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Creator / Hidetaka Miyazaki

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YOU DIED

Ever since Demon's Souls, I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds.
If you had a game that said, "Oops, you're dead. Now switch off the game," it wouldn't be very successful. So you do need to have something to teach and be there to learn from, and we feel that death in video games is a positive experience.

Hidetaka Miyazaki (born September 19, 1974) is a video game director and company president of FromSoftware, best known for creating Dark Souls. His games are notorious for their brutally addictive gameplay, Nintendo Hard difficulty, and strong usage of Show, Don't Tell. He's also considered the spiritual father of the Souls-like RPG genre.

Originally an account manager for the American tech giant Oracle, after playing ICO at the recommendation of a friend, Miyazaki decided to switch careers to become a video game designer. Due to his mid-career change, very few companies offered him employment, one of them being FromSoftware, where he chose to join in 2004. His first assignment at the company was as a planner on Armored Core: Last Raven and he would make his directorial debut in 2006 with Armored Core 4.

During development of Armored Core 4, Miyazaki would learn of a Troubled Production with Sony Interactive Entertainment regarding a fantasy Action RPG that was suffering from numerous problems stemming from a lack of vision. As the game was already deemed a lost cause by company higher-ups, Miyazaki was allowed to direct the game while being given full creative control over it. This allowed Miyazaki to incorporate many of his ideas and design philosophies that would come to shape his Signature Style and future games from the company. Initially met with mixed previews when it was first revealed, namely due to its then-uncommon brutal Nintendo Hard difficulty, the game, Demon's Souls, would be released in 2009 to vast critical acclaim and strong sales, quickly becoming FromSoftware's most successful game at the time. The rest, they say, is history.

Miyazaki would go on to create Dark Souls, the Spiritual Successor to Demon's Souls, while continuing to direct games including Bloodborne, Déraciné, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring. During Bloodborne's development, Miyazaki would be promoted to company president of From, succeeding company founder Naotoshi Zin.

In addition to ICO, Miyazaki draws upon world architecture, numerous video-game Long-Runners including The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest, authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George R. R. Martin (whom he'd later collaborate with on Elden Ring), and manga like Berserk and Devilman for inspiration. He takes a great deal of inspiration from both Western and Eastern sources, and as a result, his games are greatly enjoyed by gamers on both sides of the pond.

His massive influence on the video game industry would culminate in him receiving a spot on TIME Magazine highly coveted 100 List for 2023, the second game developer (after Shigeru Miyamoto in 2007) to do so.


Games directed by Miyazaki:

Tropes common to Miyazaki's works include:

  • Creator's Oddball: Deracine is a gentle VR adventure game with no combat. Story remains cryptic as ever, though.
  • Creator Thumbprint: Games directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki tend to share a few key elements, namely...
    • A significant focus on smooth, complex melee combat.
    • Giving the player character canon Resurrective Immortality as an in-story reason for the ubiquitous gameplay loop of dying and respawning. They also have a hole in their pocket that spills all their Weird Currency (which pulls double-duty as dosh and experience points) when they die.
    • Making the final battle a Duel Boss of some kind, usually a tragic one.
    • Dense, interconnected level design.
    • Cryptic story and lore.
    • A Player Headquarters with a loyal female NPC who either levels you up or enhances your healing abilities.
    • His "main" games so far (Armored Core 4/ For Answer, Demons Souls and its derivatives) feature a universe where higher powers have driven the world into perpetually miserable state of being. The Player Character, who is made into a part of the system that contribute to the misery, is the only one capable of making any meaningful choices by upholding the status quo, replacing it or breaking it (for better or worse).
    • He also seems to really enjoy Fallen Heroes, Tragic Monsters, and the Was Once a Man trope.
    • By his own admission, Miyazaki also really enjoys making poisonous swamps. He knows that literally everybody but him utterly despises them, but he simply can't help himself.
  • God Never Said That: He has been misquoted in more than one way:
    • Fans of both Berserk and the Souls games often talk about Berserk being a primary, or even the inspiration of Souls based on an interview where Miyazaki acknowledged that he is a Berserk reader, but that's probably a big exaggeration. For example, after mentioning Berserk in that interview, he attributes most of his inspiration for the Souls games to his collection of Western Tabletop RPGs and Fantasy Literature, as well as the earlier FromSoftware game series King's Field and the Fighting Fantasy game books. He does say in the same interview that when Art Designer Masanori Waragai showed him his Catarina armor design, he felt reminded of Bazuso from Berserk and thought that old design was appropriate for Siegmeyer's character concept, but this is one of the few parallels or Shout Outs he has actually acknowledged. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that Berserk has had some influence on the games, such as when he acknowledged that the greatsword artes and playstyle in Dark Souls III were inspired by Guts, but fanon tends to blow it out of proportion and treat Dark Souls as if it were practically Berserk with the serial numbers filed off.
    • After Dark Souls came out, That One Boss The Bed of Chaos was so poorly-received that it was said that Miyazaki had publicly apologized for it being so bad. He made no such apology.
  • Nintendo Hard: Many of his games are notorious for their extreme, but fair, difficulty. This stems from his philosophy of giving players a strong sense of accomplishment by overcoming a challenge.

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