>>11902998
Eh, that game suffered from a lot more than that. People were generally pretty hype when they released the initial tidbits about Balan, more so when some of the art and renders came out. What really, really hurt Balan was the type of bizarre development cycle it had. On his previous games Yuji learned to basically outsource the entire development of the actual game portion to studios that would do it super cheap and garnered some success by this method. He'd get a bunch of super talented people to handle the art direction, ost, premise, story, all that stuff, then let literal who's code the actual games portion and thats what ultimately bit Balan in the rear. An inexperienced team who used ai to handle the level design and had very loose notes on what the gameplay was supposed to be.

Its a real shame as if you begin to look at the concept art and read what the premise was supposed to be, that game would have been SOUL personified if the gameplay could have lived up to the rest. Genuinely some of the best concept art I've seen in a game.