 Hidetaka Miyazaki is a game designer who is as enigmatic as he is exceptional. Responsible for the lineage of games that extend from Demon's Souls to Sekiro, Miyazaki's design sensibilities have inspired new ways of thinking about games. The Souls series has reignited difficulty as a core aesthetic in design, used as subtle forms of storytelling that has inspired countless people to obsess over its lore, and has effectively inspired a new sub-genre, Souls Likes, that share in the game's lust for tragedy and hardship. Despite his undeniable influence, Miyazaki very rarely speaks in public about his games and how he goes about designing them, which makes him as elusive as the worlds that he crafts. From Dark Souls and Demon's Souls' high fantasy medieval nightmares, to the love crafty and madness of Bloodborne's Gothic Streets, Miyazaki and FromSoftware's world get us to confront our deepest anxieties and revel in the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Much effort has been shed trying to piece together the worlds and systems of Dark Souls, but the focus in this video will be on Miyazaki himself, and his philosophy when crafting games. It all started with Demon's Souls in 2009, a project that Miyazaki entered in the middle of and was by all accounts destined for failure. Maybe it was this backdrop that allowed for the experimentation we see in the game, but regardless, Demon's Souls broke the mold in more ways than there are to count. The game has very deliberate combat that requires precise movement, stamina management, and intentional action. Any mistakes are punished severely, and this is where the game's foundational identity comes from. Death in Souls games is an event. You lose all your accumulated souls, and are set back right to the start of the level. Coming out at a time when casual games and accessibility concessions to new gamers was becoming more common, Demon's Souls was a shock to the system. It was a game that wanted you to feel punished. Except, this was never the intention of Miyazaki. In an interview with Wired Magazine, Miyazaki stated, I have no intention to make the games more difficult than other titles on purpose. Ever since Demon's Souls, I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment. In essence, the use of difficulty in his games was never meant to be arbitrary or punishing, but give players a real challenge. However, this idea of difficulty can only be understood in light of Miyazaki's views on the relationship between a game's theme and their mechanics. He states, I think my philosophy towards game development is first, set a certain game system and then apply a worldview that matches that. When it comes to Souls, first of all I came up with the Action RPG game system and then applied the mythology. The other way around doesn't work for me. I couldn't start from a worldview, like Souls, and then make another type of game fit that mold. Miyazaki started with the gameplay system, one rooted in giving players a sense of accomplishment and agency, and then crafted a fictional world where the themes made sense in it. This is why there is such a tight coupling between gameplay and story, system and fiction. Demon's Souls story is set in Boletaria, a kingdom that was attacked by a being called the Old One due to the abuse of forbidden soul art magic, casting the world in a magical deep fog. This sounds like a quintessential hero's journey, but much like the mechanics of the game, the themes are more subversive, tragic, and mired in futility. More importantly, it respects the difficult gameplay with the world equally as challenging. With Miyazaki's fictional worlds, we get themes that reflect the many patterns of play we adopt in the game, and this is done in different ways in each of his games. In Dark Souls, the narrative justification for a continuous rebirth is hollowing, where the will that depletes every time you die is met with a corresponding loss in humanity. The overarching story of Dark Souls is about resisting the end of the world through sheer will, crafting a fiction that makes sense for the gameplay. We die, lose some of ourselves, and then respawn, and so does our avatar. Thematic alignment happens with the core gameplay as well, which is mainly inspired by the King's Fields series of games. Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are very methodical combat, but you can choose from a variety of classes, each of which makes the game either more or less difficult to play tacitly. And this aligns with Miyazaki's desire to let players come up with their own solution to conquer the environments. In Bloodborne though, you had a much more aggressive, frenzied form of play, owing to quicker weapons and movement, as well as a mechanic that allows you to reclaim some of your health by striking an opponent after you hit. What's interesting again is that this fits with the themes of the world. You are a hunter roaming the streets, fighting people and monsters on the precipice of madness in a world obsessed with ascension. The mechanics get you to feel this bloodlust that humanity's insatiable curiosity pushed us towards, by making the gameplay system more frenetic. In Sekiro, Miyazaki was exploring ideas of being a shinobi and a fighting style informed by the Bushido Code. The posture system in the game, where you have to break an opponent's defense before you can strike, plays like a dynamic tango between offense and defense. There is a decidedly Buddhist motif that runs through the game. One where transcendence from the cycles of futility explored in Dark Souls and Bloodborne can be overcome by finding a way to achieve nirvana. The gameplay system attempts to strike that balance, even though Sekiro didn't have the agency of class choice the other games had. It's stealth elements, inspired by the tango series of games, where you can use the verticality of the environment to stalk your prey, preserved his desire for player agency. Iko awoke me to the possibilities of the medium. This is what Miyazaki said in an interview with The Guardian. Iko is known for its somber melancholy world and incredibly immersive sense of place. It is after all a game about a girl and a boy escaping persecution. However, the DNA it shares most with Miyazaki's approach to storytelling is intentional ambiguity. The reason for why Miyazaki gravitated to cryptic forms of storytelling are quite fascinating. He claims to have grown up reasonably poor, and so his parents couldn't afford books or manga. So instead he borrowed books from the library. That's how he ended up with works beyond his reading capabilities. Despite being a keen reader, he'd often read passages of texts he couldn't understand, whether it be because it was too difficult or in English, and so it would allow his imagination to fill in the blanks. In this way, he felt he was co-writing the fictions of the worlds he was making. This is a beautifully convenient explanation for the origins of his storytelling method, but Miyazaki is also extremely humble. In another interview, he states, First of all, I don't dislike direct storytelling. Actually, the truth is, I'm just not good at implementing direct narrative in my games. Another side is, I want to leave the interpretation of the world's stories to the player. That's actually my biggest reason for focusing on environmental and subtle storytelling. Rather than the game itself automatically telling the story, the player gets more value from it when they themselves find out hints they encounter in the world. Another fascinating thing of note of Miyazaki is that he didn't play video games when he was younger. He only started in college. Instead, he read books, which is where his familiarity with Bram Stoker and Lovecraft came from, authors that inspired Bloodborne, and how George R. R. Martin's dark fantasy writing inspired Dark Souls. In essence, his foundational storytelling influences came from other mediums. The narratives of each of his games seem simple enough at first glance. They are quintessential hero's journeys that task you at destroying some level in force. However, each of his games subverts expectations in different ways. Piecing together the stories of each of his games requires us to scavenge for items, listen for obscure dialogue, and draw connections between people and places. We are effectively entering a world where things have already happened, and it's the mise-en-scene or environmental storytelling cues that clue us into what is going on. Not only are the themes of the game subversive, but so too are its methods of delivery. Dark Souls sets us up on a quest to reignite the world, to assume our mantle as the chosen undead to link the flame and stave off the death of the universe. However, as you meet more characters and slay more demons, it becomes apparent that what you are doing may not be so noble. Characters you meet, like Knights Solare, are all plagued with a pervasive sense of purgatory. They are trapped between being alive and dead. Other entirely optional things you can do in the game, which I won't spoil, reveal how there are forces beyond your control, perhaps manipulating you from the start. There is a subtle element of meta-fiction here, and the player is left to figure out for themselves the many mysteries of Lordran. The overarching narrative is about cycles coming and going, and there is a tangible sense of futility embedded in the story. The titular Dark Souls refers to humanity, and the game is subverting our understanding of good and evil, light and dark. There is a Nietzschean sense of eternal recurrence, a Sisyphean sense of futility, and a general sense that no matter what we choose, damnation is abound. As Miyazaki claimed, he builds a world to fit the mechanics, and in this case, the mechanics of challenge, futility, and tragedy are most intrinsically built into gaming were made manifest in a fictional world. Jesper Ewell calls games the art of failure, saying it is an art form that creates an aesthetic out of suffering. Miyazaki seems to have caught wind of this intrinsic sensibility of games, and built it into his narrative. If Dark Souls is about questioning our purpose and our morality, Bloodborne interrogates our very capacity to seek truth. Bloodborne takes place in Yharnam, a decrepit gothic city known for the practice of blood administration. Over the years, many journey to the city seeking to cure their afflictions with this practice, but deal with the proverbial devil. The city now is plagued with an endemic illness that has transformed most of its citizens into bestial creatures, and we must navigate the night of the hunt, stop the source of the plague, and escape unscathed. On the surface, the game pays homage to the hero's journey with a Lovecraftian twist, but once more it's the implicit and embedded narrative that subverts what this all means. A mechanic called insight is granted to you after every boss you encounter, and as you make progress in the game, but this actually reveals truths about the world around you that are better left unknown. It's an homage to Lovecraft's famous quote, The most merciful thing in the world is the inability for the human mind to correlate all its contents, but delivered in mechanical form. Also, many of the scholars in the game, whether from the College of Bergenwerth or the School of Mensis, are obsessed with immortality and ascension, and will stop at nothing to attain this. However, the core of the game revolves around how this pursuit may reveal things that might drive us to madness. The pieces of this narrative are scattered about for us to figure out, and there is no guarantee we will have done this by game's end. We have seen this theme play out in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Our Bloodborne, the idea that there is a sense of decay, and it is the folly of sentient beings that has contributed to this. It is a tragic rhetoric that seeks to highlight the liabilities of one's desire for power, truth, and godhood, and the games are both celebrating our capacity for triumph and empowerment, as well as the absurdity of such vulgar pursuits. We are meant to feel at a loss, both at the meaning of the themes that exist, as well as the supposed distillation of their disparate elements. Again though, this was intentional. In an interview in Rolling Stones Magazine, Miyazaki states, Our goal was to allow players to do what they want, define their own goals, make their own discoveries, embrace their own values. Core to that was the importance of getting lost. This gives value and meaning to finding one's way. Much like how the difficulty of the games were instrumental towards creating a sense of accomplishment, the ambiguity and confusion in the game is instrumental towards getting the player to find their own meaning. There are multiple endings in the games, as well as different ways for character substories to transpire, but it's more in the sense of what the themes of the game mean to people that this form of storytelling truly shines. Getting lost also applies to playing the game, both navigationally and systemically. Very little is explained to us as we play, and we are expected to uncover the many interweaving systems in the game for ourselves. Demon's Souls Nexus allows us to choose from one of five opening areas, establishing a non-linear template, and Dark Souls introduced us to an interconnected world with a quasi-metroidvania feel, as well as bonfires that serve as periodic checkpoints. Dark Souls' world map is an astonishingly vertical and integrated map that somehow manages to host a series of embedded narratives, while still feeling consistent in tone. Locations are not just levels with obstacles, they tell the story of the game as well. When you are first whisked towards Anor Londo and Dark Souls, you are met with the fictional equivalent of the Vatican, as blinding rays of light change the complexion of your quest thus far. Although it may seem easy to get lost in these games, difficult areas are often segmented implicitly, whether it be because the enemies are too difficult, or the shape of the narrative or the design of the levels don't guide you in that direction. With Sekiro though, the game is both more linear as well as more dynamic. You have genuine opportunities for stealth, but unlike the other games, it lacks classes and leveling up systems, opting for a more action oriented feel. What's interesting is that the overarching narrative of the game is also constrained, it features a defined character and a more coherent explicit story. Red is a game that comes after Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne. Sekiro has a more optimistic message about how we address the problem of eternal cycles. Without spoiling anything in particular, it is both Buddhist and existential, uniting themes from the east and west. Although the world Miyazaki creates engender a startling sense of isolation, one of the most revolutionary features of his games are the multiplayer features. Starting from Demon's Souls, players all occupy a shared universe where they could leave messages for one another, as well as summon people into their world for a bout of jolly cooperation. As stark and as abject as these worlds might be, these mechanics manage to create a sense of connection and allow people to rely on one another for assistance when things seem absurdly difficult. In an interview with Eurogamer, Miyazaki explains the origins of the multiplayer systems in his games. The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on the hillside after some heavy snowfall. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill. That's it. That's how everyone can get home. But I couldn't stop the car to say thank you to the people who gave me a shove. On the way back home, I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight. You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time, simply because it's fleeting, like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much. We're all dead, so let's help each other out. We could talk about the many influences of Miyazaki's design, whether it be the entire souls-like genre, atmospheric games like Inside and Little Nightmares, social elements in games like Journey and Death Stranding, or the resurgence of difficulty we see in all kinds of games. We can also talk about the masterful execution of implicit narratives that both leverage the forms of storytelling inherent to our medium and reflect themes about the medium itself. However, the enduring message of his design philosophy, at least in my estimation, is that meaning needs to be handed to the players themselves, which is why I shall turn it back on itself and state my opinion on the lasting legacy of Miyazaki. To highlight that which is beautiful, we need to contrast it with the ugly, the profane, by being unapologetically debased, horrific, and intimidating. Miyazaki's games create a space where beauty can be appreciated in the smallest of things. Miyazaki, despite being considered an auteur, is by almost everyone's account an exceptionally humble human being. A humility his games ask us to exhibit in the face of the many incomprehensible forces of our universe. Dark Souls, by many a person's personal testimony, has helped people overcome depression, forge communities and bonds, and define their identities they're in. There is a reason why humanity's greatest stories remain tragedies, whether Hamlet or Oedipus, they force humility, reflection, and understanding, and the Souls games are our medium's equivalent of tragic catharsis. If video games are the art of failure, then Hidetaka Miyazaki is undeniably our greatest artist.