It's sad to see Yuji Naka's titles flounder so much. When he was a Sega he seemed like he was a very talented creator and during his tenure, a lot of my favorite Sega franchises were created or grew under his guidance as Producer but during his last years with the company the cracks started to show and the same franchises I had grown to love worsened significantly.
Shadow the Hedgehog was, no pun intended, a black sheep among even the middling 3D Sonic games.
Sonic Riders somehow managed to be less enjoyable, to me, than the infamous Traveler Tales Sonic R and Phantasy Star Universe took what was, at one point, one of the most promising online action RPGs that pioneered some of the things we take for granted in more modern games and wrapped it in a big ball of yikes so much so that a lot of the momentum the Phantasy Star Online series had built up came to a halt and the series remained dormant (at least as an online action RPG for 6 more years), unless you count with those mostly-offline PSP spinoffs.
And since he left Sega the titles he produced didn't improve much... in fact, I'd argue they got worse. I had some hope that with Rodea the Sky Soldier for the Wii I'd get to see a glimmer of what I admired in his Sega titles but for some bewildering reason, the publisher held on to the finished code of the game for so long that by the time it came out it was so late in the Wii's lifecycle (3 years after the Wii U's release) and the game was so detached from people's memories that it was irrelevant and the ports of it for the 3DS and the Wii U were much worse and stained the original release.
At that point I kind of just stopped caring about following his career and it's only because Balan bombed so much that I even became aware of his involvement in project.
It's sad to see his career come to this.
