Stellar Blade’s Director Shuts Down Game’s Comparison With Harrison Ford’s Oscar Nominated Movie

Sony’s PS5 exclusive game Stellar Blade, which is set to be released on April 26, has created quite a buzz around it. Fans who have anticipated it for long a time can get a glimpse of the game by watching the demo that came to the PS5 last month. The demo covers around one to two hours of gameplay, covering the first chapter.

The gameplay demo starts with the female protagonist, Eve, who is a member of the 7th Airborne Squad. She, along with her teammates, is being dispatched to Earth to recover the planet from the alien race Naytiba. The demo continues until the players get to see the first boss encounter.

Stellar Blade‘s Director talks about inspiration from Blade Runner

Shift Up’s upcoming game, Stellar Blade, has over time been compared with various other games and movies that have a similar setting. To throw more light on them, game director Hyung-Tae Kim, in an interview with GamesRadar, discussed the game’s influences and inspiration.

Several fans have pointed out that Stellar Blade has some similarities with the popular Nier games. During the interview, Kim added that despite the Nier series not being an accurate match for Stellar Blade’s gameplay, he is happy that fans are drawing a comparison. Kim however added, “Nier was very important for inspiration when it came to developing our games”. 

Some have also compared Stellar Blade to Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner movie which came out in 1982 and has several nominations under its belt at the Academy Awards. During the course of an interview with IGN Japan, Kim shed more light on this comparison.

Since Kim has always been inspired by the dystopian science fiction works from the 1980s and 1990s, the team took a lot of inspiration from Harrison Ford’s sci-fi film Blade Runner, and the post-apocalyptic manga Battle Angel Alita.

Kim further added that even though the team has taken inspiration from Blade Runner, manga, and other similar games, Stellar Blade isn’t similar to any of them and the developers have worked hard to keep it unique.

Why do some think Stellar Blade to be similar to Harrison Ford’s movie?

Blade Runner, the science fiction film starring Harrison Ford, depicts a dystopian future in Los Angeles where humans are bio-engineered by a corporation to work in space colonies. When a group of these bio-engineered humans flees back to Earth, Officer Rick Deckard hesitantly agrees to track them down. Deckard was responsible for locating and decommissioning the bioengineered humanoids that illegally came to planet Earth.

Some fans might think the movie and the game are similar, as the latter might seem to have some similarity in the approach to its story and narrative.

In Stellar Blade, the humans lose a war against an alien invasion and are forced to leave their planet. These humans go on to settle in a Colony and from there, Eve and her team are sent to fight the aliens and win back Earth.

The movie and the game might look the same to some fans because both of them involve a group of advanced beings who come down to planet Earth to take control of it. In Blade Runner, the protagonist goes to fight bio-engineered humans who have descended to Earth, and in Stellar Blade, the protagonist is tasked with fighting an alien race who has taken control of planet Earth.