This is mostly me just talking about Demon's Souls as a game rather than as a remake, since I never actually played the original and from my understanding the remake is almost identical on a mechanical level. That said, and looking at Demon's Souls as someone who's played every other game in Fromsoft's prestigious "third person action games with a dodge roll" series, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed my fairly short time in Boletaria (my final play time was about 18 hours, but that included a few times where I just left the game running while I did something else). I was kind of expecting the game to just be Dark Souls Zero where a lot of mechanics weren't fully realized, but that really wasn't the case. Demon's Souls was both a fully realized game, and a shockingly different experience to Dark Souls, even if the moment to moment gameplay between the two is strikingly similar.
The main Souls cycle of wandering through an area while avoiding traps and using slow attacks to fend off fiendishly placed enemies until you find a boss room behind a fog door is still here, but the overall structure of Demon's Souls is what made it feel so different from Fromsoft's later offerings. While Dark Souls's Lordran is this interconnected land of places stacked on top of each other with paths constantly looping back on themselves and areas connecting to each other in multiple places, Boletaria is made up of five self-contained and linear worlds. Each of these worlds is made up of a few individual areas, each of which ends with a boss fight and an Archstone that acts both as a checkpoint and a portal back to the Nexus, the game's central hub where you can level up your character, store, repair, and upgrade items and equipment, interact with a handful of NPCs and vendors, and move freely between the five worlds. Once you finish one world entirely, you can move directly between them from an Archstone instead of having to return to the Nexus, but for a good half of the game, you're always going to pass through the Nexus whenever you want to go to an area in a different world. This, coupled with the game's healing system that relies entirely on single-use items that count towards your carry weight (or miracles in my case but even then I had to carry a bunch of MP restoring items) creates a flow to the game that's entirely different from Dark Souls. You're not creating a web of shortcuts and safe zones as you wander through one world. You're preparing in a central hub, then seeing how far your skill and your resources can get you into a linear zone before you either die or have to turn back. You regroup, restock on your items, and hopefully you go deeper into your labyrinth of choice on the next run either through just knowing the area better, or through one of the game's handful of shortcuts. This is probably because my mind is rotted by replaying the Etrian Odyssey games, but I couldn't shake the feeling that Demon's Souls was kind of structured like a dungeon crawler. The Nexus serves as your central hub or town, and each of the worlds is one long dungeon, in a fairly loose sense of the term. I think this is what made Demon's Souls feel so different to me. It seemed like it was designed like an RPG (focus on resource management, numbers, preparation for fights, puzzle-like bosses) first and an action game second, while every Fromsoft game made after has moved a bit more towards being an action game first. None of their other titles have nearly as many puzzle bosses as Demon's Souls does, and even the bosses that are more of a straight combat challenge like the Penetrator or Flamelurker aren't all that difficult once you get a feel for their basic attack patterns. There's nothing here anywhere close to the level of Elden Ring's Malenia, Sekiro's Isshin, or even Dark Souls's own Artorias in terms of difficultly. That's not to say there aren't parts of the game that are hard or annoying, but the difficulty comes more from annoying enemy placement or the lack of shortcuts in certain areas which makes running back to bosses particularly annoying.
Speaking of the areas, I was surprised by how consistent the game's level design was. Dark Souls and to a lesser extent From's other recent games tend to get noticeably worse after a certain point. That's not really the case here. Yeah the last area in each world is basically just a corridor leading to the boss, and the Swamp of Sorrow kind of sucks, but there's nothing here that's anywhere near as bad as Lost Izalith, or as infuriating as the Black Gulch from Dark Souls 2. Now there aren't any areas that stand out as fantastically designed, but I ended up really liking all of Latria, the Tunnel City, and most of Boletaria Palace. The Shrine of Storms was alright even if running back to the Old Hero sucked, but it made up for it with the fight against the Storm King at the end. Old King Allant was a decent enough “final” boss even if he was on the easier side, but the real final fight was basically just against a slug monster and kind of unlosable. It reminded me a bit of the Yu Yevon fight from FFX where the previous boss was meant to be the actual final challenge and it was more of a victory lap.
I can't speak too much on the changes Bluepoint made for the remake since, as I mentioned before, I never actually played the original, so all I can really say from a graphics and art style perspective is that Demon's Souls is a really pretty game. I'd expect the original to be a bit more tonally consistent than Bluepoint's version since they tend to make things flashier/more epic just for the sake of change, but that never really detracted from my enjoyment of the game. If I had a PS3 or any understanding of how to emulate/pirate games without the feds breaking down my door and shipping me off to internet jail, I'd try the original just to see how they compare.
I think World Tendency is kind of a bullshit system but I also found it really funny that I messed it up without trying to and the best way to fix it was to keep killing myself until a giant bug thing appeared so I could kill that and make things easier again.
The main Souls cycle of wandering through an area while avoiding traps and using slow attacks to fend off fiendishly placed enemies until you find a boss room behind a fog door is still here, but the overall structure of Demon's Souls is what made it feel so different from Fromsoft's later offerings. While Dark Souls's Lordran is this interconnected land of places stacked on top of each other with paths constantly looping back on themselves and areas connecting to each other in multiple places, Boletaria is made up of five self-contained and linear worlds. Each of these worlds is made up of a few individual areas, each of which ends with a boss fight and an Archstone that acts both as a checkpoint and a portal back to the Nexus, the game's central hub where you can level up your character, store, repair, and upgrade items and equipment, interact with a handful of NPCs and vendors, and move freely between the five worlds. Once you finish one world entirely, you can move directly between them from an Archstone instead of having to return to the Nexus, but for a good half of the game, you're always going to pass through the Nexus whenever you want to go to an area in a different world. This, coupled with the game's healing system that relies entirely on single-use items that count towards your carry weight (or miracles in my case but even then I had to carry a bunch of MP restoring items) creates a flow to the game that's entirely different from Dark Souls. You're not creating a web of shortcuts and safe zones as you wander through one world. You're preparing in a central hub, then seeing how far your skill and your resources can get you into a linear zone before you either die or have to turn back. You regroup, restock on your items, and hopefully you go deeper into your labyrinth of choice on the next run either through just knowing the area better, or through one of the game's handful of shortcuts. This is probably because my mind is rotted by replaying the Etrian Odyssey games, but I couldn't shake the feeling that Demon's Souls was kind of structured like a dungeon crawler. The Nexus serves as your central hub or town, and each of the worlds is one long dungeon, in a fairly loose sense of the term. I think this is what made Demon's Souls feel so different to me. It seemed like it was designed like an RPG (focus on resource management, numbers, preparation for fights, puzzle-like bosses) first and an action game second, while every Fromsoft game made after has moved a bit more towards being an action game first. None of their other titles have nearly as many puzzle bosses as Demon's Souls does, and even the bosses that are more of a straight combat challenge like the Penetrator or Flamelurker aren't all that difficult once you get a feel for their basic attack patterns. There's nothing here anywhere close to the level of Elden Ring's Malenia, Sekiro's Isshin, or even Dark Souls's own Artorias in terms of difficultly. That's not to say there aren't parts of the game that are hard or annoying, but the difficulty comes more from annoying enemy placement or the lack of shortcuts in certain areas which makes running back to bosses particularly annoying.
Speaking of the areas, I was surprised by how consistent the game's level design was. Dark Souls and to a lesser extent From's other recent games tend to get noticeably worse after a certain point. That's not really the case here. Yeah the last area in each world is basically just a corridor leading to the boss, and the Swamp of Sorrow kind of sucks, but there's nothing here that's anywhere near as bad as Lost Izalith, or as infuriating as the Black Gulch from Dark Souls 2. Now there aren't any areas that stand out as fantastically designed, but I ended up really liking all of Latria, the Tunnel City, and most of Boletaria Palace. The Shrine of Storms was alright even if running back to the Old Hero sucked, but it made up for it with the fight against the Storm King at the end. Old King Allant was a decent enough “final” boss even if he was on the easier side, but the real final fight was basically just against a slug monster and kind of unlosable. It reminded me a bit of the Yu Yevon fight from FFX where the previous boss was meant to be the actual final challenge and it was more of a victory lap.
I can't speak too much on the changes Bluepoint made for the remake since, as I mentioned before, I never actually played the original, so all I can really say from a graphics and art style perspective is that Demon's Souls is a really pretty game. I'd expect the original to be a bit more tonally consistent than Bluepoint's version since they tend to make things flashier/more epic just for the sake of change, but that never really detracted from my enjoyment of the game. If I had a PS3 or any understanding of how to emulate/pirate games without the feds breaking down my door and shipping me off to internet jail, I'd try the original just to see how they compare.
I think World Tendency is kind of a bullshit system but I also found it really funny that I messed it up without trying to and the best way to fix it was to keep killing myself until a giant bug thing appeared so I could kill that and make things easier again.