When you look at the character select screen in The Duskbloods, you’re probably wondering what kind of nightmare blunt rotation FromSoftware cooked up here. Each of these Bloodsworn have their own playstyles and backstories and are all pulled from different eras in time, but if you look all the way to the right of the screen, you’ll see Zork. Who the hell is Zork, and why is this armor-clad lad in a deep-sea diving suit with a beak sticking out? What’s the deal with his worm-like sword? Why does he have a jetpack and rocket launcher backpack? And why is he all over your social media feed where The Duskbloods players are “Zorkin’ it"?
As part of an
interview by GameSpot
, director Hidetaka Miyazaki was asked about Zork specifically and said, “I think the ultimate inspiration was Ultraman and Ultra Seven specifically, so it’s those [kinds of] monsters that rise from the depths of the ocean.”
He continued: “That was probably included in the design notes at some point. The end result is a bit different, but that’s kind of the general direction that that thought came from.”
One of Zork’s abilities is to charge his jetpack and launch himself at a target to inflict damage and cause a knockback, and Zork players became my nemesis during the preview event I went to at the FromSoftware office in Tokyo. I was more fascinated with the rockets on his back that function like a mortar you can manually aim, almost like adding an Armored Core twist to the Souls format (both of which are FromSoftware’s territory). On top of catering to a different playstyle, it’s pretty cool to just have a goofy guy to contrast a roster of dark fantasy characters.