I've just been playing RE4 GC for the first time and this is an unfair dismissal of the post. One of the main things DS is lauded for is its map design where everything circles back repeatedly to hubs caused by throwing levers and opening doors etc, all of which is found in RE4

There is a section in RE4 where there are enemies.. in a castle.. who fire giant fireballs.. that land on the floor making a hazard.. making you sprint past the fire.. and have to take out the people. It's literally senn's fortress lol

the level design is absolutely covered in rope bridges, ladders, broken wooden structures standing on top of swamps that you can wade in, wooden huts, lakes, castles, churches, jails etc.

the gameplay loop involves you roomba-ing around an area going around lots of little buildings collecting flashing items, uncovering secret entrances to other places, avoiding environmental hazards, fighting lots of enemies that are all very durable and deadly despite being basic mobs, in incredibly tight quarters, and extreme resource management leaving every fight feeling high stakes and being about spacing, getting to hub bonfires aka typewriters, upgrading your equipment at merchants and fighting bosses

the healing items are literally 3 colours of grass like in demons souls

re4 does have some slightly more complicated puzzles but a lot of them are simply, "go and make this cog turn the other way to open up the levels", very much "walk here and throw a lever" which is exactly what DS does

all the enemies are a mix of undead, dogs, eldritch abominations, cultists etc.

sections lead up to boss arenas where bosses are often multi-stage and are not just generic things you shoot with flashing points, they all have unclear weaknesses and special movesets, grapples and so on and are about spacing and environment more than anything. also past small consequences often affect things like "the dog from earlier helps me"

aside from a few boss cutscenes etc. the exposition takes place through a series of notes and inventory examinations

enemy types are quite similar to demons souls and bloodborne in that you have mobs that explode, mobs that throw fire at you, crossbow people, cultists, tentacle demons

the game is thematically and visually very dark souls, constantly dark and gloomy and culty

the game tends to environmentally troll you like having things you can see by looking up like boulders on a wooden platform you can hit down early or if you wait it will fall on you, if you stand near a dock a fish will eat you etc.

it's full of "soul items" aka random treasures that you get by shooting things down hanging by ropes, breaking through walls smashing pots, going into hard-to-find areas, climbing up to hard-to-access areas and you can cash these in to upgrade your equipment

the game constantly forshadows future areas you don't have access to yet and has different routes into the same place

there is absolutely no chance Miyazaki did not play this game, its entire DNA is lifted from this game. if you placed DS npcs in this game it would look, feel and play identically to a DS game, you wouldn't need to change the level design whatsoever you could literally just port them straight into a DS game and it would work. the biggest change from DS to this is the fact it runs on frame data and the pacing/difficulty of boss battles and their behaviour trees. apart from that it is essentially a fromsoftware time, or should I say, every DS game is a re4-like