This is my biggest project I think i've ever undertaken. Elden Ring left me with an itch to scratch what can i say? So after finishing Elden Ring 100 hours played to reach the platinum on Playstation, I have found myself wanting more Souls just not more Elden Ring. My opinions on ER are pretty well covered i think in that thread specifically but I felt like ER had a lot of problems that i didn't like. So I thought.....why not put my money where my mouth is? I'll replay every From Soft game and analyze them to see if they were truly better than ER and my opinions are true, or if the problems are nothing new and I'm blinded by an irrational desire to shit on the flavor of the month.
Starting with Demon's Souls:
Demon's Souls is a strange game to begin with, as the only way to play the first "souls" game is to play a very updated modern remake of it. However funnily enough Blue Point did a lot to keep the gameplay experience the same as much as possible, including having AI that doesn't work. Maybe it's because for the first time ever I'm playing as a Mage, but i've had several big enemies simply not know what to do about me pelting them with bullets. The big demon early in 4-1, literally just stood there while i shot him until he died which was very nice of him.
With Demon's Souls you can really see the prototype of the FromSoft level design at play here. While the whole game isn't interconnected like the follow up is, each individual level is filled with little side paths, small ways in which is loops on itself and even short cuts in a few places. The mining area in the second archstone is big on this especially because firing up elevators allows for a couple of different routes back to where you died. The Prison in Latria is a big example of this but even the first level of Boletaria loops on itself a couple of times before you reach the first boss.
The basic enemies have varying degrees of challenge to them, though after the speed of Elden Ring not very many pose any real challenge. The only guys that scared me where the mindflayers in the Tower of Latria to be honest. Not only because their spells are nasty, but they are placed in the most bullshit of spots most of the time. Enemy placement in general is fairly poor here, and while it doesn't matter that much for this game, there are notably a few enemies that are placed in postitions meant to fuck up the player as much as possible. It could be worse, but it's just annoying at times.
Quests are incredibly basic, though vague as usual, they really just involve finding a person in a level and "freeing" them, or just opening the door they are behind. But these NPc usually end up back at your hub The Nexus and sell you things like spells or weapons. It works fine, because Demon's Souls is not a very long game and with souls experience it's also not super hard minus a couple of smaller moments. I beat the game in 18 hours for NG+ and want to mess around in NG+ before moving onto the next game.
There are two big things I want to talk about though, two things that are totally unique to Demon's Souls. The first being world tendancy, the way this works is that worlds have basically a light (good) version and a evil (dark) version. Killing bosses and helping people brings the world closer to light, in light enemies are easier and you deal more damage. Dark worlds are harder and occur as you die more and more in a given level. However deaths only while full health human count. Which means if an area is hard for you and you die a lot, you wont bring the world into dark hell because only the first death as a human counts. Each mode full light and full dark have special events that occur within so what the player ends up doing is manipulating this by not dying in a world ever to bring the world to full light side. Every time you kill a boss your humanity is restored, so in order to safely get your world to light, every time you kill a boss you go back to the nexus and kill yourself. This puts you in soul form and doesn't count as fucking up your world's tendancy. Effectively you play the game at 50% hp at all times, or use a ring to have 75% hp instead. This means you MUST use up one of your valuable ring spots at all times. You only get two rings at a time so this whole concept is only cool on paper.
Thankfully they never did the tendancy thing again. And if you only count Miyazaki's games, they never really punish a player for death either.
Bosses however are awesome. Demon's Souls has some of the best bosses in the series thanks to their memorable gimmicks. Almost every boss is a gimmick fight which sucks on paper, but when you play through the game it actually serves to make the bosses more memorable imo. The old Monk is just a dipshit with a sword, but because he is blind and you can fuck with him using the Theif Ring it becomes a much more memorable fight. Almost every fight in the game has some sort of key gimmick to it, with a couple of exceptions that act like the more normal Souls-type bosses. I found the gimmicks awesome (except Dragon God) because it made every fight feel like I had to do something other than blast away with lazerbeams to win. Some of the trophies even encourage a different approach for some bosses to give you something extra to shoot for. Like killing the tower knight without killing any archers. Or never falling for the Foul's Idol's clone trick, it gives you a reason to focus even more on the bosses and I really liked that because the bosses get a little samey after a while but Demon's Souls bosses don't because of how varied they end up being.
It's not my favorite in the series, but I think it might be top 3 to be honest.
Next up will be Dark Souls 1.
Starting with Demon's Souls:
Demon's Souls is a strange game to begin with, as the only way to play the first "souls" game is to play a very updated modern remake of it. However funnily enough Blue Point did a lot to keep the gameplay experience the same as much as possible, including having AI that doesn't work. Maybe it's because for the first time ever I'm playing as a Mage, but i've had several big enemies simply not know what to do about me pelting them with bullets. The big demon early in 4-1, literally just stood there while i shot him until he died which was very nice of him.
With Demon's Souls you can really see the prototype of the FromSoft level design at play here. While the whole game isn't interconnected like the follow up is, each individual level is filled with little side paths, small ways in which is loops on itself and even short cuts in a few places. The mining area in the second archstone is big on this especially because firing up elevators allows for a couple of different routes back to where you died. The Prison in Latria is a big example of this but even the first level of Boletaria loops on itself a couple of times before you reach the first boss.
The basic enemies have varying degrees of challenge to them, though after the speed of Elden Ring not very many pose any real challenge. The only guys that scared me where the mindflayers in the Tower of Latria to be honest. Not only because their spells are nasty, but they are placed in the most bullshit of spots most of the time. Enemy placement in general is fairly poor here, and while it doesn't matter that much for this game, there are notably a few enemies that are placed in postitions meant to fuck up the player as much as possible. It could be worse, but it's just annoying at times.
Quests are incredibly basic, though vague as usual, they really just involve finding a person in a level and "freeing" them, or just opening the door they are behind. But these NPc usually end up back at your hub The Nexus and sell you things like spells or weapons. It works fine, because Demon's Souls is not a very long game and with souls experience it's also not super hard minus a couple of smaller moments. I beat the game in 18 hours for NG+ and want to mess around in NG+ before moving onto the next game.
There are two big things I want to talk about though, two things that are totally unique to Demon's Souls. The first being world tendancy, the way this works is that worlds have basically a light (good) version and a evil (dark) version. Killing bosses and helping people brings the world closer to light, in light enemies are easier and you deal more damage. Dark worlds are harder and occur as you die more and more in a given level. However deaths only while full health human count. Which means if an area is hard for you and you die a lot, you wont bring the world into dark hell because only the first death as a human counts. Each mode full light and full dark have special events that occur within so what the player ends up doing is manipulating this by not dying in a world ever to bring the world to full light side. Every time you kill a boss your humanity is restored, so in order to safely get your world to light, every time you kill a boss you go back to the nexus and kill yourself. This puts you in soul form and doesn't count as fucking up your world's tendancy. Effectively you play the game at 50% hp at all times, or use a ring to have 75% hp instead. This means you MUST use up one of your valuable ring spots at all times. You only get two rings at a time so this whole concept is only cool on paper.
Thankfully they never did the tendancy thing again. And if you only count Miyazaki's games, they never really punish a player for death either.
Bosses however are awesome. Demon's Souls has some of the best bosses in the series thanks to their memorable gimmicks. Almost every boss is a gimmick fight which sucks on paper, but when you play through the game it actually serves to make the bosses more memorable imo. The old Monk is just a dipshit with a sword, but because he is blind and you can fuck with him using the Theif Ring it becomes a much more memorable fight. Almost every fight in the game has some sort of key gimmick to it, with a couple of exceptions that act like the more normal Souls-type bosses. I found the gimmicks awesome (except Dragon God) because it made every fight feel like I had to do something other than blast away with lazerbeams to win. Some of the trophies even encourage a different approach for some bosses to give you something extra to shoot for. Like killing the tower knight without killing any archers. Or never falling for the Foul's Idol's clone trick, it gives you a reason to focus even more on the bosses and I really liked that because the bosses get a little samey after a while but Demon's Souls bosses don't because of how varied they end up being.
It's not my favorite in the series, but I think it might be top 3 to be honest.
Next up will be Dark Souls 1.
