the unfinished game rubbed him the wrong way. He believes that it could have benefited from something similar to what was done with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, where the team kept working on the game to improve things right up until the carts needed to be produced.
For Sonic the Hedgehog, 2 weeks before finalizing, the spec was changed so that if you have even 1 ring, you won’t die. This now well-known rule was the result of improving the game until the very end, and people world-over have enjoyed it as a result.
Improving a game until the very end is what being a game creator is all about, and if that’s not possible, something’s wrong. I asked my lawyer to negotiate my just being able to comment until the end of production, but their refusal led me to file suit.
I think that the resulting Balan Wonderworld and the critical reception it received have a lot to do with what happened. I’m really disappointed that a product I worked on from the start turned out this way.
I personally regret that Balan Wonderworld was released to the world in an unfinished state. I wanted to consider all kinds of things and release it as a proper action game. I don’t think that Square Enix and Arzest value games and their fans.
Yuji Naka
That all said, it might be best to take this all with a grain of salt. While I admire the ideas he’s espousing in these tweets, he did earn something of a reputation while he was at Sega, especially when it came to his coworkers. Do recall that, essentially, four members of the dev team called in HR and got him removed from the director’s chair for this game.
On the other hand, Square Enix has kind of been putting their foot in it over the past decade. Their most recent disaster being Babylon’s Fall. All in all, the blame game is in full effect here, and I’d be hesitant to wade any further in.
Source: Prima Games
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