Whether you love them or hate them, it's been hard to avoid Soulslikes in recent years. Third-person action-RPGs that put emphasis on difficult combat and lessons learned through defeat seem to have stemmed from the success of FromSoftware's Souls games, but Dark Souls and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki doesn't know whether we should attribute the term to his creations.
"I know we've been credited [with inventing the term 'Soulslike'], 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," he told Game Informer, implying that someone would have capitalised on the idea eventually.
"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," Miyazaki said of Souls games and their origins. "The FromSoftware DNA and our game design overlapped with what was perhaps missing from the market."
It's highly unlikely people will ditch the term Soulslike now, but it's interesting to see Miyazaki adopt a humble approach when asked about the origins of the term. Perhaps some developer would have leveraged difficulty in a similar way to the Souls games, but few could have done it as well as FromSoftware.