Let me make a reservation right away: I didn’t play the original Demon’s Souls from the PS3 era, in this context we will talk specifically about Remake. Also, I won’t say anything about the PVP component, since this is a separate layer of the game.
Going through demons in 24 is like having a cat with a lousy character at home. He will place clumps of hair on your pillow, threaten your slippers and yell disgustingly for any reason and without. But you will still have tender feelings for him.
And yes, Demon’s Souls is now not a project that can provide some new experience, and some decisions in it are more likely to cause bewilderment, but through it, as through a prism, you can look at the development path of FromSoftware and how they developed the Souls Like genre.
Nexus
And here we are. We have tank control with us, our flimsy picker and shield, without which it turned out to be much more difficult to beat adversaries as a melee soldier at the beginning than in all other games of the maestro. In addition to the existing ones, there are the juiciest finishing animations and the absence of a blow when falling. Now I understand why in the first part of souls this technique was presented as a cool new feature.
Next we are introduced to what dandelions are and why now this particular variety of asteraceae will be your most desired herb over the next few tens of hours.
Every time I went to a well-known place to farm herbs, I painfully remembered the wolves from Bloodborne, exterminated for the same purpose, and praised the invention of estus. It’s especially interesting that the idea of grass was combined with estus in the second Dark Souls and Sekiro.
And that’s why it’s only less clear why it was decided to turn to this mechanic in relation to blood, however, perhaps with its help the developer was once again trying to push the player to explore.
But while this is far from us, now we are a newly-minted hero who has passed the tutorial and has already safely died from the first demon. This technique was clearly to the taste of the developers, because we will see it again in both Elden Ring and Sekiro, where death is a necessary element for advancing through the main plot. We see a rethinking of the same idea in the first Dark Souls and Bloodborne, where death is also a trigger, but the player can avoid it. And we no longer encounter a similar game situation in the second and third parts of Souls, although the idea that death is an obligatory element of the cycle, and the main thing in the game is your personal experience, runs like a red thread through all the above-mentioned games, and in general is a fundamental pillar of the genre. Evolve, Miyazaki literally whispers in your ear after each of your deaths, from Vanguard to Elden’s beast.
We are presented with the fact that the character’s soul is now in a place called Nexus. Do you want your soul back?? Be a cat – defeat the demon. And yes, you can look at your armor only while your soul is with you, the rest of the time you have a bluish glow, behind which only approximate outlines are visible. You can’t play solar fashion with this set. Fortunately, we never saw this technique again in any of the studio’s games. And if we talk about armor, then there are very few of them, as well as weapons in the game, however, all the basic archetypes that we will use in most of the subsequent From Software games of this genre are already present.
After wandering a little around the huge desert hub with the blacksmith, where the NPCs we met/saved come, I still couldn’t understand why it was decided to abandon this idea in the first moments? It can be assumed that she fell victim for the sake of the connectedness of the world, but even if so, then, apparently, the decision was not very successful, because in subsequent games we see one or another hub in every souls like release of the studio.
Obelisk-teleporters are also found there in different worlds, obviously the same idea was developed in the tombstones of Bloodborne. Perhaps added to the game primarily for the convenience of navigating through the bowls, which are somewhat vaguely reminiscent of the worlds of demonic souls. Being, as it were, an intermediate link between the available teleportation over any bonfires already opened by the player. Unlike the first Souls, where we get teleportation between fires only in the second half of the game, apparently a tribute to the narrative. And the return of hemorrhoids to moving between them, because in Bloodborne the player is also required to return to the hub before being transported to the right place.
Perhaps the idea of obelisks would not be out of place in the second Dark Souls. Most likely, its rather weak coherence of the world, gaping against the backdrop of the first part of the series, would have looked more harmonious.
And there we meet a wonderful little man with a chest, signaling that we will touch upon the next dark chapter in the history of game design.
Everything except souls has weight. The weight that we can carry not only on ourselves, but also with us in a backpack is limited. Fortunately, in the remake, if things are overweight, they are automatically sent to the chest, and you don’t have to go back for it. Initially there was no such thing. But we still have an additional stat for weight, and additional irritants out of the blue – now you need grass, but your inventory is full of armor you recently picked up, and the grass flies to the Nexus, or you pick up a new sword, but in order to try it you need to return to the chest from your unknown nowhere. And it’s good if you remember about it at all, because getting to the fire on your own two feet is often a non-trivial task.
Having assumed what level of decay awaits us ahead, we finally go to..
Obelisk of the King
And here is the bridge, here is the wall hanging over you. Finally, after so many years, art design can be seen in decent graphics, and there really is something to see here. The game literally forces you here and there to take a break from the everyday extermination of creatures and switch to photo mode.
Yes, not in every location you will want to do this, not in every location it will make sense at all, since it is as dark there as in the soul of the person who invented the swamp in this game, and not a single filter could save me from this impenetrable darkness, but where the game still allows itself to be seen – this picture can compete with many. What about the torch?? Here we are met with the next mistakes of youth because, unfortunately, the thought of them will only come to the developers for the second part of Dark Souls.
But let’s go back to our wall. And on the wall we are met by another nemesis from this game, and, for that matter, not only her – a horde of homeless people earnestly trying to drop you, backstab and parry, and that’s okay, it’s even fun. What’s not fun about this is that the most common aggressive dummies simply try to beat you with numbers, and with all this, there are often situations when it is simply impossible to get around them, which forces the player to make the same enticing passes with his hands over and over again in order to still go a couple of steps further. In some way, this dominance subtly reminds me of the balance of power in the second Dark Souls; perhaps, I owe the skill of running around everything to this game.
Painfully gnawing your way to the first boss. Having examined all possible nooks and crannies, looked under every stone and felt all the walls, unfortunately, in demons the false wall is a rather rare beast and the love of licking walls will have an effect only starting from the first part of the Stuffy series and will especially develop towards the second, I notice that I have been wandering in this location for half an hour and have encountered only one fire – the initial one.
So, I realized that the bright idea of setting up fires at least a little more often began to slowly creep into the developers only in subsequent games, although even there we still run to both Artorias and the shadows of Yharnam, and even more so to Freya from the second part of souls. This problem is already less expressed in the third Souls and found its best solution only with the advent of Marika’s wedges in the Elden Ring. But even there, apparently as a tribute to respect, they make us run around, especially around the Azul Forum
One would think that the locations are built in such a way that there is no need for a large number of fires. But no. Shortcuts are also rare in this game. And often a location is just a long intestine, sometimes rolled into a ring.
And finally the door opens to an impressive scene of a huge spear flying out of it. Looks menacing. But essentially this spear and the absolute unreadability of what is happening is all that can be found difficult in the Phalanx, it’s not for nothing that later this so-called boss became an ordinary mob in the stuffy series. Annoying, but no more. And he’s also afraid of fire.
Well, okay, the first boss dying on the first try is something unprecedented, and it seems to me that this concept was chosen quite intelligently, and stayed with us until the advent of Bloodborne, even in Sekiro the first boss was as simple as possible.
But after that the idea https://noidverificationcasinos.co.uk/ apparently turned 180 degrees, Gundir alone is worth it, I’m not talking about Margite. I refuse to consider the large Tutor mob Rings a boss.
After a brilliant victory over an incredible enemy, the game finally introduces us to the main truly difficult enemy of this game – quests. The ornateness in the presentation of the plot in demons has already reached a level worthy of a master, although it told a surprising amount.
And so we get a task – go, says the maiden in black, whose image we will now see in literally every studio release, talk, and you will have a goal that sounds simple. But!
Try to find that unfortunate NPC who will give you the quest and allow you to continue the game. While you’re running around an absurdly huge, confusing nexus and you don’t have the slightest idea where what you need is or what it looks like. What is happening will literally drive you to despair. I ran several times up and down what felt like all the floors of the building and I’m still not sure that I found everything hidden in them. And now half an hour passes, but it feels like half a life. Having already collected a bunch of clues, you finally pay attention to one of the dozen other monks sitting near the wall. All that distinguishes him from the rest is a small candle.
Damn, this game doesn’t want to be played so much that it deliberately hides the main quest from the player. Here the master outdid himself. Fortunately, in subsequent games everything was not so bad. Except that sometimes we had to look for Herman in the bushes, but this is literally incomparable.
But we can move on. Having overcome another galaxy of corridors with good views from the window and disgusting mobs around every corner, and, accordingly, having passed many foggy walls, I caught myself thinking – on the one hand, in subsequent games the developers made a significant step in favor of convenience, leaving the fog only for bosses; fit boss, lost. Well, yes, Demons is the first and last game where the existence of the fog wall is explained.
And now we get to the ill-fated bridge. And since in this game alone we use the dragon to clear the path at least three times, and we already meet him in the first part of dark souls, the developers obviously really liked the idea of such an event.
Only, unlike the first part, the demons have not yet acquired a sense of proportion, so you need to run across one of these bridges not once, but three, and at the same time you have a chance of being eaten by dogs, killed in the back by crossbowmen, or simply stabbed to death by a homeless person with a knife. And yes this is the way to the boss. And no shortcuts.
Perhaps this is still a conscious idea – the boss starts not from a foggy wall, but from a fire in front of it… then this explains a lot, it doesn’t really make what’s happening any less tiring. Every time I am glad that this idea has sunk into oblivion.
Nevertheless, having overcome this miracle of game design flight, we meet the knight of the tower.
A boss on his own with an idea. It’s a pity, I was able to count it only after death.
It’s interesting how the idea of this boss eventually split into two – the Iron Golem from Dark Souls is the embodiment of the knight himself. The idea of building a battle and an arena was embodied all the way in Bloodborne in the Reborn. Both in Demons and in Bloodborne, the concept of running and killing all the little things first – and there are about ten of them – is more boring than an interesting challenge, but the knight himself is not bad.
As a result, the boss was killed, it was long and rather mournful. However, melancholy is a seasoning that you should get used to when passing demons, and the sooner, the easier it will be to meet more and more new obstacles that require perseverance from you rather than resourcefulness. But still the boss fell.
And what I get after is an impenetrable wall – go, he says, kill the demon and only then will I let you in, so be it. From Software has not forgotten the idea of such walls and we will see it more than once in Elden Ring.
And now we have no choice but to sadly stomp back to the Nexus and from there to the next obelisk
Obelisk of the Underground King
Returning to the idea with obelisks, it was in the second world that I felt its advantages. Despite all the beauty and immersiveness of the connected world of the first and third parts of the Soul series, this approach does not give the player a variety of opportunities to change the atmosphere to something new, available in demons. And even taking into account the branching nature of the path of dark Souls, there is still a strict sequence in them, and if you are already severely strangled in a location, then you do not have many alternative paths. If they exist at all.
Looking at the problem from this position and ignoring its obvious disadvantages for now, the idea with obelisks as a whole begins to look quite elegant. It solves not only the problem of the incoherence of the world, but also makes it possible to switch between different biomes at almost any time, because for most of the game you can go to any of the worlds. And, perhaps, the open world of Elden Ring can be called the successor of this idea.
And we, meanwhile, are in the mines. The passage to them burns your eyes with its poisonous orange sky due to the overexposed brightness settings from the previous location, which makes you involuntarily want to start looking for a can of silver paint, imagining yourself as a participant in the road of rage.
But what was more impressive was the fact that now my pick, which I just used to persuade two bosses, practically does not work on the most ordinary local homeless people. It took me a long time to come to the conclusion that local miners have such fierce resistance to weapons with cutting damage and vulnerability to piercing damage, and I still can’t accept this idea.
I absolutely don’t understand how, why and why this was done so radically. And the first thing that strikes you is the narrative dissonance – why these creatures have such resistance? This is a vitamin D deficiency? Or what? And yes, of course, in the same location there is a blacksmith and a merchant selling stones, and we, as a player, can sharpen any other weapon that we have without any problems. And perhaps we were even lucky to have already obtained the necessary weapons. But you still have to grind. The only question is how long. Your time is nothing. Remember what I said about accepting sadness?.
Fortunately, in the future this, essentially a good idea, will find its development in something more understandable. Hit skeletons or stone gargoyles with a crusher, because it crushes them – clear, understandable.
But for now, grandfathers. And now, having sorted through the few weapons in the inventory. With difficulty, finding something that I can at least use. I was still able to move from the dead point. Of course, dying.
And oh how I didn’t know and how this curse of ignorance ruined my entire build.
It was here, in the second world, that I realized that this strange eye, changing its shade barely noticeably, is not just a beautiful picture from the design, it’s a damn important thing – Trend.
And you would know how glad at that moment I was that this mechanic was buried along with the Demons.
A trend is a clear example of an interesting idea on paper and its most disgusting implementation in life. Although even with the first statement it is sometimes difficult to agree. And it is death in physical form in the world that is the most likely factor that will confront an unsuspecting player with this tricky mechanic.
Now, having defeated the boss, you take on physical form, happily run on, but sooner or later, with the phrase “You are dead,” you will make a quick trip to the fire. And it would seem, “Well, he died and died,” but first, it’s worth considering that after the death of your bodily form, some of your hit points are taken away from you – in any case. As a result, you always have to wear a ring that partially neutralizes this debuff, yes, hello again Dark Souls 2. From such parallels, I increasingly begin to wonder whether the second Souls are not a greater ideological heir to the Demons than the first. But that’s half the trouble.
Indeed, back in 2009, the developers From Software still regularly lack a sense of proportion, because in addition to the reduced health of our protagonist, the health of all the inhabitants of this world and the power of their attack increases, that is, we also begin to additionally suffer from each of the numerous homeless people. Isn’t this a dream..
The only funny thing is that when you kill the boss, these hit points are restored to you, and the trend changes in the bright side – it turns out to be logic, if it’s difficult for you, then we will make it even more difficult for you, if you have become stronger, we will make it even easier for you. Whoever came up with this is a true evil genius.
But if you forget about this misunderstanding, then the rest of the idea looks very good, depending on your actions in the game, certain passages open or close. Only now you’ll have to guess about this mechanics sooner. Voluntarily, the game will only show a strange menu that does not give any explanation and a barely noticeable changed indicator in the game when loading a location and next to the hit bar. Then somehow get out on your own.
And the best thing is that in order to avoid darkening the trend of the world and progress through the game normally, after each kill of the boss you need to go to Roskomnadzor in the Nexus, because there are no consequences for death there except for the loss of HP.
In fairness, I should note that some events can be seen not only with a completely light, but also with a dark tendency, and that with a dark tendency, enemies bring more souls and loot, that is, there is some kind of balance and interest in this. The only problem is that it is extremely difficult to change the current trend.
And now we are doomed to feel free fall after every boss kill. Just because. I’m glad that I realized this not too late, because this is only the second world that I found myself in, but this was enough for me, as it turned out almost at the end of the game, to safely close the passage to the sword I needed.
But let’s return to the second world itself with its stuffy mines, a very useful atmospheric place. And to the second blacksmith, who, unfortunately, flatly refuses to go with us to the hub, and we will have to return to him, since only he can improve special weapons, and only he can forge weapons from the souls of bosses.
Oh, these blacksmiths in the beautiful nowhere. But if it’s quite easy to get to the blacksmith in Demons, then why the Fromes in the first Souls, and in the second too, decided that it was a good idea to install an NPC to which you will run on a schedule so far from the fire, I cannot understand. Fortunately, they still got rid of these mistakes of youth. As, by the way, from repairs. Which was once again more of a tedious mechanic than one that made any sense.
Here it makes sense to touch on the mechanics of creating weapons – and here the developer gave us another ode to complexity. There are already few weapons in the game, so some of them are also covered by a grind wall. After all, in order to get a special weapon, you not only need to kill the boss and bring his soul to the blacksmith, you also need to give for it a very specific and often well-pumped other weapon. For example, sword+6.
And I’m silent about the fact that you can only understand what kind of weapon it should be without Wiki only by trial and error. And yes, some of the stones for upgrading can be bought from the nearest merchant, but if you take into account that not everyone will upgrade many different types of weapons, for example, I upgraded only one weapon to +6 in the entire game, then at this moment the player is again overtaken by farming.
And even though this mechanics is quite clear to me narratively, you can make any kind of speech out of the boss’s soul, you need the appropriate material. But functionally it’s darkness. Fortunately, functionality won out in the second part of the Soul series.
And so, continuing to wander through the darkness of the second world, from which my eyes already hurt a little. Picking up rings that I simply have nowhere to put, since I only have two fingers in this game and one is definitely occupied with reducing the curse – a cure for mechanics, while the second one is needed for farming – a cure for the second mechanic.
Fighting off the darkness of homeless people, normally killed only by a backstab, and fire slugs, killing which within miles is extremely difficult not to take damage, because our character definitely needs to take a step in order to strike. Step in front of you…straight into the burning slug. Given that these slugs also like to fall off the wall on you and trap you on a thin bridge, then playing a game of "die or die" over a lake of lava becomes damn easy.
Perhaps, at this point, for the first, but by no means the last time, I felt a rolling wave of indignation from the fact that the game is difficult not because of its interesting mechanics, but because of its mechanics it’s just damn simple, but because of its crookedness, it’s not even complexity, it’s the usual stuffiness.
And with all this, next to us we encounter a rather tactile element of interaction with the world. Find the lever and make your way to the boss easier by removing the lava. Something similar will be used in the second part of Souls, where it was implemented most interestingly, but in odd parts we help ourselves only with shortcuts. Ideologically, we will meet the boss rewarding for research more than once, both in this game and in subsequent ones. Developments of this idea include the casket from Bloodborne, the shackles of Mog in Elden, or the tear.
In fact, nothing unusual, an obvious greeting from a metroidvania, but I find such small details very pleasant. And it’s even more pleasant when this means you spend less resources on the boss. What, in my opinion, is an important feature of the genre.
And now I come, to whom would you think?? To "Boss Spider, the spider is huge, who could have predicted this". What would a game of those years be without a spider boss?. And This boss once again introduced me to how crooked this game is and how brilliantly it catches its players, although I’m not sure that such an idea was present in it initially.
There is a golden rule in saltslices – hit from the back. Few people break it. And then, seeing in front of me a huge arthropod fervently spitting fire at me and threateningly twitching its mandibles, I made the logical conclusion for me then – I have to go under the tail. And what was my surprise when I was not only slowed down, but when I pressed the roll, I was cut off by the animation of such a strained, but extremely lazy attempt to move, that at first I decided that I had missed a blow, which caused me to lose my balance. By the way, the mechanics of balance (Poise) in demons have not yet visited us. Of course, at that moment I received damage and of course – this is death. And of course this happened more than once. And I’ll still remember the killer animation I encountered.
But the boss was defeated, and I moved on happy. But happiness is a very dangerous emotion in soulslike games in general and in Demon’s Soul in particular. This emotion makes you relax, and relaxing in these places is contraindicated. There was no trace of my happiness left after just a couple of minutes, as a crowd of homeless people, literally almost impassable to me, was waiting ahead of me. Well, you remember, yes, resistance, plus the corrupted tendency of the world, and the strength of mobs always increased noticeably after the boss, while the mobs look and act the same as before.
At that moment I realized that it was time for me to take a break from this world and look at others. In general, the idea is clear and worked exactly as it should, they create complexity for you in the world so that you go to study what is there behind the other obelisks. But creating difficulty by simply stupidly throwing in a whole host of rather fat mobs – these are the mistakes of youth that Frome outgrew with each new game. By the third part, such a situation should already be looked for. But while we’re here and in Demons it’s business as usual.
And after wandering a little through other worlds, I returned with new strength both in my hands and in my eyes. Because again endless dark holes of huge brightly fiery snails awaited me on one side, and just darkness on the other. I had to switch the brightness again to at least see something. Fortunately, after I literally broke through the initial crowd of homeless people, all that was left was waiting for shaykhuluds crawling out of the ground. Possessing only the excellent ability to kill with one spit. In general, this is not so scary when compared with previous creatures. And, of course, parkour was waiting for me.
Adding locations to a game with such controls where you have to make at least one jump is already a perversion. But every game Miyazaki stubbornly offers us a new and increasingly sophisticated BDSM session without telling us what the safe word is. Unless you add a cat ring so you can prolong the process. Thank you, at least in the last games the maestro became softer and added a normal jump. And parkour in Demons is a fast, but very scary journey, and if I didn’t have experience in other sauces, it would most likely be death.
Finally, after all the suffering, I see the foggy door. And on the one hand, it seems like it’s time for the boss to appear, and there are suspicious notes at the bottom, but on the other hand, something in me still hoped that the game wouldn’t force me to go through this whole path again, this is too much even for Demons.