Joshua Robertson is a News Editor for TheGamer. When not writing about breaking news, community stories, or covering industry events, you can find him begging FromSoftware for a Bloodborne remaster.
When you think of the soulslike genre, your mind should naturally come up with one single developer — FromSoftware. Not only is the entire genre named after its most popular series — Dark Souls — but the immense popularity of its games has influenced potentially thousands of developers across the globe to make games that imitate their very structure. If something is described as a soulslike, a person is more than likely trying to tell you it plays like Dark Souls, or one of FromSoftware’s other titles.
Despite this, Elden Ring director and FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki doesn’t really believe that the studio was the first to invent the game design seen in most soulslikes. In an interview with Game Informer (thanks GamesRadar), Miyazaki says that he “[doesn’t] necessarily think it’s a new invention” that FromSoftware came up with, but something that gamers had an appetite for that the studio provided.
FromSoftware Didn t Invent Soulslikes, Says Elden Ring Director
“I know we’ve been credited, but in terms of the game design, this idea of having death and learning as part of the core game cycle is something that the gaming audience was perhaps ready for,” says Miyazaki. “But there just wasn’t the perfect answer for that appetite just yet.
Hidetaka Miyzaki has become the face of FromSoftware with the games he’s directed. So let’s rank all of them.
“What we discovered is it is okay to make games with death as part of its core gameplay loop, and our answer happened to land and resonate with various audiences. I don’t necessarily think it’s a new invention, per se, it was more the FromSoftware DNA and our game design overlapped with what was perhaps missing from the market.”
He kind of has a point, if you think about it. Most elements of FromSoftware’s games were lifted from older titles, such as retracing your steps after dying, metroidvania-esque level design, and learning boss patterns to progress past a tough foe, but I can’t really recall anything that combined them to come up with the soulslike formula we have today until Demons’ Souls came along.
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Sure, you have the likes of King’s Field and Blade of Darkness (often cited as a soulslike before soulslikes were a thing), but FromSoftware definitely popularized the design enough to make it a full-blown term. It’s probably a case of Miyazaki being humble, because if FromSoftware never existed, it’s highly likely that the term ‘soulslike’ wouldn’t either.
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If you ask me, the first “soulslike” would be The Immortal (1990).
2026-01-01 19:50:06
Resident Evil, but more to the point: Onimusha (less so as it developed).
2025-12-31 11:19:34
