Book excerpt: We thought we had gone through the topic in the first volume, those two games opened new pists of reflexions. The in-depth analysis of Hidetaka Miyazaki's Dark Souls saga continues with this volume 2, decoding the Bloodborne and Dark Souls III episodes. An indinspensale ebook for all the fans of the game Dark Souls ! EXTRACT "The project, christened Project Beast, began soon after the Astorias of the Abyss DLC was released in August 2012. At the time, FromSoftware was also beginning to build Dark Souls II, its cash cow. Miyazaki kept his distance from this sequel, which was handed off to Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, with support from the FromSoftware president and creator of King’s Field, Naotoshi Zin, who supervised the game system. On his end, Hidetaka Miyazaki formed a trusted team of regular collaborators, such as lead programmer Jun Itô (who had already filled this role for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls), composer and lead sound designer Tsukasa Saitô (Armored Core games), and most of his regular artists: Daisuke Satake, Masanori Waragai and Hiroshi Nakamura. The success of Demon’s Souls, and the even greater success of Dark Souls, allowed FromSoftware to grow its ranks significantly. In total, no fewer than fifty programmers participated in the project, along with around twenty game system designers and fifty people working on visual creation (animation, scenery, characters, etc.). Thanks to financial support from Sony, many Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese studios were sub-contracted during the production to help with graphics and visuals." ABOUT THE AUTHORS Passionate about films and video games, Damien Mecheri joined the writers team of Gameplay RPG in 2004, writing several articles for the second special edition on the Final Fantasy saga. He continued his work with the team in another publication called Background, before continuing the online adventure in 2008 with the site Gameweb.fr. Since 2011, he has come aboard Third Éditions with Mehdi El Kanafi and Nicolas Courcier, the publisher’s two founders. Damien is also the author of the book Video Game Music: a History of Gaming Music. For Third Éditions, he is actively working on the “Level Up” and “Année jeu vidéo” collections. He has also written or co-written several works from the same publisher: The Legend of Final Fantasy X, Welcome to Silent Hill: a journey into Hell, The Works of Fumito Ueda: a Different Perspective on Video Games and, of course, the first volume of Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave. Curious by nature, a dreamer against the grain and a chronic ranter, Sylvain Romieu is also a passionate traveler of the real and the unreal, the world and the virtual universes, always in search of enriching discoveries and varied cultures. A developer by trade, he took up his modest pen several years ago to study the characteristics and richness of the marvelously creative world of video games. He writes for a French video game site called Chroniques-Ludiques, particularly on the topic of RPGs, his preferred genre.