Demon’s Souls

There was a time when Nintendo took the wheel of the industry, and started the rise of all the goddamn motion baby/grandma games. Nintendo’s market strategy was to appeal to a different audience than the ones they lost to Sony and Microsoft, granted they succeeded. Unfortunately, many of the industry leading publishers pushed their developers to move on that note, and started to think: ‘how can we make our games more adaptable’. So, many games were made more “adaptable”, but they didn’t stop there,games became easier, obvious, superficial, and lacked challenge; In other words for baby/grandma.

Demon’s Souls...ahaa, just hearing the name alone put a smile on my face. It came as a knight in shining armor and brought back the sense of challenge and exploration; It reminded the industry that many gamers love to be challenge.

I think the best way to describe the game’s school-of-thought is this: You cut your teeth by being dropped in a place where everything is foreign to you, you have no map, no help from anyone and everything hates your guts and wants to disembowel you, or worse. You start exploring and make your way through fighting against insurmountable enemies. After sometime you gain experience, level up and return to exuberantly kill everyone and everything.

To describe the game more technically: Its an action role playing game, with one of the best combat engines I have ever played. I can sing songs about it, but i'll try to keep it brief. TRY!. Just know that it’s easily one of the most comprehensive combat engines out there. The engine is built on high risk, high reward with every attack. You’ll have calculate each and every attack. Moreover, the combat is divided into three paths: Physical, Magical and Faith attacks.

Demon’s souls has two ways for the player to level up. First is the usual in-game which is done by leveling up your character’s attributes and weapons. The second, which many, many games lack: It’s you as a player; you learn the enemy patterns, you learn how to wield your weapon and with time you will know each and every attack you can do, where it will reach, and how much damage it will do. Anyway, with time you get stronger, more skilled and you return again to those Insurmountable enemy fucks, and kick there asses.

To be more technical, the level up system is divided into nine attributes. As you level up certain attributes you’ll be able to wield new weapons, use new magic spells, new faith spells, gain more health, get stronger,...etc; So, you're not restricted to one path, and you can mix your character’s build as you like, but to gain more abilities in each path you must stick to leveling up certain skills.

There is also weapon upgrading. Almost every weapon in the game can be upgraded into different branches, suiting your play style and your character’s attributes. The same goes for the Magic and Faith spells. More to that, is how difficult it’s to upgrade certain weapon; Some will require you to beat certain bosses, others from enemy drops. Leveling up some weapons to the max can be extremely difficult since some items has really low drop rate, but one thing is for sure: the gratifying feel of upgrading a weapon is just beautiful.

In short, the leveling system gives you a sea of choices and variety; you can become a knight that wields a sword ‘n shield, or sword and magic spells, a barbarian that can wield a giant axe with high speed, and that is just to name a few.

The level design in Demon’s Souls is absolutely top-notch work. The game is divided into five worlds and a hub called the nexus. Each world is divided into a number of levels and presented with unique theme; the first is medieval castles, second is mining tunnels. I won't spoil the rest, but each world looks, feels and plays differently. Just navigating through levels will give you an idea of how much thought was put into the design. Every single enemy, item and pathway is placed with careful thought. The enemy placement will force you to move more carefully and use different strategies. Secret Doors, paths and items will force you to explore more. At the beginning of all levels it will be daunting, and time consuming to navigate through the level, but with careful exploration it will get easier with shortcuts and whatnot.

The death mechanic is another factor that adds to the difficulty; after dying you’ll respawn at the beginning of the world, or at the start of a certain level within the world. The levels are fairly large but at certain points, if you explore enough, you’ll find short cuts, doors, elevators...etc that will get back to the beginning of the level; so if you get to a boss room and get your ass handed to you --which will happen believe me-- you can make your way back faster.

The art is another strong aspect in the game. The artists are one of the most creative minds i have ever seen in the macabre/weird-horror genre. They mix of themes inspired from H.P.Lovecraft, Japanese mythology and the manga berserk. The atmosphere is incredibly done well, and the difficulty and enemy design just adds to the weird horror feel.

When it comes to the narrative, it’s mostly all being told in an enigmatic Lovecraftian style. The art design of the levels and enemies serves more than just mere aesthetics, it also tells a story. More of the story can be found through dialogue with NPC characters you meet, or from item’s descriptions, but again all very obscure. (Just try finding the story behind the item “Sticky white stuff”). The narrative also includes choices that can impact your game, but they are mostly subtle, and you won't see the impact instantly; actually it will most likely surprise you, or you won't even know that something was the result of an action you made.

There isn’t a lot of dialogue in the game, just a number of NPCs you meet. The dialogue is mostly enigmatic, but the writing is terrific and the voice acting is excellent. Overall the game’s atmosphere is horrific and depressing, and the voice acting and writing give it that final stroke that shows how the state of the world is affecting those who populate it.

The soundtrack is a hit and a miss. The issues I had are mainly two: Half of the tracks are mostly atmospheric and lack identity to make them memorable, but they do fit the atmosphere. The other, not so atmospheric, tracks which has a lot of personality and terrific melody, lack in the overall sound; they need a bit more oomph.

As i have said before, the game had its impact on the industry with the difficulty level, but it also did in terms of online play. Online play is implemented in a clever and immersive style; By obtaining certain items, you can either join others and aid them to the conclusion of an area. On the other hand, you can invade other players as a foe and try to ruin there day killing them and preventing them from finishing the level. That system, as well as the diverse character builds opened a whole new layer to the game; which is PVP (player vs. player). I’ve spent hours upon hours just building characters, trying all sort of different mixes than fighting friends and random players.

There is a lot of ins and outs to the online system and it mostly works well. The only issue i can think of, which they solved in later games, is how to connect to friends; there was no system to guarantee that you will connect to a certain person. The way to connect to other players is: you had to use an item which writes a message on the ground, other players will see the message with your name on it and summon you. So you have to tell your friend that you’ll be in a certain location, put your message and hope that you both are in the same server.

Moreover about the online play, there is another mechanic called “World Tendency”. There is around seven levels in the world tendency, and it can be shifted from Neutral, to Pure white or to pure black. Shifting is done by killing certain bosses, or by dying outside the nexus. This system doesn’t count your actions alone, it counts all the players on the server; so if most of the player are doing actions that shifts to black tendency, the effect will be on the whole server. What the tendency does when it’s black is the enemies become more difficult but has higher drop rate, and the opposite for white tendency. Also there are events that can only be triggered during certain tendency level.

Most of the issues that can be found in the game are technical, like a bad UI (user interface), which isn’t that big of an issue. The biggest technical issue in the game is the Frame-rate drop, granted it's not everywhere, but goddamn it, just mention to anyone the name “blighttown” the area’s difficulty gets amplified by 10 from the the frame-rate drop.

In closing, Demon’s souls is one of the best examples of why i still love gaming to this day. It's a grand epic to go through. You venture through all sort of odd and eerie worlds, fighting all sort of freakish, disturbing, fucked up, enemies and bosses. The game is also filled with secret items, weapons, shortcuts, areas...etc, It built a huge community that worked together to uncover all its secrets.

I just hope to see more developers and publisher grow balls like Fromsoftware. The ideas they had were creative and very much unheard of, but they believed in them and built a huge audience. Looking at you Asscreed, do something new for fuck sake.