I didn't actually play this, but I'm just here to say that you shouldn't get a PS5 for this game. Just get a fucking used PS3 on Ebay and play the original, it's way cheaper to do that.

I can't believe that people have the fucking audacity to say that this is bringing Demon's Souls to a new generation, this is purely made to sell PS5s.

Edit: This review has aged well, cause the PS5 is now on it's last legs, that's pretty funny. Do I like this review? No, even though I still agree with everything I said. I'll leave it up anyways cause some people like it, and cause it's funny that the PS5 is now about to be obsolete.

cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments

"...you can make a wonderful film about nothing. Look at Fellini. The most important thing in a movie is the actor, and everything which is in front of the camera. And the decadence of the cinema, and we have a certain decadence, comes from the glorification of the director as...being not the servant of the actors, but his master...the job of the director is to discover in the actor something more than he knew he had. The job of the director is to choose what he sees. And to an extent, to create. But a great deal of what is applauded as creation is simply there. It was there, when you put the camera...that actor, that bit of scenery, that veil that hung over the river - it was there! And you're intelligent enough to shoot it...the director should be very intelligent, preferably not intellectual. Because the intellectual is the enemy of all the performing arts." - Orson Welles, 1982

It’s a common joke that Samus Aran never hunts bounties. She’s always either stumbling into heroics for free by accident or hired for, essentially, mercenary work by Da Army. The only game where Samus’ work could I think be conceivably considered actual Bounty Hunting is Metroid II: Return of Samus. She’s given her hit list and she trudges down into the depths to do her job.

And what we get out of it is arguably the most ambitious Metroid game to date, clearly pushing the limits of its hardware in terms of delivering a gameplay experience that, similar to its predecessor with the NES, is just clearly beyond the ken of the Gameboy but also accidentally in terms of themes and mood. It’s not a secret that Metroid 2 has gotten the coolguy art gamer reevaluation over the years as a secret death of the author gem but that doesn’t make it work any less well as one.

Samus takes up a huge chunk of the screen. You can barely see where you’re going. You can barely remember where you’ve been. The world isn’t hostile, necessarily; how could it be hostile when you dominate it so powerfully from the very beginning? Samus is untouchable – more agile and powerful than anything she’ll face from the first second to the last as she trudges down, down, ever downward, through endless twisting corridors as she practices the tedious chore of genocide. She only becomes more durable and more powerful as her targets become fewer and more vulnerable to her weaponry.

No, the only resistance is from the world’s indifference, its ambivalence to Samus and her violence, and even then only in the few places where she cannot enforce herself upon it. The only dangers on SR388 are momentary environmental hazards, getting frustrated by disorientation, being frightened by surprise or by unknown sounds. But never by anything remotely similar to what Samus herself brings to the Metroids, to the other fauna she might encounter.

Atmosphere is king in Metroid, and narrative – explicit and implicit – is rarely given much heft in these games, especially early in the series. It’s hard to imagine that Samus, given what we know of her (with her military background, her most frequent contractor being the Federation marines, literally spending all her time with one of her hands replaced with a gun) has spent a lot of time considering the morality of her place in the galactic landscape. She probably doesn’t have to think much about it, since she mostly seems to fight, like, animals and the Space Pirates who do seem like assholes (I don’t have time to go into the absolutely batshit colonialism allegories happening in Prime 2 but that game is a weird can of worms). So I really have to wonder what’s going through her head when she’s struck by the burst of compassion that leads her to spare the last metroid. What’s she thinking about as she makes that long ascent back to the surface with a little buddy who doesn’t know that its mom just butchered its race. Does she think she’s done a kindness? Is she considering the enormity of the act she’s just failed to complete? Are these things she thinks about at all?

I don’t know. Metroid 2 is a masterpiece.