Any compagny that would have publish Balan World would kick him out.
Yuji Naka probably left Square Enix in April [Up: Confirmed]
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Any compagny that would have publish Balan World would kick him out.
When you say it like that, no I guess not
They're all silly
it was probably just a name for an internal team. so they'll just get dissolved and the folks will go to some other department
I hadn't seen Various Daylife before, that is incredible, lmao
I could go on tbh. Balan Wonderworld isn't as bad as a bunch of these.
At least the game will live in infamy for its bizarro-english songs
tbh the music I heard was pretty good. It's just the game itself combined with it feels quite strange.
Is Yuji Naka the guy that threw a hissy fit when Peter Moore told him Sonic was aging out? Pretty sure Moore told him to go fuck himself. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall in that meeting.
Wait Rodea was on the WiiU? And it was bad? What was the difference between versions?
Had always wanted to pick up a copy...
i hate to see this. he's an icon, absolute legend in the day for phantasy star 1 dungeon layout, SMS port of space harrier, the best of sonic level design, PSO, nights, burning rangers and so much more - yeah he's past his prime & hasn't found his footing without the larger studio/resources but that's true for suzuki and so many other greats. man deserves better.
It is clear Naka is a better fit for coding rather than directing, but this still does not make much sense. ChuChu Rocket is legitimately a masterpiece and Iizuka directed arguably loads of trash, especially when you consider something like NiGHTS Journey of Dreams. He also produced games like Sonic Mania, Generations and Colors so...
While I am pretty confident the core issue was poor developer choice more than anything, Balan Wonderworld's development was likely filled with yes men. The one button concept is exactly the kind of stuff that Sonic, NiGHTS and Rodea were designed around and I cannot imagine any people straight out of college wanting to argue with such a legend.
For real. I sure aint looking forward to the days when someone like Kojima or Sakurai makes a game with a new company that disappoints and this site tries to say their careers were never legitimate.
he was kind of a dick when he was younger but it seems like mellowed out
Naka's real problem imo isn't sticking to what he's good at- he's a genius programmer but not that good at much else
Hey, who here hasn't told Peter Moore to go fuck himself?
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The Wii version is the only one Yuji Naka made and it came bundled with the Wii U title. The Wii U release is legitimately based on the Nintendo 3DS version so it is barely recognizable and has all of the awful world geometry and gameplay concepts from that.
As someone who has played basically every Sonic game, Rodea Wii U is worse than all of them by far. Comparable to trash like Mega Man X7 and even that is being generous. Such a shame too because the Wii game absolutely has its own issues but is seriously up there with some of Naka's best work. Barely anyone knew because everyone just assumed the Wii U version was an HD port.
He never did Sonic level design though. Carol Yas did, and it shows, because Carol Yas went on to become a hit maker everywhere (Uncharted, Jak). Naka is a brilliant, brilliant programmer though. Loops weren't even supposed to work, but he did it somehow. Wish him the best.
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I don't know when he left but I do know that the released build of 06 was and older build that was more stable then the more feature complete version. So a few months could have been vital.
Yeah, Sega of Japan was known to be stubborn as hell and pretty dismissive of Sega of America. If they actually listened to their American branch instead of look down on them, they would have been in a far better situation.
Ah, are you talking about the differences found between the retail build and the 360 Demo build? I've always wondered what the more feature complete build was like. I never had a 360, so I could never play the "better" version.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that's what I'm thinking of. I remember playing that demo in GameStop back in the day. It was the first part of Sonic in kingdom valley iirc.
stand corrected, but with that man's resume, point still stands. absolutely legendary body of work, especially as a classic sega fan.
My bad, I meant the original Wii game and yeah it is a much better version of it than the Wii U one. Was that the one that was bundled with the Wii U port or was it the 3DS one? I forgot which but I remember it being delayed for way too long for no good reason.
I edited my post to reflect my mistake.
Naka (and come to think of it a lot of SEGA console dev alumi) strikes me as a fellow that could never get over losing the higher budgets and (relative) creative freedom that is sorta associated with making console exclusives.
As a classic Sega fan I'm very conflicted with Naka. On the one hand he programmed the classic Sonic games and those are my favorite games of all time. But on the other hand he's also responsible for driving away the creative talent that made Sonic what it was with his huge ego.
I wrote a brief history of Naka with Sonic in the previous Naka thread:
There are 3 main people responsible for Sonic. Naoto Ohshima created the concept of the character. Yuji Naka programmed the games. And Yasuhara designed the game (level design and gameplay concepts).
In Sonic 1 they are credited:
Yasuhara was instrumental to Sonic being what it was and him being there was kind of a fluke. He was set to move to California and help Mark Cerny set up Sega Technical Institute but he got delayed. He headed to STI after his work was done.
- Yasuhara
- Naka
- Ohshima
Ohshima stayed in Japan and made Sonic CD without Naka or Yasuhara (and it shows).
Naka quit Sega after Sonic 1 because he wanted to work at Nintendo. But rather than submitting a resume to Nintendo he expected them to contact him because he was so good. Mark Cerny was friends with Naka and called him up to offer him better pay if he moved to California and joined STI. Sega also gave Naka a Ferrari.
—And I heard that you actually approached Nintendo after you quit…?
Naka: When I was driving back to my home in Osaka from Tokyo, I decided to stop by Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto. I actually wanted to see how long it would take for me to commute from Osaka to Nintendo's offices. (laughs) However, when I stopped my car in their parking lot, a security guard came out and started eyeing me suspiciously. I got scared and decided to just go home. (laughs) If that security guard hadn't been there, who knows how different my future might have been…! (laughs)
Naka: While I was reading those books, I got a call from a third-party developer asking if I would come work for them. But the truth is, I was holding out for a call from Nintendo.
—Oh, really?! (laughs)
Naka: The reason I thought that is, a few months before I quit Sega, I heard a story about another programmer from a big gaming company who had quit his job, and was then called by Nintendo. I was like, "Wow, that could happen to me too!" (laughs) So when I quit Sega I had this faint hope that I'd be getting a call… but it never came. (laughs) It was sad.
With Yasuhara and Naka at STI, Cerny pitched Sonic 2 to Sega but Sega declined because it was "too soon." A few months later Sega asked STI to make Sonic 2 after losing months of work. Yasuhara was once again head game designer and Naka head programmer. This time, though, Naka is credited before Yasuhara.
Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join Crystal Dynamics.
Yasuhara got along well with everyone at STI, but Naka disliked working with Americans because of the cultural differences. STI was split into 2 teams to segregate the American and Japanese developers and Naka was put in charge of the Japanese team.
For Sonic 3 Naka is credited before Yasuhara; this time as Producer and Director respectively.
Yasuhara quit STI citing differences with Naka and went to Sega of America.
Then Naka split from STI and went back to Japan to head a team there. His team was given control of Sonic but they didn't make any Sonic games. They made NiGHTs and Burning Rangers.
Back in the US Yasuhara helped STI make Sonic games and Sonic R and Sonic X-treme. Sonic X-treme was notoriously cancelled after Naka refused to let the team use the NiGHTS engine to reduce dev time.
In 1998 Naka moved back to California to found Sonic Team, while Yasuhara eventually left Sega to join Naughty Dog.
Naka stayed with Sonic Team until he bailed on Sega part-way through development on Sonic 2006.
I think this interview with Naka from 2003 best illustrates his issues:
What do you think of the way the Sonic games have evolved; was it a problem when one of your team members left to work with Sony?
Yuji Naka: Yeah, one of the guys from our team went to work on Jak and Daxter! As for the original titles, I was involved from the beginning, the creation of the game. The character was born in a kind of stream of creating, so I'm involved from the very beginning of the character. I gave the game direction, and I was the main programmer also.
So I was involved with every aspect of the original Sonics. Some of the details, like making a map, quite straight-forward stuff, was done by the guy who's working on Jak and Daxter right now. He was involved until Sonic 3, and after that for eight years he didn't do anything in Sega, so he was quite useless in Sega. We really didn't need him. He was really doing nothing with Sonic.
Basically he thinks very highly of himself and very lowly of others. He thinks things like level and game design are straightforward unimportant jobs. He calls Yasuhara useless when Naka himself was partly responsible for killing projects Yasuhara was working on.
There's also this anecdote from Peter Moore from when he was President of Sega of America:
Peter Moore recalls the last straw that convinced him to leave Sega
"So I said to the translator, ‘Tell him to fuck off’"www.polygon.com
In 2001/2002 he had Sega of America conduct a focus group of 18/19 year olds for their opinions on game companies and they said Sega was old news. He went to Japan to present footage of the focus group.
Peter Moore:
Yuji Naka, Naka-san, maker of Sonic, is in the room. Now, he and I have a love/hate relationship on a good day. And we show him this, and it's subtitled in Japanese, and when it comes to that piece he just [slams his hand on the table], 'This is ridiculous. You have made them say this. Sega is the great brand, nobody would ever say this, you have falsified!' He just gets in my face. So I said to the translator, 'Tell him to fuck off.' And the poor guy looks at me and says, 'There's no expression in Japanese.' I said, 'I know there is.' And that was it. That was the last time I ever set foot in there.
Naka doesn't take criticism well.
Basically he was just really good at leveraging his talent to get what he wanted while pushing competition out of the way. I wonder what things would be like if Yasuhara was given the credit over Naka.
Not particularly well-acquainted with Yuji Naka or his body of work, but I wish him the best all the same.
Honestly, Balan Wonderworld is a surprisingly decent name for a Square-Enix release... can't vouch for the game itself though, lol.
Lemme guess, you hate Oasis too?
Honestly, Balan Wonderworld is a surprisingly decent name for a Square-Enix release... can't vouch for the game itself though, lol.
PSU did not create any kind of dormancy, it was actually very successfull as it was the best selling PS game in Japan and set up the path for the PSP sequels (they built on PSU not really spin-offs) and PSO2.
This is it, Sega. Get him back, Naoto Ohshima, Jun Senoue, and create Sonic Adventure 3 for your new console to rival the big 3. Fund the company by introducing a second renaissance of the arcade industry with Outrun 3, Space Harrier 3, Virtua Fighter 6, and Afterburner 4. Take down the opponents with your crazy marketing tactics and once again regain majority control of the video game market.
This is it, Sega.
This is it, Sega.
Who would hire him? There's tons of articles about how Balan Wonderworld sold less than 2,100 copies in its first week in Japan.
I mean I feel bad that his idea for a game did not work out, I always do in these cases. At the same time it would be weird as hell if SE kept him/kept ties with him for another project anytime soon after such a big bomb. I do hope he can try again but with a bit more... modernization to his ideas.
Don't know the whole story on this weird weird project myself but would be curious to get a real detailed run down of what lead to this. Some of the articles and videos ive seen on it sound like a lot of speculation and not a lot of direct quotes from staffers.
Don't know the whole story on this weird weird project myself but would be curious to get a real detailed run down of what lead to this. Some of the articles and videos ive seen on it sound like a lot of speculation and not a lot of direct quotes from staffers.
It's interresting how he and Nagoshi were basically in the same position circa 2003 to 2006, being in the upper executive rows along with Hisao Oguchi (who became president later on, mainly because of his arcade efforts). Naka had the most popular console game IP while Nagoshi made tidy profit with the big sales of Super Monkey Ball which was made on a minimal budget.
Needless to day, Nagoshi definetly worked it out the best at the end. Perhaps because the Amusement Vision + Smilebit combo was a stronger foundation than Sonic Team which perhaps was caught in a predicament of wanting to try new things all the time while pleasing Sega management with tons of Sonic games every year. Nagoshi also felt the pressure of making sequels of Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball, and while Monkey Ball maybe suffered a bit, the Yakuza series stayed strong because they took risks within their boundaries and iterated.
Hey at least Naka was part of the executive team that greenlighted Valkyria Chronicles, which many people don't know.
Needless to day, Nagoshi definetly worked it out the best at the end. Perhaps because the Amusement Vision + Smilebit combo was a stronger foundation than Sonic Team which perhaps was caught in a predicament of wanting to try new things all the time while pleasing Sega management with tons of Sonic games every year. Nagoshi also felt the pressure of making sequels of Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball, and while Monkey Ball maybe suffered a bit, the Yakuza series stayed strong because they took risks within their boundaries and iterated.
Hey at least Naka was part of the executive team that greenlighted Valkyria Chronicles, which many people don't know.
I'm surprised Square even gave him a chance in the first place when Naka has been under delivering since he left Sega.
yeah i've seen this, it's really sad cause the game truly had a huge potential
Except with the story, the characters, the battle system... At least it had mini games and collectibles.
It will make Sonic Rangers look amazing no matter how bad Sonic Team botches an open world game. It will make Sonic look like Mario in terms of quality.
Hate to say it, but maybe it's better for our favorite developers of yesteryear who haven't lead a project since pre-HD era to remain good memories. Names like Itou come up a lot in topics of "who do you want to direct the next Final Fantasy game" and boy would I hate for the legend who created the ATB system and directed three of the best games in the series to pull a Balan Wonderworld.
I mean.... I really disagree. It'd have to have been designed completely differently for it to have "huge potential."
Naka has blatantly stated that SE is giving him "one chance" to make a game.
Naka's one chance garnered a Metacritic in the 30-50 range, and while we don't know the exact sales numbers it for sure did not perform remotely well, given all the articles reporting how it underperformed in various areas of the world.
It is absolutely not "jumping to a lot of conclusions."