Balan Wonderworld - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey everyone it's time for what happened a series of video essays gussied up like a cheesy game show to soften the blow of hearing about these sad stories from the video game and movie industries i'm talking like this right now because i gotta be honest this is gonna be a rough one folks now when we last left yuji naka legendary game producer during sega's heyday before moving on to square enix in 2018 in an unknown capacity that capacity is now very well known balin wonderland is what yujinaka has been up to since he joined square enix some three years ago but before that he had spent more than a decade at probe the company he established after he jumped from the smoking exploding nose diving plane crash that was the sonic 06 disaster pro produced more humble experimental titles like let's tap iv the kiwi and rodeo the sky soldier it's been like 30 seconds since we started the episode and i've already mentioned another game i'm gonna have to talk about at another time anyway probe was a small company and while their game certainly had some charm they nevertheless weren't really big money spinners which is doubly nah tripoli so with sky soldier during this same time naka also contributed to a few outside titles and one that's a particular note is we play motion which if you don't remember and i assume no one but scott the waz even does was a mini game collection that was designed by multiple studios now the main developer of wii play motion was a company called arzest they handled the programming and other technical aspects while completely separate studios designed the actual mechanics of the mini games why is this important well this two-way style development must have struck a chord with yuji naka because once the financial fallout of rodeo was apparent naka then joined up with square enix as stated earlier and probe was shut down except they weren't strangely naka confirmed as late as 2018 that the company is technically not dead as it still has one single employee that's weird anyway let's move on not long after he was hired a subsidiary was formed around naca to develop titles under the square enix umbrella games that they wouldn't normally publish now originally naka's first inclination was to make something simple and accessible and had planned to make that a social focused game for mobile phones shinji hashimoto however square enix executive officer persuaded naka to change course and to start work on a platformer he needed approval from the other heads of square enix first of course but once that was granted the subsidiary was named ballon company and as we'll see wasn't set up like a traditional studio at all their business model was centered around a core group of designers and artists who would do the planning and pre-production work and once that was done would then hire another company to handle the programming and asset building which is pretty neat i guess although it does sound familiar where have i heard of that before i just can't remember all right that's not to say that this style of game development can't and hasn't worked in the past it's just well it's possibly a contributing factor as to why what happened happened so what platformers had our zest worked on that impressed naka and square enix so much that they decided that they were the team to hire well that would be yoshi's new island mario and sonic at the rio 2016 olympic games 3ds i think that counts and hey pikmin that 2d action-focused pikmin spin-off that you only just now remembered even existed because i just told you and that's it but that's fine that's why everyone needs to start somewhere right this the same team that made devil may cry 2 made devil may cry 3 for crying out loud but here's the thing the general plan from the start for ballon wonderlands wait one no it's not it's not called wonder it's called wonder world then then why have i been calling it wonderland why didn't someone tell me oh i've been making an idiot out of myself general plan from the start for ballon wonder world's development had a few red flags that were slowly being raised some things were just it was it was just worrying even though the genre and platforms had changed what remained was yuji naka's desire to design the game to be as accessible to the widest amount of people but children being cited as a major demographic that they wanted to target this would explain the general theme the playable children avatars and the art style but it would best explain the game's incredibly simplistic mechanics you can jump sometimes collect a few things and finally you put on dozens and dozens of costumes which do one thing and one thing only literally every button you press on your controller does the one special move specific to that costume some costumes do not allow you to jump for example others don't really allow you to attack and so on now if they wanted to design a game to appeal to children keeping things as simple as possible makes sense but there has to be a balance between simplicity and engagement nori yoshi fujimoto the game's producer stated one of our goals for development was to create a game with every kind of action to put in over 80 different kinds of action but even if you include a huge variety of actions in game it's difficult to map all those to the buttons it's difficult for the player to remember them all and it's difficult to create the opportunity to use them all when we were thinking about how to make it easy for the player to understand and use all the actions to their fullest we came up with the idea of having only one action per costume this meant we can make the action controls intuitive and the gameplay simple enough to be enjoyed by anyone now i and i'm sure many of you probably just said this to yourselves well then don't make 80 actions then yes designing 80 specific special moves and having you collect them one at a time and limiting all other actions does make things technically simpler but also makes it far slower limited and way more tedious this decision was fundamental in dooming balan wonder world from the very beginning as it did quite the opposite from allowing all ages to enjoy it its plotting pace simple puzzles and brain dead combat was clearly designed with the younger set in mind completely ostracizing older fans who had grown up with balance inspirations sonic and knights almost every mechanic or artistic choice is clearly lifted from both except the ones that made those games so engaging the real drive during development seems to have been to make as many costumes as possible that was the goal and that was going to be the appeal a real back of the box feature see now in a lot of typical game development cycles you tend to over design to make too much of one thing and then have to scale it back to focus on a set of mechanics but that wasn't the case with ballon in interviews naca and others said they assumed they'd have to make lots of cuts and to focus on a smaller number of costumes but then they just decided it why not put all of them in there well when you have 80 different weapons or characters or power-ups you're inevitably going to wind up with a lot of superfluous ones and it's no different here this then makes level design tricky because since the game lacks any central mechanics or moves you're required to constantly switch out costumes and it's the only way to progress this is very much unlike many sonic or mario or any other platforms really where most of the power-ups are optional or permanent and not forcing you to laboriously navigate through 80 of them to find what you want and for the sake of argument let's just say they decided in the last few months of development uh let's just cut out like 70 of these powers and then just rebuild all the levels to support those better well that would have been a monumental amount of work see they wanted to make the game available to as many people as possible on as many devices as possible which included the switch the pc the ps4 the xbox one the xbox series x and the ps5 the amount of testing balancing polishing and optimization required to make such a change across all versions would have delayed it way past an acceptable point for square enix and throwing brand new consoles in the mix like the ps5 and the series x also complicated matters even further this is due to the fact that when asked about what platforms balon would bow on hashimoto offered whenever you're developing on a pre-launch development console the tricky thing that many may not realize is if you encounter a bug it takes more time to resolve whether it was a problem with the game or a problem with the hardware on the other hand the overwhelming specs of the console meant that some technical limitations we faced previously were moved completely this meant we got a bit carried away with the excitement coming up with more and more costumes we wanted to add in during development now because they had so many costumes it presented a problem how do you design levels that can account for all these various factors and options you don't want one part of the stage to be accessible while wearing a specific costume it's not meant for letting the player easily break the game you also have to consider enemy placement how can you predict what power up the player has before every enemy encounter well what did they do they used an ai algorithm to scale difficulty to place the power ups and the enemies spawns within every level so yeah if you've played ballon wonder world and you find it kinda bland generic by the numbers formulaic binary well there's a reason a portion of the game was designed by skynet now one of the game's positives its gorgeous cgi animated cutscenes has its own interesting origin and that origin was that they were never meant to be included at all the design team at battling company had originally planned to only incorporate in-game cutscenes to push the narrative visual works square enix's own in-house cgi subsidiary who are responsible for some stunning campaigned and lobbying to work on the project so the fact that the best part of the game wasn't originally going to be in the game at all is a little unbelievable the game was first unveiled with a trailer in 2020 and a lot of people were excited no one knew what yuji naka had been working on and now it's going to be a big mascot platformer and he's teamed up with sonic's original visual designer naoto oshima after 20 years and it has the backing of square enix what could go wrong the demo is what could go wrong ballon wonder world's public demo damaged the game's image immeasurably instead of reaffirming people's positive vibes they had going in the game's simplistic design glacial pace and dumbed down difficulty was put on display for all the world to play previews impressions videos and hot takes exploded all over the dream world that is cyberspace ballon was not very engaging with the basic gameplay the controls camera and its performance being among some but not all of people's gripes this demo created a summoning circle that brought forth this negative miasma that hung around the project from then all the way up until its launch and it never really went away the feedback was bad enough that it spurred the creators to issue a statement now yoshi fujimoto in a long-winded letter to fans to try to big up the game's positives its world characters those 80 costumes of course also tucked away in the very end of a said letter there's been a wide range of opinions and responses to the demo and fortunately at the current stage of development it simply isn't feasible to reflect every piece of feedback into the game however to offer you all a more balanced gameplay experience we will be implementing a day one patch for the full game specifically this patch will adjust movement controls camera movement and rebalancing of the difficulty unfortunately that meant the day one patch would not be redesigning most of the game but it's with most of the game that people had a problem with it simply wasn't all that interesting or challenging but not too long after that that patch would change to include one other big change to make sure that this wonder world wouldn't induce seizures in a percentage of the population when footage of a boss fight started making its way online it had several instances of a photosensitive effect that's so bad i'm not even going to show it in a censored form but believe me it was bad like battling seizure robots bad this news spread so fast that square enix quicker than a whippet with a bum full of dynamite announced it would need to be patched out square strongly urged players to download and install this day 1 patch to correct this but regardless it's always really bad when something like this gets through testing if someone buys a physical copy of ballon which is admittedly not very likely and their console isn't online or they simply don't install the patch well it could lead to potential lawsuits it was certainly another black eye for the game coupled with a negative reception from the demo and you have the ingredients for the gaming industry's newest whipping boy unfortunately the poor feedback accrued from the demo continued over to the full game now if balin had been made by a brand new indie startup that had never shipped a product before we'd probably not be talking about it right now but because of the pedigree of its developer and publisher well that only made the vitriol that more potent platformers are a tricky thing to get right sure they can be appealing to kids what with their bright colors and sugary odors oh it'll never be the darling of the so-called platforming fathers who cluck their tongues stroke their mustaches and talk about what's to be done with this balan wonder world anyway music was also a point of contention now while most of it is because it's not especially memorable the allegations that one of his composers ryo yamazaki copied other famous songs is it should be noted though that the jury is still out on that moving on while reviews were overwhelmingly negative for the final game there were some on sites like metacritic that were positive a bit too positive readers noticed a huge influx of happy-go-lucky opinions in the user score section most of them in broken english and all of them hilarious [Music] best game of the decade a really shiny experience to live for just have some good moments of fun with a nice plaque this is the greatest platform game made in the whole gem egregious and absolutely stunning game now while this next review is most likely trolling i i i just have to include it i came in blind but wow this is a masterpiece unparalleled by anything else in industry this really wonder world reminds me of plane's second best game second best game of all time shadow of the headshot who wrote this liam i feel like speedy little rodent in the field while playing pouncing upon old dancer who may dare intrude on my style gameplay is mario odyssey but much more impressive than anything that packa miyamoto could ever create story impresses with deep-seated meaning it's like hideo kojima but with a hat god many peoples are blinded by hate and greed but don't realize that love overcomes all balon has been affected by such a tragic fate do not listen to those that are not sound of mind try this game and become abundant and fun legendary now positive review bombing is rare but it does happen it could have been just a bunch of enthusiastic old sega fans that just wanted to big up naka's latest or maybe a marketing company who are trying to salvage a game's poor reputation we don't really know for sure what is for sure is that one little bit towards the end of that last review balon has suffered a tragic fate as of this writing the game's commercial performance has been revealed and it's not great in its first week in japan across all versions it failed to crack the top 30. with estimates hovering around 2 000 copies sold the nintendo eshop charts in both japan and north america were also bereft of balance magic but in the uk physical charts it also failed to break the top 40. well this clearly didn't work out but i'm sure naca and balon company can take a look at what went wrong and eventually release another completely different platformer that can sonic co-creator says ballen wonder world is his one chance to make a new 3d platformer yeah so apparently square enix upper management only greenlit the project on the grounds that if it wasn't a success it would be the last time they would publish such a game that's a weirdly harsh mandate and not entirely fair they clearly made this game to appeal to children but it wasn't really marketed that way in fact it was barely advertised at all and now there's even less advertising for it if that were possible with no real reason given square enix decided a week ago to completely scrub the internet of the wonder world demo across every single platform this is similar to sega's move in 2010 where they delisted the digital version of sonic 06 as it was similarly damaging the brand okay and there's been no word from any official source if the demo will relaunch in the future or the status of the bonus costumes players could attain through it yeah so uh yeah this demo and in terms of balance ultimate future well there's been no word on that either will there be a new massive patch that overhauls things is that even worth it at this point we just don't know but with sales numbers being so dreadful it just might be that this wonder world is going to remain closed permanently that wasn't easy okay that was that was just bad vibes all over anyway if you know of any other perilous projects played with platforming problems let me know in the comments below jump and bop over to my twitter or open a magic door into the flophouse vip patreon to nominate the subject you'd like to see next see you next time and thanks for watching me

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 656,020

Keywords: wha happun, matt mcmuscles, What Happened?, Balan Wonderworld, Balan Wonderland, Video Game Documentaries, Yuji Naka, Square Enix

Id: YuRl_AOe57w

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I'm genuinely upset that this game sucks.

It looks like it could have so much charm, but it just flopped.

[u/LammasuRex]

Why isn't it called Wonderland? I guess they don't want it confused with Alice but then it sounds so much better with the name Balan.

[u/oszidare]

Great ideas, great artwork, great feeling.

Shame that it had to be developed by the same team behind Hey Pikman and Yoshi's New Island.

[u/drizzes]

Obligatory Fuck It Up Farmer Ted

[u/LeifEriksonASDF]

The MAN who RAGES against the STORM

[u/Aeirus]

Honestly Balan had such a good design man. The way he animates around is so cool. And the thought of him having a theatre where you go when you have some kinda emotional turmoil and the world changes based on it is rad. It's so sad they dropped the ball so hard on this man

[u/Zmanwarrior]

Wonderworld

W-wait it's not Wonderland?

[u/world_persona]

I'm watching this video at work with a coworker and the moment Matt mentioned the game is called Baland Wonderworld and not Wonderland we both said "oh..." at the same time. We never noticed

[u/Real_Futer]

This game would definitely move a tier up if you could play as the hat man instead