Of swords and demons: Kentaro Miura's long shadow on video games

It's 2012, and I've just graduated: relaxation, revelry, fun and a great desire to nerd.

One evening, Federico, my best friend and trusted cartoonist, calls me, who suggests that we meet for dinner and see a little thing: Berserk, or rather ... the first film of a new trilogy, taken from Berserk, which summarizes some parts of that manga and anime series.

I don't know anything about Berserk, I plan to read the manga even though I know it's one of those series that never end (sic), but I accept. After all, it can only be a great opportunity to discover something new.

I watch the movie, The Egg of the Dominant King.

I am delighted. It's the most genuinely dark fantasy and the most beautifully historical thing I've ever seen.

The next day, or a few days later, I get my hands on a new game, Dragon's Dogma, a Capcom action rpg perhaps not perfect but with personality. And what do I find you? A particular costume design. Realistic armor, menacing two-handed swords, faithfully recreated castles. And I read somewhere that the style of the setting is inspired by that of Kentaro Miura, Berserk's father, the same brand that in a few hours had given me a new, beautiful fixed.

A fixation that goes beyond Berserk, and that includes a whole way of conceiving fantasy as more serious, less stereotyped and more adult.

A proper way of Kentaro Miura, who left us yesterday.

A way that must be celebrated with dignity, because Miura is a noble father of many things.

Kentaro Miura, Berserk, the myth

I will not tell you for the umpteenth time what is Berserk?: those who chew pop culture already know these things.

After all, the death of its author is not needed to make Berserk something on everyone's lips.
Since 1989 Berserk has managed to propose a manga capable of reworking with absolute mastery the best tradition of Western dark fantasy within Japanese literature., and at the same time to bring to the West a product capable of perfectly matching the tastes of the American and European public.

More than thirty years later, Berserk has simply become a post-modern myth, influencing thousands of authors in all fields: literature, cinema, animation, video games.

The list of ingredients of such a successful recipe is long. There is an extremely mature story, in which good and evil are divided by the usual thin line almost impossible to distinguish, there is a sense of inescapable horror and depression that shakera (anti) heroism written with skill, gore treated with class and intelligence, Lovecraftian and Gonagaian influences (Go Nagai is the father of Mao Dante and Devilman, another master of fantastic manga) and a divine character, a cursed "barbarian" anti-hero who bleeds, shakes, kills the reader with a story that comes out of the canons of the genre.

Now in the history of fantasy it is difficult to rank and draw clear links or comparisons between illustrious authors, yet in the very long history of writers, cartoonists, directors or programmers who fueled the genre Kentaro Miura and his creature have made a frightening contribution, popularizing all the elements we talked about above in a perfect way.

Let me be clear, Miura was not the first author to give fantasy such a dirty and violent imprint (before him we should at least include Michael Moorcock with the Elric saga and Glenn Cooper with The Black Company… and we would have done a few examples anyway), but it was undoubtedly one of the best at making it spectacular in a "graphic" medium.

Heredity (more or less manifest)

What releases, in the video game, such a wealth of both aesthetic and content contents?

Some given for granted: we have the fantasy perhaps a little more tenuous in the characters but still realistic than the aforementioned Dragon's Dogma, but how to forget the influence in From Software games, where the player can assault hordes of monsters with giant blades ready to mow mercilessly?

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are the ABCs of Miurano fantasy, with PCs in heavy armor with a realistic and menacing appearance and with their combat moves as lethal as they are "heavy".

Even, in Dark Souls 2 we find a weapon simply identical to the Dragon Slayer of Gatsu, in Dark Souls 3 an armor terribly similar to what Gatsu wears before obtaining the armor of the black knight and there is a boss, Gael, who has the same angry movements as the protagonist of the manga (as well as having a repeating crossbow, a weapon used by Guts).

Not to mention the out-of-scale boss fights, decadent medieval architecture and dark-hued lore.

Then we leave out Bloodborne, tour de force gothic horror: even if the 2015 masterpiece is set in a modern age-like rather than a "canonical" late Middle Ages / Renaissance, I challenge you not to compare Yharnam's nightmares with those that torment the good Gatsu.

Outside of these glaring "symptoms", various sources see signs of Miura's influence in the video game in various works through various details. Even Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Buster Sword would be a tribute / homage to Miura's work.

It is a beautiful and interesting hypothesis, which would make us reflect on the impact of Berserk, but perhaps if there was influence it is something underground, like a pop element that almost naturally ends up marking a certain environment and a particular moment of videogame pop entertainment. The hypothesis he would like is different Sephiroth as a sort of "cast" of Griffith, "villain" of Berserk: The graceful manners, the light hair almost in contrast with the darker sides of the character and the aura of a legendary fighter that we find in both characters are important clues.

But if we wanted to make a risky hypothesis, a small sign of Berserk's influence may be found in The Witcher.

In its transposition of Andrej Sapkowski's narrative universe, CD Projekt Red imagines the Northern Kingdoms not as "anonymous" medieval kingdoms, but as a sort of sixteenth-century version of Eastern Europe complete with armor, clothes and armaments from that period.

It is true that historically the XNUMXth century is a very important age in Polish history, and that CD Projekt's inspiration at this time is due to this, but comparing the two works carefully it is almost impossible not to find a sort of "ideal bridge" in design choices, wanted or not.

An immortal treasure

Free gifts or not, collaborations or not, Berserk and his imagination accompanied a kind of maturation in their own way and of "peculiarity" of the design of some video game lines.

Miura has taken fantasy to a new level, more brutal, dark, almost a fantastic reinterpretation of history aimed at creating stories that are almost capable of making people think. Tired of Tolkenian imaginaries, clean high-fantasy followed by D&D games, video games based on it, Dragon Age or even The Elder Scrolls, part of the industry has begun to feed on the Japanese master's production, to make it its own, to assimilate it, to rework it.

This is perhaps the most profound, true and clearest sign of a visual influence. And, given the importance of comics and manga in the visual entertainment society, it is an influence that could still give many results in the coming years.

At this point, we can only do one thing: take off our hats in front of sensei Miura, and hope that someone else, in the future, will gift such a powerful baggage of images.