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Famed Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki has aspirations to make a traditional Japanese role-playing game one day, but he has one key condition to be met.
This comes from an interview with Rolling Stone, in which Miyazaki explained why he probably won't be reviving older FromSoftware games developed by different directors. "I think a lot of these games are so intertwined with the directors who almost invented that style of game," he said.
FromSoftware's debut title, King's Field, is an action-RPG that was a launch title for the original PlayStation in 1994, and although it was an early pioneer of fully 3D, first-person RPGs and spawned numerous sequels, Miyazaki is keen to stay in his own lane.
"I don’t think there’s a scenario where I myself would make a King’s Field. The same can be said about Otogi and Enchanted Arms," he said, referring to FromSoftware's 2002 action game and the studio's little-known 2006 JRPG, respectively.
Armored Core, however, is a different story. Miyazaki worked on Armored Core: Last Raven as a planner during his early days at FromSoftware, and he led development on the latest entry, Armored Core: Fires of Rubicon, in its early development before handing the reigns to Masaru Yamamura. It's for that reason that he's open to revisiting the mecha third-person shooter series some day.
"I worked on Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer. It enabled me to put my own interpretation on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon and develop that," he said.
Whether Miyazaki's hypothetical JRPG would be based on Armored Core or a brand new IP is unclear, but he told Rolling Stone he's interested in making games that diverge from the Dark Souls series his name has become synonymous with. Such was the case with 2018's Deracine, a bare-bones adventure game developed for the PSVR.
"In the case of Deracine, there was new technology with virtual reality," Miyazaki said. "We wanted to challenge ourselves as a studio and acquire some new learnings to apply whatever it is we did next."
With any luck, the best FromSoftware games are still to come.
