So Demon's Souls is done, platinumed, and I'm probably not playing this game again for a very very very very very long time.
If you guys think Elden Ring is obtuse the shit you need to deal with in Demon's Souls is fucking disgusting. World Tendancy is a terrible system by itself because it makes the game harder the more you fail at it and that is fucking dickheaded design full stop. But combined with Player Tendancy it's even worse, because that also causes thing to get harder.
But the real kicker is that you need to purposefully make the tendancies go from light to black to light again in order to get all the shit in the game.
So during the first playthrough you have to kill yourself in the nexus every time you kill a boss. This is important, because you never want to be in human (full health) form while in a world because if you die while human you blacken the tendancy of that world. So you fight in soul form only (half health, or 75% if you wear the ring which you will and this means you technically only ever have 1 ring slot at a time because fucking bad design). Every time you kill a boss the world gets lighter tendancy until it reached pure white. Which means after every boss, go back to the nexus and kill yourself so that you don't risk dying in a world and fuck up the tendancy.
The reason you want full white and full black tendancy for the worlds is that there are special events that happen in the levels when you are full black or white. In white you get things like the key to free the ghost guy in the Tower of Latria, which by the way you have to do FIRST because then you turn the world black and have to fight that ghost's black phatom which wont occur if you didn't free him in pure white world first. Come the fuck on with this bullshit Fromsoft. Who thought this was a good idea? Oh and by the way, the game doesn't explain ANY of this shit. Never once does the game even mention the Tendancy system at all, so people just had to fuck around and figure this shit out.
Then there is player tendancy, which relies on world tendancy. So the way it works is that you get white (good) tendancy by killing black phantom NPC's which only occur when the world is black. But here's the kicker, if you don't directly kill the phantom it doesn't count towards your tendancy. That's right, if you use a bleed weapon for example and it's a tick of bleed that kills the phantom you GET NOTHING FUCKER!!!!!! It has to die from direct damage by you, so go fuck yourself.
Getting player tendancy to pure white takes killing a phantom in all five worlds. Then once you are pure white, you get a ring from a guy in the nexus. And now you have to go to pure black player tendancy which is done by killing npc's. BUT!!!! Do not kill Nexus NPC's yet! Go around and kill the shop keepers and blacksmiths in the actual worlds, BUT NOT PATCHES! once you've killed those you should have almost pure black, so then you kill blacksmith ED in the nexus and that should get you pure black player tendancy.
Go upstairs in the nexus and there will be a special npc who gives you missions to kill a bunch of npc's in the nexus, (oh by the way this step requires that you have saved every npc possible from the worlds first) kill the npc's as the quest desires and turn them in. The final quest will reward you with another ring (which should be your last ring and thus the trophy) Then you have to kill the mission giver, and now you can go beat the game.
NG+ is the worst fucking thing ever. I don't know what the idea was, but NG+'s scaling is fucking broken. You see Demon's Souls only lets you get weapons to +5 and the weapons don't scale the way they do in other soul's games. By the time you finish your first playthrough you are pretty much as strong as you are ever going to get. But NG+ doesn't seem to give a shit, and it will fuck you up. The valley of defilement is fucking broken, because every enemy will one shot you and there are tons of time hiding in blind corners, or positioned to hit you right as you fall into a hole you MUST fall into to proceed through the level. It's insanely hard, which is crazy because the normal game is pretty easy if you have souls experience. In NG+ the bosses are a joke, it's the enemies in the levels that are the challenge. It's baffling to me really.
So NG+ is required because you can't get all the spells in one playthrough, you need a few boss souls in NG+ to get the rest of the spells. Then I started a brand new game in order to gather all the miracles because those also need boss souls and I'm not going to fuck around with NG+2 when just doing a fresh character was faster.
At the end of the day Demon's Souls is interesting as the "father" of the Souls games but I'm glad they did away with the tendancy shit because it was a garbage system. There are a lot of bad choices in design that are gone in future titles, however the bad designs in Demon's Souls get replaced with other bad design choices.
For now I'm glad that game is done.
