The First Berserker Khazan

Every long-running genre eventually faces the same structural question: is the founding studio's vision the only legitimate version of the genre, or can other studios make the form their own? The question matters more than the surface debate about whether a specific game is "good enough" suggests, because the question determines whether the genre will continue to evolve across the next decade or stagnate into a single studio's slowly-shifting house style. Most genres, on the long historical record, answer the question by allowing other studios to take ownership. The first-person shooter, the platformer, the open-world action game, the strategy game, the survival-horror form: each of these is now made by many studios in many countries, and the genre conversations that result are richer than any single studio could have produced. The Soulslike has, until very recently, been the rare contemporary exception. The genre has remained substantially the property of one studio in Japan, and the surrounding Western critical apparatus has been mostly comfortable with this arrangement.

The arrangement is now changing. The First Berserker: Khazan, released by the Korean studio Neople in March 2025, is one of several recent Korean-developed Soulslikes that have started to make a serious commercial and creative claim on the genre's continued evolution. The game is, by every available measure, accomplished. The game has also been received by the Western critical conversation with a specific quality of guarded politeness that the standard "is this good or bad" framing has been mostly unable to articulate. The reception has been describing the game as if the question of whether non-FromSoftware studios should be permitted to make canonical entries in the genre were already settled in the negative, and the game's job were to demonstrate why this specific instance was a worthy exception. The framing is wrong, and the reasons it is wrong are the part of this essay worth developing.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader: genres in any cultural form are not the property of their founding creators. Genres are collaborative cultural achievements that develop across many creators across many decades, and the genres that survive are the ones that allow this collaborative development to happen. The Soulslike is, in this respect, an unusually constrained genre in the contemporary medium. The constraint has produced specific consequences for what the form has been able to do, and the contemporary moment in which Korean and other non-Japanese studios are starting to claim the form is the moment the genre has the opportunity to evolve in ways the previous constraint had been preventing.

This is a frame that travels. The reader who has it can apply it to almost every genre conversation they participate in. The question is whether a genre is being treated as the property of specific creators or as a collaborative cultural achievement, and the answer determines what kind of evolution the genre is likely to undergo. The genres that are treated as personal property tend to stagnate after their founders' creative peaks. The genres that are treated as collaborative achievements tend to remain alive across many decades through the contributions of many creators.

The cultural-theory foundation for this argument is some of the most-cited work in the sociology of culture. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his 1992 book The Rules of Art, established the contemporary framework for thinking about cultural forms as fields rather than as collections of individual works. The cultural field, in Bourdieu's analysis, is a structured social space in which creators, critics, institutions, and audiences negotiate which works count as legitimate, which positions are dominant, and which possibilities the field permits. The field's structure determines what the form can do. A field whose positions are tightly controlled by a small number of dominant actors produces less innovation than a field whose positions are more openly distributed.

Howard Becker's 1982 Art Worlds extended this argument with empirical specificity. Becker's claim was that any cultural form depends on a network of cooperating actors (creators, suppliers, institutions, audiences, critics) whose ongoing collaboration is what makes the form possible. The network's structure determines the form's range of possibilities. The network that has many independent nodes, each of which can develop the form in different directions, is structurally more generative than the network that has a single central node from which most developments emanate. The art world, in Becker's framework, is a collaborative achievement of many actors, and the strongest art worlds are the ones that have the densest, most distributed network structures.

The Soulslike, as a contemporary cultural form, has had an unusually centralized network structure for fifteen years. FromSoftware has been the dominant node. The studio has produced almost every entry the Western critical apparatus has treated as canonical. The other studios that have attempted entries in the form have been treated, by the same critical apparatus, as derivative, lesser, or unworthy of serious comparison with the canonical entries. The result is a genre that has, despite its substantial commercial success, developed less variation than its commercial scale would predict. The Soulslike has, in effect, been one studio's house style, with other studios' contributions framed as imitations rather than as legitimate variations.

This is what the recent Korean studios' entries are pushing against. The First Berserker: Khazan is, on a careful read, not trying to be a FromSoftware game. The game is taking the Soulslike's core mechanical commitments (the careful combat with high consequence-per-mistake, the level design that rewards spatial memory, the difficulty curve calibrated to deliberate-practice expertise development) and applying them to a different setting, with a different art direction, with a different narrative register, with different mechanical priorities. The result is recognizably a Soulslike and recognizably not a FromSoftware game. The combination is exactly what the genre needs to remain alive across the next decade. The combination is also what the surrounding Western critical apparatus has been most unwilling to accept on its own terms.

The pattern of guarded politeness in the reception is, on Bourdieu's framework, a recognizable kind of field-position maintenance. The dominant actor (FromSoftware) has accumulated substantial cultural capital across fifteen years of widely-praised entries. The cultural capital depends, in part, on the studio remaining the canonical producer of the form. Other studios' entries that successfully claim the form would, on the field's logic, dilute the dominant actor's cultural capital. The critical apparatus, which has invested substantial reputational capital in promoting the dominant actor as the genre's canonical voice, has structural incentives to maintain the dominant actor's position. The result is the specific quality of guarded politeness that has characterized the reception of every non-FromSoftware Soulslike for fifteen years.

This is not a conspiracy. This is the normal sociological dynamics of a cultural field whose positions have been stable for long enough to develop their own self-maintaining logic. The dynamics are not necessarily anyone's fault. The dynamics also have specific consequences for what the genre can become. The Soulslike that does not look exactly like a FromSoftware game has been treated as failing at being a FromSoftware game, rather than as succeeding at being a different kind of entry in the broader genre. The framing has been doing the genre a disservice.

The strongest objection to this argument does not quarrel with the sociology. It quarrels with the diagnosis. A skeptical reader could point out that Khazan's Western reviews read, on their face, like ordinary criticism rather than gatekeeping. The game holds a "Generally Favorable" aggregate in the low-to-mid eighties across its three platforms on Metacritic, a solid outcome by any standard, and the specific complaints reviewers logged are craft complaints, not vague unease about a Korean studio's standing: a slow, poorly staged opening hour that undersells the combat before the combat has had a chance to prove itself, level design reviewers described as repetitive next to the genre's best entries, environments some called visually flat, a story several found thin. IGN's review, by John Carson, went further and located the problem in imitation rather than invention, arguing that Khazan borrows extensively from Team Ninja's Nioh series and does too little with the borrowing to stand apart from a crowded field chasing the same difficulty curve. None of that reads as a complaint about a Korean studio overstepping. It reads as a complaint about pacing, art direction, and story economy, the same categories a review would apply to a new FromSoftware release, and the complaint would presumably survive unchanged if Khazan had shipped from a studio in Osaka instead of Seoul.

Most of the objection should be granted before it is answered, because most of it is accurate. Khazan is structurally a mission-based game: a hub called the Crevice, styled closely on the Nexus and its Archstones from Demon's Souls, opens onto discrete, self-contained stages rather than one continuous map, a format borrowed openly from Nioh 2. That is a real, specific design choice, not a failure to execute a Dark Souls map correctly, and nothing in the genre's founding logic requires an interconnected world. Demon's Souls, the 2009 game that started all of this, used exactly the hub-and-mission format Khazan uses. The fully interconnected map arrived two years later, with Dark Souls, and became so definitive so quickly that it is now treated, including by reviewers who know the lineage, as the only legitimate shape a Soulslike is allowed to take. A critic who faults Khazan's level design for failing to match Elden Ring's open, interlocking geography is not applying a neutral craft standard. They are applying one FromSoftware game's structure, from over a decade into the studio's run, as the baseline against which a mission-based entry gets penalized for being what it always said it was. The genre's own first game would fail that test.

The First Berserker: Khazan is one of several recent entries that the surrounding conversation has the opportunity to evaluate differently. Lies of P (2023), made by the Korean studio Round8, was an earlier signal. Stellar Blade (2024), made by the Korean studio Shift Up, was another (in a more action-game-adjacent register). Various other Korean and Chinese studios have been working on entries that will release across the next several years. The wave is real, and the wave's reception will determine whether the genre opens up across the next decade or remains, against the historical pattern of how genres typically evolve, the property of one studio.

Lies of P is the case that should test this argument most severely, because on the surface it looks like a clean refutation of it. Round8 Studio's Belle Époque reworking of Pinocchio, developed for the Korean publisher Neowiz and released in September 2023, was not received with guarded politeness. It was received as a genuine event. Neowiz announced that the game had sold over a million copies within its first month on the market, a strong result for a new action RPG IP with no prior franchise behind it, and it went on to pass three million within two years. Metacritic held it in the low-to-mid eighties across its platforms, and it earned nominations for Best Role-Playing Game and Best Art Direction at The Game Awards in December 2023, alongside a Best Visual Design nomination at the Golden Joystick Awards the same year. By the numbers that are supposed to measure whether a genre has opened up, a Korean studio's first attempt at the form cleared every bar critics and the market set for a serious success.

Read the praise closely, though, and the field logic Bourdieu describes turns out to still be operating, only in a different shape. The recurring superlative attached to Lies of P, across dozens of outlets, was a version of "the best Soulslike not made by FromSoftware," and reviews that liked the game without reservation still tended to note, in the same paragraph, that it did not reach the same highs as a FromSoftware game, or that its more linear structure kept it a notch below the genre's benchmark. The compliment and the demotion arrive in the same sentence often enough that the pattern is worth naming on its own terms: a non-FromSoftware Soulslike earns its praise by proximity to FromSoftware, not by distance from it. Khazan was held at arm's length for departing from the dominant node's playbook. Lies of P was pulled close, but only ever as a satellite, its ceiling fixed by how convincingly it could resemble the thing it was being measured against. Neither reception evaluates the Korean entry on its own terms. One withholds by exclusion, the other flatters by comparison, and Bourdieu's account of a field predicts both outcomes: a dominant position is defended not only by keeping challengers out, but by setting the exact terms on which challengers are allowed back in.

Behind the design talent and the cultural moment sits a duller, more material fact. Neople and Shift Up are the studios placing these bets right now because of what already sat in their accounts before either one greenlit a Soulslike. Neople was founded in 2001 and built its fortune on Dungeon Fighter Online, a side-scrolling brawler that launched in South Korea in 2005 and became, once Nexon acquired majority control of the studio in 2008, one of the highest-grossing video games ever made, its revenue driven overwhelmingly by Tencent's operation of the game in China. Industry trackers have placed its lifetime total well north of fifteen billion dollars. In 2024 alone, a mobile version of the game launched in China and cleared a hundred million dollars in its first ten days, helping push Neople to roughly nine hundred fifty million dollars in revenue that year, the largest in its history. Khazan, a mid-budget, single-player console game with no live-service revenue model, is a rounding error against numbers like that. Its own performance showed as much: Nexon told investors in May 2025 that the game's first-quarter revenue had come in under the company's own forecast, and framed it anyway as a successful opening move in a multi-year plan to introduce the wider Dungeon & Fighter property to a global audience. That kind of patience is only available to a studio sitting on a much larger, steadier revenue base.

Shift Up's position has the same shape with a different game underneath it. Goddess of Victory: Nikke, a mobile shooter released in 2022, was still generating most of the company's revenue in 2024, just over a hundred million dollars against Stellar Blade's more modest royalty income the same year. Stellar Blade's own commercial and critical reception, strong enough to help carry Shift Up to a stock market listing in July 2025, the largest gaming initial public offering South Korea had seen in four years, was real. But the capital that let Shift Up build and market a console-focused action game in the first place came from a mobile gacha shooter, not from console revenue at all. A purely sociological account leaves this part out. FromSoftware's fifteen years of dominance were never simply a matter of the field crowning one studio's taste as canonical and defending the crown. They were also a matter of almost no other studio having, at the same time, both the specific combat-animation expertise the genre demands and a revenue base deep enough to fund the years of iteration that expertise requires without needing the resulting game to be a hit on its own terms. Korean free-to-play and mobile revenue, accumulated over two decades largely outside Western attention, is what finally supplied the second half of that equation. The wave now reaching Western shelves was capitalized well before anyone in it wrote a line of combat code.

The frame the reader can apply forward: when a genre that has been substantially dominated by one studio receives entries from other studios, the question worth asking is not "is this as good as the dominant studio's entries?" The question worth asking is "what is this entry doing differently, and is the difference worth taking seriously on its own terms?" The first question is, on Bourdieu's framework, a question the dominant studio's position predisposes the conversation to ask. The second question is the question the genre needs the conversation to ask if the genre is to remain alive across the long term.

This pattern travels widely. The reader can apply it to almost every dominant-studio cultural form they encounter. The Marvel film made by directors who did not come from the Marvel system. The Star Wars project made by people who did not come up through Lucasfilm. The Pixar-trained directors who go to other studios. The literary novels made by authors who were not trained in the contemporary MFA system. Each of these is an instance of the same structural dynamics. The dominant institution's position is maintained partly through critical-apparatus framing that treats outside contributions as derivative. The forms that survive across decades are the ones that have eventually allowed the outside contributions to claim legitimate space.

The implication for the medium of games is that the Soulslike is, on the current evidence, undergoing the transition that almost every successful cultural form eventually undergoes. The transition is from single-studio dominance to multi-studio collaborative evolution. The transition is being driven, in this case, by Korean studios whose institutional cultures and design vocabularies differ from FromSoftware's in ways that produce different kinds of Soulslikes. The differences are the genre's future. The differences are also what the contemporary critical conversation has been struggling to recognize as legitimate.

The reader who finishes this essay can carry several useful frames forward. The first frame: when a genre has been substantially dominated by one studio for many years, the eventual transition to multi-studio production is a normal cultural-historical event, and the entries from the new studios deserve evaluation on their own terms rather than against the dominant studio's house style. The second frame: the critical conversation's structural incentives often favor the maintenance of dominant-studio positions, in ways that have specific consequences for what the genre can become. Recognizing this allows the reader to ask sharper questions about what the conversation is actually saying. The third frame: the contemporary Korean game industry, which has been producing substantial commercial-and-creative output across multiple genres for the past decade, is one of the cultural moments the medium has not yet fully figured out how to take seriously. The next several years of releases will, on the available evidence, force the conversation to develop the vocabulary it has been refusing to develop.

The First Berserker: Khazan is, on its own terms, an accomplished Soulslike with a clear vision of what its specific contribution to the genre is supposed to be. The game is not trying to be the next FromSoftware game. The game is trying to be a different kind of entry in the broader form. The trying has produced something the genre is healthier for having received. The cultural-field dynamics that have been organizing the surrounding reception have been doing the genre a disservice, and the reader can, with the frame in hand, evaluate the game on the terms the game is actually working on rather than on the terms the dominant-studio framing has been imposing.

The next several years will produce more entries in the same pattern. The medium's relationship to the Soulslike will, by the end of the decade, have shifted from the single-studio framing the past fifteen years have maintained to the multi-studio framing the long historical record of cultural-form evolution predicts. The pattern is real. The Korean studios are the leading edge. The genre will be richer for the transition. The transition is the cultural-historical moment the reader is currently watching happen.