Demon's Souls Review
Playing this like, 1 month after beating Elden Ring sure was a choice. I wrote an entire 5 paragraph essay talking about how I was ready to be done with Elden Ring, yet I'm back again writing a review for another soulslike.
I stand by every single word that I wrote in my Elden Ring review. I was ready to be done with the game. That being said, I wasn't ready being done with Soulslikes.
While playing Elden Ring, I made an offhand comment to my partner about wanting to try Demon's Souls. My birthday was about a month away, so they pounced on that as an easy birthday present. Thank you! I love you!
I could give a diatribe going on about only mildly tangentially related goings on regarding this, but I would prefer to enter this review with a bit more focus on the game. I say 150 words into a review that has not even talked about the game itself. Maybe I have a future as a game reviewer.
I played this whole game during the early-mid stages of having covid which, at the time of writing, I still have. I was mildly delirious at first and frankly do not especially remember or know how I got through 1-1 given that area is really challenging, but I did it.
I poked at the game a bit the following couple of days, not making a ton of progress but playing enough to feel satisfied.
I then felt pretty good today! Good enough in fact to put about 13 hours into Demon's Souls and beat a vast majority of the game during one prolonged play session.
I am not someone who opts to do prolonged game sessions for games. It just isn't in my nature. It is not especially an attention span thing, it's just how I live my life. I like segmentation and putting things down for a bit. That did not happen with this game. I beat the final boss, looked at my watch and saw it was 10 PM. I thought it was, like, 6 PM tops. I missed dinner without even batting an eye.
Okay, focused, focused, this is about the game.
My overall feeling is that I felt like I was going back to play the NES version of one of my favorite franchises. Think The Legend of Zelda. I had beaten Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and had about half of a Dark Souls playthough, by the time I started this game. I had proverbially played A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, and Ocarina of Time going into this. I understand what a Souls game was, and saw their evolution, but had never gone to the source itself.
So much of the Souls formula is introduced here, and for attempting to do something so drastically different, I found the experience to be shockingly coherent and enjoyable from start to finish. The soul form vs human form mechanic was a cool idea, but cutting your HP by half was a bridge too far (though equipping the ring to make it 75% alleviates much of this), and I think Dark Souls better handles this idea by making some smart changes to the formula. That being said, I found it nowhere near as obtrusive as I expected and found that I was able to enjoy the game nonetheless.
The bosses are something that I suppose I could call 'disappointing' but honestly, that doesn't feel especially fair to the game. They made Dark Souls knowing people enjoyed this style of combat and gameplay, and had the previous experience of working on the game to know what works and what doesn't work. Are most of the bosses far too easy and gimmicky? Yes! They are! But given the era that this came out in, I can totally forgive that. They didn't really have templates for bosses like this before, to my knowledge, and if I am simply not remembering any at this time, the developers did not have the action game experience to properly implement them. That isn't even to say that the bosses are all terrible-just that they are forced to stack up with some of the best boss experiences that video games have to offer.
On the other hand, I felt the levels themselves were expertly crafted. I adored exploring these environments to find new enemies and items. Exploring these environments felt as good, and as some points even better, than the other games that I have played from this series. I'm frankly impressed at how much they were able to nail this aspect right off the bat, and it makes sense that it seemingly was the most concrete part of the series, continuing fairly unchanged even through to Elden Ring's legacy dungeons.
I'll tip my hat to the PS5 remaster as well. It is visually probably the best game I've ever played environmentally, it ran at a nearly perfect 60FPS for me the whole time, and I found myself loving exploring the environment.
I loved this game, I enjoy it more than Dark Souls personally, and it was a real standout experience. I went in expecting to get something of a history lessen, but I found myself absolutely loving what was in front of me.
Please forgive any issues with formatting or if any of my points are not totally coherent. As stated, I currently have covid when writing this and am not quite feeling myself. I also didn't proofread this at all either, whoopsie.
