Reviewed on PS3. Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
I have beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and it took me a good long while. Having passed through its voluptuous challenges alive, I can say that my opinion about it has changed somewhat. I went over the rules and details of the game in my first review of it, so I won’t repeat myself here. The purpose of this re-review is to describe some of the intangible aspects I discovered about Demon’s Souls that transform its plodding and frustrating experience into one of the most addictive and engrossing games I’ve played in years.
Demon’s Souls has every advantage over you. Each of the game’s five worlds has its share of unique dangers, from fire-breathing dragons to arrow-traps to poisonous marshes, and each of them is capable of shredding an unprepared adventurer in seconds. Losing in one of its grand boss fights, and then dying again to weak monster while making a corpse run, causing all those souls you gathered to vanish, is a lesson in heartbreak. Many times, in the course of my playthrough, I tossed my Dual Shock aside and flopped onto my bed in hopelessness. I’d turn off the console, go do something else, and then, the next day, fire up Demon’s Souls again.
I’ve always been drawn to games with high difficulty levels, but I don’t put up with them if they cheat. The thing about Demon’s Souls is that it’s completely fair and consistent. The enemies are unintelligent, and they repeat the same attacks over and over, usually leaving themselves open. The traps behave the same way every time you activate them, so they’re easily avoided once you know where they are. The challenge of Demon’s Souls often comes from the environments, the level design. Enemies are often placed in tight corridors or on narrow cliffs where dodging is difficult. Traps sometimes fire from behind you when sprung, so you’ll hear them but won’t know what’s happened until you’re hit in the back. Luring tactics are often required in areas where enemies hang out in groups. The traps and monsters are always set the same places when you enter a level, though, so they’re easy to handle with the right preparation.
Building a strategy requires a lot of patience and persistence, which is something video games don’t often demand anymore. You play a game like Uncharted or Halo, which are liberally peppered with checkpoints, and you never have to replay much when you die. In Demon’s Souls, though, and in difficult games from the past, such as Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, you need to replay a significant chunk of a level upon dying, so that sooner or later, the tougher areas become a part of your memory.
I’ve said before that I’m not much for “performance games,” games which require memorization in order to win them, but in Demon’s Souls, the levels rarely play out identically from one attempt to another. The monsters switch up their attacks, they weave, they circle, and they spar. They may not be smart, but they’re not always predictable either. Recognizing telegraphed attacks, dodging or blocking them, and then countering, all while managing your stamina, makes the combat in Demon’s Souls reminiscent of Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! games. Even the toughest bosses can be beaten using this basic strategy. It just requires a little patience while you wait for that opening.
Practice and reflexes are all well and good, but Demon’s Souls is an RPG at heart, so playing its numbers is just as important as having fast fingers. It’s important to know that each weapon in the game has properties such as slashing, piercing, blunt, magical, and physical damage, which differ in effectiveness against the game’s bevy of baddies. It won’t do much good to stick with a weapon that only inflicts heavy physical damage, since it won’t have much effect against a creature like Flamelurker, who is only weak against magical attacks.
So specialization is discouraged. Keep at least one of everything. Keep a spear, a sword, a hammer, and a bow. Keep a shield that protects against magic, and another shield that keeps your stamina high, even after multiple blocks. You’ll need to upgrade multiple weapons in multiple ways using the multitude of ores you’ll find, so that you have a broad variety of attack types at your disposal. Knowing what weapons work best on each monster and boss requires experimentation and time, but it also provides you with a huge advantage, and once it all comes together in your head, and you start tearing through the bad guys, you’ll feel like a fucking genius.
And the reason you’ll feel so accomplished is that game didn’t hold your hand along the way. All that planning and practice is easy to stomach because Demon’s Souls doesn’t say a word while you do it. Like a good parent, it shuts its yap and lets you set your own goals, and learn from your own mistakes. It doesn’t give you hints when you fall to a boss, like Batman Arkham Asylum, it doesn’t interrupt your play with interminable cutscenes and dialogue, and it doesn’t shove text boxes in your face about locked doors and levers, like a Zelda game. Truly, this is a Zelda game for grown-ups.
As annoying as it could be at times, I couldn’t help but be drawn to Demon’s Souls again and again until I was through it. Then I found myself picking it up again to play the New Game+, even though I told myself that I wouldn’t. Here is a game that is a truly demanding gauntlet, but beyond each hurdle is a grand and satisfying reward. Simple, stupid experiences like Darksiders, which don’t let you move for a few seconds without hitting you in the face with a fanciful cutscene, can’t hold a candle to the endless, absorbing, almost obsessive experience that Demon’s Souls provides. I still can’t say it’s better than Canabalt, but it’s damn close. This is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Revised Controller1.com rating: 3/3
Lisvender reviews Demon’s Souls. Reviews on PS3. Developed by From Software Published by Sony/ Atlus
Review: Demon’s Souls
I haven’t beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and I don’t expect to for a long while. I don’t believe, however, that this disqualifies me from having an opinion about it. Every Game of the Year should elicit some kind of response from the average video game player, even if it’s an apathetic one brought on by hype-burnout. What makes Demon’s Souls unusual is that it was not hyped in the West at all, and the reaction it got from half of the gaming populace was one of passionate hate-spit. “This game hates me,” the detractors say, “so I hate this game.”
Does Demon’s Souls hate us? Well, it does reject many of the conveniences we’ve come to expect to be in modern games, like checkpoints. It also bucks some of the conventions of not-so-modern games, like pausing. Yeah, you can’t pause in Demon’s Souls, not even to look over your inventory. You press Start to open the menu, and the action just keeps going on around you. If you need to go to the bathroom, make sure your character is in a safe place first.
This might suggest that creators From Software were out to be unfair and mean when they made this game, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s just possible that they were aiming to create a very intense experience, something more stressful and scary than what’s offered by most video games, and that every design decision was made with that result in mind.
In Demon’s Souls, you play a voiceless fantasy hero who has traveled to the cursed kingdom of Boletaria to face down The Old One, an angry, toothy beast of Lovecraftian power and dimensions. You get to choose from a large list of character classes which includes the traditional warriors, swordsmen, and wizards. Each class has its own unique stats and starting equipment, which will dictate your style of play as you start out. You begin in a brief tutorial level that shows you what you’re going to be doing throughout the game: slashing at monsters, blocking and dodging attacks, running down halls, casting magic spells. At the end of the tutorial you are one-hit-killed by a boss, and you are thrust into the Nexus, the hub/town of Demon’s Souls. Here, you can buy or upgrade your equipment (though you cannot sell anything back), store items you don’t want to lug around with you, buy and memorize spells, and upgrade your character’s stats.
All of these upgrades are purchased using souls, the currency of the game. You get souls automatically every time you slay a monster, and there’s no limit to how many you can have on hand. You cannot, however, store them away in a bank or a stash. Your money stays with you at all times. This makes exploring new places with a full wallet incredibly tense, because when you die, you drop all your souls. You can make a corpse run if you want to get them back, but if you die again before you reach your place of perishing, the souls disappear forever. You’re going to want to take your time with this game.
The Nexus connects to five areas, and each area is divided into four sections. Every section is loaded with monsters, secret passages, and deadly traps. They have no checkpoints. If you die in them at any time, even during the boss battle at the end, you’ll have to start the whole section over, with all the monsters revived and back in place. Good luck with that corpse run! Fortunately, any switches you’ve activated or doors you’ve opened will remain as you left them.
There are monsters all over the place, but they’re often tucked away in spots where you won’t be able to see them until they’ve got the drop on you. March ahead slowly, and be ready to jump out of danger’s path.
The sword-and-sorcery combat in Demon’s Souls is complex and deliberate. You can use regular or strong attacks, parry and counter enemy attacks, and wield one-handed weapons with two hands for added damage. You can cast spells on yourself or on your enemies, but you need to have enough magic power, have the proper spells memorized, and have a wand (or “catalyst”) equipped.
Knowing your moves is only the start of the challenge. Demon’s Souls is not Zelda or Fable, where you can just swing your sword like a maniac and watch the monsters drop. Most of the enemies in Demon’s Souls can kill your character in one or two hits, so there’s very little room for error. You need to fight defensively, and attack only when there’s a clear opening.
You can’t just stand there with your shield up all day either, because you’ll run out of stamina. Attacking, dodging, and blocking hits all drain your green stamina meter. If it runs out, you can’t attack. The bar refills quickly and automatically, but only if you lower your shield and don’t do anything. This means that you’ll sometimes have to retreat from a fight momentarily to regain your strength. If you block an enemy attack that bottoms out the stamina meter, your character will be stunned and helpless for a couple of seconds, which is more or less inviting death. You can’t afford to get careless, even against enemies you’ve beaten many times before; they can still kill you, and quickly.
There are also numerous traps in the game, many of which will insta-kill you if you don’t know how to get sidestep them. An early level features causeways that you must cross while flying dragons breathe flames on them from overhead. You need to learn the timing of the sweeping fire, and calculate a starting position for your sprint. You don’t want to edge too close to the danger zone and get roasted before you begin your charge, and you don’t want to start sprinting too soon and run out of stamina before you reach the next safe spot. You’ll probably die many times before you get it just right.
Speaking of death, Demon’s Souls has a very unusual rule about it. You begin the game as a living person with a solid body. This is called “living form.” When you die, that body is taken away from you, and you enter “soul form.” To avoid confusion with all the other soul terms in the game, I call this “ghost form.” Being in ghost form doesn’t change the way you play: you can still use all your equipment and you move and fight just the same as when you were living. Your leash is tightened, though, because being a ghost halves your maximum health. As we’ve already established that death is a common occurrence in this game, expect to remain in ghost form for a long, long time.
Playing in living form with a nice, full health bar means you can take a lot more hits before dying than you can in ghost form. It’s a secure and comforting thing that you’ll want to guard jealously because it’s so fleeting, and so tough to attain. There are four ways to give up the ghost and get back to living form:
1.) Beat a boss. Beat any boss and you will be revived. This requires time and patience, as you must master the level and the boss fight to get through them without dying.
2.) Use a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes, a rare item that instantly returns you to living form. These are not sold in any store. You have to find them, and because of their scarcity, you’ll probably want to save them.
3.) Help a living player beat a boss. You can use a special item called the Blue Eye Stone to leave a mark in the level that living players on the Playstation Network can see. If one of these players activates that mark, you will join him in his game. If you succeed as a team in beating that level’s boss, you will return to your own game with a living body. This demands a little luck, however, as you have to hope that there are living characters who are not only online, but also in your particular section of the game, and also inclined to ask for your help. Teams cannot communicate in any way, either, so if one or both of you doesn’t know your way around, you’re likely to get killed, which sends you back to your own game. Better luck next time!
4.) Kill a living player. This is the most interesting, and the most asshole-ish, of your options. Instead of leaving your mark on the ground and waiting for a living player to give you a call, you can take a more aggressive approach. Use the Black Eye Stone, and the game will find a living player who’s exploring the same level as you, and shove you into his or her game. The invaded player will be notified of your arrival, but not of your whereabouts. Your goal is to hunt down and kill the living player. Do so, and you are rewarded with a living form and returned to your own game. You have essentially stolen the other player’s body. Congratulations, you dick. If the other player kills you, you don’t lose anything and are returned to your own game. If you fall to the monsters, however, you are returned to your own game with a stat rollback. Your most recent stat upgrade will be undone, and the invaded player will receive a bonus equal to the amount of souls you spent on that upgrade. So beware if you wish to go ganking. The game will only allow you to invade characters with similar stat levels, but since the filtering ends there, there’s no way to know how skilled or well-equipped your quarry will be. Your best bet is to perform the invasion in a level you know very well, so you can take advantage of the environment, and surprise your victim.
Demon’s Souls looks like a simple Diablo clone from a distance, but it is immensely more strategic and slow-paced. Every action you take demands care and forethought. Where most games only set you back a few feet when you die, Demon’s Souls is always ready to take something from you that you might not want to lose. The auto-save feature seems to be in constant effect, so you can’t just reload your save when you screw up. Amazingly, the tense exploration and the heartbreak of dying are not strong enough for me to discount Demon’s Souls: the action of dodging traps and slicing monsters is fun and satisfying enough that it is worth experiencing, if only in small doses. If your temper is flaring, it’s probably time to take a break. The game is dense with difficulties, but it is not impossible. Keep coming back, and you’ll find that even the sternest areas become easy with practice. Of course, by “practice,” I mean many, many deaths. But come on, let’s be honest here: It’s only video game money you’re losing. Is it really that important?
Take a look at your little Demon’s Souls guy. He might suffer death again and again, but he keeps getting back up and drawing his sword. He’s always ready to get right back in there, among the demons and the darkness. We could all learn a lesson from him.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3
