Balan Wonderworld (Yuji Naka + Square Enix)

[JezMM]

5 hours ago, Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon said:

Definitely would not put it past Square to do something this underhanded, but has it been confirmed it was them yet?

I apologise for phrasing that so concretely, naturally there's no confirmation that the Metacritic thing is being done by anyone involved in the production of the game, when I said it was flagrantly Square that was just me stating a personal assumption.

But it's just SO suspect that not a single one of them is an established account with reviews for other games too.  There is a chance that they're just hyper-defensive fans, but the fact that they're all so Engrish-laden too MASSIVELY stinks of fakery to me.  Oh, and finally, all the account names are vaguely-name-resembling gibberish, not a single one of them tells the tale of belonging to a real person with a username influnced by personality or interests.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

You have to love the review that says give it a chance...by getting to World 8 and 9, which is the final worlds to my knowledge.

Ah yes, it’s good to know your game apparently doesn’t get good until near the tail end after hours of boring, monotonous gameplay. If this is Square, it’d be fitting that of course even the reviews can’t do a good job making it sound good lol

[Azure Blue Tori]

31 minutes ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

You have to love the review that says give it a chance...by getting to World 8 and 9, which is the final worlds to my knowledge.

Ah yes, it’s good to know your game apparently doesn’t get good until near the tail end after hours of boring, monotonous gameplay. If this is Square, it’d be fitting that of course even the reviews can’t do a good job making it sound good lol

I mean, that's how people tried to defend Final Fantasy XIII (and for bonus points, that supposed section where the game becomes open-world is just a temporary monster-hunting diversion). So yeah, that does fit Square.

[Stasis]

I can get the PS4 version for £27.99 and yet I still can't commit to paying that for it right now. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

3 hours ago, Stasis said:

I can get the PS4 version for £27.99 and yet I still can't commit to paying that for it right now. 

From what I've played and heard, you still wouldn't be getting your money's worth.

[Nix]

This shit will probably find a home on Game Pass in record time, so I'll give a try there.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Give it six months and it’ll be under £10. If KH3 can drop to £15 in six to eight months, Balan won’t have any trouble.

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

So, in terms of hype to dread, this thread just turned out to be an abridged form of the Mighty No.9 and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite threads.

[Blue Blood]

Nintendo Life have put up a savage review of the Switch version, giving it a 3/10:

The situation with the number of costumes is even worse than I thought. Not only are they incredibly limited in their scope, each one functioning as a specifically shaped key for a specifically shaped lock, some of them are the same as other suits with a slightly enhanced function. One allows you to swim along scripted paths, another allows you to swim along scripted paths and jump at the same time. It just sounds so dire, and the Switch version is obviously the worst of a bad bunch. A game like this should have made Switch performance a priority considering that most of its potential audience would be there. But the developers didn't do that, and even got "carried away with the PS5" according to a developer interview.

And to everyone who opined that the demo was lacking in narrative explanations and gameplay instructions because it was demo... You were wrong. It's no different in the full game. This game has key mechanics that it doesn't explain to you, such as accessing the wardrobe at checkpoints and what the fuck the Tims do. And whilst you can say whatever you want about platformers not needing a story, the simple fact is that this game does have a narrative for each world and an overarching plot that are so obtuse and separate from the gameplay you'll never know what the fuck is happening. It's a bad thing if a narrative is presented for a game but it leaves the player confused and explains nothing.

Yet despite all this, Metacritic is full of these fake, Engrish reviews. It's shameful. Mind you, there is an 8/10 review from Video Chums, so that's something. IGN France gave it a 5/10 however and VGC have it a 4/10. It's not uncommon for the occasional outlier in reviews. I think it's quite clear that this game will be a disappointment to most. Probably not least of all Square Enix and Yuji Naka, who I can't see developing a follow up.

[Dejimon11]

Saw a livestream of the game it does suck that the game turned out the way it did. It does feel like a lot of post dreamcast Sonic Team stuff where the ideas were there but the execution needed some time in the oven. The biggest detriment is that the game really wanted to do the 1 button functions all for every power up so if there's a section that needs platforming and you don't have a costume that can jump then you're screwed. 

And while I do have my issues with Naka I don't think he's an Inafune or anything close to that. This does feel like he wanted to make a good game without any malicious intent but he needed the right people for it. On that note has Arzest made a good game at all since their creation? It just seems like they keep making shovel ware and keep getting work somehow. 

[Azure Blue Tori]

 

7 minutes ago, Dejimon11 said:

On that note has Arzest made a good game at all since their creation? It just seems like they keep making shovel ware and keep getting work somehow. 

If we're counting their Artoon days, I personally liked Yoshi's Island DS, though that was also because I was more forgiving as a kid and was just looking for anything that filled that Yoshi's Island niche. I can understand why a lot of people don't like it, but there was still some degree of ambition in it.

[Blue Blood]

7 minutes ago, Dejimon11 said:

And while I do have my issues with Naka I don't think he's an Inafune or anything close to that. This does feel like he wanted to make a good game without any malicious intent but he needed the right people for it. On that note has Arzest made a good game at all since their creation? It just seems like they keep making shovel ware and keep getting work somehow. 

Arzest (and Artoon by extension) is notoriously low-bar developer that seems to be content to work on smaller projects for big names. Many of the Yoshi games on DS/3DS, including the generally disliked New Island and "okay" DS, some Mii games with Nintendo, supported development on some Mario & Luigi games and a Mario and Sonic Olympics game... A few of their own titles from the Artoon days were well received, like Blue Dragon and The Last Story, but nah. Their games are usually worse instalments of existing minor IPs or shovelware, or they just provided development support. Balan looked like it was their big chance.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

I honestly don’t know how they could’ve executed this well, tbh. Part of me wants to say “sonic” because his earlier outings used a simple button layout, but that was 2D games, and his moveset was expanded come Adventure. Not to mention that Sonic works somewhat better because you’re moving at high speeds, it’s important to have things readily available in a reactionary game.

The slow speed mixed with the simplicity doesn’t fit for a platformer, it just makes your character feel overwhelmingly awful. You can’t make bare basic jumps onto ledges, forcing dumb workarounds for the simpliest of jumps in other games, you can’t do simple things like jump and hit at the same time, etc. It’s boring, meandering bullshit for the sake of it. If the game can’t have the common decency to show respect for your time and instead waste it with the costumes allowing you to do literal basic functions one at a time, then it comes off very badly.

Its like if Sonic could barely jump, barely run and couldn’t spin dash, and had to find a ring that lets him do just ONE of those actions at a time. It’d be absolutely awful. I genuinely don’t know how you could make “locking away basic actions” fun. The very notion instinctively both restricts your own movement and capability as a player, while also making everything frustratingly roundabout in its problem solving. 

[Azure Blue Tori]

The main issue I have with Balan is the timing. We're no longer in the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter age where you could sell a game solely for being a 3-D platformer. Between Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time, there are so many good, polished options these days that you really need to bring something new and interesting to the table if I am to check it out. And Balan, to put it mildly, doesn't.

31 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

And whilst you can say whatever you want about platformers not needing a story, the simple fact is that this game does have a narrative for each world and an overarching plot that are so obtuse and separate from the gameplay you'll never know what the fuck is happening. It's a bad thing if a narrative is presented for a game but it leaves the player confused and explains nothing.

I get the idea of trying to convey a story without dialogue, but there still needs to be something. If not full voice acting treatment, at least some snippets of lore in the levels. This is one of those aspects where the developers seem so dedicated to being a retro revival that it feels like a regression.

[PickleBrows]

I think the restricted movement could have worked if they had doubled down and made the game more of a puzzle-platformer instead. Hugely scale back on the number of suits (should've done that anyway) and focus more on how different suit combinations can work together to be more than the sum of their parts. For example you could have a strong muscle suit that lets you break walls objects etc. Sometimes this might reveal a secret collectable or alternate route but smashing these things also creates debris. You could then perhaps switch to some sort of elastic suit that's able to grab those bits of debris to throw at switches and enemies. Not a very deep or clever example but starts to give the player some more options.

Right now the game is a 3D platformer that goes out of it's way to make navigation as restricted as possible. Had it instead made limited navigation part of the core challenge I think we could have had something interesting. The slower pace would've also fit better in a game where you would've spent more time figuring out HOW to navigate the next section. 

 

[Blue Blood]

12 minutes ago, Azure Blue Tori said:

I get the idea of trying to convey a story without dialogue, but there still needs to be something. If not full voice acting treatment, at least some snippets of lore in the levels. This is one of those aspects where the developers seem so dedicated to being a retro revival that it feels like a regression.

Dialogue, either written or spoken, is not essential to tell a story. What do you mean by "snippets of lore"? 

[Azure Blue Tori]

At least something to communicate what was going on. Maybe not having spoken or written dialogue can work, but one really needs to be clever with the environmental design and characters' facial expressions in order to do so, and what I played of the demo wasn't it.

I guess as far as lore goes, I was thinking about Metroid Prime's famed scan feature, but even Super Mario 64 had NPC interactions that made the levels feel like distinct worlds and missions like Lil' Penguin Lost that felt like mini slice-of-life stories.

Besides, they released a tie-in novel to this game, which makes one wonder why they couldn't have communicated that information better in-game.

Edited March 29, 2021 by Azure Blue Tori
Added extra argument

[Ryannumber1gamer]

1 hour ago, Blue Blood said:

Dialogue, either written or spoken, is not essential to tell a story. What do you mean by "snippets of lore"? 

I imagine using the stage design itself to tell a story, even if you don't necessarily need dialogue to convey it. For example, Sonic 3 & Knuckles taking you through the different areas of Angel Island until you slowly find the areas Eggman's taken over and built militarised bases around, and towards the end, the ancient murals depicting Super Sonic and Eggman's fight, implying that the echidnas had foretold the events of the game would happen.

Zero dialogue, but a lot of information you can infer from the visual design and level progression alone.

[Kuzu]

Its amazing how this game feels so ambitious, yet so lacking in the fundamentals of basic game design. 

Its like the devs cared more about adding as much ideas as possible, as opposed to making sure those ideas were functional.

Which would be more forgivable in the early ages of 3D platformers, but the fact that this is a game released in a post-Super Mario Odyssey world is laughable. Not that every game needs be on that level, but that's really no excuse.

 

I sympathize with Naka, but I honestly get the feeling this is on him as much as was a matter of resources. This is his third attempt at breaking out from his Sonic shadow and he still can't seem to get the basics down. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

Does Naka have an aversion to storytelling? Because the narrative in this game is absolutely player hostile.

You're apparently helping people solve their problems, but no context is given to how your actions are supposedly helping them. Hell, a lot of the dilemmas don't even get proper explanation.

How this WonderWorld helps them, doesn't get elucidated. Heck, not even sure WHAT it is still!

[Scritch the Cat]

It may not be fair to say this without playing the game, but I'm tempted to deem this a bigger strike against Naka than Sonic 06 was.  The one thing holding me back from it is I don't know how much of 06 was Naka's fault, and the narrative had been some combination of "the game failed because he abandoned it" and "he abandoned it because it was being run by others in such a way as he knew it would fail".  But however Naka factors in, that game crashed and burnt due to the perfect storm of ambition combined with tight deadlines.  While Elise kissing Sonic and their plot in general would still get on people's nerves, otherwise none of 06 was conceptually broken, particularly not the gameplay.  But this game, on top of it having no perceivable reason to run as poorly as it does even if it was fixed to run well, would still suffer from a gameplay approach that is unremarkable, and as Ryan said, feels like it's unremarkable on purpose. 

Somehow Yuji Naka has fallen from making his mark with a famously mobile character, to making characters who are intentionally disabled, and need to find what are too often glorified crutches--and even some of those crutches add disabilities of their own.  And while certain games can make a weak protagonist work, this game is apparently not very challenging so the weakness only comes off as adding length instead.  Nothing's really much more challenging due to its design; merely more tedious and time-consuming.

Also to beat another dead horse, why would they go through the trouble of making an intriguing title character only to barely use him in the games' events and play as him even less?  It actually makes me curious what the planning was for this game, and at what point they decided their most publicized character wouldn't really play a big role.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Scritch the Cat

[Soniman]

38 minutes ago, Scritch the Cat said:

Also to beat another dead horse, why would they go through the trouble of making an intriguing title character only to barely use him in the games' events and play as him even less?  It actually makes me curious what the planning was for this game, and at what point they decided their most publicized character wouldn't really play a big role.

Like did they not learn from the child sections of the nights games that no one wants to do that and just play as the quirky flying character? Would the workload have not been easier for them if they just....ripped off NIGHTS and make a 2.5D flying game like people wanted anyway?  Just baffles me like everything else in this game. 

[Wraith]

There were a lot of weird decisions made with this one, but one thing I'm not going to disparage the game for is being an original concept instead of a ripoff. If anything should have been re-thought, it would probably be Balan since he just gives off the wrong impression wrt what type of game this is.

[Blue Blood]

23 minutes ago, Wraith said:

There were a lot of weird decisions made with this one, but one thing I'm not going to disparage the game for is being an original concept instead of a ripoff. If anything should have been re-thought, it would probably be Balan since he just gives off the wrong impression wrt what type of game this is.

What impression do you get from Balan? I see nothing wrong with him; he's a weird magician-looking guy in a world that's all based on dreams. He's the guide for the world and that's... Fine. The only reason that I might think it's a game about flying is because I'm already aware of NIGHTS and he's of a strikingly similar appearance. Otherwise he just looks like some cheery magic dude. 

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

55 minutes ago, Wraith said:

I'm not going to disparage the game for is being an original concept instead of a ripoff.

I don't think anyone was really pushing for it to be ripoff of NiGHTS. At best, a good spiritual successor to the series. Because, like it or not, that is pretty much how the series was advertised.

And even for all its originality, the game is bland as toast left out in the sun.