Terada Storytime: F and F Final

Translated from Takanobu Terada remarks in the following Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/TakanobuTerada/status/1687704072051376128

I have no idea what made the higher-ups decide to put Super Robot Wars games on the Sega Saturn. The directions as passed down to me were: "Develop an SRW game on par with SRW4 for the Sega Saturn." "That will be one of our key strategic games for the Saturn." I suspect there were console concerns for the company at the time. That said, the development timeframe and release date were decided based on multiple companies' strategic concerns, and they were brutal. To put it in SRW hit rate terms, we had a 20% chance of being able to make it work.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, our development schedule was changed very abruptly. This, combined with the fact that this was our first foray into working on the Sega Saturn, meant that development was a struggle from the outset. The new series being included in F were expected to involve a heavy volume of scenario work, and I warned the higher-ups that we weren't on track to finish by our deadline. But they insisted that for strategic reasons, there was going to be a presentation that couldn't be pushed back. Hence, we ended up announcing the title at a time when most of the game wasn't even functional on a real Saturn.

All we had for PR materials at the time were a handful of screenshots, but a Saturn magazine did a big feature on it anyway. I was grateful, but I also broke out in a cold sweat.

Once the game was announced, we had no choice but to follow through with it. The development staff fought the good fight, but the crunch did a number on many people's health. I kept asking to push back the release, but the company refused for sales reasons, among other things. (In hindsight, I suspect the higher-ups had their own reasons that they couldn't afford to compromise.) They were going to make us push it out with a ~5% chance of success. My failure to persuade the higher-ups at this point is the first thing I reflect back on from this time.

As I recall, the game was about 30% finished when it came time to submit the master copy. The main staff were burnt out, and things were looking dire when I got called into the company's executive offices, where upper management questioned me very harshly.

This may sound like making excuses, but from my perspective - the players were expecting great things from SRW F, but it was never going to be ready for launch. They were in for a hell that eclipsed even what they experienced in Shin SRW. A friend who had no idea what I was dealing with told me that I looked like death warmed over in those days.

"What now?" "If we don't release F, it's going to be a huge mess." "Is there anything we can do?" "Explore every option you have." "If our chances are greater than 0%, make the bet." Those were the sorts of things the execs were telling me, as I recall. That said, it wasn't all blame and demands. Some of them were sympathetic. One asked me, "Are you okay, health-wise?" (I was immensely grateful).

When pressed for answers, what I came with on the spot was...

"We planned for each playthrough of F to be about 70 scenarios long. We can probably get up to 35 done in time. There have been SRWs that short in the past, so what would you say to splitting the game and releasing each half separately?"

Naturally, I was afraid they'd chew my head off. But due to cash flow constraints at the time, they ultimately went with my suggestion. I wasn't expecting that afterward, players would go, "Don't push your company's arbitrary constraints on me." I didn't predict the anger, disappointment, and loss of trust from players who were expecting one game but it turned out to be two instead. And I'm sure some people could only afford to buy one full-priced game...

Later, my direct supervisor at the time scolded me hard, going, "You of all people can't talk like that!" and they were completely right. That's my second and greatest point of reflection. I was very brokenhearted in those days. But there were even bigger problems still ahead.

To avoid any misunderstandings, let me be clear - SEGA helped us in a great number of ways. I still stay in touch with the point of contact I worked with at the time. I harbor nothing but gratitude and apologetic feelings toward SEGA.

When I was considering how to give Winkysoft the news about the split, their company president reached out to me asking to discuss their struggles with scenario work. They did all kinds of stuff in Shin SRW, but here they were, asking to discuss the scenarios with me... I figured it MUST be an emergency, so I headed to Osaka. It worked out, since I had things to discuss about the scenarios as well.

We'd finalized F's packaging before the split, and the cover art included robots like the red giant. Since there were robots on the cover not featured in the story in the first half of the game, I wanted to ask them to find a way to feature them early on. I thought it was a smart idea on my part.

However, when I got there, they were clearly in terrible shape. Honestly, we'd made a lot of other unreasonable demands of them, and I think I felt people glaring daggers at me when I was there. From a QA standpoint, reworking the scenarios simply wasn't feasible.

Even if we did try to rework the packaging, there was no time to re-do the cover art. And more importantly, if we didn't feature each IP being included, it could be considered a breach of contract. Our last-ditch effort to bridge the gap was to include a preview chapter for F Final that would feature the robots on the packaging. I don't think that was my idea, but I quickly went over things with each publisher and got their okays.

The player base criticized the preview afterward, but time-wise and staff-wise, it was the only option we had. Furthermore, the red giant used a barrier in the preview, but after design changes in F Final, the barrier ended up not getting implemented.

The issue they wanted to discuss was that the total scenario volume had grown much bigger than expected, and they were having trouble finding a stopping point for the story in the first half. We worked something out after discussing it with multiple staff members, but completion of the second half slipped out of sight. At that point, for a brief moment, I saw a glimpse the hell that lay ahead.

There were multiple discussions within Banpresto about how to explain splitting the game into two halves. I think by all rights, they should have just said they couldn't finish everything in a single title, but if that was mishandled, it could cause major trouble not just for Banpresto, but for other involved companies like SEGA. Instead, they explained it as, "We couldn't fit the volume into a single game, so we're splitting it into two." Not entirely true, not entirely false. I remember players at the time were going, "Yeah, right. The game's just not finished." That was heartbreaking all over again, but we deserved it.

No room to postpone the launch. In the midst of an all-out battle like something straight out of a final SRW stage, something new arose.

It was a save bug. Despite the many, many attempts to fix it, it just kept happening. We got help from SEGA identifying the cause and worked out a fix. Bruised and battered, we sent in our master copy... but the bug reoccurred in a test playthrough afterward. (My memories from this time are vague, so it may have happened before submitting the master copy.)

When I saw the screen go pink (IIRC) from the bug, my mind went blank, and my heart broke all over again.

We did another fix, but there was still a chance it could happen in the released game, so we rushed to insert a warning into every instruction manual and prayed the bug wouldn't happen.

But it did happen. I blame the short amount of time allotted for debugging. The debuggers apologized to me at the time, but it wasn't remotely their fault.

After that, we received broken F discs in the mail, and fans aired grievances to sales staff who complained to us, "Where's your pride as a developer?!" Mentally, I wasn't in a very good place. I'd kowtow and mumble apologies in my empty bedroom. I blamed everything on my decision to split the game into halves. "If only I'd been able to get us enough development time and debugging time..."

Development shifted to F Final with no time to rest. We still had a lot on our plate - things we'd initially postponed, post-release bugfixes, and carrying over save data, something we hadn't planned on initially before splitting the game.

We had a writer who stepped in due to the amount of volume of scenario writing needed. They did their best, but there just wasn't enough time. Adding route splits would give the debuggers more work later, so the scenario structure was kept as simple as possible.

The number of scenarios in a full playthrough (stage 1 to last stage) had grown beyond initial plans, and keeping the game balanced was a struggle. If you upgraded the heck out of your early/mid-game robots and leveled your early/mid-game pilots aggressively, the back half of the game would be too easy. I was fine with that, really, but we implemented upgrade limits and heavily buffed the back half enemies. There was also a feature we omitted to up the difficulty level. I'm sure there are mixed opinions about F Final's game balance, and I decided to do things differently in SRW Alpha.

SRW F/Final's development was a tumultuous time, but the dev staff stuck with it to the end. Despite the huge mess, there were still players who said they loved it. I didn't stop to rest, either - I was starting development prep work for SRW Alpha. An even greater hell than F/Final awaited me... but that's a story for another time.

By the way, it's generally management that decides what consoles we work on, not anyone on the dev team - or at least, that's how it was for the titles I worked on. We got orders to port F/Final to the Playstation afterward, and I have no idea how that decision came about. I suggested at least releasing both games as a set at a lower price point, but that never panned out for various reasons, of which I suspect sales figures weren't the only factor.

A short while after F Final was finished, I had a little wrap party with the president of Winkysoft (it was just the two of us IIRC). They told me, "If you hadn't suggested splitting the game, my company might have closed its doors by now. You saved our bacon."

I'm not trying to glorify my story, but purely in terms of what was going on behind the scenes on the dev side of things, hearing that gave me a little respite for my heart.

I'm sure there are many who would say that we learned nothing from the F/Final debacle, but I think finishing those two titles was instrumental for everything that followed. Those are my honest feelings, now that I've stepped down from being an SRW game producer.

Addendum (https://twitter.com/TakanobuTerada/status/1688130066331672576):
(Translator's note: This addendum refers to this event here: https://www.wired.com/1997/05/bandai-calls-off-planned-merger-with-sega/)

I see some people in the replies to my F/Final story thread claiming that the Sega-Bandai merger had to have some bearing on what was happening, but it didn't. You're all free to come up with whatever personal theories you like, but as someone who studied PR sociology back in college, I find it fascinating the way speculation by third parties morphs into the gospel truth as it spreads. (Fun fact: My graduation thesis was about gossip and the way it spreads.)