I first played Demon’s Souls in 2021 right after the remake first came out. I think at the time I gave the game something like a 7/10, but in actuality I really just did not like that game and I was being nice. I lied! I'm sorry…

Demon’s Souls on PS3 was a really interesting experience for me. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure what made me want to replay the game. The game just has this weird pull to it unlike other fromsoftware games, save for BloodBorne. I knew i wanted to get the Platinum Trophy (we will fucking get to this i promise) but I really dont even know why i wanted that either. Well, whatever the reason, I'm glad I went and revisited the game. The PS3 version makes it a lot easier to meet the game on its level. The art direction is just simply more cohesive than in the remake, which does a whole more than you would think in terms of pulling you into its world. The game definitely devolves into a slideshow at points… but what PS3 game doesn't have an awful framerate? It's a part of the charm. The PS5 version has a lot more issues to it than just the art direction, being honest. Not only is the look of the game just really generic and very distinctly NOT fromsoftware, it also creates a really peculiar juxtaposition between cutting edge ultra extreme graphics and gameplay that is genuinely the exact same in both feel and function to the 2009 original. I’ve seen people complain about the gameplay in the remake and the art direction separately but not how they intersect to create a game that just feels wrong. This is not to say that the original is at all bad, but like i mentioned earlier, it's a lot easier to meet the game on its own level with the original rather than the remake. When i first played the remake i honestly just took it for a really mediocre souls game that didn't do much interesting and had terribly just insane design choices attached to it. There's still a few things I definitely still dislike about Demon’s Souls and I want to talk about what I appreciate about the game more now.

To start, I think it's incredible just how much they got right with this game. This is genuinely their first try at creating an entire game sub-genre and despite its faults, they did a great job. What Demon’s Souls does right, it REALLY does right. The level design is intricate and meaningful, and while the game is very linear within its individual levels, it allows you to tackle them in any order you wish (for the most part), giving a sort of Link to the Past style of player freedom. The combat is very simple, but it allows them to design enemies that provide a meaningful obstacle for the player. I’m still fairly mixed on a lot of the bosses, but one thing I praise the most of them for is the way in which the bosses actually interact with the arena in which you fight them. The bosses aren't like the boss's you'd find in a game like Dark Souls III, and instead are more focused on some sort of central gimmick that the player must exploit. As an example, a lot of bosses have separate AI patterns depending on how the player chooses to approach the fight. The Tower Knight will take the player head on in a grounded fight but if the player chooses to get to the higher vantage points of the arena to use magic/a bow the tower knight will instead fire soul arrows continuously at the player. I think this is really cool and works in some cases, but unfortunately, 99% of these boss fights are solved by simply using magic. Being a spellcaster makes this game genuinely trivial. There are a few bosses that are more akin to those of the rest of the series, and they’re pretty underwhelming to be honest. I really like Penetrator, since he has a huge polearm he stabs you with in a horizontally challenged arena. It bridges the gap between more gimmicky yet interactive fights and more interesting fights that challenge player skill, but the rest of them are either copy pasted into its sequel, (man eater becomes the gargoyles in dark souls 1) super underwhelming (flame lurker), or really cool but can permanently lower your level (Allant). Relating to the bosses, I STILL think the boss runbacks in this game are absolutely fucking dreadful. Some of them require you to run an olympic marathon with dumb fucking idiot skeletons that fucking hate you only to fight a stupid boss that is either the easiest shit of your life if you use magic or one of the worst video game experiences if you have with a strength build (the correct way to play these games). I would really like to know what the fuck happened here. A fair few of the bosses have really nicely made shortcuts that make for simplified but still engaging runbacks, but some of them just dont have shortcuts and they fucking SUCK. I would really like to see boss runbacks return to the series because they're honestly a really interesting and underrated aspect to the game design of these games but if a game as popular as Elden Ring is willing to forgo them I doubt we will ever see them again. I think the last truly negative i have on this game is the healing items, but honestly who fucking cares. Use the dupe glitch like the rest of us. It's fine. Everyone has already talked about how much it sucks, but it's really not even that bad without the glitch.

This paragraph is reserved for talking about the platinum trophy experience. OH my GOD this platinum sucks. Honestly, at first it's not too bad. If you make sure to follow a guide and get unique weapons as you go through the levels and pay attention to world tendency, it's pretty fun. It only gets fucking awful once you get close to beating the game. Since it's a 100% run, you have to do all the crafting bullshit before you go and finish up with the final boss. The crafting system in this game is so insanely obtuse and fucking stupid i cannot possibly imagine that not a single person in this design room didnt think it was ridiculously contrived and a massive time waster at least a little bit. Honestly most of the materials aren't that bad to get as it's likely you can get most of them just by playing normally, but the real problem is with pure greystone. I spent 5 hours farming for this shit and that seems like a godsend compared to some of the horror stories you can find about it. The rest of the stuff you have to farm for took me 10 minutes so they get a pass. You also have to do specific weapon crafting and fusion that is hardly explained by the game and is really contrived for the unique weapons trophy. Once you get past all of that stupid crafting bullshit you have to make sure you can get pure white character tendency so you can get a ring for the ring achievement. Doing this in a game that has its servers forever shutdown is really stupid, because there's only 5 red phantoms per save file and it means that if you mess up even a little bit you need to go and replay the game all over again. World Tendency and character tendency are honestly fine mechanics but their biggest issue is that they refuse to actually tell you in clear wording what the tendency actually is. BEcause of this you’re entirely left up to comparing screenshots of pictures of peoples TVs from like 2012, since all the search results are flooded by the remake. I actually managed to take advantage of the private server fans have made and had some absolutely lovely people let me kill them like 5 times so I could get the ring I needed, but even though I did legitimately do it on a PS3, it kind of falls into an unofficial limbo that I can't expect everyone to be willing to try. Overall I think the platinum was really rewarding but for the love of god please do not fucking do this to yourself.

If you haven't played Demon’s Souls on PS3, I think you should really give it a shot. It’s definitely flawed but it's a great game and I think it's a whole lot better than the remake, which honestly is just a really confusing product. If it was on PC it would make a bit more sense, but as is it's a just as inaccessible version of the game that seems to fundamentally misunderstand what the game is and what it was trying to be back then. I think it’s a little silly to say this after a whole review of me pointing out what I appreciate about Demons Souls, but I still think the game is a 7/10, I just mean it a whole lot more now. If you're wondering, yes, i finished platinuming the game on 4/20, and I did get so high i forget what happened next after finishing the game. If there are any typos in this review i will cry. I didnt capitalize my Is, im so sorry

Drakengard is one of the most interesting games I have ever played. At its first glance and in its opening hours, it seems like the standard RPG affair, and it's not until after the first of the games 5 endings did the gears start turning in my head. Drakengard’s thesis statement might as well be to subvert the players expectations at every turn after that first ending, and it's honestly one of the most ethereal gaming experiences I have ever witnessed. To be honest, I’m having trouble even formulating all of my thoughts in an even slightly coherent manner, because this game is so fucking good. I think it is inevitable that in a few months I will find anything I say in this review somewhat shallow but that's the beauty of interpretive art like this. I didn't truly understand Evangelion after I first watched it at 15 and I think my Metal Gear Solid 2 review is extremely surface level now but I leave it up as a digital time capsule. Can you tell this review is going to be a lot of yapping?

The game is a deconstruction of RPG and general fantasy tropes in such a brilliant way, at first seeming to give into them. However, as you go on and dig under the surface of these characters and realize their complexities you start to understand and appreciate Drakengard that much more. Caim at first looks the part of your standard pure of heart RPG protagonist, even going mute at the very beginning of the game to mimic this. However, you very quickly realize that Caim is an absolutely bloodthirsty maniac. He is purely fueled by blind rage and bloodlust, yet will still protect his sister because he knows he's supposed to care for her. The game calls you out on this constantly but you must continue the bloodshed in order to press on with the game…
His sister Furiae seems to be your standard pure and innocent “damsel in distress” character, but this presentation of her character early on is almost like a red herring of sorts. Her lack of development is a critique of that archetype in and of itself. She purposefully keeps the less savory parts of her locked away, and it's not until the end that it's revealed more. Her feelings for Caim are just subtly incestuous which serve to drive home the point that despite her surface level appearance as your standard pure damsel in distress, that's really not what she is. Every character is like this really, Verdelet constantly accosts Caim for his bloodshed yet he is the one that drives him to action most often and routinely benefits from it. Inuart seems like the standard best friend character but gets consumed by jealousy and a pursuit of power to protect his lover, almost acting like the protagonist of a story that's not his. The greatest thing about the complexities of these characters is that it's never too particularly in your face about it either. I absolutely love how this game urges you to dig deeper into its themes. Other than the deconstructive elements of the plot, I feel like Drakengard is a story about hatred, revenge, the things we lose, the importance of love and what a lack of love can do, and the inherent faults of humans. In endings A B and C, Caim loses those closest to him due to his endless conquest of bloodshed. He ends with less things than he started. Ending A he not only loses Furiae and Inuart, but Angelus as well. Ending B he loses not just the three mentioned but the world is doomed and it seems like whatever battle that comes next won't be one Caim survives. Ending B in particular really brings things full circle for Furiae to me as well. After an entire game where she gets minimal screen time or development, the world is filled with grotesque clones of her that doom the world. She no longer has any love for Inuart or even Caim, after Inuart obsesses over protecting her. In Ending C Caim is forced to kill Angelus with his own two hands, the final price of his senseless killing is killing one who he holds the most dear. In each of these first three endings Caim is explicitly punished for his bloodshed. None of these endings are happy, and when I was playing I thought that surely endings B and C would be happier endings than ending A. However, Drakengard does not feel compelled to do this and each ending gets even more bleak than the last. You could take this as the game just being edgy, but I think to do so would be to blindly deny the game of its narrative qualities. Ending D sees the world caught in a permanently frozen state, but not before Caim dies in the end. It's so bleak and just so ethereal. Ending E is the most out of left field one. Caim and Angelus end up in fucking Shinjuku where they play a rhythm game to beat the final boss before being shot down by two missles from the Japanese defense force. The atmosphere is just so chilling and the imagery of Angelus being impaled on top of Tokyo Tower is one of the coolest things ever. The point I'm really trying to make here though is that every ending ends in varying degrees of misfortune for Caim as a result of his blind rage. Even in D and E where he tries to save the world and do a good deed he is punished with death. In attempting to save the world he also dooms it. Another core theme I find with this game is love. You see this a lot with Manah, who is seemingly manipulated by The Watchers/The Gods into thinking she is loved by them, as she received no love from her own mother and was abused by her. This sends her on a path to creating the apocalyptic scenarios that appear in basically every ending. In the end of ending A, she begs for death from Caim yet neither of them think she deserves such a release. She ends with no one left to give her love, not even The Gods. Inuart constantly tries to look for love from Furiae, completely misunderstanding her at every turn, eventually blaming Caim for his own infidelity and seeking revenge on him. These two themes come together to show that the world is this way because of the faults of mankind. Caim is only a coldblooded killer because of his parents death during the war and the attempted reconstruction of the world is due to the easily manipulated nature of humans especially those that are young and not cared for. In the more abstract, things are this way because of the genre that this story is. There is war, there is untold amounts of bloodshed because this is a fantasy RPG. Caim kills because he needs to level up and continue with the story. Which brings me to the gameplay.

The way people talk about the combat of this game makes it seem like the biggest piece of dogshit ever crafted, but really it's not that bad. The systems present in this game are fine enough and far from what I would call bad. However, the combat in Drakengard IS monotonous, but I think this serves a thematic purpose. You’re not meant to enjoy all the senseless killing, and as I said earlier Caim is punished for the indiscriminate bloodshed. However, this is a video game and you must do what the game says to keep going. You must kill even when you don't want to, to continue the game. It's a commentary on the genre in the sense that in RPGs and most video games in general you are rewarded for bloodshed. You are rewarded for killing senselessly and are never called out on it simply because it's a video game. Drakengard breaks this mold and goes as far to try and make the killing itself unenjoyable. I think it’s a really cool aspect of the game that gets overlooked by some because they simply write the combat off as bad and don't interact with it in a ludonarrative sense. The flying missions are awesome though I cant lie. They do also get a bit grueling at times so the ludonarrative cohesion remains intact but they’re definitely more fun than the ground missions.

The last thing I really want to talk about is the music in this game. Drakengard has the most interesting soundtracks in any game I've ever played. It has the sound of what you would expect from a high fantasy game, except it doesn't. Every song in the game uses samples from famous composers in really interesting ways. From Mozart to Tchaikovsky to Holst, you're bound to recognize some of these composers when you see them in the credits but it's doubtful that you'll actually recognize the songs as they appear in game. The game will often loop the same very short sample over and over to create songs that sound traditionally orchestrated but still have a distinct electronic feel to them. I’ve never heard anything like it— I wouldn't necessarily say that the songs are good in a traditional sense but as far as experimental music goes it's really unique and fun to listen to. The best of these songs is the ending B credits theme, “Growing Wings”. Give it a listen if you'd like to see an example of what I'm talking about.

I think that's about all I have to say about the game at this time. This is a serious contender for one of my favorite games of all time and I implore you to play it if you haven't. This probably isn't the case if you read this spoiler tagged review but the point still stands. This game is a masterpiece