Do we like them?Do we like Hidetaka Miyazaki?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing nasty found and no court trouble, but we couldn't open enough full articles to say more than that.
Hidetaka Miyazaki is the president of FromSoftware, the Japanese studio behind the Souls games, Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring. He's still the one directing the games, not just signing off on them. He's the face of a studio that fans trust to make hard, strange games the way it likes.
The news hook is a shareholder tussle at Kadokawa, FromSoftware's parent company. Reporting describes an investor dispute and fan worry that the studio might be nudged toward safer sequels. Miyazaki replied to Japanese outlet Denfaminico Gamer by email, mostly steering clear of the investor drama.
What he did say was reassuring for fans of the studio's weirder instincts. He said FromSoftware would “work harder than ever to create truly valuable games”, and he pointed to unannounced projects as well as announced ones. That's a statement about creative freedom, not a political one, and it's the whole of what the June coverage gives us.
On the harm check, we searched for anything he's said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate. Nothing turned up, in either direction. No campaigning, no conspiracy-theory slide, no culture-war posting. We also found no sign of him working with people who push harm, but we couldn't read many full articles this time, so treat that as a clean search, not a full audit.
On the good-person side, no credible lawsuit or allegation against him personally came up. The only legal story was a fringe small-claims suit from a player against the studio over Elden Ring's difficulty, which isn't about how he treats anyone. One forum post made an unsourced claim about him that no mainstream outlet backs up, so we've left it out.
His next big project is The Duskbloods, a Switch 2 game that Nintendo is publishing, and he's said the studio will keep making single-player games too. Honest gap: we didn't find charity work or personal causes, so there's no real good deed to point to beyond the games fans love and the industry honours he's collected.