Before becoming a household name in gaming circles, he cut his teeth working on the studio's long-running Armored Core series, serving as a planner on 2005's Armored Core: Last Raven and then as director on Armored Core IV and Armored Core: For Answer. Following the success of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, FromSoftware went on to release two more Armored Core games, though Miyazaki wasn't directly involved in those projects. Since then, the studio has been busy building on the Souls series, culminating with the runaway success of Elden Ring. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, From is revisiting its mech franchise. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon also marks the directorial debut of one of the studio's most promising up-and-coming talents -- Masaru Yamamura the lead game designer on Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and a designer on Bloodborne. Armored Core VI is not a Soulslike, but a lot of its best ideas feel informed by Sekiro and Bloodborne.

But backward compatible games will vary between the Series X and S. Games with uncapped framerates, like the Xbox One X version of "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice," are able to hit their target cap no problem for the Series X. "Sekiro" runs at a smooth 60 frames, a welcome bonus for a game that relies so heavily on player reaction time. On the Series S it is capped at 30, the same as the Xbox One version of the game. This is something Microsoft addressed previously: Backward compatible games for the Series S would be based on the Xbox One version, not the One X enhanced versions.

This console generation is on its way out, but Andrew Tarantola believes one of the PS4's best games ever is about to appear. That game, of course, is Ghost of Tsushima, which takes place during the Mongol invasion of Tsushima Island in the 13th century. It's not breaking a lot of new ground gameplay-wise, though, with elements cribbed from other third-person Sony games you've played before, like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Uncharted, as well as third-party titles like Batman Arkham and Sekiro. Still, he said that "Sucker Punch has managed to seamlessly meld them together, hone and polish the overarching gameplay experience into something truly phenomenal," so I guess there's one good reason to give your PS4 another go before it's replaced this fall. Just as we were getting used to the Lego Super Mario kits, the company has officially unveiled a brick-based replica of an entire Nintendo Entertainment System (which just so happened to turn 37 today).

It's all fun and games until you have to pick the Game of the Year. Looking back, this year certainly had its share of contenders for the top spot in our annual video game list. From new gaming IPs such as "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice" to older stalwarts making a return to form like "Resident Evil 2," there was no shortage of games worthy of the crown. Like every year, however, we have to pick one title as the best of the best. Then again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't recognize all of the other great games that came out, either.

As a one-armed orphan – a disability that you might think would disqualify him from the opportunity to work as a lone assassin in 16th-century Japan – Sekiro is well acquainted with disadvantage. Still, a smooth sea never made a skilful mariner, as they used to say, and these physical and psychological handicaps have only served to strengthen this shinobi, who, with a variety of terrifying prosthetics, must now avenge his fallen master by taking down the Ashina clan. Up close, this is grindcore game-making, in which you are forced to watch the lolling of your victims' astonished mouths as you trace a katana across their necks. This world of blood, fire and pitter-patter footsteps across bamboo rooftops calls to mind Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood or Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro in both theme and body count. But in its moments of exquisite pause, it's also a game of refined cinematic style, the traumatised ninja silhouetted against a flaring sunset, while the reeds rustle and soothe.

While the rest of the world was calling out for Bloodborne 2 to be FromSoftware's next big game, a select few were hoping for an entirely new and fresh idea. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was this new title, and it was immediately clear that it would be a huge departure from their past hit games such as Dark Souls and Demon's Souls. Sekiro is unapologetically the furthest from a typical Souls game in the best ways possible. As you might expect, the game is exceptionally difficult yet wonderfully rewarding in its combat and exploration. It bares all the trademarks of a FromSoft title but Sekiro's biggest departure however is that it's a character-driven story with a fairly explicit plot. In previous titles like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, you created your own character and gave them your own backstory, justifications and drives.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, president and game director of FromSoftware, is one of the most renowned game designers of his generation. The director of "Demon's Souls" (2009), "Dark Souls" (2011) and "Bloodborne" (2015) recently took the time to answer some questions about "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice," a game about a one-armed ninja, set for release on March 22. FromSoftware has a reputation for making challenging games. Has this reputation shaped the types of projects that the studio is willing to consider? How much flexibility is there to pursue more offbeat projects like the recent VR game "Déraciné"? Hidetaka Miyazaki: While I don't think it's fair to say there's zero influence, we as a studio don't tend to worry about such things.

There is no way to speak definitively about what is likely to astonish in the days to come, and so one must fall back on intuition or educated guesses. In the search for shortcuts, pedigree is an easy metric on which to rely; it's the principle that informs the following selections of the most anticipated video-game titles of the coming year. Each of the development teams behind a game on this list is responsible for a previous widely acclaimed tile. No one here is an underdog. In 2013, the cultural marketplace was saturated with post-apocalyptic zombie narratives.

It took me four tries to beat the first major enemy in our Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ($60 preorder on Steam) demo. Just a slightly more powerful soldier than the mobs around him, a named Samurai General commanding nameless hordes. Time and time again I marched towards him though, having dispatched his troops, and was killed by the sweeping swings of his sword. As much as it's tempting to lump all of From Software's games into a "Souls-like" umbrella, the studio's proven skilled at reinventing what that term means--from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls, Dark Souls to Dark Souls III, and to the faster-paced fan favorite Bloodborne. Sekiro has plenty in common with its brethren, to say nothing of Team Ninja's Nioh, and yet it's also uniquely Sekiro, and that means going through the entire Souls learning process once again.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice solves Dark Souls' biggest problem.Credit: FromSoftware FromSoftware's upcoming video game diverges from its'Soulsborne' series in many ways according to everything we've seen and heard about the game so far. Instead, you'll play a ninja named Sekiro who is an established character in an established story. As with Bloodborne, combat will also see a number of significant changes, with an emphasis on vertical traversal vis-a-vis your Shinobi-arm, a prosthetic that includes a handy grappling hook. But perhaps the most significant change of all is the fact that this is an action-adventure game rather than an RPG. Of course, the Souls games were never heavy on roleplaying, but there was a pretty significant emphasis on RPG progression.