Spot on. Especially the creepy adult characters. It seems like they should be voice acted and be telling the player something about Jesus or forgiveness while they do the awkward dance routines.
The worst part is I bet Square Enix upper management learned the wrong lesson from this. Probably concluded "The failure of this means people don't want a 3D platformer." instead of "This is a terrible 3D Platformer."
SE told Naka that they weren't a company that MADE platformers, but were willing to give them a shot specifically because Naka was a legend in the industry. If anyone's to blame here, it's Naka for not releasing a good, successful product.
Saying Yuji Naka a "legend" was too much of a stretch. He didn't do anything substantial after 2D era of sonic, and he deliberately interfered with the development of later games only to boast his ego.
@Ein Bro they literally fired him and pushed the game out 6 months early. What happened here is entirely the fault of Square Enix and nobody else. Why say shit like this when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about?
@@dokidokiduckie What exactly do you think would have changed if Naka was kept around for 6 months? This game was in development for 2 years before he was fired. If you or I did as bad at our jobs as Naka did for those 2 years we would have been fired too.
I really agree with the "devs trolling each other" theory, like maybe they were getting underpaid or something and decided to try and ruin the parent company by making a product that would definitely fail.
I am certain this was a result of some very disillusioned programmers following a manager’s directions to the letter. Sure, they could have fought back against middle management’s insane ideas but why bother?
Other games: NPCs stop rendering when you get far away from them, in order to preserve memory Balan Wankerworld: NPCs stop rendering when you get close because fuck you
@@BlxxdLxst17 its important for kids games to send a strong message to the youth on proper etiquette and behavior; nobody will ever love you, nobody even wants to look at you, let alone smell you, let alone actually TOUCH you, you're going to die alone and everything you ever find exciting is going to be totally useless and disappointing its actually a 10/10 game but our society can't interpret such a brilliant artistic vision that actually includes a PRACTICAL and important LESSON
"The design proposal included the 80 costume count as a hook, and Naka was sure he would need to halve the number as production went on. In the end and to his surprise, he was able to create all 80. The large number of costumes were made relevant by each having a single action tied to it, with only one button command so the younger players the team were targeting as part of their audience would not get confused." you know, in case you were curious.
Reminds me of how Insomniac initially had a *lot* of concepts for weapons and gadgets in the original RaC. The difference being them having people that knew what they were doing so they focused on the ones that would actually be fun and/or useful for the player.
It's like Naka remembered that his one button philosophy worked really well on Sonic and he just thought he could also apply it to a 3d platformer in 2021.
Meanwhile Kirby & the Forgotten Land only has 12 traditional copy abilities (not counting mouthful mode) and not only are they all fun, they have more than one use (aside from Sleep which is intentionally made that way)
@@El_Omar2203yeah but in that game you have to play as a foreskin and stuff Oreos into yourself (metaphorically; the Oreos are actually cars fridges and traffic cones) so
I thought it was supposed to be her long lost dad or something, given all the jubilation. Then the exact same thing happened with another dude so who knows lol
>On my death bed, with my grandchild beside me >He tugs at my hospital gown "Grandpa, do you want to watch Dunkey's Balan Wonderworld video with me, one last time?" >It's our tradition to watch it once a year >I shed a tear >We start quoting the video from memory >I start seeing black as the firefighter's dance song comes on >The last thing I hear is "this game costs 60 dollars" >It is the happiest I have ever been
"Oh, okay," you think. After all, the Splatoon franchise and its mascots embrace the silliness well. And the backing instrumentation to your singing actually sounds great, if a bit uninspired. And then you saw how the rest of the game turned out.
The second dunkey finds this cool exploit skip the game instantly recognizes he's having 210% too much fun and immediately sends his ass to balan's bout.
Does anyone else for some fucking reason feel like he says "it's the farmer off of Undertale" every time they watch the video even though he never does?
7:07 The composer must have been like "Ah, fuck, I don't have enough time to finish these compositions, I'm sure no one would notice if I just took one of the themes in Ghostbusters and change like two notes in it"
Dunkey thinking he was doing a sequence break with the ice costume only for him to immediately stumble into a Balan Bout is one of the funniest things I've seen
"What does this powerup do?" "Oh, it opens a door." "So it allows you to open a variety of areas and open the game world up more?" "No. It opens one specific door. And then it's worthless."
@@adamocarrillo344 If I had to guess, too many cooks in the kitchen and not enough communication between different groups. Just by watching the footage I could practically feel the work environment where nobody could just say no as more and more bloat gets added and it looks like the levels and powerups where designed separately and by different people and then awkwardly frankensteined together. Damned shame because I like aesthetic and was curious about it and thought the negativity might have just been the Sonic Curse making people hate it just cause, but now that I've seen the footage I see what the problem is.
I love how this game was just soo lame it was immediately forgotten. Being in this Dunkey video is the most cultural impact it’ll ever had. Just a complete waste of time, I feel bad for everyone who had to work on this.
The motion capture movement in this game is terrifying. Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night, you look across your room and see a farmer breakdancing in the corner before he slowly vanishes from existence
Fr, when they do the side by side aerials. I audibly gasped. I never could’ve predicted that they were also badass gymnasts Correction, everyone is amazing gymnasts lmfao
they remind me of youtube videos that use spiderman and disney 3d models and just have them do a stock dance animation and get 1 mil views because its made for kids
The saddest thing about that… is that the dance sequence could’ve been a good qte like in the ff7 remake, but instead they wasted balan on making really bad qte segments. They could’ve at least made the balan sections into something like Superman 64. I mean it would still be a super shitty game, but at least then it would be slightly memeable in a good way.
3:12 - I'm really feelin' the soundtrack on this one... Also, I noticed that there is a total of 2 animation sets for the dance sequences. All the backup dancers on the outside of the ring have had their dance animations copy/pasted and are identical, then the main character and the farmer have the other animation. 10/10
Looks like? This is absolutely a tax write-off. No sane human would look at this and think "yes, this is something we should legitimately sell for 60 dollars."
It was more like 'Yeah we got Yuji Naka, we're going to make an awesome platformer to rival Nintendo and all the old Sonic Adventure fans are going to buy it'. Then they quickly realised much like Shenmue 3 or Mighty No. 9, it isn't a good idea to pull a guy out of pseudo-retirement to work in an industry that's evolved into something he barely understands, especially when his recent track record has been low quality Wii projects and goddamn Rodea the Sky Soldier If it wasn't for Yoko Taro carrying them with Nier Replicant, SE's stocks would be in the toilet right now
I like the game, but I also have to fully agree with you, Sixty dollars is really bold for this. The game is nowhere as complex as others, graphically as detailed or much longer then others. I not even want to compare it with other games, because the pricepoint is like you said, bold.
Literally it feels like they just wanted to be able to advertise as 'The most power ups in any game ever!' and then were like 'Oh we need to actually make all of them do stuff?'
@@Chibi_Rikka they legit just made simple platformer mechanics into individual costumes, like the gear one thats whole purpose is to turn gears for a single puzzle, or bulldozer pushing stuff, it's like those old fake NES games and shit that were like "700 games in 1!!!" but in reality it's just the same game with some assets changed 700 times.
@@lordpotatochips3973 Yeah it's honestly horrible. Even worse when you consider how overly done and boring those kind of mechanics are. I don't know anyone who actually likes the box pushing puzzle mechanic and yet they went ahead and made a whole powerup based around that.
@@Chibi_Rikka gotta love box fox though, i think that is probably one of the laziest, i almost guarantee they just made a fox model and decided "yeah fuck it just randomly place a cube object around it and call it a day", literally looks like a blender 3d model with no texture was placed around the original model, i hadn't bought nor heard of this game until charlie's video, but after seeing that and then dunkey's, this game gives me unfiltered and pure rage.
@@lordpotatochips3973 Oh yeah that looks dumb, especially the 'when it feels like it' mechanic, cause that's what I want from a powerup. I heard about this game when it was first announced and was super excited due to being a joint effort between Square Enix and the original creator of Sonic making a spiritual successor to NiGHTS, but then they showed gameplay and I was immediately put off and it somehow looks even worse now that they 'finished' it. I'm past the point of rage though, I just feel nothing towards the game, I only watched this video cause I was sure it would be funny cause it's dunkey, and I wasn't wrong there at least. xD
@sannio komi yeah, like, take away the shitty physics, the shittier powerups, the even shittier minigames, the dances, and replace it with actual gameplay, and you've got a pretty decent game at least, specially coming from Square Enix.
@@TheKorenji I unironically like a lot of the designs... some* of the designs. I remember seeing balan the character in thumbnails before the game and I remember thinking “wow that looks like the guy from nights!” You know... the Dreamcast game. Look the point is they blew their budget on a decent designer that they fired halfway through and then they were left with twenty bucks to fund the rest of the project. I’m one of the people who are positive this was going to be a mobile game that they (poorly) optimized for consoles and pc at the last second so they could charge the full amount for it.
gotta appreciate how they made all the powerups just usable for completing the main task but impossible for actually having fun with off the main path, incredible
The orchestration and timing of that final sequence is just perfect. Never though that Dunkey saying “this game costs sixty dollars” could function as a drop but here we are…
This game makes a lot more sense now that we know it was just a front for Yuji Naka to hang out at Square-Enix headquarters and commit white collar crimes. My man is now doing farmer dances in JAIL
I've played the game. That one is no exaggeration. You literally can't decide when it turns you into a box. The box is uncontrollable, and has ice physics. It is HILARIOUSLY useless.
And then he drops his flowers and he's holding a knife. And then you hear a bang and it turned out the knife was a distraction for the gun in his other hand.
This game reminds me of those kids shows where each episode there's a very specific problem with a very specific solution, then they sing and dance at the end.
@@snatcherofpeachs From what I've heard, it was deliberately designed that way because Yuji Naka doesn't think kids can handle having buttons do more than one thing. Mystery solved, problem not so much
I got this girl in my class who will not shut the hell up about this game. She mentions it every single day, about how everyone should play it. She is obsessed with it. It is all she ever talks about. She disrupts conversations and lessons to talk about this godforsaken game. This video is therapy for me. UPDATE: last week in class literally nobody else showed up on Friday and it was just me and her, she talked to the teacher about it for 45 UNINTERRUPTED MINUTES. I now know every single plot detail of this game. I hate my life.
Mr. Sakura here are some characters I want to see in super smash bros ultimate dlc packs. 1. Bebop, Rocksteady and Anchovy The Mutant Velociraptor (IDW TMNT Comics) 2. Klonoa and Guntz 3. Razor Fist, Amy Rose, And Thresher Claw 4. Gex and Busby 5. Michiru (Brand New Animal) 6. Susie (Deltarune) 7. Papyrus (Undertale) Tails The Fox, and Kuma the bear That’s about it hope you understand thanks 😊
i dont get it. ive heard of veggie tales, is this like that? ...for me, at church it was a tape(yes im that old) of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. Maybe some Tintin when we got bored.
The fucking dancing sequence gets me every single time. They make it seem so intimate, and emotional, then they start doing what is basically Fortnite dances.
@@moomooold It's in gibberish that's supposed to represent "all languages" for the player's experience (the game has a huge hardon for not giving text/words that had to be translated), but there is an english version that plays of each song if you 100% the world.
When I'm feeling suicidal, watch one of the dance numbers in Balan Wonderworld. It doesn't make me feel better, mind you, it just confuses me so much that I forget I want to die.
how tf did square enix make this The highest rated version of this game is for the PS5 and honestly Astro's Playroom, a BUNDLED IN GAME, looks and is better.
