Hidetaka Miyazaki is a renowned director and president of FromSoftware, famous for his contributions to the rise of a new subgenre known as Soulslike. Soulslike’s origins trace back to the release of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls by Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware.
Mizakai has released several games adding to the Soulslike subgenre, known for their dark fantasy lore, intricate detail attention, immersive world, environmental storytelling, and difficult gameplay. Some of the most celebrated games in the subgenre include Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring, Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne.
Despite the celebrated success of these games, some people find them overrated and not up to par. Largely due to the games feeling like more of a chore than an enjoyable experience due to their difficulty. Some people argue that these games hide behind the facade of lore, attention to detail, and immersive worldbuilding to justify the difficulty of their gameplay.
Why do fans hate Miyazaki’s games?
Miyazaki is an auteur, known for attention to detail, immersive world-building, and a focus on making challenging gameplay to push people to achieve excellence. Some of the games are so difficult that if you fail to stay alive and die without reaching your checkpoint, you can be at risk of losing all your progress, weapons, and other equipment, leaving you to fend for them from point zero all over again.
The reason some people feel these games are a chore is largely due to their difficult gameplay mechanics, which can be really frustrating at times. A user portrayed their hatred for the games via Reddit by saying:
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Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was the first Miyazaki title to win the Game of the Year award in 2019. Miyazaki’s world invokes the use of high difficulty and narratives presented largely through environmental cues, which contributes to the uniqueness of his imagination and world-building skills.
Miyazaki is no doubt a master of his craft and has hence managed to create a special place in the world of gaming. He is an auteur of his genre and manages to invoke feelings of extreme gratification and satisfaction upon the completion of his games.
What makes the Soulslike subgenre appealing?
Soulslike games are known for their gruesome gameplay, and dark fantasy, which appeals to a lot of players all over the world. FromSoftware is a Japanese company that serves a global audience to reach a larger chunk of people. To achieve universality, they collaborate with another company known as Frognation, tasked with translating all the games that come out of FrontSoftware.
Ryan Morris, the lead translator for the games, talks about Hidetaka Miyazaki’s imaginative world and how he manages to achieve it. He said:
One of the big ideas that has driven the design of these games is a seamless experience, and do the best you can to avoid it feeling like a game. – With FromSoftware games, there’s this idea of not telling the whole story in linear fashion, or telling you every factual detail about the world. I feel like the lore probably only exists in Miyazaki’s imagination – I don’t think it’s written down in a canon for reference
Using a non-linear narrative, Miyazaki takes a different route from the conventional form of storytelling and enables people to revisit places with new knowledge, peeling the layers of foreshadowing with each visit. This makes Miyazaki’s world interesting and fresh and helps beat the mundanity and difficulty of the gameplay.
