Or did he git too good?
As with any auteur video game director out there, the name Hidetaka Miyazaki has stretched beyond the confines of his position and very much coloured the works of all From Software games. And it makes sense, often we're told how large chunks of the heart of Souls games originate in his reference-addled psyche, and it's the testament of his team's skills to be his scribes that they can consistently and faithfully recreate his mad dreams for his project. That's why he's called the Father of Dark Souls. Without him there would be no Souls series like we know it today and likely no Souls mini subgenre, which means no Bloodborne, no Elden Ring, no 'Salt and Sanctuary', no Blasphemous and, worst of all, no Hollow Knight! So his is a legacy worth defending and commending in equal measures, such to the extent that we all blindly worship the ground he walks on and never dare to ask the question: has Miyzaki beaten Dark Souls?
It seems odd, almost sacrilegious, to even raise such a query, and yet that very idea was thrust upon us just recently when snippets of a Miyazaki interview started appearing around the web. And well, you'd just assume that he had, right? Isn't it internet bottom-feeder shorthand to say that if you haven't beaten Dark Souls then you can't be a high tier gamer? (Because gaming is obviously segmented into the commonly known 'tier system' which we all agreed on back in the day.) So that very simple barrier to gaming worthiness, that gate for which one needs to bypass it's keeper, (if you will) should surely have been childsplay for the father of Dark Souls himself. Right? I mean he can likely beat the game in his sleep. He probably does a full broken sword speedrun every night instead of closing his eyes. It's his baby, he knows it inside and out. And he does, but he doesn't.
Doesn't play his games, that is. So he likely has never beaten Dark Souls. This comes as something of a shock, obviously, because it's not as though Miyazaki is one of those work-a-holic addicts who loses all time in his life for anything other than making games. We know he's a big fan of Magic the Gathering, such to the point he created his own unaffiliated fan game and called it 'Bloodborne'. The guy does like to kill free time having fun, which is likely the only way how he can lead design games razor focused to ride the gap between challenging and rewarding. Except that he doesn't sit down and enjoy the finished product himself, bask in the journey he laid down and scale the mountains he placed. Our man is a Dark Souls unbeliever, in a way, and somehow I find that just fascinating. So many of those classic fan-loved studios have that exact same mission statement to "Make games that we wanna play", but here's a director who just hasn't got the time or love for that goal.
Of course he has a reason, it would be quite weird if he just left it at that and walked away. He says that this policy comes because Miyazaki doesn't feel there's anything left to discover in a game that he helped create. Which makes some sense given the amount of creative control he's said to have over the majority of creative decisions that go into this franchise. He lays out the story, designs the conceptualisation of the monsters and locations and apparently even gets down and dirty with the balancing of the bosses if the story about him personally nerfing Dark Souls III's Pontiff holds any weight. These games are his baby, but a baby he has nurtured excessively to the point where he has no investment watching it thrive in the world. Imagine pulling enough weight that your parents are finally proud of you, only for them to immediately lose interest because they played such a role in your raising that you hold no surprises to them. It's just a lose-lose all around, huh.
Which isn't to say that Miyazaki necessarily has never played his own games at all- I think it would take a pigheadedly stringent policy for the man to somehow avoid ever grabbing a controller throughout the development process, for early build testing at the very least. I guess he just thinks that the very moment the thing goes off to test for gold status that he's done with it forever. Although that does also mean that he apparently doesn't have time for games that others make, such as the incredible Demon Souls remake by Bluepoint. He commended their work, says they reached heights the team could only dream of, but won't actually play the thing itself for the emotions and memories it dredges up. (Talk about 'tortured artists' syndrome.) So... what does mean about Dark Souls II then? He didn't direct that game, and it's not a remake of a game he made a decade ago... so has he played that? Or did he too hear about the Frigid Outskirts and just thought "You know what? There's more to life than this."
But just because I might reach some understanding for why Miyazaki feels the way that he does when it comes to Dark Souls and his relationship with that- you best bet that doesn't mean I'm happy with it. Oh no. Because whereas he is depriving himself of a polished playthrough of an incredibly influential back catalogue of his own games, he's also denying himself the punishment that every developer needs to suffer- the bite of their mistakes. That's right, even Dark Souls is not a perfect game, and beyond annoying enemies and questionable level layouts (Blighttown) we have a single boss who I think can easily be crowned the worst in the franchise. The Bed of Chaos. What a mess. A boss who forsakes the entire game of timing and build management before and after it, asking instead for the player to undergo an impromptu platforming challenge with these woefully undercooked controls and be happy about it. The fight is so bad that it's the only fight in the entire franchise for which the game saves your process, so that the many times that you are expected to die, you can ride right back into the fray and only struggle with the remaining awful jumping tasks. That boss is an abomination, and it's only just now I'm realising that it's one Miyazaki dumped on his fans and didn't even suffer himself. What a villain.
There was a silver lining to this interview, underlying the actual point of all this talk regarding which past game Miyazaki would play. (apparently none of them. Not even King's Field.) Because when on the topic of Elden Ring, the man not only crowned it the best game that From have ever made (sure, it's the idea to keep getting better with each game, I guess) but went so far as to suggest that if he were to ever play his own games- this would be the one to win him over. Which I guess either speaks to the amount of overarching world lore that George R.R Martin contributed to the script, or just the general dynamism captured in this new open-world infrastructure. (I suspect the latter.) Even Miyazaki, mister 'I control everything' could find something new to love and discover in this game. Theoretically, that is, he still probably won't play it so that he can spend time mastering some new Magic booster deck metagame or something.
Which I guess just goes to show how important it is that even men such as Miyazaki, giants in their respective fields, have a talented and passionate team working under them not only to bring their wild dreams to fruition, but apparently also to playtest the finished product in order to ensure it's all come together. Although I have to ask, how many other famous directors just aren't interested in their own games? Kojima usually puts himself in his games, is that in lieu of him actually picking up the controller and donning the shoes of the avatar in those games? Did Ken Levine sit down to slap his wrench about Rapture? Does Todd Howa- actually, I'm pretty sure Todd Howard doesn't even have a physical body outside of his Beach- he probably can't play games. Maybe all the best directors are so good they don't even play games anymore. Food for thought.
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