Disaster Day of Crisis - What Happened?

[Music] welcome to another earth-shaking record-breaking and burger embracing episode of what happened the show the chronicles video games movies and media with disastrous development cycles so uh let's get started most should be familiar with monolithsoft the washington state studio responsible for such classics as blood septeracore and the fear franchise among many others established in god damn it tokyo-based developer responsible for xenosaga batten kaitos and those project x namco games that everybody wants but nobody actually plays now while monolithsoft started working almost exclusively under namco that relationship gradually dissolved after the retirement of then namco ceo masaya nakamura in 2002 this was due to the eternal structure of the mega publisher changing drastically once it merged with another company to become the mighty bando namkai that we all know today conversely monolith ceo hirohite sugiyara felt that after the merger they were getting less and less flexibility to create what they wanted so they broke away from namco in search of better opportunities they then struck up a relationship with nintendo's shinji hatano who promised more creative freedom in their games as long as they were exclusive to nintendo hardware after that it wasn't long before they were tasked with making something very different and very quickly for nintendo's then newest hardware the wii or as it was known back then the revolution now look before we go any further i have to address the fire tornado in the room there's probably a sizeable percentage of you out there that might not even heard of today's game and there's a good reason for that so if you are a disaster day of crisis virgin then let's take a moment to catch you up raymond bryce is a former us marine and international rescue team member who gets caught in the middle of a paramilitary force named serge from occupying blue ridge city they're demanding a ransom from the us government and if their demands are not met then they'll unleash a man-made earthquake that'll set off a chain reaction of every disaster movie cliche you can think of along the way rey will save dozens of people shoot dozens of people and eat an entire watermelon in one go as to how this crazy adventure came all about well i'll let the game's producer hitoshi yamagami set the stage approximately one year before the release of the wii around the beginning of 2006 my boss sugura said let's do something big and epic for the release of the wii up until then monolithsoft had worked mainly on rpgs but is also very good at video production so i decided to work on something that makes good use of that as a result the project turned into an american movie-like action game dealing with natural disasters when this idea started to come together i realized that it would be interesting however the content was so rich that i wondered if it could really be done in just nine months but the team said that it could so we started development however by the end it turned out that the development itself was a disaster so yeah the only mandate from the higher ups was to make something epic for nintendo's new console but they only had 9 months in which to do so as the wii was releasing that november while the studio's pedigree laid in rpgs they had the foresight to realize something of that scale couldn't be done in such a time frame so they decided an action game would be a safer bet but just a simple shoot bang wouldn't be epic enough so like yamagami said natural disasters were thrown in you know as a little treat problems started to happen almost immediately this definitely has turned out to be one hell of a day the main one being that monolithsoft did not receive redevelopment kits right away they did have an idea of the final specs but they had to start designing the game with their old gamecube kits now this wasn't seen as a problem at first because they're pretty familiar with the old lunchbox as they were just finishing up baton kaido's origins at the same time so they simply plugged away like this for a few months but when they did receive the final wii hardware they realized several aspects of the game just wouldn't work they had designed this early version of disaster with standard controls in mind and thus classic controller support was what the game primarily used having no idea just how integral the wii remote would be to the wii experience amongst the team it didn't take long for concerns to start arising that day of crisis despite having some exciting ideas wasn't all that thrilling or unique to actually play since a good chunk of the game revolved around saving people from perilous situations and tending to their wounds but with that initial reliance on standard controls all you had to do was press the a button and bam you were a hero many on the dev team felt that this wasn't particularly fun or inventive and since it was a core concept of the game these concerns were very valid this got to such a point that in october of 2006 just a month before the wii was scheduled to hit stores that the team were still struggling so it was decided by yamagami and his bosses to shelve the game temporarily because there was no way it was going to make launch this is actually a refreshing change of pace when compared to most stories we cover here at what happened because many games are simply visited by the good old captain in order to get them over that finish line which as we know rarely ever works in the short or the long run for that matter this was though an especially tough time for the team as their first big game under a new partnership with nintendo was clearly not going well and they would miss the lucrative launch period it could have been worse though because disaster narrowly avoided being cancelled altogether yamagami recalls this pivotal point in the game's life cycle i considered canceling the development but i thought that would be a waste because of the theme and the cinematic style presentation was very interesting although it would cost a lot of money i thought it could result in a unique game so i set a new timetable and discussed how to steadily solve the problems one by one after a while we had a proper development system in place so with a new plan and refocusing on the control possibilities of the wii remote the team expanded the game in a lot of key ways while you could navigate environments and rescue people like the original builds combat would be handled completely differently becoming an on-rail shooter whenever encounters with surge broke out one thing you can certainly say about the wii remote is that it made this type of gameplay immediately accessible and what's more is that it wasn't some basic implementation of it either with the new release date being shifted to 2008 it allowed monolith to really flesh this out you could acquire multiple weapons with different firing speeds crit chances and ammo capacities you could even unlock crazier special weapons and level each gun as you play through the story leading to a pretty robust system when compared to other light gun fare driving sections were also added which saw ray-ray and his chin strap either dodging cars collapsing buildings or even volcanic rocks being spewed into the sky because that's how disastrous this game gets in a single day this man will be in danger if he stays with me now since these vehicle bits use motion controls exclusively and was one of the last things they implemented a few of the staff felt they were a bit too difficult as just one or two mistakes could force the player to start over having experienced them a few times myself i tend to politely agree now the man orchestrating all of this disaster keichi ono had up until then only directed in-game cutscenes for xenosaga and baton kaitos and found himself in the big chair for the first time he was the one that came up with the idea of an action game revolving around a famous wwf tag team and he also found the game's development a bit taxing to him personally monolithsoft has made many rpgs so it was a challenging project in terms of general know-how the procedure for making a game how to put everything together becomes rpg like itself if you approach it a certain way there was definitely a learning period to make that method suitable for action games so that's where i struggled initially in the end i cleared each problem while learning how to make everything work as the release date approached the team was keen to include all the features the wii could provide and delivered something that was unlike any other game nintendo had published yet on the console it launched in september of 2008 in japan and was published by nintendo themselves and while it shared a lot of similarities with the disaster report series its focus on action cinema style presentation and a strong main hero set it apart that also reflected in the review scores that it garnered which were all above average or even better for the most part however the crisis was not yet over for raymond bryce in fact his most perilous journey had barely even started a tsunami a big one's coming while quick video snippets of disaster were seen in several nintendo presentations and social media accounts throughout 2006 and started again in 2008 it began to no-show in a lot of nintendo of america's release lists and pr which led many to speculate that it might not make the trip across the pond that's because just two years into louise life fans were starting to get used to the fact that not all games announced by nintendo of japan would see release outside of japan the first real hint that disaster's chances of making over with slim was with an ign podcast where matt casamasina paraphrased a conversation he had with then noa president reggie fisa may we hung out with reggie and basically he doesn't think disaster is a 50 game especially in terms of audio which he said is laughable he's going to wait to watch and see how it performs in europe if it does well you'll probably get it in america and if it's a bomb you probably won't this news as you can imagine made the rounds as websites love to point out the many games that nintendo of america would skip of course amplified by project rainwater was it what was it called um operation rainfall god that takes me back now talking brass tacks here it's true that certain specific games made for the japanese market might not appeal elsewhere but like disaster day of crisis was literally modeled after american film so it couldn't have been more appropriate the prevailing theory is that much like the legendary meta wolf chaos's original release in 2004 was that pr people would sometimes worry that american sensibilities and cliches captured through a japanese lens still might not translate well like wait what are you talking about i'll smash it faster than a florida recount regardless this is going to be a sticking point with disaster from here on out the script and the voice acting tough guys like you are such fun it'll be so much more satisfying when i destroy you now then shall we dance anyway we're not down with it honestly it doesn't even matter the reason why just know that they weren't having it i mean personally i can't imagine it any other way they kidnapped her which is also a sentiment shared by the actual people behind the dub and the motion capture [Music] most might know ruben langdon from this party's getting crazy let's rock and this could be interesting bring it on meatball but aside from just voice acting mr langdon has an extensive history working in japan on sentai action series stunt work and has done motion capture for major hollywood films and about every triple a game series you can think of the company he co-founded just caused productions were then hired to bring that cinematic flair to the cutscenes that monolith soft were looking for he expressed his disappointment regarding the lack of news for a north american release and even confirmed that the game's audio and script were a point of contention still not sure if we will ever see this game stateside after we finished the mocap and voice over stuff nintendo of america decided the dialogue would not fly with american audiences the original cast was brought in to re-record a lot of their lines probably the most noticeable change was changing storm 2. surge a lot of the other changes were pretty minor just changing sentence structure and other stupid stuff not quite sure why they did it the original sounded fine to me last i heard there were actually going to be two versions of the game i think the japanese release stuck with the original version the one that we just cause created together with monolith not sure about the european version whether they went with the original or the nintendo of america rewrite anyway i do hope it does make it to the shelves whichever version they decide to go with like i said a lot of hard work went into making it i just don't want it to go to waste damn it to clarify the re-recorded dialogue was in the european and australian versions which released shortly after the game's japanese debut furthermore regi himself did confirm in an investor meeting that noa was indeed going to be gauging the game's eu sales and then make a decision based on that don't tell me okay it's it's a bit tricky to actually make a good guess of overall european numbers as each country reports them all separately and inconsistently so we're gonna have to rely on the uk charts yeah it's not great during the entirety of disaster's debut month october 2008 well it simply failed to crack the top 50 meaning it didn't even chart so things were fast becoming japanese numbers honestly weren't much better it moved somewhere in the neighborhood of 21 000 copies before dropping off the charts there as well as to why well you can certainly make the argument that action games like this weren't exactly what the wii was all about but it's also a fact that nintendo of any part of the world marketed the game rather poorly there were minimal print tv and online ads for it which of course was certainly a factor as to why it didn't make any title waves at retail if you're among the many that hasn't played it what you'll find is a fantastically cheesy charming adventure that constantly throws new stuff your way in terms of gameplay all to the bombastic orchestral score by yoshihiro ike story-wise it's a cross between metal gear solid and the aforementioned metal wolf chaos just with a lot of american disaster movie tropes mixed in because every disaster is like a gift from god it's certainly rough in a few areas i i can tell you that for free with graphics being a bit worse than what you'd see from the higher end wii games of the day certain missions as discussed before do feel a bit unbalanced again something that i speak from experience since i own both versions of it fortunately though while the game was far from a success it didn't spell dessert for monolithsoft as a studio in fact they started doing better than ever nintendo bought a majority stake in the company in mid-2007 which then resulted in the eventual release of xenoblade chronicles for the wii given the studio's sterling rpg pedigree it was indeed a pretty big hit that in turn led to nintendo entrusting monolith and supporting them on other big franchises like smash brothers zelda and animal crossing so fortunately not a sad end at all just a tad disappointing if nintendo wanted to mitigate risks disaster could have seen a digital release on the wii u or hell even the switch itself as most of its motion-centric sections would have played just fine keiichi ono for his part left monolith in 2012 but he was still credited as a combat designer on xenoblade chronicles x when that was released a few years later so while its sales were dismal and nintendo may have been right to not bother bringing the game to north america no [ __ ] they were wrong i mean they brought out goddamn devil's third in north america and that that's way worse so yeah i i don't have a point here just the next time you see raymond bryce in spirits mode just remember to thank him for saving the world during the course of that fateful day if you know of any other disaster cataclysmic video game or movie developments let me know in the comments below flail your arms as you run towards my twitter or wade through the waters of the flophouse vip patreon and become a big burly boss to nominate the subject of a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching i don't want it to end yet you sick [Music] bastard you

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 294,117

Keywords: Disaster Day of Crisis, Nintendo, Matt McMuscles, What Happened, wha happun, video game documentary

Id: OmisZL1PFY4

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Annieone23]

I loved this game back in the day. It is really wacky and very weird but oddly fun. It is a B-movie turned in to a video game, and I love the American machismo through the lens of Japan; such as healing by eating huge hamburgers lol.

[u/X-pert74]

I was so upset when Disaster never got a US release, that I said "screw it" and got homebrew on my Wii. I imported a UK copy of the game and had a great time with it! I genuinely had no idea until this video however that there's two different versions of the English dub... not sure how to feel about that. I'm now kinda curious to see videos comparing the two - since I have a UK copy, I apparently experienced the second version of the two. Interesting.

[u/yeti0013]

I loved their lets play back in the Two Best Friends Play days.

And it blew my mind when Raymond showed up as a spirit in Smash Bros