Thanks RPCS3. My favourite Souls - Blanketed in sorrow and an intoxicating ambiguity. An artstyle akin to a faded picturebook you've plucked out of an ancient water-logged library. I love so much that all of the environments feel restrained and utilitarian. A soundtrack that is wholly unique, doesn't feel a little inspired by the Hollywood Orchestral Epics nor does it even attempt to hit those notes.
The one title in the franchise that actually feels like a fantastical adventure, with encounters and environments that are more often a challenge of wit and intuition than attack pattern memorisation or a side-flippy shounen damage value race. It reeks!!! But it reeks beauty. I genuinely don't believe FromSoft in their current form have it in them to create a boss battle like King Allant again.

Solid and innovative, continues to be the breath of fresh air now as it was when I first played it in 2009. Nothin like it!!!!

All I'll say on the Bluepoint demake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5z2-hpZB1w

The culmination of my playthrough of all the Souls games and their FromSoft progeny, starting with Sekiro and working my way backwards chronologically. As I played through its successors, everything I heard about this game made it sound like a janky mess from which blossomed the pure brilliance that is Dark Souls. I was surprised to find that not the case.

In a lot of ways, Demon's Souls is more tidy than Dark Souls. Its linear world design invites a clear categorization that later games deny. (Players even refer to them as "1-4" and "2-3" like Mario levels!) The consumable (and easily-farmable) healing items give players more flexibility in how they move through the space than Dark Souls' bonfire-tethered estus flasks. Even the parries seemed easier to parse, although that could just be my own human skill improving with six of these games under my belt.

At the same time, though, about 70% of the brilliant weirdness that's usually attributed to Dark Souls appears here. The combat is almost the same (the lack of curved rolls shocked me at first but I quickly acclimated), the boss design is already stellar, and although the world design is linear each level within the worlds are pure Souls: layered, evolving, and hauntingly strange.

There's no doubt that Dark Souls' two key additions (the estus mechanic and the connected overworld) were excellent, and brought the formula to a new height of challenge. But this is the game that deserves to be considered the father of the genre.

It is a miracle that we got Dark Souls cause my god this game is.... rough. I love hard games. I've beaten DS 1 & 3, I've beaten DOOM Eternal on Nightmare difficulty, I've even done challange playthroughs of games like Thousand Year Door where I beat the entire pit of 100 trials blindfolded. I love hard games. This wasn't a fun type of hard though, in the same way a Mario Maker level filled with enemy spam everywhere isn't a fun type of hard. I'm glad this game was made, it's an excellent proof of concept a great example of an idea being really close to being great, and once it was interested upon and tweaked a bit it was fantastic. But the lack of shortcuts, healing items you have to farm, and inconsistent enemy AI made me just have to put the game down. I'm glad I played for about 12 hours to see what the origin of the Souls games was like, but I'm very content not pushing through the agony of dated design decisions just to say "I beat it."

there's a lot to like about this one but i think it suffers more from its unrefined qualities than it revels in the creative freedom they enjoin. they clearly knew at this point that the bosses were a major draw for this kind of game, but so many are unremarkable and require little active engagement to succeed against. only a few, like flamelurker and the maneaters, really felt like they were testing my ability to learn animations and timing, but they were still really easy. more challenging were areas like level 5-1, which feels like the only moment in a souls game where the difficulty is truly based in frustrating and overwhelming the player. it's just badly designed, no room to maneuver and a truly stupid number of swarming enemies. there's plenty to appreciate here, particularly in the strangely alien designs of certain enemies and areas, but mostly what's good about this game comes just as foreshadowing of what would come later.

Para ser el primer juego de esta saga conceptual de From Software, acaba siendo el mejor de todos. Se siente raro, ya que si hablamos desde un aspecto mecánico, este es el más simple de todos (y uno de los más faciles de romper para el caso) pero su armonía con el diseño de niveles y jefes están tan bien congeniados que esta falencia no llega a ser de mucha molestia. No bromeo al decir que no hubo ningún jefe que me haya disgustado, que a pesar de ser sencillos en su mayoría todos tienen una temática y metodo de vencer diferente que los vuelve memorables, es una diferencia muy remarcable con sus secuelas ya que la mayoría acaban siendo muy repetitivos o tematicamente poco interesantes. El lore en este juego también es algo diferente de sus sucesores, al ser uno mucho más directo y no tan discreto, pero sigue teniendo una narrativa muy sólida que retomaría la fama de la fantasía grimmdark en el gaming camuflada de tu típica épica medieval. La única pega real que tengo con el juego es que, para ser un RPG, no hay muchas cosas para personalizar en cuanto equipamiento se refiere, y los enemigos comunes llegan a repetirse mucho o le cambian las skins con muy ligeros cambios en sus patrones que a la larga no marcan mucha diferencia. Pero en definitiva se convirtió en mi Souls favorito y a la vez uno de los mejores juegos que tiene From Software, junto con Echo Night, Dark Souls 1 y Kings Field 2 y 3.

Demon’s Souls will, unfortunately, reside in the shadow of Dark Souls for many people, including myself. It’s unfortunate as it’s a very innovative, creative game which sadly due to its follow up’s success and refinement of many features explored in Demon’s Souls, makes it hard to view Demon’s Souls on its own merits. Dark Souls is one of my favourite games, and Demon’s Souls is the second From Software game that I’ve played outside of half-hearted attempts at friends’ houses, and I feel like it’s only fair if I establish this context so that if you read this you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
There is a lot I like about this game. The combat is flashy, fun, the stamina comes back mercifully quickly, and while I still hadn’t quite got used to the delay on dodges when this game allows for it you can be pretty damn agile, which makes it really fun. Many of the enemies are very enjoyable to fight, such as the red eyed knights or the guards in 3-1, and the environments have a real beauty to them, from the Valley of Defilement’s grotesque, decaying wasteland to the haunting majesty of Latria. World Tendency, as neutered as it is with the absence of multiplayer, is a very cool concept and it feels really interesting to see it work. When I accidentally lowered the Boletarian Palace’s world tendency by killing an NPC and only realised afterwards what I had done, I felt both dread and excitement at how a simple mistake had made the game that much harder for me. With multiplayer no longer working I sadly felt like I couldn’t really explore world tendency’s full potential, but it’s a really interesting idea I’d like to see more games try, albeit with better explanation to the player.
Many consider Demon’s Souls the easiest game in the series due to the power of magic and how easy it is to cheese many of the enemies. I went with a dex build, as that’s the playstyle I enjoy the most from these games, and overall found the game to be pretty hard, but rarely excruciatingly so. If I were to compare the game with Dark Souls, the bosses tended to be easier while the levels were generally at least as hard if not more so. Every enemy had a weakness I could exploit, or could be avoided entirely, so very little of the game ever feels truly unbeatable. Most levels are gauntlets of varying difficulties, with 1-1 training you in the basics of the game, to 4-2 testing the player’s perception, reaction time and skills like few games I’ve played. One downside to the levels being this hard, along with a lack of shortcuts for many levels (looking at you 5-1) mean that, by the time the player reaches the boss, they’re exhausted and unwilling to be creative with their approach (unless of course, unlike me, they’re actually good at the game).
Granted, few bosses in this game are really that hard, I took down nearly half of them on my first try, but I think it speaks to how hard the game is (and how long the levels actually are) that I felt it necessary to play many boss fights as safely as I could. I’m very split on how it feels, on the one hand I hated having to push myself through gauntlets over and over to reach a boss that killed me because of one mistake or a slightly mistimed roll. Dark Souls had its long rushes to bosses but comparatively most runs were easier and/or shorter than most here. On the other hand it helps give the boss fights a real sense of tension, and made them more satisfying to overcome. So ultimately, I’m very torn on the relationship between the levels and bosses. I’ll say I definitely felt a sense of dread and excitement for most of my 17 hour playthrough, the sickening feeling in your stomach that challenging games can make super, super addicting, but it was released with whoops of joy as often as screams of frustration. Is this a good thing? Probably.
I must admit that I found the story to be serviceable, but nothing that really stood out to me. Very few characters were particularly memorable (unfortunately some were very clearly inspirations for certain NPCs in Dark Souls, most of whom handled the caricatures explored better) with the exception of Patches, who’s amazing as always. I know these games are rarely clear with their lore but I kinda wish there was some more insight given for the pros and cons of fighting for each side. That said the story fits well with the game, and there are some great narrative moments helping sell the desolate world of Boletaria.
I don’t own a PS5, so can’t comment on whether this version or that one is the superior game. What I will say is that this is a janky, messy, inconsistent experience held up by some great combat, a cool aesthetic and the addictive rush of adrenaline after overcoming the game’s many challenges. It feels like a disservice to this game to play Dark Souls first, so if you’ve never played a From Software title but want to get your teeth into this challenging series, it might be best to experience this title first simply so you don’t run into the issue I did where I compared everything with its follow up.

Picked this up cheap only having a vague idea of what it was, had a blast until I got stuck on Tower Knight, looked up how the multiplayer worked and read an article that said the servers were shutting down in a month. Disappointed I'd be getting a lesser experience, I sacked it off and bought Dark Souls.

After Dark Souls, I thought I'd try this again, and found the servers were still going. I had an incredible time with it, the dreamy atmosphere sucked me right in, and I cheesed my way through the whole thing without ever gitting gud because that's how I reckon I would do it if it was real.

I'll play the remake when there's a GOTY edition on a PS5 Slim.

Fromsoftware is easily my favorite developers in recent times, with Dark Souls 1 being my personal favorite game of all time. But I admittedly never finished Demon's when I originally picked it up a year ago. It was until Bluepoint's remake was announced was when I jumped back into this game to experience what I missed out on.

The first go on this game made me pin down why I dropped before. It's muddy textures, lack of omni-rolling and 30FPS (that sometimes the game can barely hold) did turn me off from any enjoyment I could've had. Demon's also exactly isn't an intuitive game either. Grass is so unbelievably unbalanced that you either can have too much of it or not enough, item burden was also the worst mechanic in a souls game, and for a while it felt like I wasn't doing enough damage to anything, until I learned of an early game weapon that's hidden in the Shrine of Storms that normally scales with magic, but I used it for my strength build for the entire game.

These are also probably the most oppressive areas seen in souls, with no break points in between them. I'm not talking about just their atmosphere (which the game does a great job building) I'm talking in level design. Shrine of Storm has ghosts that shoot lasers while you're walking near bottomless pits, Mind Flyers in Tower of Latria that will stun you and eat your brains up, and Valley of Defilement with tiny plague rats that need to be hit with a certain weapon and have an endless amount of enemies swarming you in tight corridors. Miyazaki and his team did a great job in making these places shitty places to live in, but I think some areas are a bit too cheap for my tastes. (those laser ghosts in Shrine of Storm can fuck off.)

It was until Maneater was when I hit a wall for about a day, as I wasn't very good at that fight. But it was until I used some resourcefulness by using the firepit in the middle to get good footwork around the bosses and messed with their AI I finally did beat them.

Then, something what I can only describe as magic happened: I beat the game in one sitting.

It took me 4 hours after maneater, the only bosses I did before maneater were the 2 in Boletaria, adjudicator, and Fool's Idol. After that though, every boss I would beat on the first try. It was like my hatred for those fucking laser ghosts activated a primal instinct for survival in my brain and made me accumulate all the skills I have learned from playing other Fromsoft games. Even in the games levels I was being more resourceful, saving my grass when needed, switching to the Stealth Ring to avoid detection in the Valley of Defilement, and using other weapons I normally wouldn't for certain situations. Demon's Souls is surprisingly short for an RPG.

After all that, experiencing all the content the game had to offer on my first go, every oppressive area and unorthodox bosses, getting the "good" ending, I sat there as the credit screen scrolled, looking at all the names at Fromsoft who put their hearts making something so unique out of a failed Elder Scrolls clone project, I said to myself:

"Damn, that was pretty great!"

Been continuously trying to "get" demon's souls has been potentially harming for me honestly.

I'm not saying I don't understand where everyone's praise is coming from, and I don't write this in some act of their upheaval, but moreso because I walk through the fog wall feeling nary a thing. Seeing the talk of the town years and years later as I try to get into it after being able to appreciate other games I didn't before and still feeling the same npc face go across me is like a gutshot to the heart.

The vibe is not for me I guess. I can break down how effortlessly and excellent a lot of the qualities are that makes the unique and interesting game this certainly is, but all of it feels tenuous and out of my grasp when I try to visualize it and feel it. But even now I still feel a startling obligation that I have to finish it at some point, because almost all of my friends and peers on here love it. Who knows, maybe years from now too I'll break through whatever metaphysical wall is in the way but I'm starting to think that it never existed and that reality is ugly here as it was for the kingdom of Boleteria.