Balan Wonderworld is an absolutely fascinating disaster story.
The game started life as a collaboration between Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, two of the developers
who helped shape Sonic the Hedgehog.
When Balan Wonderworld released, its shallow design and awkward controls led many players
to compare it to some of the least beloved Sonic titles, such as Sonic Boom: Rise of
Lyric and Sonic The Hedgehog 2006.
So what went wrong?
How did such an iconic development duo create such a reviled final game?
Looking back at interviews with director Yuji Naka, it’s clear that the game’s problems
were baked into its initial concept.
Balan Wonderworld was doomed from the start.
Work on the game took just two years, with Naka starting on the project in 2018.
He had just joined Square-Enix, and was eager to make something different.
While initially considering making a social game, he instead decided to fall back on his
primary strength: action games.
He hoped to create a longrunning 3D platforming franchise.
Here was the first hurdle to the game’s design, though: Square-Enix is not known for
creating platformers.
The company typically puts storytelling, rather than tight controls and balanced physics,
at the core of their games.
Said Naka: “Square Enix's management philosophy is
‘to contribute to the wellbeing of people all over the world by providing the best stories.’
When I joined the company and heard that, I was like ‘Stories, huh...’
“To be honest, I'm not really the type of developer who focuses on a game’s script.
I always emphasize how the game feels and the action, while the story may be a bit weak.
I wasn't very good with stories.”
So, desperate to figure out what he was missing, Naka decided to try learning how to write
a story that would live up to typical Square-Enix fare.
His plan was simple: he would read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces,
an academic text about the universal monomyth which initially inspired Star Wars, and which
is often used in Hollywood as a basic initial story structure for many films.
The book is not actually designed as a how-to guide for creative writing, so we have to
hope that Naka was reading an analysis, rather than the text itself.
Naka clearly felt very confident with his newfound storytelling abilities, because he
decided that the story was so good that he should work with a former Sega employee and
writer Soshi Kawasaki to create a Balan Wonderworld novelisation.
This was plotted out and written concurrently with the development of the game.
So confident was Naka that Balan Wonderworld would become a beloved longrunning series
that he established a new Square Enix subsidiary, Balan Company, to spearhead development.
Naka’s plans for Balan Wonderworld were ambitious in many ways.
He wanted the game to have phenomenal depth, with dozens of different abilities for players
to try out.
He said: “During the proposal stage I wrote down
that it would have 80 different types of action, but I thought that once I actually started
making the game, I would run out of steam at around 40.”
Finding the perfect balance for these eighty different costumes ended up taking a lot of
time.
Said producer Noriyoshi Fujimoto: “While it was interesting and enjoyable
to design costumes with appearances that seem to intuitively match the action, it was also
quite difficult.
Additionally, if we made one costume action particularly good when we were adding unique
characteristics to the over 80 different actions, the player would just keep using that one
same costume.
It was challenging to balance and think of the pros and cons for every action.”
So the team at Balan Company had their work cut out for them.
The fledgling team had a veteran game developer at their head who was trying something completely
different by focusing on storytelling, and they were expected to develop eighty different
power sets and controls for a game, despite their parent company, Square Enix, having
little to no experience with developing platformers.
As any novice developer will tell you, in a platforming game, nothing is more important
than nailing player controls and movement.
Getting this right once is a challenge, but perfecting it eighty times in the space of
two years is a tremendous ask.
This wasn’t all that the team had to contend with, though.
Balan Wonderworld was set to release for the PlayStation 5 alongside other platforms, and
it was decided that the team should make use of many of the new console’s unique features.
Said Fujimoto: “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 removed completely.
This meant we got a bit carried away with the excitement, coming up with more and more
things we wanted to add in during development.”
Even right up until the last second, the team were trying to squeeze in extra gameplay gimmicks
to appeal to new PS5 owners.
Said Fujimoto: “Towards the end of development, we wanted
to add a feature that made use of the PS5’s unique capabilities, so we added the adaptive
trigger feature to the game.
The implementation itself wasn’t too difficult, and the development staff could make minute
adjustments however we liked.
Thanks to this, we managed to convey the unique character and variation between the 80 costumes
even better than before.”
It's not hard to see how Balan Wonderworld ran into trouble.
A game that was ambitious from the start, failed to take advantage of its team’s primary
talents, as everyone tried doing something they were wholly unfamiliar with.
Add in their efforts to work with a brand new games console that nobody had experience
developing for, and it’s clear why two years simply wasn’t enough time to make Balan
Wonderworld shine.
The moral of the story feels particularly relevant to all of us in 2021.
Pace yourself.
Don’t push too hard, try not to overwhelm yourself by expecting too much growth during
a difficult, stressful period.
Celebrate your small successes where you can.
Sometimes, you don’t have to go fast.