Hideki Kamiya has quite the CV. The co-founder and lead designer of Platinum Games has been director on some of Japan’s finest games of the last two decades. Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry, Okami and Bayonetta speak to a career making subversive, boisterous works with mechanically sharp action but rarely ones that follow a set tone or genre.

Instead, Kamiya tells me backstage at Xbox’s E3 showcase that every game is a statement of intent. “There are lots of games bouncing around in my head that I really want to make,” he says. “I don’t put priorities on them but when we started Clover Studio we wanted to make a game that was representative of what that company stood for and that was Okami. When we started Platinum that was Bayonetta.”

Platinum Games are now one of the most respected developers of action games in the world. A super-studio founded in 2006 by some of Japan’s premier designers: Kamiya, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami (since departed to found his own Tango Gameworks) and prolific producer Atsushi Inaba. With Platinum’s presence well-established, their next game is a Kamiya project straight from the heart.

“In this case, someone walked up to me and asked ‘what do you want to make next?’” Kamiya says. “It was a total free question. I didn’t have to look around at the situation, what was appropriate for the time, it was just thrown at me. So I simply said: I want to make a game with dragons.”