Incidentally, Dark Souls 2 probably bears the Souls series’ closest resemblance to Elden Ring. Design wise, both Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring stressed open-ended gameplay and ditched linear progression. Miyazaki agrees and in fact goes a step further. “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.”

Miyazaki adds that having different directors also helped the series as a whole. “We were able to have that different impetus and have those different ideas and make those different connections that we otherwise might not have had.” He goes so far as to say that “there’s really no way of telling how or if the series would have continued the way it did without Dark Souls 2.”