 Balan Wonderworld is an absolutely fascinating disaster story. The game started life as a collaboration between Yuji Naka and Nioh Tuoshima, 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 long-running 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 well-being 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 emphasise how the game feels and the action, while the story might 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. Oh, you've got that book! The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It's right there. 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 would 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 long-running 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 about 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 80 different costumes ended up taking a lot of time, said producer Noriyosho Fujimoto. While it was interesting and enjoyable to design costumes with appearances that seemed 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 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 80 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 the player controls and movement. Getting this right once is a challenge, but perfecting it 80 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 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 realise 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 features of 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 Asia 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 was doing something they were wholly unfamiliar with. 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 gotta go fast.