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On Miyazaki
🕑 Added 2024-05-08 17:48:18 +0000 UTCNo, not that Miyazaki.
Today I'm talking about Hidetaka Miyazaki, the video game designer behind the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring.
I am not a great video game player. I usually muddle through games on Normal mode, with many tries. And like a lot of people, the most I had heard about Dark Souls and its sister games is that they are hard. Mercilessly hard. That did not appeal to me at all.
But when Bloodborne came out, I was instantly drawn to its atmosphere and aesthetic. I bought a ps4 specifically so I could play it. And listen: it's a hard game. But it's also a beautiful game, lovingly designed, full of moments that stick with you long after playing. Also, it's not as hard as people say. Oh sure, you will die a lot. But that's just part of how the game is designed. If you keep sticking with it, you can absolutely beat the whole game. I did, and I'm not that great at video games.
I have since played all the Souls games, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, most of those multiple times. Something about these games keep me coming back.
There is, of course, the atmosphere, which is always lovely. Elden Ring contains moments of stunning visual beauty that have nothing to do with the technical level of the graphics, and everything to do with an eye for timeless design.
And there is the game design, which destroys you in thoughtful and often funny ways. Sure, it's a little frustrating when steps away from a bonfire, an enemy comes careening out of a hidden corner and pushes you off a ledge. But it also carries with it the knowledge that the designer thought about you in this moment, thought about where you were going to be focusing, and put a little guy there to mess with you. It makes you feel cared for, in a way that you often don't in the vast empty corporate open worlds of many high budget games.
But at its heart is the story telling. At this point it has become a cliché, the idea of hiding story fragments in item descriptions and oblique bits of spoken dialogue, to be cobbled together by dedicated youtubers in videos titled things like "10 secrets about Elden Ring that will make you sob".
That's missing the point of this kind of storytelling though. It's not a story designed to be understood in full. It's a story designed to be caught in fragments, to be half understood in passing. Names repeat. Themes emerge. But there are no big pay-offs. No twists. Just the sad feeling that you are living in a world that's glory days are long behind it, and all you can do is try your best with the decaying world that is left. It's relatable.
I've played this games over and over, and will keep playing them. Because no other game I've found gives me quite the feeling that they do. Because every time I move from them to some other game, I feel a little pang of disappointment. And because they tell stories that I still don't quite understand, but that live in me like dreams, or like memories half-forgotten.
So thank you, Hidetaka Miyazaki. You're the less famous Miyazaki, but you have the same ability to conjure a world that feels truer than true, and that makes me sad when it's time to leave it.
-Joseph Fink
Comments
Calder Ravel
In 2013, I had a falling out (that's since somewhat healed) with my parents over my coming out, I moved out and left my PS3 at home next to the TV. I was a pretty avid gamer, but never the Fromsoft stuff, which I also assumed was just frustration central. I only had a laptop that ran casual games and League of Legends (don't make the same mistake I did) (I know Arcane was spectacular, don't let it make you play League of Legends), barely. For years I didn't really play videogames much (the last one I had finished had been Bioshock Infinite) until I got a new flatmate with a very busy work schedule and, wouldn't you know it, a PS3 he was happy to share with me. I was in a very defeated place at the time, mental health concerned. This is where a lot of people say "and then I discovered Dark Souls and it helped me keep going" (which IS a common and very meaningful takeaway I don't meant to diminish!) but like me that flatmate was prone to navelgazing and his entire game library consisted of very well executed but bleak games (Last of Us, The Line, Limbo, etc.) and ... at the bottom of the pile, Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, which a friend had gifted him and which he'd not touched. Those pulled me back up (round of applause to Dameon Clarke's Handsome Jack for that achievement). When I got back home in 2018 I decided to treat myself to a gaming PC and (naively!) assuming Bloodborne and Demon's Souls, which intrigued me immensely, would get a PC port soon, I thought I'd try to pre-emptively Get Good at Fromsoft games by playing the ones available on Steam. They ended up meaning so much to me I was kind of stunned. I exclusively play them offline because I'm pleasantly haunted by the feeling of loneliness in the Dark Souls and Elden Ring worlds in particular, I don't want to see the phantoms of other players, I just want it to be me and the world. I love that parts of it will never be explained and parts of it need to be pieced together meticulously. I love that parts never make sense. I appreciate youtube lore channels a lot, and watch a fair amount of them, but I also like just having my own ideas about the world, which I take as headcanon over other people's takes. And sometimes there's not even all that much to have a headcanon about, it just exists in these strange but beautiful worlds. I think I had a similar feeling about Night Vale when I first started listening. Just this strange, beautiful, distant little world that I could listen to and think about. Not downplaying Ghibli movies, of course, but ... I certainly know who my favourite of the two Miyazakis is. (Still didn't really get me into Berserk though, for all the repeated references in Dark Souls / Elden Ring and my respectable attempt that made it a little past the Eclipse.)
Izzy
Hearing you lay it out like that kinda makes me think of the crossover in appeal to me that his games have with your work. A world that isn't meant to have all the answers or make complete sense, with boundless history and a tendency to make you uncomfortable once you think you have your bearings.
Arwen
I played video games growing up but they kind of fell by the wayside as I progressed in my 20s. Then at 42 I decided to get back in the game (ba-dum-pum) and went all out with Elden Ring. I'd never really played "hard" games before so knew I was in for a rough ride. But it was so truly incredible. Beautiful, insanely hard, but also immensely satisfying when I beat a boss. I'm still not good at video games (after almost 200 hours I still haven't beaten Elden Ring) but now I can appreciate the talent of such a wonderful team of designers and programmers. The bar is also now possibly set too high for me as I look for other games to play...thanks, Miyazaki...
