Compared with the road of "Zelda", the president of Sony has repented in his intestines!

After six and a half years of accumulation, NS's game library has become very large, and the variety of games included is also extremely rich. But if you make a table and talk about the regrets of NS's game library, "Black Souls 2&3" is not on NS must be among them.

Today is the 13th anniversary of the original release of "Dark Souls", and when its remake was announced to land on NS, there were players looking forward to playing the full series on NS. After the official release of the remake, the good optimization makes people think that 2 and 3 are also OK.

"Miterode", "Castlevania" created "Metroidvania", "The Legend of Zelda" created "Zelda-like", the ancient "Rogue" created "Roguelike"... However, after the game industry entered the 3D era, it is becoming more and more rare to define a new subgenre with a certain game.

With its maverick and anti-bone design, FS created the label of "soul" game, and gradually became a popular and popular genre.

But 15 years ago, FS and its first "soul" game were not favorable, and were even evaluated as "incredible garbage games" by the president of Sony SIE.

Pushing the "Soul" series from an unpopular "garbage game" to the public step by step, and even on the throne of the annual game, it is inseparable from one of the games in this series, "Dark Souls".

Today marks the 13th anniversary of the release of Dark Souls, and it is in this short 13 years that the "Souls" series has risen rapidly, and even given birth to a large number of believers and imitators.

However, to talk about the turning point of "Black Soul", we cannot avoid returning to the origin of the series 15 years ago - "Devil's Soul".

Demon's Souls was first unveiled in Famitsu magazine in 2008 and a demo version was shown at the TGS Game Show at the time – just 15 years ago now.

TGS Game Show is not only a paradise for players, but also a grand event for industry insiders to exchange and discuss. Shuhei Yoshida, who served as president of Sony SIE, happened to be there at the time.

Since FS approached Sony as a publisher at that time, hoping that "Demon's Souls" would become a PS3 exclusive game, in the mood of "looking at the quality of the games released by itself", Yoshida Shuhei tried "Demon's Souls" live on TGS.

However, when he spent 2 hours playing the game and never got out of the original area, Shuhei Yoshida called Devil's Souls "an incredible garbage game."

However, the issuance agreement is signed, and it cannot be cancelled temporarily. Therefore, "Demon's Souls" was released as a PS3 exclusive game. However, due to Sony's internal feelings, such a garbage game must die violently, and it is a waste of money to invest in it, so it refused to release "Devil's Souls" in the European and American markets.

In desperation, the FS agency turned to ATLUS, yes, the ATLUS of "Persona", and asked their American branch to help release the American version of "Devil's Souls". In Europe, Bandai Namco was in charge, and Bannam later became the publisher of most of FS's games.

However, after the release of "Devil's Soul", the sales of "Devil's Soul" in Japan and Europe and the United States formed a strong contrast.

The Japanese version of the game was released in February 2009, but after selling nearly 40,000 copies in the first week, the game instantly fell out of order. It wasn't until the end of December 10 months later that sales in Japan barely reached 130,000 copies.

However, in Europe and the United States, the game has received a lot of praise from the media and players, and GS even named "Demon's Souls" the best game of 2009, thus obtaining considerable sales.

In an interview a few years later, Shuhei Yoshida admitted that Sony regretted this decision very much, and did not recognize the charm of the "soul" design at that time, thus ceding this good thing to ATLUS, which made money and earned word of mouth.

It may be precisely because of this regrettable decision that Sony even used the remake of "Demon's Souls" to first escort PS5

However, although the reputation of the game is very good, and the sales of 1 million in 2 years are not bad, this sales also shows that such a difficult game is still the choice of niche players at that time.

It may be a bit abstract to say this, but comparing the total sales of the "Black Soul" trilogy of more than 30 million and the annual sales of "Elden Law Ring" to nearly 20 million, you can understand how niche the sales of 1 million in 2 years of "Devil's Soul" are.

Although the commercial results can only be regarded as "no failure", word of mouth has been established, and players have proved that there is a market for difficult games with practical actions.

Then as long as you sink down and continue to improve in the next work, create higher quality works, this market that few people have stepped on will be promising.

With the belief that success is achieved without success, FS employees plunged headlong into development. Three years later, the new work "Dark Souls", which was born from "Demon's Souls" and improved in all aspects, and achieved the ultimate in map design and other aspects, was released on PS3 and X360.

Thanks to the design experience of "Evil Soul", "Black Soul" has been significantly evolved in terms of boss mechanism design and map scene design.

As an emerging subgenre, the media has also begun to have a new scoring standard for "Black Soul". For example, if "Star Kabi" is designed so hard, it must be a deduction item and must be scolded to death by the player, but in "Black Soul" it will not be deducted because it is difficult.

After having a suitable evaluation standard, the comprehensive evaluation of "Black Soul" is also further than the already good reputation of "Evil Soul".

The game was originally only released on the PS3 and X360 consoles, because FS was not very good at PC game development, so it did not make a PC version at the beginning.

But the players were too enthusiastic, and nearly 100,000 players even jointly launched the PC version of the petition. In response to fans' expectations, FS developed the PC version. Although the initial optimization of the PC version was very bad, many players were still impressed by its unique design and had to play it despite the bad optimization.

With top-notch design in all aspects, "Dark Souls" has really made a name for itself and has become a hot star in the game industry.

Many designs have matured in Black Souls 2 and 3, and the game is constantly seeking to change, so in addition to many innovations in each generation, there will always be some dissatisfaction for players in the previous game. With the iteration of the console, the 2nd generation born at the end of PS3 and the 3rd generation born on PS4 have also been greatly improved in the action of the game.

Between the two works of "Black Souls 2" and "Black Souls 3", FS and Sony cooperated to develop "Bloodborne".

One of the main features of this game is that after the player is attacked, he can quickly counterattack and return blood. This very encouraging offensive design, but also tried a new style outside the "Black Souls" series, and provided a lot of design ideas for subsequent works.

It's a pity that because "Bloodborne" was developed by FS and Sony, just as "Angel Hunt 3" will not be on platforms other than Nintendo, "Bloodborne" is also an exclusive game for PS. However, the game is only 30 frames, and it has not been able to release the Pro enhancement patch or PS5 patch. Playing Bloodborne up to 60 frames has always been a dream for many players.

At the same time, the "Soul" series also gave birth to a kind of imitator. Including "Salt and Sanctuary" and "Blasphemy" known as 2D Soul, "Blood Devouring Code" by the two-dimensional soul, "Pascal Contract" and "Road to Redemption" by domestic souls, and "Pinocchio's Lie", which has just been released in the past two days, the protagonist has the "ultimate hand".

Although the "Black Soul" series is currently temporarily stopped at 3 generations, the battle experience created by FS to fight the weak and the strong, and the wonderful box court map design born from "3D Galaxy City" were later used in the two works of "Wolf" and "Elden Law Ring".

These two games also won the TGA Game of the Year in 2019 and 2022 respectively with their new style and top action level.

"Elden Law Ring" even won 20 million horror sales in just one year, and it really became popular all over the streets. There are many open world and box court designs in the game, which also deeply understand the essence of series such as "Miterode" and "Zelda".

This work has also won a very high evaluation, and even many players believe that such a high evaluation of "Law Ring" will make "Kingdom Tears" avoid its edge and postpone it (although it was indeed postponed to this year, but it was not because of high ratings that people "hidden").

At that time, almost every day, players came to ask us if it was possible for "Law Ring" to land on NS.

Obviously, with the current performance of NS, it will definitely not be able to bring the "Law Ring". A series of bottlenecks such as memory make it difficult to run on NS even if the resolution is reduced.

But I believe that soon on the new plane of the old Ren, we can see FS Club with their family barrel, "Black Soul 2", "Black Soul 3", "Wolf", "Law Ring", "Armored Core 6" and even the next new work will appear.

Old Ren, work harder!