Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/19/2022)

Hi and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week! We’re a little late this week because I am in Tokyo and also misunderstood how timezones worked. I have spent most of my time here in Japan working in an office, but this weekend I had a little time to hit both the Nintendo Store and Pokemon Center. It’s good that Japan is open again, but man, visiting both those places when 1) Japan was still closed to tourists and 2) on a weekday morning is definitely a different beast than going to Shibuya on a Saturday night. Anyway, people got presents and I spent too much money, hooray for me.

Yuji Naka Gets Arrested

This past week, prosecutors in Japan have formally charged former Sonic head honcho and Balan Wonderworld creator Yuji Naka with insider trading. What they’re alleging is that, when Naka worked at Square Enix, he became aware that developer Aiming Inc. was working on the Dragon Quest Takt free-to-play mobile RPG before it was publicly announced. Naka allegedly then went and bought $20,000 worth of stock in the company anticipating it would go up after the public announcement.

I’m no prosecutor and this will probably plea down regardless, but it does cap off an extraordinarily weird few years for Naka who once headed a major franchise. By his own admission, he was fired from Balan Wonderworld in the last six months of the game’s development by multiple people at Square Enix and developer Arzest. There’s reason to believe that Naka’s story about only being fired because he was pointing out all the problems with the game is fairly one-sided, though he very clearly still holds a grudge about the whole thing.

He sued Square Enix over it and seemingly lost.

With Balan Wonderworld’s reception and the subsequent fallout seemingly ruining Naka’s career, he retreated into self-developed mobile game creation. This arrest, which will probably not result in anything resembling hard time, is such a weird coda to an already pretty depressing story.

I’ve met Naka a handful of times and couldn’t really give you an impression of the man. Not sure I really have feelings about this, other than that the stories about him being difficult to work with are repeated with frequency in Japanese game development circles. Maybe this will be the thing that finally gets him set in whatever correct direction he needs to take.

Boy, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet Run Badly, Huh

I did not review the new Pokemon game. In fact, I planned to skip it entirely. I did get to observe the entirety of the game, however, and man...I just do not understand how the biggest IP in the world puts out a video game like this. I came away from watching that game feeling like this is the Pokemon game that would have revitalized my interest in the series but the performance would have made me quit long before I got anywhere near the most interesting parts.

In my time observing the game, I saw lighting that changed based on cursor position in the menu, cameras and models that clipped through doors, relatively horrific loading times in battles, NPCs running at single-digit framerates even up close and literally disappearing like ghosts from a few feet away, and so much more. I know a lot of people puff their chest about being able to ignore this, but like, why? Even if you enjoy the game, call this out! Don’t actually let it be acceptable!

A lot of people want to explain this away as a publisher problem and not at all on Game Freak’s shoulders, but that’s partially true and mostly wrong. Game Freak is not an idle observer in when these games release, they’re willful participants in maximizing the profit that Pokemon makes the entire Pokemon Company, of which they own a third. The narrative that’s being pushed that they’re a trodden-upon developer being coerced by a willful publisher is easy and also incorrect. It doesn’t even make sense on its face, the publisher would be Nintendo, which pushes back games all the time.

Anyway, if you can ignore all the performance and technical problems with the game, the new Pokemon title seems very enjoyable. But we should maybe be demanding better than below the bare minimum.

The Game Awards 2022 Nominees are Out

We got the reveal of the Game Awards nominees this week and for the most part they seem fine. I was not part of the nomination process this year, but it’s always puzzled me how opaque they are for non-voters. People who are part of the process are bound not to explain how the process works, which feels like an unforced error in getting people to take the awards seriously.

That said, I know how the process works and even I’m a little baffled at how Stray found its way into the Game of the Year nomination. The game’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but fine is just about right. It’s better than the sum of its parts and the cat animations are extremely impressive, but a Game of the Year nomination feels like several steps beyond where it exists.

Ultimately all award shows, from outlet Game of the Year to The Game Awards to the Oscars, are a collection of opinions that may or may not match your own. That’s all or as little credibility as they need.

Blizzard and China Cut Ties

Blizzard announced this week that they will soon be cutting off support of their entire profile of online games with China after failing to come to an agreement with partner NetEase. Blizzard largely implied that NetEase was insisting on policies that Blizzard could not agree to, though stopped short of actually detailing what those policies were.

This means that games that have been running in China, like World of Warcraft, will no longer be able to after the current deal expires next year.

While being very careful to point out that I am not talking about any companies i used to work for and have signed non-disparagement agreements about, I’ll say it is not surprising that Chinese companies like NetEase are getting more aggressive about how they publish games in their home country. Government regulation on game publishing is cracking down hard, or in many cases just apathetically not allowing anything through.

It seems entirely likely that NetEase is demanding things that help it avoid the eyes of government regulators that are anathema to Blizzard. The western company also possesses the enviable negotiating position of just being able to walk away from all of this because of an impending acquisition by a company with a lot of money.

NetEase, for their part, has only implied that Blizzard’s issues begin and end with someone being a jerk. I could also believe that, sometimes people are jerks. I suppose we’ll never really know for sure.

Next Week

• As far as I know, there’s no Materia Possessions scheduled for Thanksgiving week. Partly because of the holiday and partly because I’m in Japan. So we’ll take a week off and come back for the next scheduled episode!
• It’s probably about time I write some Steam Deck recommendations.