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This Week in Games - Burning Bridges

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Of course, there are plenty of rumors of Naka himself being difficult to work with, and many folks are bringing up the commonly-heard (though not well-corroborated) story of Naka supposedly “ruining” famous cancelled Saturn title Sonic X-Treme… though that game was basically cursed from the get-go, I'm afraid.

Yeah, people are always so quick to bring up how Naka took away the Nights engine that Sonic X-Treme eventually wound up using at one point, but none of them actually bother to get the full context behind it, which really just came down to "No one ever bothered to ask Naka if his brand new game engine could be used for a game he had nothing to do with". While his reaction was no doubt harsh & even overblown a bit, it was also understandable why he did what he did, and if he was simply approached about using it beforehand, then he likely would have allowed it, to some extent. He was simply being protective about something he created, though probably a too much so, in some regards; yes, that engine was technically Sega's property, but it's messed up to not talk to Naka first.

As for the whole Balan Wonderworld situation, this whole reveal by Naka has really just turned into people using for each extreme. People who already had problems with Naka are just taking everything he said with an ocean's worth of salt & finding ways to twist it so that he alone is the reason why he was fired from Square-Enix, for example, instead of taking a much more reasonable stance of "The entire game was getting screwed over from the start, Naka & Oshima obviously clashed over things, and Square-Enix certainly didn't make things any better".

It's also being reported that Sony is demanding publishers make ~2-hour playable game trials of titles priced $34 and up specifically for the service.

Not in the final six months; that stretch is usually when you're in the final draft phase just putting things together and squashing bugs. And while extra time would have helped on the technical front with polish, there is no way it would have fixed the game. The problems with Balan are on a fundamental core design level; there would be no way to fix Balan without going back to the drawing board and restarting the whole project.

Furthermore, as noted by many, it's difficult to believe Naka at his word because he has his own history of being a toxic, egocentric jackass. It wasn't just Sonic Extreme either, there was also the case of the canceled Geist Force where Naka apparently wanted most of the team fired so he could steal their engine and use it for Sonic games. Or the case where Peter Moore showed him data that SEGA's image was waning in the West to which Naka screamed at Moore and accused him of falsifying information to which Moore just told him to piss off and walked out of the room and SEGA. Or him trying to patronize Lani Minella (one of the GREATEST video game voice actors) about casting and voice direction when localizing the Sonic games. There are other stories, but overall is really just seems like Naka has been high on his own supply for years. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

I'm in no rush to defend SqEx (-looks at them forcing out Yasumi Matsuno because he was tired of the executives-) but this reads less like a righteously angry artist and more like a bitter man who finally got a taste of his own medicine. Seriously, when you've pissed off the sound director, you are probably not someone people want to be around anymore.

As for other things, I don't really bother with Twitch but these changes are pretty bad. Keeping an eye on Legend of Mana, but anime based on games are wonky.