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By published
The chosen director.
The enormous success of the Souls series has led elements of the community to somewhat deify one of the key creative forces behind it, Hidetaka Miyazaki. While these games are worked on by hundreds of coders and artists, Miyazaki’s stamp on the final product is always unmistakable, from his deeply melancholy and oft-grim tales of heroism to the sense of slapstick humour that pervades these bleak and deadly landscapes.
Miyazaki himself remains something of an enigmatic figure: He gives great interviews without ever really saying much, and part of the games’ magic is that their surprises are kept hidden from players until release. I guess all this preamble leads up to a very silly thing, which is that now you can bum around in Dark Souls as the director of Dark Souls.
The Miyazaki as Dragon mod replaces human and hollow player characters in dragonform with a pretty spectacular likeness of the man himself (‘dragonform’ is a transformation that comes with one of the game’s covenants). The mod comes in both Dark Souls and Dark Souls Remastered flavours, and the 3D model is the same one previously used to put Miyazaki in Sekiro, which you can see below.
The best element of this mod is that it comes with an additional mod called Miyazaki as Dragon Phantoms that allows both invaders and summons to be Miyazaki. I’m not sure how mods work with Dark Souls’ network play (and the game servers are currently down anyway) but this seems like an opportunity too good to pass up: So once they’re back I’m gonna give it a whirl and try hunt down some hosts as the director of vengeance.
The Dark Souls modding scene has produced some great stuff on PC over the years, and is inevitably going to die down somewhat when Elden Ring aka Dark Souls 4 releases (though ambitious projects like Daughters of Ash remain ongoing).
Over recent years modders have done the lord’s work in proving what outrageous BS the Bed of Chaos is, added custom maps, let you play through the entire game as your favourite boss, and re-jigged the game in some horrible/ingenious ways. And hey, if you don’t fancy playing as Miyazaki, why not try it as CJ from San Andreas.
Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as «[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.»
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