Must have been awful for NST trying to make the game fun, but the Japanese executives being obsessed in removing the good parts of it (the tone and art) because they couldn't understand it.
Their first attempt to tweak the game seemed to focus on bringing in destructible environments and making that a core part of the game. There wasn't an immediate push to reduce the mature tone. The core gameplay as it existed was just... meh. And a lot of the people at E3 who actually played the demo said the same thing. So something had to be changed at the fundamental level.
Glad some posters are pointing out the obvious. This is a one-sided account comprised mainly of anonymous sources. It's an interesting tale, and doubtless some of it is true, but caveat lector just the same.
Yeah, that's definitely my takeaway on this. I don't think anyone can disagree that there was a management issue, but I don't necessarily think it was how it's being presented by the former employee(s) and was likely addressed by the entire staff poorly.
Jesus.
One of the most xenophobic stories I've ever heard.
"It's all the evil Japanese people's fault!"
Yeah, this is my other big takeaway from the story. The fact that we have employee(s) throwing around overtly xenophobic statements with regards to management and terribly one-sided accounts about the situation doesn't really speak all that well of the staff that was in the picture in the first place; xenophobia doesn't just magically appear, after all, and management was hardly solely responsible for the creation of what was described at E3 as a boring game, so of course they'd want to make changes. And supposedly racist managers somehow getting off scott-free in a large multinational corporation like Nintendo? Yeah, sorry, something's off about that.
I will say that despite reporting what was heard from former employee(s) verbatim, an attempt was made to at least even things out in the video and not squarely lay blame in one direction beyond what was said.