Large development teams and especially their creatives often specialize in specific genres. There are obvious reasons behind these choices, from personal preference to simple team experience and the technical difficulties of a major stylistic or tooling change. Sometimes, however, certain studios would appreciate the idea of doing something different and giving vent to their creativity in a new genre. The same happens to Hidetaka Miyazaki, president of FromSoftware and director of multiple company games over the last 15 years, including Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
Miyazaki has in fact revealed that he would appreciate the idea of working on a JRPG, or a Japanese-style role-playing game. This therefore pushed us to ask ourselves: what could a soulslike video game of this genre be like?
Explicit plot and lore
It is undeniable that one of the fundamental components of Miyazaki’s soulslikes is the “lore”, that is, that set of details linked to the basic mythology of the world, the past of the characters and the most hidden secrets around us. Soulslikes, however, shun the idea of one explicit plot and leave it to the atmosphere to make the player understand what is happening and why he is acting in a certain way.
The lore is not meant to force players to become researchers and read every bit of description, unlike what is believed, but to give the user the opportunity to create their own version of the story based on what little they have discovered and understood. It’s a creativity tool, but in a JRPG we believe it shouldn’t have all this space.
Here is the first fundamental element on which Miyazaki should work: a more direct explicit plot, with the lore serving only to refine some secondary backstory. In terms of setting and style, we would ask the director to keep his style – with dark and fallen worlds – and play with his usual themes. We would also ask to create a new IP, instead of relying on an existing one, so as not to have creative limitations.
Our characters
Miyazaki souslikes are games built around a single character, created by the user and without an actual voice. This is a blank avatar that is also hidden by armor. In a JRPG, not only the protagonist should be a fixed character with a personality and power of actionbut he should have companions.
The possibility of have your own team it would be one of the biggest differences compared to soulslikes, but it is also one of the most important characteristics for the genre, both in narrative and playful terms, as it opens up many possibilities never touched by Miyazaki’s works. However, we believe that FromSoftware should absolutely bring back the characters it usually creates for its souls. A large cast of twisted minds with an absurd laugh, with their own agendas, often associated with other characters or factions that we may not find out anything about for hours and hours. Our idea would be a JRPG with many recruitable characterssome of whom are ready to betray us at any moment, others suspiciously too positive and faithful, always leaving us in doubt that something is wrong.
Souslikes have no problem transforming a character who has been close to us into an enemy and we would like the same from a JRPG. Certainly we would never ask Miyazaki to create the classic team of teenagers who solve everything with the power of friendship.
The game world
One element we wouldn’t want to change is the design of the game world. Elden Ring proposes a very high quality open world and even with a change of genre we would like to maintain a good part of the structure.
In particular, we would like to be able to explore in multiple directions with total freedom. The need to have a more explicit plot would make it more complicated to manage the thing, but we could for example explain from the beginning that every powerful enemy hides an object necessary for us and propose independent plots for each region that work in any order you face them, The Elder Scrolls style.
We will also keep the idea of a large dungeons for each area, to explore in search of checkpoints, rewards, secondary bosses and shortcuts. In the open map, we would like to once again have secondary dungeons to find and additional bosses that are not too strong that help train the team and give rewards through which to customize our characters.
Combat and upgrade system
What we would change instead would be the combat system. Let’s be clear, we love soulslike battles, but the idea of having an entire team fighting together with us in a game of this type doesn’t fully convince us. Furthermore, we believe FromSoftware should challenge itself with something very different, completely distancing yourself from the action.
We don’t have one specific preference (but we are sure that you will have it), so they could propose classic turns, ATB turns, a strategic tile system, card battles or an autobattler style. What Miyazaki’s heart would propose to us would be fine.
However, we believe it is essential to propose one Layered character upgrade system, with the possibility of customizing their armaments and their statistics not with total freedom (with an explicit plot, if a character is a magician we don’t want to transform him into a heavy warrior) but within a series of sub-archetypes that respect the style, but allow you to prepare tactics depending on the enemy in question. We would also include the possibility of repositioning the levels at any time, so as to change tactics every moment and give the player more freedom.
Difficulty and death
We would also like a not low difficulty level (which doesn’t mean being destroyed in two hits by every enemy). Synergizing this with the freedom of exploration and multiple characters to find and recruit, we would appreciate a game system that requires us to use certain tactics very precisely to defeat each powerful enemy, so as to push us to move from area to area in search of some strengthening and new allies and then going back to that adversary who put us in such difficulty.
Furthermore, we would retain the idea of losing something indefinitely in case of defeat. In this case we would avoid leaving experience points behind and in their place we believe the idea of could be interesting “abandon” part of our party. Narratively the idea is that, having been defeated, we are forced to retreat and part of the team remains behind to allow the others to escape.
We would allow the team to recover immediately with a consumable item, without penalty, or we could return to them to save them and thus obtain a reward: The longer the road, the greater the reward would be. In this way the defeat would not be a potential punishment but a possibility of gain. If he died a second time, the team would reunite without gaining any benefits.
The multiplayer
We know that Miyazaki loves multiplayer and believes it is a fundamental part of his game. The cooperative side it would be complex, because calling up an ally with an entire team at our side would perhaps be a bit much, especially in a non-action game. Instead, an asynchronous aid system could be created.
It could be made so that the player can leave one of your characters “on loan”. in exchange for a reward (similar to the Pawns in Dragon’s Dogma 2), at specific points such as at the entrance to a major dungeon or directly in front of the boss of the moment. Whoever summons the new ally could only use him in the immediately following area. This would allow those who are in difficulty to have access to a useful character for the area, without having to go looking for him in the rest of the world.
Finally, we believe there should be the competitive. The easy way to put it is an arena where you sign up and fight, but the return of an invasion system could be interesting.
For example, if you decide to summon another player’s character there could be the risk of being invaded by an opposing team (in this case, the battles should be timed to prevent those who invade us from blocking us in a battle and avoiding complete your turn).
Why stop at a JRPG?
The question we now ask you is: How do you imagine a soulslike style JRPG? What features would you like to see in a game of this type made by Miyazaki? And above all: why stop at a JRPG? What other genres do you think could be able to merge with soulslike? A music game? A battle royale? Or maybe a driving game… ah, that already exists and it’s called Nightmare Kart.
