In my review of Demon's Souls, a point I brought up is that the battles in Demon's Souls ended before they begun, due to the reliance on deliberately sloppy balance that meant players either had all the tricks prepared beforehand, or there was functionally no way to win the battle regardless. This required you to assess situations and often genuinely look through all the tools you had, and this mattered in situations where you couldn't pause, so you'd have to pre-emptively critically assess what to do and how to do it. The immersion and engagement bolstered by the design of Demon's Souls is unmatched, especially when considering its sheer aesthetic in mind on top of that. The question is apparent then: how does Dark Souls improve, or at least, follow-up on that?
For the most part, the only real strong changes in overall design are a focus on world design (note: not level design) and a change of structure to remove the non-linearity. This changes the games flow significantly, since Demon's Souls balance relied on backing out of challenges and stocking up from another area on tools to get you the win. Dark Souls difficulty amounts more to bashing your face against the wall until it breaks, and granted: this can be engaging depending on the content itself, but I don't quite think Dark Souls sticks the landing. Demon's Souls style of challenges relied on variety; each boss has a different mechanic that required you to rethink how you played each time you arrived at the next fog door. The World Tendency system makes it so that enemies are haphazardly placed to blockade your path to the boss, and for all you could argue this is frustratingly unfair, it is variety and makes boss-runs fresh repeatedly, which are already not too bad given the games length and the boss-runs lengths themselves. It's all about offering new perspectives on different challenges and letting you do the thinking. Dark Souls' bosses aren't really... like that. You'll find yourself dodging behind them and dying repeatedly, but there isn't much thought to do often besides just mastering the reflexes, which are so consistent across the game that it can get quite easy once you know the exact rhythm of combat. This is a problem because difficulty aside, Dark Souls really doesn't do much to expand upon Demon's Souls, and it's style of difficulty is reliant on mindless tedium often within fights and general exploration. I'd like to remind everyone of the Basilisk which you'd often have to travel way out of any area where it's present just to cure the effect it gives you. There's nothing to think about when a Basilisk inflicts a Curse upon you, it just adds more length onto the game.
Length becomes Dark Souls biggest problem on the whole and it's fairly plain to see. Not only is it significantly longer than Demon's Souls, but the game doesn't warrant it in regards to richness of content. Even the most hardcore die-hard fans of the game will argue with each other over whether the second half is rough, but I'd argue the symptoms of stretching the content thin rear their heads quite early on. The game is mostly padded out by somewhat bland areas and boss-runs, but if you take a vague sense of "challenge" aside I'd argue it's not particularly engaging; which is fatal for a game centered around unique challenges - because a good challenge, to me, at least, relies on high reflexes, intense thinking, or ideally; a little bit of both. The general point is that Demon's Souls is overall just a tighter game and it makes coming back to Dark Souls feel exceptionally dull when you realize how tedious and bland a lot of the content is. There's less mechanical tweaks and additions as much as there's more mechanical reductions and content that actively was taken away from Demon's Souls (see: again, World Tendency, a system with huge potential which only saw the light of day once.) This leaves you with the world design as the only strong suit of the game, and it's gorgeous. The landscapes convey a sense of scale and decay that's unrivaled by basically any other game. The sense of how it all interconnects is breath-taking... if you ignore the fact that all it really has going for it is interconnection. Not many areas rely on very interesting level design themselves individually, and if you take the scenery aside, it's often very basic areas that are either labyrinthine, cramped or extremely open, and none feel particularly polished or thought-out to me outside of just looking pretty. The game carries itself on the sensation of forward momentum above all else and the interconnection is a sign of this, even if the level design and bosses and enemies are all tremendous downgrades, and it's true: no game does a sense of forward momentum better. But, at what cost? I don't hate Dark Souls, it's decently fun, but it's a poor follow-up in my eyes, and it feels like a weaker version of a game FromSoft already made before it. In spite of the fact I find it enjoyable, I find it functionally impossible to recommend because I can't think of any quality it does that much better besides a strong sense of progress - yet even if that's unmatched, there's still other games that come close, and I don't think it's worth slogging through Dark Souls for that alone.
For the most part, the only real strong changes in overall design are a focus on world design (note: not level design) and a change of structure to remove the non-linearity. This changes the games flow significantly, since Demon's Souls balance relied on backing out of challenges and stocking up from another area on tools to get you the win. Dark Souls difficulty amounts more to bashing your face against the wall until it breaks, and granted: this can be engaging depending on the content itself, but I don't quite think Dark Souls sticks the landing. Demon's Souls style of challenges relied on variety; each boss has a different mechanic that required you to rethink how you played each time you arrived at the next fog door. The World Tendency system makes it so that enemies are haphazardly placed to blockade your path to the boss, and for all you could argue this is frustratingly unfair, it is variety and makes boss-runs fresh repeatedly, which are already not too bad given the games length and the boss-runs lengths themselves. It's all about offering new perspectives on different challenges and letting you do the thinking. Dark Souls' bosses aren't really... like that. You'll find yourself dodging behind them and dying repeatedly, but there isn't much thought to do often besides just mastering the reflexes, which are so consistent across the game that it can get quite easy once you know the exact rhythm of combat. This is a problem because difficulty aside, Dark Souls really doesn't do much to expand upon Demon's Souls, and it's style of difficulty is reliant on mindless tedium often within fights and general exploration. I'd like to remind everyone of the Basilisk which you'd often have to travel way out of any area where it's present just to cure the effect it gives you. There's nothing to think about when a Basilisk inflicts a Curse upon you, it just adds more length onto the game.
Length becomes Dark Souls biggest problem on the whole and it's fairly plain to see. Not only is it significantly longer than Demon's Souls, but the game doesn't warrant it in regards to richness of content. Even the most hardcore die-hard fans of the game will argue with each other over whether the second half is rough, but I'd argue the symptoms of stretching the content thin rear their heads quite early on. The game is mostly padded out by somewhat bland areas and boss-runs, but if you take a vague sense of "challenge" aside I'd argue it's not particularly engaging; which is fatal for a game centered around unique challenges - because a good challenge, to me, at least, relies on high reflexes, intense thinking, or ideally; a little bit of both. The general point is that Demon's Souls is overall just a tighter game and it makes coming back to Dark Souls feel exceptionally dull when you realize how tedious and bland a lot of the content is. There's less mechanical tweaks and additions as much as there's more mechanical reductions and content that actively was taken away from Demon's Souls (see: again, World Tendency, a system with huge potential which only saw the light of day once.) This leaves you with the world design as the only strong suit of the game, and it's gorgeous. The landscapes convey a sense of scale and decay that's unrivaled by basically any other game. The sense of how it all interconnects is breath-taking... if you ignore the fact that all it really has going for it is interconnection. Not many areas rely on very interesting level design themselves individually, and if you take the scenery aside, it's often very basic areas that are either labyrinthine, cramped or extremely open, and none feel particularly polished or thought-out to me outside of just looking pretty. The game carries itself on the sensation of forward momentum above all else and the interconnection is a sign of this, even if the level design and bosses and enemies are all tremendous downgrades, and it's true: no game does a sense of forward momentum better. But, at what cost? I don't hate Dark Souls, it's decently fun, but it's a poor follow-up in my eyes, and it feels like a weaker version of a game FromSoft already made before it. In spite of the fact I find it enjoyable, I find it functionally impossible to recommend because I can't think of any quality it does that much better besides a strong sense of progress - yet even if that's unmatched, there's still other games that come close, and I don't think it's worth slogging through Dark Souls for that alone.