Hidetaka Miyazaki on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s setting, narrative

Over the last few years FromSoftware has consistently developed some of the best action RPGs that we’ve ever seen with the likes of Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne. You can understand then why people were excited when its latest game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, was announced at the Xbox E3 press briefing last week. Stevivor had the opportunity to speak with Game Director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, to find out more about the project.

“When [FromSoftware] first started thinking about this project, [we] had just finished Dark Souls III and Bloodborne. And [we] wanted to create something new,” Miyazaki told Stevivor through a translator provided by Sekiro‘s publisher, Activision.

“[We] had a few options, and one of them was to do a game set in Japan. [We] had been involved in games set in Japan previously, such as Tenchu. And so it was kind of a natural progression for [us] to look at Tenchu titles, in particular, when they were thinking about Japanese these games.

“Really, from a game design perspective when [we] were looking at what to make… what got [us] the most excited was the idea of being a ninja. That was kind of the key word [we] were using and kind of focusing [our] ideas from the start, because that was the most exciting to [us].”

“When [I] was thinking about Souls, or when [I] was thinking about those other games, [I] wasn’t thinking ‘Let’s make a game about knights.’ Or, ‘Let’s make a game about magic users.’ That was not how it started. And so from the beginnings it was completely different. They started thinking about this game as a ninja game when they first began. So that’s one big difference.”

Miyazaki’s last few games have been very subtle in they way inform players about what is happening in their worlds. With Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice introducing a main character into the story, we wanted to know how they have evolved their approach to storytelling.

“For this title there are some aspects of storytelling that are different, and some that are the same,” Miyazaki told us. “To speak to the differences, this game’s story centres around the main character. He is a character in the story. And the things that occur, occur from his perspective. So it’s much easier, in a sense, to understand what’s going on because it’s a story character from the start. Aside from that, that’s the different part. The same part is everything else.

“What [I’m] not going to be making is a cut scene laden, super heavily laced in single path story in this game. It’s going to be more like there are little tid bits of story all throughout the world that you discover as you explore. And it’s up to you to find them, surmise what they might mean and kind of put it all together. He actually used the term ‘A drama rollercoaster.’ It’s not going to be a drama rollercoaster. It’s going to have a lot of different places you can go.”

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is due for release next year on Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC.