Note: Demon’s Souls is a stat-heavy action game and will be reviewed as such.
In Demon’s Souls you create a character by choosing his class and appearance and then enter a dark medieval world where you must kill all the demons and free yourself and the mortals inhabiting it. The story feels like it was made long after the game, just to have something to accompany it. There is nothing going on and the few characters you meet offer just a few lines of text, to inform you who they are and what they’re doing. The surroundings and the atmosphere of the game though is truly great. Most people are depressed and have lost all hope, the Maiden in Black, who is the main NPC who will help you in the game has a hypnotizing voice, while using archaic grammar and speaking in meter, there are background sounds in each level like hammers, howls and growls and the background music, in its simple yet beautiful rhythms, never fails to add another layer to your sense of fear. Visually, the game uses tones of grey, brown and black in most areas, and when other colors are used, they are at their darker variants. The enemies vary from simple zombies to powerful knights and from mindflayers to flying mantas and literally everyone has a chance of killing you, at least through the first half of the game. All these factors make you believe that whatever you do, you won’t manage to save anyone, that you are really weak and unimportant; in this game you have to become a hero, you are not meant to be.
The Nexus is the central hub of the game and it connects to the five worlds you can go to: the castle, the mine, the prison, the cliffs and the swamp, each of them being very different from the others, except for the same dark atmosphere. Each level has four levels, except for the castle which has five, and at the end of each level there is a boss. In the Nexus there are NPCs who can teach you spells, sell you things, upgrade you weapons, stash your items and the Maiden in Black who can help you level up. You have eight stats (Vitality, Intelligence, Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, Magic, Faith, Luck) and each time you get a level, you choose one and it goes up by one point. You can improve your Strength so that you can hold a stronger weapon or shield more efficiently, or your Intelligence so that you can have more spells and so on and so forth.
As Alex has explained in his essay, this does not make the game an RPG. And indeed, Demon’s Souls is a great example of his point: if the screen with all the stats and numbers was not in the game, and each time you went to the Maiden in Black with enough points to get a level she would grant you a wish, for example “Make me stronger”, I’m pretty sure that no one would label it as action-RPG. All the calculations could be left exactly the same, but the appearance or not of one image with some numbers would define the genre of the game in most people’s minds! The only role-playing element Demon’s Souls has is that you can choose to kill everyone (except for the Maiden… if you try, she apologizes politely: “I’m sorry… I cannot die.”) but this is not done in the Deus Ex way, integrating a character’s death into the plot, because there is no plot in the game. If you kill the merchant, you can’t buy from him, if you kill the mage you can’t learn spells and keep in mind that this is irreversible, as Demon’s Souls saves your game in real time. This, however, can be a problem because if you hit someone hard enough, he will turn hostile for the rest of the game stopping all interactions with him.
Demon’s Souls is considered very difficult and unforgiving. This, however, is not true and it comes from people who have not understood how the game should be played. It is neither a fast-paced action game like Bayonetta, where you want to fight a lot of opponents at once, to feel that adrenaline rush when dodging away from one and counterattacking after you finish your dodge, nor a piss-easy JRPG like Final Fantasy XIII where you can finish your battles by pressing the same two or three buttons in the same order for all the game. It requires you to be methodical and manage your resources carefully, but as soon as you realize that (and it shouldn’t take you more than ten minutes and a few deaths, really), you shouldn’t have a big problem clearing the game. You don’t want to fight more than two monsters at once because regardless of your level or equipment, they can tear you apart quickly. You don’t want to walk on a narrow corridor without having your shield raised at all times. Do not use all your firebombs before trying to defeat your enemy in other, less item-consuming, ways; you may need them later in more dire situations.
Your character has four basic moves. You can attack, make a strong attack, block or dodge. Each of these uses some of you stamina bar and you can very quickly run out of it, so you can’t just mash the attack button to defeat an enemy. You have to find openings, dodge or block, move away, wait for your stamina bar to refill, then strike again. There are other moves too you can use, after you become familiar with the basic stuff. When you use spells, you don’t lose stamina but you lose magic points, which do not regenerate. The controls are good and you become familiar with them easily. However the inventory management is not that good. You choose five consumable items which you can browse at any time with the up button of the D-pad, so if you skip the one you want, you have to press the up button four more times and this is harder than it sounds when done under pressure. When you ask me to do things like use potions in real time, I need an efficient way to do it with one or two clicks, not by searching a small list. Additionally, there are many things left out. You can’t jump, you can’t climb and the environment in Demon’s Souls could certainly be explored in these ways. It feels awkward, seeing an edge which you could grab with a jump, only to realize that you have to go all the way around to get there. Another problem is that there will be some cheap deaths because you fell from a height. Fighting monsters in high places (especially in narrow high places) is pretty difficult and you can easily fall when your enemy blocks and the recoil sends you back.
In Demon’s Souls, you start in Body Form. That means you have all of your lifebar and the range at which monsters become aware of your presence and attack you is bigger. When you kill an enemy, you get Souls which are the currency of the game: you can use them to buy things, upgrade weapons and to level up. If you die, you lose all of your Souls, but a bloodstain is left in the place you died. Additionally, you stop being in Body Form and become a Soul. In Soul Form your lifebar is cut to half, but the enemies’ range of detection is smaller. There are few ways in the game to get back your body, one of them being defeating the boss of each stage. After you die, you start the stage at the beginning and all the enemies you had killed respawn. If you get to your bloodstain before you die again, you get back your lost Souls, but if you don’t, the old bloodstain (and your Souls) disappear forever and a new one appears in your new place of death. And this is what frustrated people: if you always lose at a certain point in a stage, but always manage to get there, you have collected a lot of souls, but if the next time you try to get there you fail, all of them dissapear. What I did is never care at all about how many Souls I had. When I finished a stage, I got back at the Nexus and used up all my Souls and that was all. I never needed to farm (except for once, for five minutes or so, because I was a mage and I had no potions for restoring magic because of a bad calculation) and that is the beauty of the game. If you want, it is possible to finish the game without ever leveling up. Most of the times, you just have to think of a clever way to defeat a troublesome opponent, maybe change your weapon from a blunt one to a sharp, or use your bow or just pass by him until you become stronger and can defeat him.
In the levels you might find a lever that opens a door, or clear a blocked way so that when you start again from the beginning you can take this shortcut. These shortcuts are hidden, but not very well: everyone could guess that if you are on top of the castle and you need to go through the west tower to continue, and there is an east tower, and when you where at the bottom of the castle the door to the east tower was locked, if you go now to the east tower, you’ll probably unlock that door. In the later stages however there are some more hidden or dangerous ones. For example in one stage the lever is very close to the boss, but if you go and try to use it you might die, and so you might miss the chance to fight the boss which you could defeat and not need the lever at all, presenting you with a risk vs reward situation.
The bosses are generally not that difficult, and I killed most of them on my first try, one on my third and the rest on my second. This is mainly because they’re patterns are very predictable and when they have weak spots, they are pretty obvious. They are pretty cool though, and you will always be on guard against them, because if you take two hits you lose, and if you lose, you have to make all your way back from the beginning of the stage. There is almost always a hard and an easy way to defeat them, so again the game asks for your creativity. A good idea is to be an all-around character, knowing some spells and having a variety of weapons, so that you have many ways to deal with a situation. Keep in mind that you can’t pause the game in Demon’s Souls, so you have to be careful at all times.
When you do certain actions in a level, like dying when you are in Body Form or killing a boss, you shift that World’s Tendency. That means that the level becomes darker or lighter, with a few changes each time. As the Tendency moves to the dark side, the monsters become stronger and give you more Souls and valuable items when you kill them, while some powerful special enemies might appear. As the Tendency moves to the light side, the monsters become weaker and give you less Souls and less valuable items. At each side, some special events occur that give you access to unique weapons and items.
The online part of the game sucks. First of all, whoever wants can leave a message which is presented as some red letters on the floor. When you write a message you use a number of preset words and sentences. When you read one, you can recommend it and if you do, the message will stay there longer and its writer will be healed. There are basically two types of messages left: either helpful messages informing you of an upcoming danger or a message of someone that asks for recommendation, so that they can be healed. All these red stains destroy the atmosphere of the game, not only because they feel outside of the world, but also because even seeing them can make you beware of what lies ahead. Not to mention that there are places where there may be two or more messages, making the floor much more red than it should be. Demon’s Souls makes you feel very alone, you meet very few people outside the Nexus, but all those stains make it feel much more lively. You can also find the bloodstains of other players and use them to watch a replay of their death. Now, if instead of the same bloodstain for everyone, it was their dead character you saw and if the number of dead characters was set to three per level and if there was nothing out of the ordinary about their bodies to inform you that “this is a dead body of a player, you can come here and press X and see how they died” that would be a cool feature. But this way you just see the same pool of blood here and there which feels, at best, awkward. The only nice thing when playing online, is that you can sometimes catch glimpses of other players as ghosts, when they are near you and even this is more frequent than it should be.
When you actually interact with other players, you can either form a team or fight against each other. There is no voice chat in the game and the communication can only be done by messages or with emotes, which are certain actions done when holding the X button and moving the controller in a direction. When you team up, the players (three at most) play the same level, which makes things a lot easier, especially if one of them has played the level before. There is a level restriction, so you can team up only with someone at about your level. Also, only the host progresses the game, the other players just get Souls and their bodies back if they defeat the boss. If no player has played the level, I suppose it could be nice to do it once or twice, but otherwise it’s just stupid. I mean, instead of you playing the game, there is someone who knows exactly what is to be done and he is playing the game for you! At the same time you could be on youtube watching a video walkthrough and there would practically be no difference. When a player wants to fight, if he is in Soul Form, he can invade a player who is in Body Form. This can only be done if the invader is of lower level and because you rarely have a Body Form, it will happen very few times. It can certainly be harsh if you have just gone through a difficult part and someone invades to kill you, but it adds to the excitement, trying to kill that annoying dude who thought you would be easy prey.
After you complete the game, you can replay it with the same character, keeping all non-key items, in what is supposed to be a more difficult mode. The difficulty is supposed to rise for the first seven times you complete the game. The enemies are stronger, but you are stronger too and you know what to do. You don’t have to waste time searching for anything, you know the patterns of the bosses and all this makes the second time through the game feel easier than the first. I rushed the game two more times after the first one, and I’m sure that it would be more difficult if I had started a new game with a new character.
To summarize, Demon’s Souls is a very good designed game, better played offline, with a great dark world to explore and a lot of worthy enemies to kill. The atmosphere is very good and it is refreshing to see a new game in this genre which doesn’t give you anything for free, but challenges you all the time. You will never feel overpowered, but you should never feel underpowered too, if you are careful and methodical. If it wasn’t for the easy boss fights, the lack of jumping and climbing, the few cheap deaths and mediocre inventory management, it would be an excellent game. All those details do manage to get a star off the rating, but nevertheless Demon’s Souls is a great game which actually feels like an adventure at most times.
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