Balan's Wonderland |PS/XB/NSFW/PC | Yuji Naka goes to war!

Banal Wonderland.

Yeah I was interested when I first heard about this but everything they show looks wonky in the way that so much of what Naka has done from Sonic Adventure onwards is

Saint of Killers wrote:Banal Wonderland.

Oh hang on I misread that

Oh, no.

That level footage at the start of the video :dread:

Man, that looks like absolute shite.

I'm out. Ain't even going to bother with the demo I downloaded.

Wasted bandwidth.

Suspicions confirmed then, it always had the look of a stinker IMO.

f wrote:

Oh, no.

That level footage at the start of the video

Yeah I'm not going to bother :dread:

I was pretty keen on trying this out... but, yeah, it doesn't look great. I like 3D platformers but I think I'll be holding off from this.

I think I’ll play the demo and make up my own mind.

Hah, TJ from (S)ONM got a shout out at 1.32 for a tweet. I was watching and thought I recognised the twitter handle!

jawa2 wrote:I was pretty keen on trying this out... but, yeah, it doesn't look great. I like 3D platformers but I think I'll be holding off from this.

Well colour me disappointed - I was predicting you'd pre-order this and become the martyr for the forum :lol:

The initial trailer didn't impress me and yeah it doesn't surprise me at all. For such lavish looking cut scenes the game looks incredibly bland.

I played a little bit of the demo

It is uniquely bad. In a way I don't understand how it is possible. The whiplash from the pre-rendered opening cutscene (which is weird but actually pretty good!) to in-game graphics took me back twenty years. Movement feels absolutely lifeless. Did you know A/B/X/Y/ZL/ZR are ALL the jump/interact button? (That is, for the things you don't interact with by just running into or in the case of hatching an egg... rubbing up against? It reaches your character's crotch level). The jump is fixed height and puny. There's no edge grabbing or anything like that. You run at a constant walking pace. The first two transformations are both wolf fursuits. The first swaps your jump for a tornado spin that behaves exactly the same as the jump but "breaks" certain blocks (they fade away when you touch them). The second gives you a yoshi-like jump flutter extension if yoshi was mute and half-paralysed. Swapping between them takes a good second of input-less animation. You seemingly can't take off a fursuit once you've got one on, only swap them. The fursuits in question are based on these actual wolf characters who appear all over the level doing some kind of fortnite dance, but if you try and run (walk) up to them they just... fade away? They come back again if you walk away. I don't really know, the opening of the level also had a giant farmer who just faded away when I got close enough to touch him. It's definitely intentional. There is also this definitely intentional perspective warping of the level at mid-to-far distances. It's kind of visually interesting but I have no idea what it is trying to achieve or convey. Similarly there are these magic mirror warps that actually reflect the live level so you can see your character and all the little furry tims(?) following you around (I haven't mentioned them, I don't really know what they are or why they are following you all the time but you can pick them up I guess and the hub world is kind of a chao garden where you feed them the gems you have been collecting?). So yeah, the mirror reflection and distant perspective distortion is sort of cool and entirely at odds with the otherwise early 3D era in-game visuals. Did I mention the hub world? I jumped in a pond and my character just stood slightly below the surface of the water, with just enough distinction to make it look both entirely wrong yet somehow intentional. Also there was this Balan QTE section where you have to press B (or A/X/Y/ZL/ZR I guess) when an image lines up with the character model to score points? The same animations kept repeating and the background was basically empty so I don't know what that was about really.

I could go on

OrangeRKN wrote:I played a little bit of the demo

It is uniquely bad. In a way I don't understand how it is possible. The whiplash from the pre-rendered opening cutscene (which is weird but actually pretty good!) to in-game graphics took me back twenty years. Movement feels absolutely lifeless. Did you know A/B/X/Y/ZL/ZR are ALL the jump/interact button? (That is, for the things you don't interact with by just running into or in the case of hatching an egg... rubbing up against? It reaches your character's crotch level). The jump is fixed height and puny. There's no edge grabbing or anything like that. You run at a constant walking pace. The first two transformations are both wolf fursuits. The first swaps your jump for a tornado spin that behaves exactly the same as the jump but "breaks" certain blocks (they fade away when you touch them). The second gives you a yoshi-like jump flutter extension if yoshi was mute and half-paralysed. Swapping between them takes a good second of input-less animation. You seemingly can't take off a fursuit once you've got one on, only swap them. The fursuits in question are based on these actual wolf characters who appear all over the level doing some kind of fortnite dance, but if you try and run (walk) up to them they just... fade away? They come back again if you walk away. I don't really know, the opening of the level also had a giant farmer who just faded away when I got close enough to touch him. It's definitely intentional. There is also this definitely intentional perspective warping of the level at mid-to-far distances. It's kind of visually interesting but I have no idea what it is trying to achieve or convey. Similarly there are these magic mirror warps that actually reflect the live level so you can see your character and all the little furry tims(?) following you around (I haven't mentioned them, I don't really know what they are or why they are following you all the time but you can pick them up I guess and the hub world is kind of a chao garden where you feed them the gems you have been collecting?). So yeah, the mirror reflection and distant perspective distortion is sort of cool and entirely at odds with the otherwise early 3D era in-game visuals. Did I mention the hub world? I jumped in a pond and my character just stood slightly below the surface of the water, with just enough distinction to make it look both entirely wrong yet somehow intentional. Also there was this Balan QTE section where you have to press B (or A/X/Y/ZL/ZR I guess) when an image lines up with the character model to score points? The same animations kept repeating and the background was basically empty so I don't know what that was about really.

I could go on

Sounds like Jawa should get his pre-order in!

Will wait for a discount.

It looks and sounds quite splendidly awful. I’m looking forward to reviews in a weird way.

I've watched more of that NL video and yeah they basically hit on the same points. It did help explain the perspective warping at least - it's off when you start the level but then gets turned on once you pass a certain point?

It's kind of morbidly fascinating. Like, it does so much so badly but in such a weird almost intentional way you can't stop thinking about it :lol:

In that video they suggest it was perhaps meant to be a mobile game. That would honestly make so much sense I think it has to be true.

Yuji Naka quickly joining Keiji Inafune in the category of Japanese game devs people horribly overrated because of their involvement with something made 30 years ago.

Saint of Killers wrote:Didn't stop Nights's popularity

You see Nights is a charming game. Is it a GOOD game though? Ehhhh...

And I owned a Saturn.

EDIT - Judging by the footage my spidey senses were bang on this time.

Balan's Wonderland |PS/XB/NSFW/PC | Yuji Naka goes to war!

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