HOME | DD
MicroGamer1 — Derpy Review #101: Demon's Souls (pt.1)
#game #review #derpy #demonssouls #soulsborne
Published: 2023-06-21 17:56:13 +0000 UTC; Views: 16168; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 1
Redirect to original
Description
Derpy Review #101: Demon's Souls (Spoilers, obviously)
(Part 1)
Micro: Before there was Elden Ring, there was Sekiro. Before there was Sekiro, there was Bloodborne. Before there was Bloodborne, there was Dark Souls, the very series that has touch the hearts to gaming in one way or another, being the influence for some series and is the most used measuring stick for dick beating mostly by journalists that thinks Prowling Magus and Congregation is impossible before they met the Soldier of Godrick. Yes, after one year since Elden Ring and me still waiting for the DLC for that to come out, we’re finally going to do a marathon of the Soulsborne series, Lord knows a certain bat girl is being giddier than a preschooler finding out she’s getting two apple juices during snack time.
Shekra: Bloodborne!~
Micro: I rest my case, though I won’t lie and say I’m not happy to finally talk about this series as well after I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about this game since we started Derpy Review, as well as dreading a bit given some of the specific games we got on the list.
Shekra: The Soulsborne series has to be one of our most favorite series of games we played, and that’s kind of saying a lot given the number of games we played and Micro’s love for Spyro, as well as games like Kingdom Hearts or Yakuza.
Micro: Very true, I will openly say that Soulsborne games is defiantly high up the list, which is funny given how many tries it takes you to convince to give the series a bigger shot as well my own free time from my beginnings of trying these games out. I’m pretty sure we didn’t say this in our Elden Ring Review, so to give a brief history of this series for me, I tried this series out a few times, like three times to be exact, and those three actually did not help me to click with the series, with my first experience being actually Dark Souls itself I think the year or two it came out one my Xbox 360, to which I rented for like a day and immediately return it as, yes you can guess, I found the game far too difficult for my liking, though to be fair, I was still in high school back then I think it was and I was heavily limited on when I could play games and so didn’t want to invest that much time into the game. As for my second or third experience, ironically enough for given the context of one them being one of my favorite games in the whole series, I invested a lot of time into the two other games, like a good few weeks for both, but I ended up dropping them both, mostly out of frustration, burning out and wanting to try out stuff out at the same time, one of these game actually being Bloodborne itself.
Shekra: And I couldn’t blame you in the slightest, my first time trying the series really was hit or miss for me as I was pretty much like Micro with the series, however, after wanting to see the ending, as well as looking up walkthroughs, yes even we due that, bite me, I manage to get to the ending of one of these games, Dark Souls 3 actually, and the series just click for me enough that I wanted to see the other games to the very end as well, even if there were a bunch of sections in these games that made me want to rip my wings off. And after finishing the series, I convinced Micro to the series out.
Micro: Well, it also helped that you taught me some much needed things I needed to know about these games, as well as showed me a bunch of boss videos and top ten stuff with the series that made me want to fight the boss. But because of that, much like Shekra, I can’t help but love the series, and we can’t be more happy to finally start this Soulsborne marathon, but not with the game that most people would probably be everyone’s first Soulsborne game of the series, but with the game that started it all, Demon’s Souls, series why the hell is it spell like that and not just Demon Souls, but oh well. That right, we’re starting with the granpappy of this series as we talk about every Soulsborne game that we haven’t talked about yet since we already talked about Elden Ring, six games total, from Demon’s Souls to the game we feel like would be the best to be ending this marathon on. But first thing first, Shekra, if you’ll do the honors.
Shekra: Demon’s Souls, a title is a major staple to the Soulsborne series with many mechanics and idea that were in this game that would help give later games their own identities, all thanks to FromSoftware and one man that help make this series for what it is, for better or worse, that being Hidetaka Miyazaki. Thanks to games like Dark Souls, the series helped to be a major influence some people such as the series getting references here and there in other series like there being a easter egg of the series in the Fallout game, to the series being a major influence to some developers in one way or another, such as the Surge, Code Vien, or Hollow Knight, which at least with this marathon we finally get an excuse to finally try the latter of the games after we got the game like two years ago. However, before we talk about Demon’s Souls, we should talk about another first that if you’ve been in the Soulsborne community long enough, then you most certainly heard of one name that some fans like to refer to as the actual series that most like help made the Soulsborne series as it is, and that being a series call King’s Field. Now, I don’t know anything about this series except it’s a lot older and has a lot more games than I thought, ranging from seven games to what I look up that started in the 1990s to 2006, with these games being made by FromSoft themselves. From what very little I bother to look up the series, its defiantly and old series, with it being a medieval fantasy game. We would’ve tried to maybe see about finding any of these games for a future Derpy Review, but given some of these games are barely old enough to drink and vote, I doubt we would have a easy time finding any of them in decent condition.
Micro: An idea for the future if we bother to, but not any time soon, but who knows, maybe there might be some weird port of the series in like GOG given that’s where I managed to complete the Legacy of Kain series a month ago.
Shekra: And back to Demon’s Soul, it has a bit of a rather interesting development history itself, as you’d think that the series as popular as the Soulsborne series that it created the term Soulsborne genre, Demon’s Souls would also be very popular at the beginning just like every other game after it, except that isn’t entirely the case. Yes, Demon’s Souls is still a one of the more belove games in the series, however, back when this game was released in 2009, the game sold well enough with it being a PS3 exclusive, but it still wasn’t exactly great in terms of sells from what I remember hearing about, and that’s no thanks one specific company that wasn’t exactly doing a great job marketing, cough, Sony, cough. Sony being Sony and having somebody that plays like a GameGrump for seeing how difficult this game can be, Sony was very hesitant to even have this game localized to the west as they saw the series as a very niche that wouldn’t get a good enough audience, a decision that Sony themselves would admit they regret thinking. As for the development of the series, interesting enough from what I tried to look up, Miyazaki wasn’t the first guy to run the project of the game as FromSoft was having difficult trying to figure out what the game was supposed to be in the first, but due to a lack of coherent vision of this project, as well as the team finding high fantasy games a failure to them, which maybe from how previous fantasy games FromSoft made has sold is probably what had them think like this, needless to say the project wasn’t getting off the ground. It wasn’t until Miyazki himself heard of the project and personally wanted to take the challenge of running the project, and much to the benefit of Miyazaki, FromSoft figures they got nothing to lose if the title does sell well and let Miyazaki move the game to any direction he wanted. Thanks to Miyazaki allow to do what he wants, he works with the fantasy idea still as he wanted to make a dark fantasy game, thanks to his inspiration of European folklore and mythology, with the game getting its soundtrack from one Shunsuke Kida, a composer that for some baffling reason, I can’t find anything else about the guy’s work outside of Demon’s Souls, not even on Wikipedia. That said, there were still some issues in development that Miyazaki had to work around with to get what he wanted as he still has to deal with Sony. One of the issues being multiplayer that Miyazaki had difficulty explaining to Sony how it works exactly, all while he still wanted the game to be a single player experience with only multiplayer enhancing the single player experience instead feeling like its needed to beat the game, the concept of multiplayer in this game being actually based on Miyazaki’s experience on the road one time as he witness groups of people helping one car on a very snowy day to get it moving, no, I’m not making that up. The other issue that Miyazaki had to deal with was the difficulty, more specifically, how the Souls mechanic works, to which if you read our review of Elden Ring or play the game, then you know this as the Rune mechanic where you beat enemies, you gain rune to use as experience or currency but lose all of it if you die once and permanently lose it if you die again before you could collect. Miyazaki had to be as quiet as he could around Sony, no doubt because he had to know that if Sony understood how the mechanic works, they would’ve made him change it just to lower the difficulty of the game, especially after this one idea that got scrapped because the team found it going too far in making the game difficult, that being there being a perma death mechanic, to which, thank God and Christ this idea wasn’t put into the game cause I think that would’ve been the nail that would’ve made people not like this series at all. It’s funny, cause when looking up this game and its difficulty, its been said by Miyazaki that he didn’t mean for the game to be as hard as it came out, as he only wanted to make a challenging and very rewarding experience for players to have.
Micro: Which I’m calling 100% bulls$%t on as there is no way in hell you didn’t mean to make the game as hard as it is without being this meticulous of level design, enemy placement and where some certain lizards that we’ll get into later are place.
Shekra: Right, well, that aside, the game did sell well enough at the time to at least validate a sequel, to which we already know that so call sequel would in fact be the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls of it being Dark Souls. I highly recommend this video by a Youtuber named Matt McMuscles call Demon’s Souls – What Happened? as it does a far great job in going into bigger details of how Demon’s Souls’s development went and how it performed on the PS3. However, obviously, if you’ve been playing games a lot in recent years, you know already that Demon’s Souls didn’t stay as a PS3 relic as in 2020, the world was revisited by the kingdom of Boletaria as thanks to a developer studio by the name of Bluepoint Games, Demon’s Souls got a remake……. For the PS5 during the time when scalpers were at full throttle of grabbing every console before anyone could have a fraction of a chance to grab any of them.
Micro: And people won’t be shedding a single tear for the pricks that ended up losing so much profit from doing this crap since like me a bunch of people were extremely patient on Sony’s end to get their asses in gear of actually making more of the damn consoles. Its also because of both the scalpers and Sony’s lack of getting s$%t done is why it taken us two years to ever think about doing a Soulsborne review as I wanted to get the PS5 so we could play the remake, blue balled for two years but was worth it in the end to finally play this game.
Shekra: Back to Bluepoint, if their name sounds familiar in some ways, well, that’s because these guys have been around for quite a lot longer than you’d think, as in 2006, to which these guys has been making games, or should I be more accurate to say that they’ve been handling games. As it turns out, Bluepoint were the people that handle HD collection on some of the more popular games with these HD collection ports being well, with the collections being that of the Uncharted series, God of War series, Metal Gear Series, and the Ico & Shadow of the Colossus games, the last of which being really important to Bluepoint Games as they would in fact make a remake of Shadow of the Colossus. Given how successful that game has been, I guess it was warrant enough for Sony to think that Bluepoint Game could handle making a full out remake of Demon’s Souls.
Micro: Which is in fact the very version of this title that we will be looking at. Hey, I had to wait a long time to play this version, so we’re talking about it, but I should say that we will try to look at the PS3 version in some points of the review as there is still points to the PS3 that makes that version worth playing as much as the PS5 version, more so if you still don’t have a PS5 but still have the PS3, hell, in fact, if you reeeaaallly want to play this Demon’s Souls at least on the PS3 version, there is a emulator for the PS3 version that is actually functional from what I saw people playing with online, just don’t bother asking me how to run the emulator. With that said, before we finally start this marathon with the grand pappy that started the series, one little thing we should mentioned about how this marathon is going to work is that we’ll be looking at the titles in order of release except to the final two reviews, as well be looking at this game first, then Dark Souls, then two, then Sekiro, and we’re leaving the final two for Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, however, we’re not sure which of the two to end this series on.
Shekra: The reason why we’re doing this order is mostly because we love Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne over the rest of the series, however, when it comes to the last game of the marathon itself, we’re conflicted on either ending the marathon with the game I wanted to play so much for such a long time, Bloodborne, or we end the marathon on Dark Souls 3 as that game has a bunch of Micro’s most favorite bosses in the series with one particular boss that even I have to agree that it’s the boss that is the living embodiment of what Soulsborne is all about that ends the Dark Souls series. We’ll most likely will decide which of the two to end the series on once we’re done with Sekiro, but for now, that’s all we want to let you guys know of how we’re doing the marathon.
Micro: And that’s finally it for the explanation of a lot of things, sorry if this introduction was a significantly longer rambling than usual, but we figure we set things right given how much we love these games and would at least want to try to convince some people who never touch the Soulsborne series to at least look up videos of the series to see why fans of the series love these games so much. And with that, its finally time to start with Demon’s Souls.
Shekra: Spoilers are abound!
Micro: Well, first thing first, we got to find the f$%king plot once again.
Story and Characters:
Micro: On the first day, man was granted a soul, and thus was given clarity. On the second day, God said “f$%k you” to man and dump demons to ravage the land.
Shekra: Way to take piss on the story as usual, Micro.
Micro: Happy to do so.
Shekra: In the land of Boletaria, the land was thriving thanks to the power of Soul Arts, the magical arts of channeling souls that brought lot of knowledge and power to the land, and helped it prosperous. That is until one day a colorless fog swept in and soon the land was ravage by a scourge of demons that was killing people left and right while consuming souls, all no thanks to a powerful demon called the Old One, a demon with unfathomable powers that it was incomprehensible, making lesser man go mad just from the sight of it as unleashed demons to rip the land asunder and wiping human population. However, thanks to people sacrificing their humanity to become monumentals, and using Soul arts before forbidding it later, manage to lull the Old One into slumber. After the words, the land was split to six regions with whatever human managing to survive the scourge would live to help Boletaria thrive again, Boletaria Palace itself with its leader being King Allant, the Tower of Latria with its wise queen, Stonefang were miners and crafters rules, the Storm Shrine where pegans could worship a god of storms and heroes were buried and mourned, the Valley of Defilement is California, and finally the Northern region were giants once thrived in peace, with these six location erecting Archstones so each land are connected to one another by one central area, the Nexus. The Nexus a hub in a realm between reality and death that serves to hold souls that could travel back to the ethereal planes in hopes of getting their body back. But more importantly, the Nexus is also the very location that is hovering above the Old One, keeping the demonic being on hold as it slumbers…. Until one day that all came crashing done. Wanting to bring eternal wealth to his kingdom, King Allant brought back the use of Souls Art, which has awakened the Old One and soon the colorless fog once again swept the land with demons ravaging the land, and to make matters worse, King Allant has given himself wholly to the Old One for power. And now Boletaria is another horrific scourge as demons are killing and consuming once again, the sane has gone mad and attacking everyone, heroes and legends are either dying or have been corrupted by the demons, and the six regions are now in turmoil. Boletaria Palace is devasted by demons and dragons, Stonafang has awaken until horrific creatures that turn the miens into their home, Latria is now a HP Lovecraft home nightmare, the undead rises and rules over the Storm Shrine, the Valley of Defilement is still California but with part of Portland as well, and the Northern Region was wiped out with their Archstone destroyed.
Micro: Which is where you come in as you play Derp Demon Slayer, some idiot that decided to be one of many that decided to try their luck through the fog and fight the demonic horde. After setting up my character, I go through the tutorial level and fight the skinniest TikToker before being teleported to a different location where I get some goodies and I got b$%ch punch by a dragon god and am eating dirt and die, great start.
Shekra: And because you die, now your soul is trapped in the Nexus and even if you somehow get your body back, you can’t leave, not while the Old One is awake.
Micro: And after having to deal with the real tutorial level where you can’t even level up till you beat the first actual boss, no I’m not joking, the waifu in black 1.0 and this monument child that you’ll forget exists after the first time you talk to it ask you to help them put the Old Prick back to sleep, which means having to kill King Allant himself. And that’s pretty much it in terms of how the actual main plot of this game, Demon’s Soul has to be the most straight forward of the plot out of the series as you are given pretty much everything you need to know about the world right off the bat in the game with it being rather very simple to get an idea of what’s going on.
Shekra: I wouldn’t say that, as there still a lot of things you’ll only understand what’s going on only if you go out of your way to once again, or the first time in the series I guess, look at item descriptions, talk to NPCs multiple times, and finally visual storytelling, which this game does a very good job of doing to be honest while still being able to be vague enough of something to not give a definitive answer to, one example being the first level of the game where you can see a dragon nest and if you are stupid enough to march into the very center of it to grab a particular ring, you may get an idea of one of the more important characters of this game may have die in this spot.
Micro: That maybe true, but let’s be honest, you’re mostly talking about of what’s happening per each region we visit as the real thing we need to know is more or less straight up told to us by the two characters I mentioned and the intro cutscene itself.
Shekra: Alright, I’ll give you that one.
Micro: That’s not to say the world isn’t still interesting, as there is still a bunch of things of Boletaria that I still finding very interesting, though its mostly with how each region is design that I’ll get into more with the game play section. That aside, I like how each region you visit either has its own story and myth to tell that is distinct to that region, such as the mythos of a character call Big M being a mighty warrior that punches dragons with his fist that you can find before the world 2 second boss, as well as the idea two characters you’ll be visiting a bunch to repair you equipment might have to ancestry towards Big M. But the one I like more is this little part where some characters you’ll talk to, Biorr and Ostrava, holds deep loyalty to King Allant, however, even they know something is incredibly wrong with the King, even more so as Biorr gets locked up in Boletaria palace and Ostrava is constantly getting attack, yet even when we all know including himself that Ostrava is way out of his league to be venturing into this hellhole, he still wants to know the truth as he doesn’t want to believe that his dad would do all of this. Which now brings up something about the characters in this game. Um, if you saw our Elden Ring review, you’d know that one of the things we loved in that game are the characters you can meet and talk to and be invested to know more about the deeper into the game you get, as well as get ready for some gut punch moment when ya boi Blaidd gets the old yeller treatment.
Shekra: For the characters in this game….. well, let’s just say that you’ll like several characters, but not because of their personality but more because of what they can do for you. Yeah, there will be characters that you may genuinely like, like Stockpile Thomas as he is willing to hold your items for you out of pure kindness, but there really isn’t much to know about almost every character in this whole game. Yes, some characters will get more attention in depth than others, but it can still be a footnote worth of knowing anything about a good chunk of the characters. Not even the Maiden in Black, the probably most interesting character in the whole game given how she is said to have been one of, if not the most, powerful demon out there given she herself is capable of putting the Old One to sleep and can manipulate souls, with her being the one you go to level up.
Micro: The only thing you’ll be getting out of these guys is some footnote lore of certain locations, some specific characters, and Boletaria, but more importantly, the importance of Soul Arts and how its both used and viewed as. Besides that, having fun trying to find any character that will leave a very long last impression on you besides Stockpile Thomas, and Patches, you magnificent dick, how’s the ass kicking going? But let’s be perfectly honest, if you’re going to go into this game, it’s not because of the character or the story, it’s because of the game design and visual story telling.
Shekra: Not that it stops you from wanting to drop a bit of what you’re doing just so you could go out of your way to got to world 1-3 to rescue Yuria, simp.
Micro: Hey, she knows some of the best spells in the game that can f$%k a lot of enemies up.
Shekra: Simp.
Micro: ….. ok, maybe I am for the witches in these games.
Gameplay:
Micro: Alright, now we get to the real meat of the review. If you read our Elden Ring Review, then might be thinking that you know what you’re in for already, and that’s mostly true as Soulsborne game tends to not be that drastically different to each other in terms of how they function with the exception of two games. However, we’re playing the grand pappy of Soulsborne games people, which means that this is the game that started a lot of things that later games would adapt and refine, and boy does this game sure at times know how to feel like the first game of the series. Unlike Elden Ring, we don’t have a massively open world that we could get lost in just the first area of the game for literal dozens of hours at least, no horse to ride on, hell, we can’t even jump in this game.
Shekra: We’re going to try our hardest to not repeat in each game of this marathon of what you can do that other games share, but for the sake of this marathon and because its been a year since we did the Elden Ring review, a refresher of what you can do in these games is probably needed. Much like Elden Ring, you have classes that each has their own states and prefer weaponry, however, you’ll later find that you can still use other weapons as long you can have the states to use them. There’s two forms of combat, melee and magic, and its as simple as it sounds where you use melee weaponry to give enemies all while everything you do uses a stamina bar, swinging your weapon, drawing bows, dodge rolling out of the enemy’s way into off to a cliff, everything. As for magic, you actually have two types of magic in this game, regular magic and faith, the major difference being that one uses spells that are more offensive while faith is more supporting and defensive from what I’ve seen of both spells and miracles. You also got plenty of armors and rings and other items you can get to deck yourself out with to help with whatever combat style you’re comfortable with, want to be a dodge rolling little gremlin that is annoying for enemies to hit, put on some light armor or no armor at all as much as you want, want to be a tanky sponge by can dish out the punishment, slap on some of the heaviest armor that makes you look ridiculous to dodge around but enemies won’t be laughing long the second you slam a slab of iron into their heads. You can even upgrade your weapons to make them more effective to which can also affect the weapons to make them scale even higher to some states. And beating enemies gives you souls, which are both currency and experience points to use with certain NPC to get items or level yourself up with the Maiden in Black, but you’ll lose all your souls if you die and if you don’t retrieve them from where you die and die again, they’re gone permanently and you’re back to grinding on enemies for more souls. And yes, multiplayer is still a thing in this game where you either summon other players to help you, are invaded by players that you have to fight, or the opposite where you’re invading them, which should mentioned that even in offline mode, you’ll be invaded by NPCs.
Micro: Alright, so from what Shekra just said, this makes Demon’s Souls sound like Elden Ring but without the open world section and a horse, so surely that means if you’d survive Elden Ring then Demon’s Souls shouldn’t be a problem right. Well, to be honest, I won’t fault you for thinking it as I have mentioned this to some people that if you want to get into the Soulsborne series, then one of the games to try out would have to actually be this game, however, if you go into this game thinking you’ll be in a breeze of a time, then you’re going to get one hell of a reality check as you’ll be reminded that you’re playing on Demon’s Souls rules now. We’re back in the beginning of this series where there is no such thing as Ashes of Wars where you can have weapons that have some special powerful ability, we’re back where weapons are either regular weapons or have passive buffs that will help only if you know how to properly utilize it fully. There’s no a whole pharmacy of items that will have great buffs that you can grab from enemies, you’re using items that will help heal your health, restore magic, get rid of poison and minor items that can be use for combat. Demon’s Souls is its own beast in the series people, so if you go into this game, prepare to learn that very quickly.
Shekra: While Demon’s Souls might be looked at as another Soulsborne game, there are a bunch of things that easily distinguish Demon’s Souls from the rest of the series. For starters, Demon’s Souls is more or less the most linear of these game to how level structure is built in this game in that you have five regions to explore, but none of them connect to other regions except through the Nexus, which is the main hub of the game, and each region you visit except for the first one has three areas to go through that is rather very formulaic while the first area has four areas. For the formulaic part when exploring the other regions, the first two areas will always be you trying to explore the areas, fighting enemies left and right while being careful as you can before you finally get to the end of the area where you have to fight a boss, to which it should be point out that unlike Elden Ring that would have at times these friendly checkpoints that makes it significantly easier to just walk to the boss room if you die in there, if you die any point of the area, you are sent back to the beginning of the area as there is no checkpoints at all. The only checkpoints you get with each region is at the beginning of the area and the end of the area after you beat a boss, to which the third and final area of most of the regions you’ll be fighting will only just have a final region boss room that you can simply walk to after you fight the second boss. That said, Demon’s Souls will be a punishing game to a point as if you treat some enemies as a joke as you explore areas, you’ll quickly find how fast your health will drop to zero even from the most basic of enemies.
Micro: If there is one major thing I can say about Demon’s Souls, it can possibly be one of the rougher games to get into the series, more so if you tried to play this game AFTER you played any other game after this one. Where to properly begin with what I just said? Starting with certain mechanic, you’ll be familiar with the concept of equipment weight where the heavy the armor you have the harder it is to move around, that’s in this game, however, one of the more annoying things to also deal with in this game is that you have to also deal with item load, where you can carry so many items at once before you have to drop stuff off, which is where Stockpile Thomas comes in as he’s the guy you’ll be talking to the most to drop things off, and you’ll be talking to him a lot as plenty of items in this game will heavy as hell. Which is score one for the remake as it help rectify the item load problem a lot simply by making it to where if you’re full of items you can just send whatever item to storage without having to leave the area to drop things off, which thank God because the mechanic of enemies that you killed comes back to life the second you either die or move to a different location is still in this game. Some people will say that breaks a lot of the emersion of Demon’s Souls or lowers Thomas’s value by a lot, but I’ll take really much needed helpful convenience over very annoying emersion anytime of the goddamn day. Besides that, back to the weight thing, hope you like investing leveling up states on endurance cause endurance, and I think strength to some point, is the only way you’ll be having your character to not only be able to run anywhere in this game without having the stamina of chain-smoker, but as well the main means to wear and hold heavier weapons armor while being more mobile than a fat guy trying to run away from a salad bar. Then you got the equipment itself, or I should say what you’re limited to wearing as you got the usual four slots for armor stuff, pants, gloves, hats, you got the gist, but weapons, you only get two slots per arm, two type of arrows and bolts, five quick items to use, and two rings…… yes, the last part is what annoys me the most about the equipment set up, as I find very annoying to have only to be wearing two damn rings, especially because, and let’s be perfectly honest for those of us that have played this game, you’re going to be actually using one optional ring because the first ring is going to be locked to one specific ring, that being the cling ring. What’s so special of the cling ring exactly, you might be wondering? Well, keep wondering for maybe a few minutes before I talk about that particular mechanic that this game is known for, because I want to talk about the controls in this game. This is no disrespect to Demon’s Souls, but this game can feel very janky at times and that’s all due to how your character moves with anything. The character at times feel rather stiff, both at walking around areas and fighting enemies, there’s something that makes the character feel like he’s cover in syrup at times as there are some moments here and there the character feels like they’re doing everything slower than he should be, walking, dodge rolling, using healing items for crying out loud, and the biggest offensive, climbing ladders where I swear to God the ladder climbing part of this game is so painfully slow on purpose mostly as a joke towards Metal Gear Solid 3 even when some ladders are only two feet higher than the character. As for combat, I’m not going to explain how combat works, you should already know what a sword and a giant “No Horny” club can to a creature’s skull, but when it comes to combat in this game, like I said, it can feel janky at times, the character swing the sword so off looking, enemies can at times feel extremely sporadic in some moments while dumb as rocks in another, some weapons look well in combat while just doesn’t look right when use, take the halberd for example, tried it one time in the original in I swear my character thought he was using the thing to poke a sausage in a tiny arc instead of swinging the thing like a actual weapon at times. And there is more problems about the combat to bring up, some people in the community love to brag about not using shields in the series, but have fun trying to say that s$%t in this game cause I swear Demon’s Souls demand that you have a shield no matter what you want to do, and that’s either because of either specific enemies or how the levels are made. Obviously, there are going to be enemies that will want you to have a shield at times so you can block some attacks here and there, or not as you could just simply move out of their way, it’s the level design on the other hand that will make you want to keep a shield with you at all times throughout this whole game. We’ll go more of what we think of the levels in a bit, but for now, there are a bunch of areas in this game that you’ll find yourself in tight areas with next to no spots to move to simply avoid damage, times you’ll swing a corner and a enemy is right there to sucker punch you in the face, or the worse of it being that you are walking through a very narrow area only for a trap to be activate and you better have a shield or you’ll be skewer to death if you don’t have even remotely high enough vitality to live. And dying in this game can be very easy at times either because of certain level design or how punishing some enemies will be at times, some more bulls$%t than others. Which now brings up the main reason I brought up the cling ring in the first place because of one of the mechanics in this game when you die, that being you’re stuck in Soul form. Here’s the major difference about human form and Souls form, human form you have all your health and you can do multiplayer if you really want, though this game is honestly more certain towards singleplayer that if you add a second player into the mic of things unless they’re the invader, you pretty much just broke the boss and enemies of this game already and that’s without using magic, but more on that later. As for Soul form, you don’t get to use multiplayer stuff, but worse of all, you only get half of you health from now on until you either beat a boss or use a item to get back to human form, which brings up the cling ring as this thing will boost your max soul form health to about 70% of your real health instead of fifty. You might be thinking at this point, “Ok, souls form sounds awful and I would like the second ring to not be use to keep me alive slightly longer by given me a percentage of my max health but on something potentially more useful, so I’ll just use something to go back to human form, and if I die again, I’ll just use human form again.” Except you may want to heavily reconsider that idea once I tell you of the main mechanic that is exclusive in this game and thank God for me that its not in any of the other Soulsborne game, that being world tendency. World tendency is kind of stupid to be honest, mostly because of how poor the game explains this damn feature as well as how annoying it can be to manipulate it if you are completely on your own. Here’s how world tendency works, your actions in each area of each region will affect each region that you do said actions in, whatever the actions being will lead to either white or black tendency, how both work is rather painfully simple, in white tendency, enemies are easier to beat and some parts of the world are actually for real reason are open up while you can also encounter certain NPCs, whereas with black tendency, the same thing about paths and NPC are apply, but enemies are harder to fight but give out more souls. You might be wondering that besides more souls, why in the world you want black tendency, well, that’s because exclusive items and demons, which you need the latter in order to get some spells, can be only found in black world tendency. However, it’s the manipulating part of these tendency that’s really stupid about this mechanic as there are several factors to take account, for starters, to shift things to white tendency, you have to beat the boss, simple as that, but for black tendency, you shift the tendency per each world if you either die as a human in the region or kill a NPC that’s not invading you. As you can guess, getting black tendency is so much easier to get if you keep using human form, while if you’re trying get pure white tendency, you have to either do your hardest to not die in human form and kill almost every boss in the region to shift to pure white tendency, or do what everyone else do and go kill yourself in the nexus as it doesn’t affect tendency at all and stay in soul form otherwise you’re f$%k.
Shekra: This is where multiplayer shines in this game as this is what you use to help shift tendency significantly easier to white tendency as all you have to do is keep killing invaders to shift it to pure white, or die to them will shift it black as dumb as that sounds. That said, one major problem for multiplayer that should be stated now, if you’re hoping to use it on the PS3, you can forget it, the servers for it were shut down years ago and so there is no way you’ll be able to use at all. Which is another score for the remake, as this version is of course recent which means servers are up and even though its been a few years, the multiplayer of this game should still be strong enough to play with someone, I think, of course Micro didn’t want to fork over cash to play multiplayer with this game. That said, I wanted to say this sooner when Micro was ranting about the jankiness with the PS3 version of the game, but a lot of the janky feel that Micro was talking about in the PS3 version has been more or less refine in the remake, in fact, if you want a definitive version in terms of mechanics, pick the remake as the game really did some better quality improvements of this game. For starters, of course this being a remake, the graphics is going to get a major overhaul and I have to say the graphics are rather gorgeous, I know we don’t talk about graphics much, but holy cow a lot of the location, that isn’t in a cave, looks breath taking, even when some of it is ruins of Boletaria, I feel like I’m looking at a painting half of the time while wondering what the graphical overhaul can look like in Bloodborne. But back to the more important part, mechanics, or more specifically, combat in this game feels much more fluid than the PS3 version, your attacks don’t looks a bit awkward with some weapons, rolling is easier to work with in this game as I found out recently that the original was rather limited of how it worked, some mechanics like parrying is a bit stricter than the original version, but your actions still feel faster than the original, especially the ladder. Should say this now, this game isn’t anywhere near as fast pace in terms of combat like Elden Ring, Bloodborne or especially Sekiro, how that is something I say is great about Demon’s Souls. Yes, there are moments that some weapon swings or attack animation feel slower than it should, but I enjoy the combat in this game, you really feel the weight of both your attack and the enemy’s when you fight, your action really matters a lot of you are very committed to what you do next, you aren’t dodge rolling like a hedgehog because some enemies have anime like attack speed, magic isn’t as flashy as in much later games, but they are still powerful with the cost of you need a moment to cast the spell while being close enough to the enemies where you still need to think of when is the right time to cast a spell given that you will not have something to make spells absurdly broken as you fire a giant kamehame blast at a building all while the same can be said about enemies. This game is punishing, but its punishing if you try to blow past enemies and underestimating enemies, seriously, you can easily die from the most basic of grunts from the very first level of the game.
Micro: Which brings up something I wanted to say about this game in terms of where I if I would recommend this game to others that want to try the Soulsborne series, and here’s the thing about Demon’s Souls I find it, its possibly the roughest game in the series, but its probably the easiest game in the series to get into. I know I sound like I’m bashing this game in terms of mechanics, but no, I’m not joking when I say that Demon’s Souls might be one of the easiest Soulsborne game in the series. Yes, this game will no doubt kick your ass no matter what, but this game still has a bunch of things that can help you break this game. Melee is simple to grasp in this game, enemies give good enough telling of their attacks to know when to either block or dodge out of the way, the tools you get might look basic to some extend but they get the job done a lot more than you think that you’ll be relying on some items more than you’d think you would. Parrying in this game, is rather stupid in the best way in that its one of the most forgiving parrying system in the series, don’t even f$%king lie those that play this game, you know I’m right about it, especially when countering the enemy by striking the enemy almost immediately after you parry them or back stab which is so easy to do in this game will cause a lot of damage to even the girthiest of enemies. You don’t have some magical refilling healing bottle that is limited but refills a lot of your health, but you get several types of grass that can heal you and you can carry so much grass in your pocket that Snoop Dogg will wants your number And there’s no way I could talk about this game being the easiest of the series without mentioning how powerful magic is in this game. As Shekra said, you’re not going to see anime level bulls$%t flash of magic in this game, if anything, some spells will make you look like a dork tossing a beanbag while saying “lightning bolt”, but magic can be very punishing towards both you and at enemies as magic can do a great amount of damage. Not mentioned that casting spells can be very forgiving to a point in that you have a regular magic bar and it can be easy to find items to refill magic, hell, you can get rings that can regenerate magic to a soul degree as well as health, and slap in the Adjudicator’s shield on your back and you just made it hard to die immediately in some location, especially if you dump a lot of points into magic. And some of you might be thinking that you don’t want to cast spells and prefer fighting in close combat, guess what, Crescent Falchion+1, world 4-1, right at the beginning, still dump points into magic and upgrade to melee sword, you’re welcome.
Shekra: Combat in Demon’s Souls is very easy to understand, and while its not as flashy future games, fighting is still very rewarding in this game when overcome some challenges, and that is most likely due to how the game wants you to play your first time. If you go into this game and try to bum rush things, you’re going to get destroyed like a pathetic joke, but if you take your time with the game, learning a ounce of patience, you’ll be surprise of how fast you’ll be able to take on enemies in whole areas as you navigate areas, avoiding some traps that actually are more obvious the more you look at it or think about your location. While most Soulsborne games rewards patience and learning to look at your surroundings or learn to take a hint of paying attention to the items you find, Demon’s Souls really rewards patience as the game will have some moments where you could use your surroundings to your advantage instead of the other way around. Prime example in the first world area, you’re navigating a narrow area at the edge that looks over a bridge and there are several enemies in the way, however, before that, you see a container of boulders and if you hit it in the right spot, you can make the boulders roll over and kill the enemies without having to fight them yourselves. This may sound painfully simple, but once you do it, you slowly realize of the massive benefits of understand the locations you are in, using bottomless pits to trick enemies to fall into, using narrow passage to make enemies to have a difficult time hitting you even with the most powerful of spells, use hazards back at enemies to kill them first before they may have a chance to fight back, or even use the advantage that you’re an a area that the enemy can even reach you no matter what to snipe some arrows or spells to kill them from a very save distance so you don’t have to worry about them once you walk over to their location. Demon’s Souls is very punishing to very reckless people, but it can be extremely rewarding cautious and patient players, and that’s something I really like about this game. Other games more or less do the same thing as well in their own way, but Demon’s Souls I think perfected in a way that you might not see in the other games than you’d would think, and the remake really help drive this point out the most given the refinement to the combat in this game which makes me picks the remake over the original.
Micro: I agreed a lot on that statement, and there is another thing we haven’t mentioned much yet and that is the level design of this game. Demon’s Souls is the most unique of the Soulsborne games in that you don’t have a massive world that connects to each other even the slightest like say Dark Souls or Bloodborne, hell even Elden Ring finds way to connect one side of the world to the other side unlike this game. In this game, the only thing connecting each region you go through is the Nexus as it’s the hub world of the game, but other than that, something Shekra mentioned, you have three areas to explore for four regions and four for the first, with nothing looping to each other then say the teleporting archstones. Not to mentioned, something I notice is how shockingly short these levels can honestly be than you would also think, you’re first time playing this game at least expect to spend at least thirty hours in this game exploring the whole game, but when I play it for this review and it helps that I played this game a few times to this point already, each area can be beaten in like an hour, less for some levels, and I’m not talking about the third area for each regions that are just a final boss arena. No, I’m not also joking about the level lengths for most of this game as I was looking at my clock whenever I have to check on when to stop for something and I would notice that at times the level can be quickly beat if you at least good with the combat, with the only thing that makes the level longer if its because of I got beaten by a enemy, fall to my death like a dumbass, or something really stupid, but even when I explore everywhere for either some goodies or maybe a shortcut to make it easier to get to the boss just in case I wiff it like a moron in the fight, exploring these levels when you play cautiously can take no time at all. That said, I can’t help but love the level design for about most of the game, every level feels almost well made to what they were made for. Boletaria Palace is magnificent medieval location with design of the buildings, the long ass bridge of burnt corpses, and the center location where the palace itself looks beautiful despite the ruin condition its in. Stonefang tunnel is mostly a mine location where it can get very boring, but when you’re not looking at the mine part of the region, it can either look cool and intimidating or cool in general. Tower of Lotria is Lovecraft horror fest and I love the location, and it has no doubt the biggest Berserk influence in the whole game, you cannot convince that Miyazaki took some inspiration from the Conviction Arc of Berserk and use the Tower of Conviction as something to help shape this whole area. Which I should mentioned this now about Miyazaki, guy is a big nerd for fictional fantasy, Beserk being one of the most obvious examples given how much that series helped shaped a lot of the Soulsborne series to the point you just need to see a giant sword in a Soulsborne game and you can possibly think of Guts, but the other obvious fantasy series no doubt Miyazaki is a fan of is Dungeons and Dragons as one enemy you will see mindflayers, monsters that you might think is HP Lovecraft, but is actually from D&D, which might not mean much given that HP Lovecraft is still a influence for the creature and Bloodborne, but the point still stands. Anyways, back to Lotria, I like this place a lot with how disturbing it is as it gets worse the deeper into the region you go, from the first area being this oppressive horrible dungeon to a location where you not only have to deal with man made evil but natural evil as you deal with horrific magical experiments while having to go through the swamp. Storm Shrine has to be my favorite location in the game with how it looks with its rainy location, but at the same time, you got to deal with third biggest bane of a Soulsborne player’s existence, rolling skeletons, get use to these guys, you’ll be seeing them in a lot of Soulsborne games. And as for the Valley of Miyazaki’s hatred for gamers, f$%k this place with a nuke. I know the point of this area is to be a wastefilled dumpster of a location with plaques, the sick and the typical dips$%ts the obsess about complaining of toxicity of whatever, but doesn’t mean I have to like this place, its dark as f$%k that I had to turn the brightness on the game a lot just to see anything, its home to Miyazaki’s favorite type of lake with next to no land to step on so you aren’t getting HIV every two seconds, home to some of the more annoying enemies to deal with, and I can’t go through this location without feeling like I need six showers. Anyone who says Blighttown is the worst locations in Soulsborne history is it being a disease cesspool clearly never even played this game, come back to me when you go through that island with the three giants and then we’ll compare which version of ebola is worse.
Shekra: Besides whatever the heck Micro said at the end there, I really love the location as well, with Tower of Lotria being my favorite as I love the gothic architecture of the place. But the other thing I really love about the level designs is something that goes back to what I said about the game being very rewarding to players if you take the time to be cautious and patient while also taking the time to explore the world. You see, the worlds being constructed the way they are can be very beneficial to the players for multiple of reasons as you don’t have to do all of one region in one go. For example, let’s say after you beat the first area of Boletaria Palace since it’s the mandatory first stage you have to complete first before you could do any other stages of the game, and you decided to try the Valley of Defilement for whatever reason, you’ll notice the enemies are incredibly weak and don’t give much souls, but their poison feel way too much for you to bear. Well, instead of keep doing the level, how about go to another level, like say Tower of Lotria or Storm Shrine and while in the middle of the levels, you find items that either give you regenerative benefits, poison resistance, or give you magic refills, its there that you can put two and two together and realize that you can go back to the Valley of Defilement with these items and with your skills hopefully improve you’ll be having a easier time using items or even magical spells or miracles as miracles can also be a godsend to you with some miracles healing you or removing poison. Then there’s the other thing that I love about not only this game but other Soulsborne games that we mentioned is that some items can help give a story without letting you know that there is a story, you just have to take the time to look at item descriptions or the item itself to take the moment to think about if some items give more meaning of what’s happening in the regions you’re visiting or not, such as what we mentioned earlier about there being a massive hint of one key character you never met dying at the dragon next in world 1—1. Which leads to another thing I like about the game, the game does a excellent job giving you subtle clues about the worlds without telling you as well, such as one item you can get in the Storm Shrine being the Adjudicator shield where if you look at the item description, you’ll not only see the boss of the arena but you learn a thing about him. Let’s give the biggest prime example, the very first stage of the arena, you’re fighting enemies left and right, and you’re slowly getting the feel of the game, when later you fight enemies that are nothing you fought at all before, these weird little blobby things with giant shields, they are incredibly defensive on the front but super weak on the back, not only that, but they are super weak to magic, to which if you take the moment to look around and explore, you’ll get a lot of fire bombs and stuff that can temporarily cover your weapon with fire if it can. If you take the moment to remember a small event of opening a giant gate just seconds before you fought the weird blobby things, you’ll realized that in the cutscene a giant spear was shot out and its similar to what the blobs use on you, that is more than enough to give you some indication of what’s going on. Now, not every level is going to something even close to what, once you get to the second level, you’re on your own, but the game will throw you a massive bone more than you would think.
Micro: I think I heard of a comparison of how Soulsborne games are like to that of a step dad that is rather tough but very loving at the same time, the game will give you plenty of crap, but if you can tough it through, you’ll be surprise to how much of this game you’ll be able to succeed in, that’s just the game trying to give you tough love. It’s very much similar to the Monster Hunter game we talked about last year where it will kick your ass when you begin the game, but once you understand everything, you’ll be a nightmare to the enemies. Now, is the game still perfect in the level design and enemy department section, f$%k, there’s still somethings in this game that is still bulls$%t, and don’t believe the ones that claim Demon’s Souls is 100% fair as we mentioned already some of bulls$%t earlier. Level design is great, but there is one major problem with the level design for a good chunk of the game and that is that you’ll be walking through a lot of narrow areas where you will probably need a shield no matter what as there is no way to roll out of a enemy or trap’s way, not to mentioned that fighting in very narrow area absolutely sucks as even in the remake your weapon will still find a way to bounce off the walls when you didn’t even meant to hit them in the first place, which gets very annoying if you go through the tunnel with the skeletons. In fact, this is something to finally address about the remake, while I’ll choose the remake over the original because of its mechanic refinement that I think the original really needed that the most hardcore Demon Souls fan will never admit, and this remake has reconstructed the original almost perfectly, that’s the major issue of the remake, the remake reconstructed the original’s designs to a fault. If you played the original and find a bunch of things annoying in terms of level design, enemy design, or something else, nine out of ten times you better expect the same thing to apply in the remake as the game is almost one to one to the original that it’s a debate to call the remake a remake and not a remaster given that the only major thing the remake did that’s noticeable is having the graphical overhaul. The remake did nothing to change a bunch of major thing besides the mechanics in combat and items we mentioned, they change how to manipulate the world tendency or even made it easier to explain the damn thing, characters have about the same level of depth as in the original instead of adding something to the characters so you’d be interacting with them more or even do more side quest which this game has rather very limited amount of maybe two or three from what I can tell it even has, and one of the bigger offensive is that the remake wasted the opportunity to add in the mythical sixth region that is the Northern Region. For those that don’t know, the real reason why the Northern Region is not in the original game wasn’t because of story reason but because of time constraint and so it had to be cut out, so with this remake being made from the ground up, Bluepoint had the opportunity to make the lands of the giants to give the remake something new to look forward to play it over the original, and they wasted it because they wanted to stay as faithful to the original as they could, which I’m not 100% knocking that done, I’m glad they did, but still wish they taken some leeway to change something major. Hell, want another example that wasn’t change even the slightest for worse of it, the f$%king dragon, don’t let their appearance fool you, they’re not dragons, they’re attraction obstacles that if you want to get rid of, have playing arrow shooting simulator 2009 with the red dragon, as well as arrow shooting simulator 2009.2, electric boogaloo with blue dragon as you’re shooting hundreds of arrow and thirty minutes with the dragons, each. Which brings up something else that if you’ve been in the Soulsborne community in recent years and you see what some people think of the remake, there are several points that some fans who made videos of the subject of what they don’t like of the remake and at least two of these points I’ll address in this review, with one of them you’ll have to wait for the boss, but if you can guess what that point is, then you know what I’ll be talking about. But for the first point, while Bluepoint was trying to reconstruct the game as faithful as they could, they sacrifice atmosphere and art direction in this game, something that I’ll agreed and that is something the PS3 have over this game. Let’s give a small example with one of the bosses you’ll be fighting, the Adjudicator, this guy originally was glowing and stand out from the whole arena, and Christ jiggle physics should not be apply to somethings, but in the remake, that glow is gone and now he looks so muted and honestly, kind of boring, which sucks, cause the weird glow the boss had made him look otherworldly and not from this world. Another example being the Tower of Lotria, the PS3 version looked so oppressive and wrong, I wanted to get out of this location as soon as I can, but the remake just makes it look darker and removes a bunch of the oppressive feel of the first area. Is what I just said nitpicky, of sure it can definitely be, but one of the few times I’ll say this now that the art direction can really set the mood of how you’ll like the game and removing that art direction for this game can hurt it more than you’d expect. Hell, one thing I also like about the original, and this is something that may sound odd, but I also love the character design of the original over the remake, yes, everyone looks like a melted barbie doll, but honestly, that just gives Demon’s Souls’s it charm.
Shekra: True, and I can’t argue with Micro said about the art direction of this game as what Micro describe Lotria is another reason I like the location in the game and find it one of the best in the game, even if fighting the mindflayers can be annoying in some ways. Which does beg the question, do want good art direction but janky controls and other things, or do want refine gameplay but the art direction is somewhat cut done. If you want the former, go with the PS3 version, if the latter, than the PS5 version, but no matter what you pick, I think you’ll love either version as I still find either version fun to play, and let’s be honest, that’s the most important of these game.
Micro: True, no matter what version you’ll be playing if you decide to play this title, you’ll have a experience you may not be forgetting if you’re willing to tough through the challenges in this game.
Shekra: That said, something that both versions still share in common is still the bosses being the most memorable part of the game.
(End of part 1)
