Demon's Souls

Only Available on PS3
Played it for 100+ hours

RATING: 7.5/10

"I want to get off Mr. Allant's Wild Ride!" my character seemed to say as he was fighting the final boss of FromSoftware's famously difficult Demon's Souls. First of all, if readers don't know what Mr. Bones' Wild Ride is, please look it up immediately. Second of all, if you have a PS3, go out and purchase this game. If you're not a Souls fan, it's the first and best welcome. If you are a Souls fan, it's a beautiful history lesson.

The game is just as punishingly hard as you've always heard, that's for sure. The game begins with a tutorial that ends in a boss fight that is impossible to win. Or, at least, if you're lucky enough to kill the Vanguard Demon with the minimal amount of room the game gives you to move around, the second boss will kill you in a cutscene. So it teaches you early on that you will die. Often. The game proceeds to resurrect you in "The Nexus," a central hub that will transport you to one of five worlds that are all around the kingdom of Boletaria. Your simple mandate is to eliminate the demons that now control the world of man. Simple, right?

The first level is fairly straightforward. It's the outside of a castle, and you must find a way to open the portcullis to proceed. Complicated? No. Easy?... No. The game doesn't have an indication of what enemies are more or less difficult, so it's easy to stumble into an area that's impossible to beat at the start, such as the dragon outcropping or the red-eye knight's bridge. Additionally, if you don't explore the whole area, you'll miss the most valuable item in the whole game: the Cling Ring. Normally, death reduces your max health to 50%, and this can't be changed until a boss is killed or a finite item called a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes is used. The Cling Ring, however, boosts your health back up to 75%, which is significantly more manageable. And if you don't fully explore the very first area of the game, you won't have this item for the other four and half worlds.

However, getting past the first boss, the Phalanx Demon, is a treat. As a first boss, it's simple and pretty boring. But it also gives the player access to Stonefang Tunnel, The Tower of Latria, The Shrine of Storms, and The Valley of Defilement, all of which are unique and fascinating areas that, at least in the lore, are all tied together. By reading the item descriptions, you can begin to peace together tiny bits of information until a picture begins to emerge. It's never told to the player exactly what the story of Demon's Souls is, or what the accurate history of Boletaria is. Instead, this is left to the player and their imagination. Who is Yurt, the Silent Chief? Why, when the player digs deeper, is he working for Mephistopheles? What is the Order of the Soul? None of these questions are ever fully answered, and this is part of the charm of the game. When you get down to it, the biggest question throughout the story is simply, "why?"

This is why Demon's Souls is such an interesting game, and why it spawned so many spiritual successors in the Souls-borne games. On the surface, it's a simple RPG about stamina management and strategic upgrading, but the world is incredibly rich and deep if you're willing to do some digging, and it paints a tragic story of a kingdom cyclically inviting the same demon invasion countless times, each time causing so much destruction that it takes a thousand years just to rebuild to medieval technology. Each world that the player visits has its own theme, and each holds its own piece of the overall story. And the player isn't just told this, they discover it themselves while being an adventurer.

Now, mechanically, this game is... lacking. In several areas. For one, a lot of the game feels incredibly floaty a lot of the time. Hits don't have much of any real impact, falling is slow, and the player can only roll in four directions: forward, left, right, and backward. This makes combat significantly more tedious, as rolls often shoot off in unintended directions, and many fights just aren't that engaging. Most of the bosses are great, but end up as gems in the mud as players trudge through the chore-filled areas of the game, which becomes especially true later on in the Tower of Latria and the Valley of Defilement.

Balance-wise, the game is also not stellar. Later Souls games would introduce the concept of a rolling gradient, which allowed players to roll very fast when they were lightly armored, roll decently most of the time, and "fat roll" only when they were heavily encumbered by their gear. Demon's Souls did not have this, it was either rolling fast or rolling badly. This meant that a reasonable investment in endurance would see you rolling all over the place in even the heaviest of armor sets. High mental stats, like intelligence and faith, would see absolutely devastating damage increases on spells, and of course the now famous "Purple Dragon Smasher" meta forced FromSoftware to rethink how weapon buffs would work in later games.

But, despite the problems, it's still a fun game. And, like I said at the start, it offers both the best welcome for newcomers and an interesting history lesson for veterans. It may not be worth playing multiple times, but it's absolutely worth playing.