Few designers have dedicated themselves to the dark arts of video game combat more than Hideaki Itsuno, who has spent his three-decade career adapting the hyperviolent DNA of fighting games to ever larger, more ornate playspaces.
Itsuno, a game director at Capcom, cut his teeth on Street Fighter Alpha, a 1995 fighting game of crystalline purity whose brawls took place in confined two-dimensional stages. In the Devil May Cry series of the 2000s and 2010s, the symphony of on-screen savagery played out across discrete levels.
Now Itsuno is set to release his most ambitious game yet, transposing the blistering melee combat he made his name with — including in the cult classics Rival Schools: United By Fate, Power Stone and Capcom vs. SNK 2 — to a gigantic open world of quintessential fantasy tropes. When a monster lurches from the thicket in Dragon’s Dogma 2, which arrives on Friday, the game crackles with the cadence of its fighting forebears: the swing of a sword — bang — followed by bone-crunching pow.
The original Dragon’s Dogma, from 2012, married robust combat with slow, methodical adventuring and baroque, anime-esque pomp. (The player’s heart gets ripped out by a dragon in the opening 10 minutes.)
Its fantasy setting was an exquisite puzzle box of topography, one that rewarded players for learning its interlocking routes. Battles were chaotic yet underpinned by deeply satisfying controls, like waiting for the perfect moment to deliver the “thunder riposte” of the Mystic Knight.
“On a micro level, the action is the same as a fighting game,” Itsuno said of the franchise through an interpreter. “From the number of frames for the button input to the number of frames for the hit itself on the enemy.”
Itsuno, dressed casually in jeans and a blue hoodie, his arms folded during a video interview, said the original Dragon’s Dogma was an attempt to create his ideal action role-playing game.
“I’m still chasing that idea,” he added.
Among his video game peers, Itsuno, 52, has been afforded rare freedom. Part of the reason that Capcom, whose headquarters are in a sparkling glass building in downtown Osaka, Japan, has been his professional home for more than 30 years is because “they’ve allowed me to do what I wanted to do.”
When Itsuno joined the company in 1994, he did so not in a specialized role like an artist, animator or tester, but as a “planner.” “That was appealing to me,” he said. “I wanted to create something on my own.”
Itsuno long preferred this self-driven way of working. Born in Osaka in 1971, he shunned team sports like soccer and baseball in favor of tennis, explaining that it is a sport where “you can’t really blame others, only yourself.”
As a young child, he loved miniature mecha; as a teenager, he started shooting movies, sometimes live-action versions of manga by Fujihiko Hosono and other favorite authors.
At college in Kyoto, while studying for a chemistry degree, Itsuno organized the student festival; there were quizzes, video game competitions and a giant maze. To this day, Itsuno’s games bristle with a wicked and pronounced sense of humor.
Itsuno joined Capcom as a fighting game fan yet initially worked on quiz games, writing some 7,000 questions in a six-month period. Quickly enough, he assumed the role of “main planner” — a job that has largely been replaced by the role of director — on fighting games vaunted for their considerable style.
For the young director, the appeal of the nascent genre was not pugnacious violence but its ferocious tempo and the skill it demanded of players. “Whether you win or lose is decided in the span of two or three minutes,” he said. “Your technique is reflected immediately in the results.”
Although the names of developers were not prominently marketed at the time, combat aficionados were paying close attention to Itsuno and the games he helmed.
One of them, Cory Barlog, said he repeatedly referred to Rival Schools while he was a young animator at Paradox Development. He fondly recalled the over-the-top special moves of the swimmer Nagare Namikawa in the original game, and those of the tennis player Momo Karuizawa in the sequel, Project Justice.
“It was just this giant ball of creativity in comparison to what you’d seen in other fighting games,” said Barlog, who would go on to direct the God of War franchise. He added, “There were just so many fantastically weird and funny aspects to those games.”
While other Capcom directors moved into executive roles or left the company entirely — notably Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil, and Hideki Kamiya, the creator of Devil May Cry — Itsuno stayed put.
After wrapping up Capcom vs. SNK 2 in the summer of 2001, Itsuno and his colleagues began brainstorming ideas that built upon Capcom’s 1996 arcade game Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. Some ideas turned into the Monster Hunter franchise, an online game of kinetic cat-and-mouse action involving the killing of gigantic virtual beasts. Others eventually became Dragon’s Dogma, although the game would not see the light of day for more than 10 years as Itsuno worked on the Devil May Cry series.
Barlog called Dragon’s Dogma illustrative of what he calls Itsuno’s “gameplay forward” approach. “The mechanics are very responsive, very crisp,” he said, adding that every element of the game sustains the core fantasy of adventure, one that feels like the “greatest promise of living out the D&D campaign that existed in your head as a kid.”
“It’s not enough to say, ‘I can go hit things and that’s really cool, and I will go collect things and that’s really cool,’” Barlog said. “It’s more that I believe I am this person, and that each decision I’m making continues to feed into that sense that I’m telling part of the story.”
Dragon’s Dogma 2, which is coming to the PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, expands on both this promise of adventure while leaning into the original’s quirkiness.
There are nonplayable characters, referred to diminutively as “pawns,” who learn from the player’s actions and can be instructed to behave in particular ways. Your relationships with them are an anchor in the otherwise alien and hostile world, and you can even download the pawns of your friends, a strange social addition to an otherwise solo adventure.
The game’s lavish open world is reminiscent of Elden Ring, the fantasy action role-playing game that took the industry by storm in 2022. But where Hidetaka Miyazaki, the co-director of Elden Ring, has called “hardship” its crucial quality, Itsuno’s philosophy is perhaps closer to delight.
“For pretty much any circumstance, I stressed to the team to always prepare at least two options for the player,” Itsuno said. “This is not ‘Option A’ and ‘Option B’, one being right and one being wrong. But preparing at least two ways for the player to operate. Then, as much as possible, prepare a third option, an ‘Option C’, where we catch the player off guard, where the player will be surprised at what they can do.”
This delight-driven philosophy permeates every facet of Dragon’s Dogma 2, including how players approach quests and real-time combat decisions. The character creator even allows for the painstaking customization of individual teeth.
Leaning forward, Itsuno summed up the emotion he aims to foster with gratifying “oohs” and “aahs” — the noises that players make when their expectations of possibility have been surpassed.
Across his career of rich, action-oriented work, is there such a thing as the “Itsuno touch”? At a fundamental level, it is perhaps the sense of embodiment that his games impart, the feeling of tangible connectedness through the alchemical combination of onscreen animations and the pressing of buttons. You can physically feel this in the Dragon’s Dogma games through the pulling of an archer’s bow, taut and ready to unleash, or the plunging of a spear deep into the fleshy abdomen of a foe.
For Itsuno, the answer is more abstract. “I emphasize that whatever you do produces a result that makes sense,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be a good result, but it has to be consistent with the player’s decision.”
A logical, coherent game world lets players take responsibility. In other words, the player owns every chastening loss and every exhilarating victory, whether that means falling prey to the deadly heat of a dragon’s breath, or extinguishing it with one exquisitely timed blow.
