Hidetaka Miyazaki

Hidetaka Miyazaki
Native name 宮崎 英高
Born 1974 or 1975 (age 42–44)
Shizuoka, Japan
Nationality Japanese
Alma mater Keio University
Occupation Game director, game designer
Notable work Souls series, Bloodborne
Title President of FromSoftware, Inc.
Term 2014–present

Hidetaka Miyazaki (宮崎 英高, Miyazaki Hidetaka, born in Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese video game director and designer who is the president of the game development company, FromSoftware. Miyazaki originally joined the company as a game planner 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, starting with Demon's Souls in 2009. Although Miyazaki had directed the first two games in the Souls series, he took a supervising role for Dark Souls II, due to the parallel development of Bloodborne, 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. Following that, he directed Déraciné and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Miyazaki's influences range from the works of various novelists, mangakas, and other game designers such as Fumito Ueda and Yuji Horii, as well as Asian and European architecture. Miyazaki's games, particularly the Souls series, often invoke the use of high difficulty, strong visual and environmental storytelling, and providing a large amount of the game's setting and character background information through mostly vague flavor text and fluff.

Early life

Miyazaki stated that he grew up "tremendously poor" while living in the city of Shizuoka, Japan, stating that he had no life ambitions unlike many peers of his age.[1] Despite that, he was a heavy reader, but as his parents could not afford to buy him books or manga, he had to borrow from his local library.[1] The books he read at the time, many in English, were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts of text he could not understand fully. Using his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, Miyazaki used this as inspiration for some of his later ideas on game design.[1] Alongside this, he was restricted from playing video games by his parents until he was old enough to attend university, instead playing and enjoying gamebooks and tabletop games such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and Dungeons & Dragons.[2]

Career

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][3] 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 game planner on Armored Core: Last Raven in 2004, joining the game's development halfway through.[1][3] Miyazaki later directed the development of Armored Core 4 and its direct sequel, Armored Core: For Answer.[3]

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 of 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.[4][5]

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".[2] 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] The game was later revealed to be Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which will be released in March 2019.[11] Miyazaki also directed the 2018 PlayStation VR game, Déraciné, with his intended goal for it being to recreate the classic first-person adventure game genre in virtual reality.[12]

Influences and design philosophy

For Dark Souls, Miyazaki was inspired by European architecture, such as the Milan Cathedral in Italy, modeling a central area in the game after it

Miyazaki's influences include video games such as Ico,[13] the early Dragon Quest games,[14][15] The Legend of Zelda[14][16] and King's Field video game series,[17] manga series such as Berserk, Saint Seiya, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure,[18] and Devilman,[16] the literary works of H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George R. R. Martin,[16][19] and gamebooks such as Steve Jackson's Sorcery! and RuneQuest.[20][16] Miyazaki is also inspired by architecture, more specifically of Europe, and often uses it as a way of environmental storytelling.[21][22][23] He stated that psychology, sociology, and the history of humanity have also influenced his design philosophy.[2]

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".[21] He has stated that death is supposed to be a tool meant to be used to learn in a trial and error process, and that the idea of using death in-game as an educational tool would have been received poorly by both his superiors and the players, at least before the commercial and critical success of Demon's Souls.[24] When asked about his style of storytelling, Miyazaki stated that despite what others may believe, he does not 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".[21]

Works

Year TitleRole
2005 Armored Core: Last RavenPlanner
2006 Armored Core 4Director
2008 Armored Core: For Answer
2009 Demon's Souls
2011 Dark SoulsDirector, producer
2014 Dark Souls IISupervisor
2015 BloodborneDirector
2016 Dark Souls III
2018 Déraciné
2019 Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Parkin, Simon. "Bloodborne creator Hidetaka Miyazaki: 'I didn't have a dream. I wasn't ambitious'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 3, 2015. Retrieved May 8, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 Silva, Marty (February 5, 2015). "Inside the Mind of Bloodborne and Dark Souls' Creator - IGN First". IGN. Retrieved February 15, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 Gantayat, Anoop. "Hidetaka Miyazaki Discusses Dark Souls". Archived from the original on April 27, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2016.
  4. ↑ Duwell, Ron. "Dark Souls' Hidetaka Miyazaki Promoted to President of From Software". Techno Buffalo. Archived from the original on April 2, 2015. Retrieved March 25, 2015.
  5. ↑ Karmali, Luke. "Dark Souls Director Hidetaka Miyazaki Made President of From Software". IGN. Archived from the original on May 24, 2014. Retrieved June 10, 2014.
  6. ↑ "新しいハードで新しいゲームを――PS4専用タイトル「Bloodborne（ブラッドボーン）」とはどんなゲームなのか。ディレクター・宮崎英高氏インタビュー". 4Gamer. June 19, 2014. Archived from the original on February 16, 2015. Retrieved February 16, 2015.
  7. ↑ Hussain, Tamoor. "Dark Souls 3 is Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki". GameSpot. Archived from the original on July 23, 2015. Retrieved July 16, 2015.
  8. ↑ Scammell, David (June 17, 2015). "Dark Souls 3 is being developed by a different team to Bloodborne". VideoGamer.com. Archived from the original on June 17, 2015. Retrieved June 17, 2015.
  9. ↑ Hillier, Brenna (April 27, 2016). "Dark Souls 3 director already working on a new IP". VG247. Archived from the original on April 28, 2016. Retrieved April 27, 2016.
  10. ↑ Hussain, Tamoor. "Dark Souls 3 Interview: "It Wouldn't Be Right to Continue Creating Souls"". GameSpot. Archived from the original on March 29, 2016. Retrieved March 26, 2016.
  11. ↑ McWhertor, Michael. "FromSoftware's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice coming from Activision". Polygon. Retrieved 11 June 2018.
  12. ↑ Yamagiwa, Masaaki. "Déraciné: Japan Studio X FromSoftware's PS VR Debut". blog.us.playstation.com. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  13. ↑ Parkin, Simon. "Bloodborne creator Hidetaka Miyazaki: 'I didn't have a dream. I wasn't ambitious'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 3, 2015. Retrieved April 9, 2015.
  14. 1 2 "Dark Souls' grand vision". Edge. Archived from the original on February 4, 2012. Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  15. ↑ Nunneley, Stephany. "Dark Souls online play to bring back the feeling of old Dragon Quest games". VG247. Archived from the original on June 30, 2015. Retrieved April 9, 2015.
  16. 1 2 3 4 Mielke, James. "'Dark Souls' Creator Miyazaki on 'Zelda,' Sequels and Starting Out". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on October 5, 2016. Retrieved October 6, 2016.
  17. ↑ Cook, Dave. "From King's Field to Bloodborne: the lineage of Dark Souls". VG247. Archived from the original on April 15, 2015. Retrieved April 9, 2015.
  18. ↑ "Dark Souls Design Works Translation: Weapons and Equipment Part 1/2". Giant Bomb. Archived from the original on May 22, 2015. Retrieved April 9, 2015.
  19. ↑ "[Bloodborne] Exclusive Interview with Jun Yoshino!". playstation.com. Archived from the original on April 15, 2015.
  20. ↑ Hussain, Tamoor. "Dark Souls 3 Interview: "It Wouldn't Be Right to Continue Creating Souls"". GameSpot. Archived from the original on November 22, 2015. Retrieved November 20, 2015.
  21. 1 2 3 Kamen, Matt. "Dark Souls 3 director: it's about 'accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds'". Wired. Archived from the original on April 20, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2016.
  22. ↑ McMullan, Thomas. "From Dark Souls to Manifold Garden: How games tell stories through architecture". Alphr. Archived from the original on June 16, 2016. Retrieved June 10, 2016.
  23. ↑ Stanton, Rich. "The Real Dark Souls Starts Here: 13 Real-Life Inspirations for Lordran". IGN. Archived from the original on August 20, 2016. Retrieved August 1, 2016.
  24. ↑ "A journey into the mentality of Dark Souls with director Hidetaka Miyazaki". Archived from the original on April 26, 2018.
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