no gamer but i am curious what has led to these weird ambitious misfires over the last year like balan, avengers, left alive, and quiet man
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Three of those are PS2-style attempts to revive AA-tier software in a world squeezed into blockbuster-or-bust. I love that they keep trying but they’re not even close to their PS2 days let alone their PS1 heights.
Avengers is the odd-man out, just another attempt to dethrone the reigning MMO by outspending it and arriving years too late. Every western publisher was pushing in this direction between 2015 and 2018 and like every late-follow product they almost all lost everything.
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if the reigning MMO here is Destiny that’s a wild missing of the mark
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oh you know it is
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finally gave in and bought a physical copy that arrived via Amazon today.
And because it is a Yuji Naka game, of couse I did what i’d never do in other games:
Watched the credits first before starting the game.
What caught my eye:
German Film Orchestra Babelsberg, recorded in Germany.
What on earth has SQEX been thinking, did they give him a blank cheque, never asked what he was up to and came back after three years?
This is utter, pure, beautiful madness at work, and I am glad i have bought it for full price, because i can look in the mirror in the future and say that i have at least tried to make this break even.
And to the five (six?) of you that have done the same, let me express my gratitide for doing the same. If this really is the end of the road for Naka and the Balan Company, what a way to go out in style.
Let the show begin ~~~
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I believe @Rudie was %0.5 of all sales in Japan. It really is a rarified club.
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We all gotta save our tickets.
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I beat the game and I will laminate that ticket. Holy shit.
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Might be a bit Youtuber for some but from 20:30 in the video it covers a lot of the tie-in Balan book which the game only seems to touch a fraction of.
the more i learn about this game the more i feel like it is an elaborate prank on the video game journalism community. like on a certain level it seems beyond criticism, and on another level it looks like one of the worst games ever made
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I’m totally going to read the novel and no I won’t just listen to a youtube video about it.
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It’s here! @MintyJuffowup
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Oh boy oh boy oh boy!
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Oh hey, so I actually read the book. I will spoiler tag all this because sure but what the hell.
Wow there is a lot of shit here. Nobody gets to use their actual assigned names (every character in this game as a FULL NAME) except Leo, the boy. They all have names referring to themselves that everyone just magically knows (like they literally talk about how everyone just magically knows each other’s names). Sometimes it is hard to figure out who they were in the game.
So each person gets to Wonderworld when they feel negative emotions about something in their life to the point that it stops them from doing what they want, sorta. And Lance meets them in the World and helps them set up their stages (and yes, the book calls them stages, like theatre stages, but also levels) that all lack the thing they are afraid of. Which is why like Dolphin Girl (called Seagazer in the book, but also called Fiona Demetria on the Balan website and later in the book) has a drained sea as her level; she’s not afraid of the dolphin per se as much as the water itself that the dolphin accidentally drowned her in.
I’ve seen that cutscene; that ain’t no accident. that is (attempted) murder. The red eye dolphin is maybe the best part of the game.
So Leo’s big negative thing is that he thinks he doesn’t need other people in his life, and his whole time in Wonderworld is him figuring out he needs the people from their stages to help him defeat Lance, because as long as Lance is around, th people won’t leave their stages and will get turned into the bosses we have to beat.
Tims are just little balls of positive energy, in contrast to the Negati, who are the black shadow monsters that show up, who are…negative energy. There has been no mention of the Tower of Tims in the book.
Each time Leo beats boss and turns the people back to people, he asks them to come fight Lance and they are all like “nah, i’m good not dealing with my fear/anxiety, thnx”. They eventually all come to his aid in the end because they realize they don’t need the keyblade anymore, their friends are their weapons…wait a minute.
In the end, it turns out Lance used to be Balan, but then after trying to help people so much, he got super derpessed too and started trapping people in Wonderworld, but knew he has become so negative that he made a new Balan to fight him, who he warns not to care too much about the people, and not to cry about them and what the flying fuck is this story.
2 stars. Don’t read this. Or do. I don’t even know. You can learn the FULL NAMES of all these characters you will never see again.
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Naka saying “I’m 55 I might as well retire.” Right below this is a tweet about Prope’s mobile game ending service.
I feel bad about my strongest feeling about this weird weird game. As soon as a man is broken it isn’t funny anymore.
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I mean, we are probably the most positive people about this game who talked about it on a podcast, so.
But yeah sorry, Yuji.
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awwww such a shame… but otoh, he got to go out in style, with the (seemingly unlimited) SQEX credit card used to the max for his last hurrah.
Rather glad to see him retire with an ambitious dream-like Balan, let’s not forget a proper console release after all, than some mobile F2P crap!
I for one will continue enjoying the rest of Balan, have taken it slowly up till now and been exploring/soaking up the atmosphere of the first two worlds.
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I feel bad for Naka, and I can’t believe that Balan was his fault. Oh, he’s made a lot of bad games in his time, but this is a vanity project that really has few redeemable qualities.
Arzest has 80 employees? And they also worked on Fantasian and are doing translation work for the new R&C. How many people actually developed Balan? Did SE let a 40-person team go wild on the condition that they had to ship a 3D platformer for all modern platforms including PS5?
I find it interesting that on Naka’s Wikipedia page the only other game he’s listed as Director on is ChuChuRocket. When he went to SE he wanted to make social games, and it was CEO Hashimoto who convinced him to make another platformer. Like many older game creators, he’s been swept in the wave of big budgets and high expectations to fufill his glory days.
While we talk about glory days, let’s reassess Prope’s back catalog. Prope made some small, quirky, good games. Did anyone else play Ivy the Kiwi?
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This is the best thing Naka was ever involved with.
This is not meant as a slight, I am sharing how I feel, this is better than anything related to any video game, pretty much.
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I did, I liked what I played of it but had totally forgotten it existed