"The way I see Twitter, it's like going to a bar with a bunch of friends"
Scalebound's Hideki Kamiya in Platinum form.
From Resident Evil to Bayonetta, via Viewtiful Joe, Okami and Devil May Cry, Hideki Kamiya's name is all over some of the best Japanese games of the past 20 years.
But his name is also known on Twitter for a different reason.
"Do you eat sh**?" "Why haven't you made any success since your birth?" "Go ask your mother."
Put simply: Kamiya likes taking the piss out of his fans.
Not all his fans, mind, but Kamiya has gained a reputation for taking no crap. He suffers no fools, and let's be honest - on Twitter, there are many.
Act like an idiot and you'll get blocked. Say something mean about Kamiya's work and you'll get blocked. Pass by his mentions column and... well, you'll probably get blocked.
It's got to the point where there's now a Tumblr dedicated to Kamiya's best tweets and a six-year-old NeoGAF thread that still gets updated with his latest online interactions. People regularly ask to be blocked by him as a badge of honour.
In person - and he may well block me for saying this - Kamiya is quite the opposite. I met the game designer last week during a brief Microsoft presentation on Scalebound, his upcoming PC and Xbox One role-player, and found him to be warm, funny and thoughtful.
"The way I see Twitter... it's like going to a bar with a bunch of friends," Kamiya said when we got chatting about his outspoken online persona.
"In a bar, we're going to talk about anything. It's a place, a venue... I use Twitter in that manner. That's how you're going to find me there.
"But here I am, I'm responding to questions," he continued, as his nearby Platinum colleagues laughed. "I'm being a bit formal, I'm acting pretty serious here," he chuckled.
But can Kamiya's Twitter persona pop out in real life, too? Apparently yes, it most definitely can.
"Twitter Kamiya-san exists in real life, too," producer Jean-Pierre Kellams said. "If you want to bring it out in the office just give him a really stupid idea - you're either going to get no interest, just like 'move along'... or you're going to get blocked.
"Dumb ideas hit a pretty strong wall."
It was time for my dumb idea. After a question on PvP, a feature Kamiya said would have to wait until a Scalebound sequel, I asked what would come next: Scalebound 2 or Bayonetta 3?
"Or maybe it's Wonderful 102?" Kamiya laughed. "It's really whose chequebook comes out fastest. We're guns for hire."