Nintendo Is Teaching FromSoftware to Say Hello First

The first time I played Demon's Souls, I fell off the same cliff three times in a row because I didn't know the game had a jump button. The tutorial told me nothing. There wasn't really a tutorial. The game just dropped me into the Nexus and expected me to wander until a giant demon clubbed me into the floor. I learned, eventually. But I also stopped playing for two weeks out of sheer frustration.

That's the classic FromSoftware experience. Not the getting good part — the getting lost part. The games are famously vague by design, and for a lot of players that ambiguity is exactly the appeal. You decode the world yourself. You earn every moment of clarity. But Hidetaka Miyazaki just admitted what many of us suspected all along: a lot of that obscurity wasn't intentional alchemy. It was just them "dropping players in and hoping they would figure it out." That's not a philosophy. That's a habit.

So when I read that Nintendo's partnership on The Duskbloods helped FromSoftware build proper onboarding, I felt something shift. Not betrayal. Relief. Nintendo has spent forty years perfecting the art of teaching without a single word. Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 doesn't have a tutorial screen. It has a goomba with a built-in lesson plan. You learn to jump by being given a mushroom and a brick. You learn to avoid danger by running into it once. Nintendo doesn't tell you how to play their games — they architect the first five minutes so your own instincts become the manual.

That's the unexpected connection nobody's talking about: FromSoftware and Nintendo have always been working toward the same goal. They both want you to feel smart. The difference is Nintendo genuinely helps you get there. They respect the player's intelligence by giving them clear, legible systems. FromSoft respects your intelligence by hiding the systems entirely and daring you to find them. One of these approaches is more welcoming than the other, and it's not the one that made you look up where to ring the second bell on a wiki at 2 AM.

This isn't about dumbing anything down. The Duskbloods can still have brutal bosses and cryptic lore. But if Nintendo pushed FromSoft toward better signposting — a clearer objective here, a visual cue there — that doesn't dilute the challenge. It just removes the unnecessary friction. The friction was never the point. The triumph was.

Think about Elden Ring for a second. That game already started moving in this direction. Glowing graces guiding you to checkpoints. Sites of grace telling you, in no uncertain terms, where to go next. Some players complained it was too obvious. But Elden Ring still sold like a weed and remains loved precisely because it let more people reach the good parts without needing a weekend to decode the map.

The Duskbloods landed on Nintendo Switch 2 for a reason. Nintendo knows their audience includes kids who've never touched a Souls game. They know their platform is where curiosity meets comfort. So they did what they've always done: they made sure the door opens inward. Not a hand-holding tutorial. Just a sensible introduction.

I don't need FromSoft to become Nintendo. I need them to steal one specific page from the playbook. The page where the game says "go right" before it says "get hurt." If The Duskbloods can make a player feel lost without actually being lost, that's not compromise. That's the next step in a twenty-year evolution.

And honestly? I'd probably fall off that cliff a lot less the fourth time around.