Bandai Namco’s Dark Souls series is either a path to salvation or frustration in your video game journey. The franchise is one of the most critically acclaimed video game series in the world, with a lot of fans still debating over whether Dark Souls 2 is the best or the worst in the series.
While the games are frustratingly fun to play, the director of the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, also shows his own frustration (how does it feel huh?) when he talks about this one shield in the first installment of the series. Of course, we are talking about the Crystal Ring Shield.
Let’s delve deeper into what the Crystal Ring Shield is and why it annoys the man who loves integrating poison swamps every two steps into his games.
Miyazaki was inspired by a 1966 show for Dark Souls
Dark Souls is one of the best RPG video games in the entire video game industry. The title has everything a video game connoisseur would ever want from a video game. From a deep, enriching lore to a mind-blowing world design, the game provides absolute joy to the players. It is also often considered one of the greatest games of all time.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, the man, the myth, the legend himself, has often expressed that while making his games, he takes some form of inspiration from other media as well. Like his hugely popular game, Bloodborne was mostly inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s book, The Call of Cthulhu.
Similarly, in Dark Souls, a shield known as the Crystal Ring Shield was inspired by a Japanese science fiction TV series known as Ultraman. The series was aired back in 1966 and instantly became a pop-culture hit. Miyazaki’s inspiration for the shield came from Ultraman‘s special attack, but he didn’t like how the actual product turned out in the game.
In an interview between Knowll and Miyazaki, he revealed how he wasn’t entirely happy with how the shield looks in the game. He agrees with his game designer, Masanori Waragai, and lead artist, Daisuke Satake, that the shield was supposed to look like Ultraman‘s Ultra Slash, but that did not happen.
Are you referring to the Crystal Ring Shield? Honestly, I was not entirely happy with how that turned out.
In the same interview, he also mentions how he explained the concept to his artist, but the person had no idea what Miyazaki was talking about, and that’s where he truly felt a generational gap between him and his team.
Miyazaki’s frustration shows his dedication to his work
Despite his frustrations with how the Crystal Ring Shield turned out in Dark Souls, it did not stop him from making the game an absolute masterpiece. The entire Dark Souls series has received critical acclaim, and the first game in the series is what we love to call a magnum opus in the franchise.
His disappointment in the shield just shows how difficult it is for someone to pour their vision out in a game. Even one of the greatest video game directors could not 100% achieve this goal. While the shield may not have turned out exactly how Miyazaki would have wanted, we are hoping that the success of Elden Ring has made him forget about how bad the shield looked in the game.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
