I mean every word of it in a good way. Demon’s Souls, published by From Software, exclusive for the PS3, is a challengingly difficult game, and difficult may be an understatement. Its ability to strenuously challenge the player is a double-edged sword. From Software crafted a masterpiece that distinguishes itself from the myriad of Action-RPG dungeon crawler clones out there, with intensive combat sequences, menacing colossal demons, towering Gothic structures and their dark medieval claustrophobic corridors, with its creepy phantoms and dreadful assassins stalking your trail. Death is around every corner, and I don’t just mean that literally. You will spend more time dying than exploring and fighting and you will feel that the game is trying to tell you how much you suck at this game (or gaming in general), that why you are not learning from your mistake.
The bad side of thing is the amount of frustration it generates, when the game goes out of its way to punish you, by making you lose your precious time, your progress in the game. your souls. Souls are the only currency of this game, and that includes being your experience points. Dying causes you to lose every last drop of your souls, and you can’t use your souls to Level-up unless you backtrack to the Nexus. After Death you will re-spawn in the beginning and have the chance to go back to your body to retrieve your experience points, just like in World of Warcraft, but the difference is as a soul, you are even more vulnerable, more likely to meet your demise. And if you die again before going back to your body, you will lose them forever. The game auto-saves itself as often as it can and won’t let you manually save to another slot. The only thing that can keep yourself from dying again is your real life experience of what you have learned from your previous death. This might not sound too awful on paper but its unforgiving nature is in fact surpassed by how it would simply goes out of its way to impose that apprehension as you turn every corner and hear the footsteps of unseen foes approach.
You will spend your time playing this game in either soul or body form, you have more HP in body form and will do more damage in Soul form, and after you die in body form, the only way to recover is with special items or beating boss demons at the end of each levels. Even if you were the most meticulous player you are not going to spend too much time in body form because you are going to die, in fact if you read the FAQs you will find advise about committing suicide in the Nexus, the place that connects all the worlds and where you don’t suffer a penalty from losing your body, which ties into the world tendency events and affects and dark and light path of this game, which I won’t go too much in depth here.
Demon’s Souls is a multiplayer world with almost nonexistent multiplayer gameplay, and I say that in a good way because it exists in a bare bone form which is quite eerie and appropriate, and nothing like the crap you experience in Fable 2 (I shudder with the thought of it). Watch the ghosts of other players fight and die around you without directing interacting with them, and players can write messages to warn others and ask for help and sometimes summon other players to help you take down bosses and you could even get murdered by other players, but you probably are not going to mind because you are going to die all the time anyway. Game designers should take note of how well done an online community this is, without the actual multiplayer hurdles. That you feel that you are a part of the world trying to conquer the beast that is Demon’s Souls, and your PS3 is a single node in that array of parallel dimensions.
Demon’s Souls takes a lot of skill and patience of learning enemy routines and behaviors just to progress but its a true RPG at heart, which means stats govern everything here – how deep your sword cuts, how long your can hold your ground with your shield up against blows until your stamina gives out. It isn’t Shinobi (the remake on PSX), in which it is a tough game, but if you die and die again you will get better and you will kill bosses in seconds once you have mastered the art of Shinobi (unless if you were a total imbecile, then you shouldn’t be gaming at all). Demon’s Souls punishes you even if you have perfected your skills, you still needed to be strong enough, real life experiences and skills is only half the formula here. If you endurance wasn’t high you would get killed in one cleave of a sword, and if you magic was not powerful enough you would be scratching the skins of your foes. Which makes losing your hard-earned souls when you die all the more painful, and yes, you have that one chance to retrieve them, and you will hope that you won’t fall down the cliff when you are on the edge, and well, if you died near a boss you can’t beat, you are out of luck. And yes, you can possibly go to another world to harness some more souls and grind and level up a bit before you tackle the last spot where you died, but again, good luck on that. In fact, the game was so tough for me in its first stage, I had to start over with a magic user (the general consensus is that the Royal class is the easiest) instead of going pure melee, since leveling up was not an option in the first stage. After that you could build your character any way as you see fit.
I have this rule that I shun every game that deliberately waste my time just to prolong gameplay. In this day and age we simply have not enough time to enjoy all the gaming goodness out there so there is no need for a game to take more of our time than necessarily. But I make a slight exception here with Demon’s Souls being able to differ itself from the other easy games out there by providing a challenge instead of devoid of penalty when you perish. However there are many ways they could have improved this formula which could have made it a much better, if not perfect game — like providing an item that lets you travel back to the Nexus without losing your souls (there’s a spell I know but not everyone can learn it), letting you open gates like in Diablo would be a good idea, or simply having a standard gate that let you travel back before each boss fight, or simply any extra place for you to spend your souls to improve your abilities while in dungeon would have made this game more forgiving while still retaining its arduous excellence.
Close quarter combats is especially well done here, I was reminded of my college days when I played King’s Field (also from From Software) on the PSX. The sword (and whatever else) and shield fighting here shines — every flurry of blows impacts your souls, and the huge dragons and demons will make you shudder with trepidation. Even though that I thought that this game could have benefited from a better story and easier gameplay, From Software has no doubt crafted a masterpiece, 2 generations after the excellent Armored Core and a bunch of shovel-ware sequels and mediocre RPGs on PS2 and PS3. I remember Evergrace, Forever Kingdom and Enchanted Arms with apprehension, and not the kind of dread I get from playing Demon’s Souls — which is a must-own exclusive title, if not the best, for any PS3 owner and action RPG fans, even if you are likely to give up the game in the middle, or the beginning, you owe it for yourself to treasure the experience which you will not likely find in the ocean of casual difficulty current generation video games manage to offer.
