Hidetaka Miyazaki

Hidetaka Miyazaki (宮崎 英高, Miyazaki Hidetaka, born in Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese video game director and president of the game development company, FromSoftware. Miyazaki originally joined FromSoftware as a programmer in 2004, and after directing Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer in the 2000s, he became internationally known for creating and directing the Souls series in the 2010s.

Although Miyazaki had directed the first two games in the Souls series, he took a supervising role for Dark Souls II (2014), due to the parallel development of Bloodborne (2015), which made him unable to direct both titles simultaneously. After the release of Bloodborne, Miyazaki returned to the Souls series as the lead director on Dark Souls III (2016).

Miyazaki's influences on game design and writing style range from the works of various novelists, mangakas, other game designers such as Fumito Ueda and Yuji Horii, as well as European and Asian architecture. Miyazaki's games often invoke use of strong visual storytelling by way of explaining the backstory through in-depth lore, with the Souls series in particular being notable for it.

Early life

Miyazaki stated that he grew up "tremendously poor" while living in the city of Shizuoka, Japan.^[1] He was a keen reader, but since his parents could not afford him books or manga, he had to borrow whatever he could find in his local library.^[1] The books he read at the time were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts of text he could not understand fully. Miyazaki used his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, which later inspired some of his ideas for game design.^[1]

Career at FromSoftware

After graduating from Keio University with a degree in social science, Miyazaki went to work doing account managing for the U.S. based Oracle Corporation.^[1][2] Upon a friend's recommendation, Miyazaki began playing the 2001 video game Ico, causing him to consider a career change to a game designer.^[1] At age 29 however, Miyazaki found that few game companies would employ him, with one of the few being FromSoftware, where Miyazaki began working as a planner on Armored Core: Last Raven in 2004, joining the game's development halfway through.^[1][2] Miyazaki later directed the development of Armored Core 4 and its direct sequel, Armored Core: For Answer.^[2]

Upon learning about what later became Demon's Souls, Miyazaki became excited at the prospect of a fantasy action role-playing game and offered to help.^[1] The project, up until Miyazaki was assigned to it, was considered a failure by the company, with Miyazaki stating "I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure."^[1] Although the game was received negatively at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show and sold far under expectations upon release, it began to pick up after a few months and soon found publishers willing to release the title outside Japan.^[1] After the release and success of the game's spiritual successor Dark Souls in 2011, Miyazaki was promoted to the position of company president in May 2014.^[3][4]

After the release of the Prepare to Die edition of Dark Souls in August 2012, Sony Computer Entertainment approached FromSoftware concerning cooperative development on a new title. Miyazaki asked about the possibility of developing a game for eighth-generation consoles, and the concept of Bloodborne developed from there. There were no story or setting connections to FromSoftware's previous titles, even though Miyazaki conceded that it "carries the DNA of Demon's Souls and its very specific level design".^[5] Development ran parallel to that of Dark Souls II, which Miyazaki simply supervised as he was unable to direct both titles simultaneously.^[6]

After the release of Bloodborne in March 2015, Miyazaki returned to the Souls series as the director on Dark Souls III, with assistance from Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor and Dark Souls II lead directors Isamu Okano and Yui Tanimura, respectively.^[7][8] The title was released in Japan in March 2016, and worldwide the next month. In April 2016, Miyazaki revealed that he and FromSoftware were working on a new intellectual property, unrelated to the Souls series, which he wanted to personally move away from.^[9][10]

Influences and design style

Miyazaki and his development team for Dark Souls were inspired by the Milan Cathedral in Italy, modeling a central area in the game after it

Miyazaki's influences include video games such as Ico,^[11] the early Dragon Quest games,^[12][13] The Legend of Zelda^[12][14] and King's Field video game series,^[15] manga series such as Berserk, Saint Seiya, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure,^[16] the literary works of H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George R. R. Martin,^[14][17] and gamebooks such as Sorcery! and RuneQuest.^[18][14] Miyazaki is also influenced by European architecture, and often uses it as a way of environmental storytelling.^[19][20][21]

Miyazaki stated that the notable difficulty of the Souls series had no intention of being "more difficult than other titles on purpose". Rather, the difficulty was a part of the process that gives players "a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds", while also having a certain level of difficulty incentivizing "players to experiment more with character builds and weapon load-outs".^[19] When asked about his style of storytelling, Miyazaki stated that despite what people believe, he doesn't dislike direct storytelling, but instead prefers players to interpret the world for themselves, stating that the "player gets more value from it when they themselves find out hints of plot from items or side-characters they encounter in the world".^[19]

Works

• Armored Core: Last Raven (2005) – Planner
• Armored Core 4 (2006) – Director
• Armored Core: For Answer (2008) – Director
• Demon's Souls (2009) – Director
• Dark Souls (2011) – Director, producer
• Dark Souls II (2014) – Supervisor
• Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (2015) – Supervisor
• Bloodborne (2015) – Director
• Dark Souls III (2016) – Director
• Untitled project (TBA) – Director

References