Dark Souls is Over*

Dark Souls has long been my favorite game and series, but I've also long believed that it needs to be over. Not only because Dark Souls 3 ended the series so fantastically, but also because the brilliance of Dark Souls was its uniqueness. Dark Souls was a single, stoic island of gray hopelessness and desperate challenge in a gaming world seeped with easy, toothless sequels. Now, Dark Souls has inspired game developers around the world and created a whole legacy of games that built on that promise, and that means it's time for it to step back and let its children try to surpass it before it makes a misstep and falls into obscurity by its own awkward clumsiness.

And, fortunately for me, Miyazaki, the genius who created Demon Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls 3, agrees: and in a recent interview with Kotaku, he admitted that, for him, at least, the Dark Souls series was over.

“For me, Dark Souls III is the end. But that doesn’t mean the end for Dark Souls. If someone other than myself, like another staff member, wants to make a Dark Souls, then I don’t want to deny others from making future installments.”

You know, if you asked any fan of the game if it were okay to let a new person take control of the series, they'd adamantly say no: there's a lot of respect and love for Miyazaki in the community, and no one wants to see his 'baby' taken from him. It's just like him, however, to take a far more reasonable, relaxed approach with his 'sacred' IP, leaving it free for anyone to play with.

Regardless, the interview went on to discuss how he'd be working on other titles, such as a new Armored Core, and his opinions on the games that Dark Souls had helped inspire--I recommend you give it a read if you have the time. But for me, what matters is that Dark Souls 3 is, in one way or another, the final chapter for the dark fantasy epic, and I wouldn't have it any other way.