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Hidetaka Miyazaki, who had previously worked as a planner for Armored Core: Last Raven and director of the Gen 4 series of Armored Core, volunteered to help with the project upon learning of a dark-fantasy role-playing game. Due to the company's doomed outlook on the project, Miyazaki was essentially given free rein to modify the project in whatever way he wanted.
The end result was Demon's Souls, an eccentric action RPG unlike anything at the time. The game initially underperformed and received negative feedback from Japanese audiences, with even the president of Sony at the time deriding it as an “unbelievably bad game.” However, it became a huge hit in the West when published by ATLUS. Western audiences were enticed by its allure of difficulty and an unforgettable bleak, oppressive atmosphere.
Demon's Souls laid the groundwork and established the basic gameplay loop that all later Souls games would employ. Its spiritual successor, Dark Souls, was released in 2011, and Miyazaki went on to become president of FromSoftware. Fromsoft would go on to produce some of the best games available on the market today, and it all wouldn’t have been possible without the creation of Demon Souls.