i've never beaten vanilla demon's souls before and that's made it really hard to work out my feelings on this remake. my most concrete thought is that demon's souls (2020) is existentially terrifying. demon's souls (2020) and shadow of the colossus (2018) feel like they've taken a major step beyond something like the twin snakes, the total separation between bluepoint and the original developers is extreme in a way that i'm just not comfortable with. superseding a studio's original vision with your own is aggressive even if the intention isn't actively malicious. it's not even a question of "does bluepoint 'understand' the original purpose of a specific texture or line of dialogue." even if there was a perfect, 1:1 understanding of the source material, demon's souls (2020) would still look radically different from its original incarnation as the new developer would express these understandings differently, in ways that make the most sense to them. so we have a refraction of demon's souls (2009) through the lens of an american company who's first and only original creative output was a game called Blast Factor. (most of) the levels are great, the visuals are weird and sometimes out of place and occasionally beautiful. the bloom has been filtered out. some bosses now look like diablo 3. some of them look like league of legends. some of them look like mortal shell. some of them look the same. the box art is terrible now. the game runs at 60 fps (unless you check the box to make it run worse for no reason) and that feels very good. spells have punchy sound effects that are mixed with really accentuated lows so they sound like a marvel movie. the character creation theme has been done so dirty that bluepoint should be dissolved just for changing it. i think i like demon's souls (2009), but i won't know for sure until i play and beat that game. i think i like demon's souls (2020) too, but i can't help getting sad whenever i think about how it was made.