Zero Punctuation: Demon's Souls
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Turn the difficulty down then if you find it too hard, dont complain that putting it on hard is too hard for you, it obviously means you havent got the hang of using proper tactics yet. I liked playing it on hard because it meant I had to go off and do some side stuff before I could defeat the final bosses of each section or whatever, also HOW did you miss Zevran (Zevran is perhaps plausable given your disposition or Liliana? You didn't go to the pub in an RPG, What kind of maniac are you? Besides the chests aint that great most of them dont have much of value in them aside from some potions.yzzlthtz said:I keep assuming I'll find one.sanzo said:You can't open the chests? What kind of adventuring party are you running without a rogue of some sort. For shameyzzlthtz said:
But I haven't. I'm especially annoyed, since I rolled a mage, and picked the exact same spells that the mage who joins you early early in the game starts with. Apparently, it is far better to roll a rogue. Why did they even let me create a mage or fighter? Or why not change the npcs you meet based on what you rolled? Why do I even need a stupid lockpick skill in the first place? Talk about tired tropes. Most of those chests looked like they were made of flimsy wood.
Dragon Age Origins is a table top RPG pretty much, that's the way it is, don't like tabletop rpgs? Don't complain.
The game was hard in the beginning since you are rather weak but once you level up your stats and get more armors and weapons it actually become rather moderate in difficulty. Yahtzee probably reviewed this before he got further into the game.
Alright, I never thought I'd do it but: there it is. I made an account just to comment on a ZP-Review. I won't do it again.
Basically, i love this show. I don't really agree with all the points made, but thats great, because you can't argue with taste. Saying that Demon's Souls is a bad game however is not a matter of taste, it is plain stupid.
This game stands alone against the ever oncoming march of spoon-feeding achievement-based cheapass shite fuck that has become of video games. We've been playing this at the office for nights, something no other game (apart from the recent Bayonetta, to be honest) has ever made us do.
It feels like fun again, rewarding, always fair, always punishing stupidity and not paying attention. This can be mistaken for "hard" only by people that don't pay attention when playing. Which is fine, they can do wat they want.
I'm writing this because, somewhere out there, there are tons of people that would have loved this game, and now will treat it as a cheap japanese piece of crap, which it is not. Poor work Yahtzee, you've done better before.
I know that nobody here will read this, and that's just as well, as they're busy playing GTA or Dragon Age or COD or some other pointless crap, and they won't ever experience the rewarding joy of progressing in Demon's Souls.
P.s: I don't even own a PS3, but this made me at least consider buying one.
Basically, i love this show. I don't really agree with all the points made, but thats great, because you can't argue with taste. Saying that Demon's Souls is a bad game however is not a matter of taste, it is plain stupid.
This game stands alone against the ever oncoming march of spoon-feeding achievement-based cheapass shite fuck that has become of video games. We've been playing this at the office for nights, something no other game (apart from the recent Bayonetta, to be honest) has ever made us do.
It feels like fun again, rewarding, always fair, always punishing stupidity and not paying attention. This can be mistaken for "hard" only by people that don't pay attention when playing. Which is fine, they can do wat they want.
I'm writing this because, somewhere out there, there are tons of people that would have loved this game, and now will treat it as a cheap japanese piece of crap, which it is not. Poor work Yahtzee, you've done better before.
I know that nobody here will read this, and that's just as well, as they're busy playing GTA or Dragon Age or COD or some other pointless crap, and they won't ever experience the rewarding joy of progressing in Demon's Souls.
P.s: I don't even own a PS3, but this made me at least consider buying one.
Tobe_banned is correct, to be honest. Yahtzee seems to be completely contradictory in his demands from games.
One certain days he feels all tough and manly and bitches about how "modern games hold your hand and see you through to the ending", while on others he finally plays a challenging game and bitches about it.
Demons' Souls is by no stretch of the imagination BAD.
One certain days he feels all tough and manly and bitches about how "modern games hold your hand and see you through to the ending", while on others he finally plays a challenging game and bitches about it.
Demons' Souls is by no stretch of the imagination BAD.
May I also add that the game doesn't determine whether or not you progress, your skill does. If your not skilled enough to carry on then you go to level up or get better equipment.yzzlthtz said:
tobe_banned said:
You DO realize this was always intended to be a niche title right? I don't think this game was ever intended for mainstream success, and was designed to cater to a very specific demographic of players.
Especially as he elaborated on it in "Extra Punctuation" I think his review was in keeping with what you'd expect him to say based on his other reviews. The biggest complaint I had was that when he expanded on things he mentioned adding a difficulty slider to the game, which struck me as being a bit odd since really I can't see how it would have affected much since most of what kills you isn't the raw difficulty of the monsters, but rather the traps/situations and having to try out differant weapons and such on differant opponents. If you removed the traps and such, or gave more forgiving checkpoints, or removed monster resistances or whatever to make the game easier there would be nothing less.
That said I think most of those turned away by the ZP review are probably people who would be outside the audience the game was intended for anyway.
Truthfully Yahtzee got as far as beating Phalanx, and by that point he's pretty much seen what the game is like and enough to make a fair judgement of it, nothing he said was actually wrong.
The Deadpool said:
Well, to be fair what he more or less said was that he felt the game wasted his time. He elaborated on his review in "Extra Punctuation". His major complaint more or less being that every time you die you need to restart a level with all the enemies respawned. Meaning that it can take up to 30 minutes to get back to the part you actually need to work on, and it becomes rapidly repetitive, and repetition leads to you making mistakes in your haste to get back to where you were.
On some levels he is correct about that, but if it wasn't for that element it would be a very short game, and quite probably way too easy. For example the boss fights in many cases wouldn't be anything special if you could just zerg them from a checkpoint (even if their health came back).
The problem being that his comments on how to fix Demon's Souls would basically ruin the entire experience, which I see as being similar to oldschool sidescrollers like "Shinobi" where you need to do a whole level including the boss perfectly in order to progress. The remake of Shinobi being called "the game that hates you" simply because it kept the old school attitude.
More checkpoints, and a difficulty reduction (though honestly I have no idea how since the way the game is set up it would be an all or nothing desicians) would have made this just another action-RPG with some horrible physics (running past a corpse which then blows around like a leaf on the wind, and maybe even getting stuck on your avatar for example).
Now personally the part of the game that I think can go frakk right off is the farming. I can understand wanting the trophies and such to not be a "gimmie" but most of them aren't skill related, but patience related. Involving running through the various worlds once you master them hundreds of times waiting for "pure" ores and such to drop so you can forge weapons and such. So basically not only are you going to spend 8-10 hours clearing a section of a world (especially if your bad at it like me) but then your going to hang around killing millions of skeletons in hopes you'll get a pure bladestone or whatever. I don't mind a bit of a grind, but this is totally ridiculous.
What's more one point I think reviewers NEED to slam the game on is that the whole thing is based on an online gimmick, with the spirits and messages of other players all over the place. The problem is that to get everything you need to be able to control world tendencies to spawn pure white and pure black events. It's not a hard concept to work with, but the game is bugged so it has a tendency to reset the world to neutral when your online, and so far they have found absolutly NO way of fixing it. This means you can either play offline and lose out on the biggest gimmick of the game, OR you can hope you can find time during a server event when the company hard-sets the world tendencies on the servers.
I wasn't planning on playing Demon's Souls again (got an American copy to replace my broken Asian one) until I finished a couple of other games, but have been goofing off with a couple of characters specifically to get some of the pure white items so I'll have them when I play more seriously later. I for example just developed a female Royal with the binded armor suit who is working on building the stats to use that spear from 4-1, and a male soldier who is developing into a tank with the Brushwood armor suit (ring of great strength until I can grind enough Stamina).
This is a big deal because I have no intention of playing offline, and that means I would otherwise never have had a chance to get any of that stuff simply because of how badly they frakked things up.
Truthfully I'm a little disappointed that as a reviewer Yahtzee (and noone else I've seen for that matter) didn't talk about how badly they dropped the ball here. As a professional he SHOULD have figured that bit out.
Isn't the point of ZP that he rips on every game he reviews, thats why it's funny. I have laughed the most when he has been ragging on games I thoroughly enjoyed. If you look through the games he has reviewed there are very few he actually "likes".Telekinesis said:
These aren't serious reviews thats why he doesn't give a score. i never take him seriously I buy games based on my own opinions not his funny rants.
I played this game during my fall quarter at school, and I just wanted to play more of it! It's entertaining to have Yatzee critique the games I like.
I feel sorry for those that are truly taking Yahtzee's word about the game, since this review is a mess of outright misinformation. If you want a real review of this game, check out Susan Arendt's from a few months back or Kotaku's review.
To correct a few things here starting at 1:20 minutes in...
1:20 - The game has two types of dodges that are both clearly explained in the tutorial, Rolls and Backsteps. Backsteps are simply pressing the button without directional input and are mainly used for dodging a SINGLE attack and then following up with your own counter. Yahtzee was attacked with a 3 hit combo which means he should have either did one roll OR 3 backsteps to completely avoid. This is once again user error on Yahtzee's part and it's flat-out embarrassing he would lie that the game was at fault here. Demon's Souls' combat system is one of the smoothest comabt controls amongst action game the past several years, so much so it makes games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry look clunky.
2:40 - The game's worlds are divided into stages with Archstones (teleport nodes/checkpoints) that drop off bosses as the dividers except for the first one at the start of each world. Every time you die you are sent back to the nearest archstone, HOWEVER there are numerous shortcuts in each stage you can unlock and stay permanently unlocked until new game+. World 1 Stage 1 which is the only stage Yahtzee played has 3 of these which he failed to mention and they are all in plain sight with a very bright white phantom player showing you need to activate the switches. This is not the game's fault, but Yahtzee having very poor observational skills (as if he was rushing through the game).
3:00 - The first boss Yahtzee is describing is a black sludge monster composed of small black sludge that have metal shields and spears to block/attack you with. The name of this boss is called Phalanx appropriately and the mini-phalanxes it is composed of move/attack very slowly and generally can't keep up with the main blob. Their main weakness is their unguarded backsides and while they are very weak to fire attacks, it's a ridiculously simple fight to complete without since it is nothing but kiting around pillars and killing all it's pieces. The stage leading up to the fight gives you a speedy approach however by having numerous Fire grenades and Fire oil to put on your weapons throughout the stage. In fact there is even a vendor in the stage that sells both.
3:25 - There is no pause in this game, this much is true. However the reason is the same as why they don't put a pause feature into multiplayer games including MW2 and WoW. If Yahtzee had returned to the Nexus (the game's hub area), he would have recieved 2 stones that enable co-op play with other players and eventually would receive a 3rd stone later on to enable oneself to invade another's realm for some harsh PvP action. The game was designed around the online play so there is no opting even while in offline mode.
3:40 - Instead of returning to the Nexus, Yahtzee pressed onward into the first part of World 1 Stage 2 (he must have not read that part where archstones were explained early on). Upon walking out onto the ramparts what Yahtzee really saw was a ton of charred corpses and the familiar sound of dragon flapping it's wings nearby (the same dragon he already encountered in stage 1 and saw what it could to a bunch of npc foes). Ignoring these obvious danger signs, Yahtzee runs out onto the rampart and gets roasted instead of waiting 5 seconds and seeing the dragon breath a well choreographed line of fire down the rampart. It should be noted that the dragon does this as soon as you step within 10 feet of the start of the "roasted" area. This is once again the game punishing Yahtzee for both not being observant of his surroundings and for rushing through the game.
3:53 - In the tutorial the game teaches you how to sprint and if you sprint starting as soon as the dragon finishes it's first breath run, you'll easily make it to the next safe area before you get roasted. There are 3 total stretches of breath tracts in this stage, the 1st and 3rd are the only ones you have to run across. The 2nd tract is avoided by following a tunnel under the rampart that is immediately accessible after running past the 1st tract. If you failed to learn how to sprint, I can see this being very hard...but seriously this is just Yahtzee rushing through the game again.
4:00 - In the previously mentioned tunnel there are 4-5 wolves that attack you and they don't do so out of nowhere either, you hear and see them long before they attack you. However these are easily handled since you are given a very long narrow corridor to work with before this, allowing you to block and stab their stunned faces as with every other enemy encountered previously. However if you rush into them instead of drawing them out, they will surround you and kill you easily. Yahtzee rushed into the game and promptly died, no surprise there since he obviously has a deadline...
4:04 - This is the end of the 3rd tract of breath he is describing. At the end of this tract there is 4 low hp guys with crossbows and one blue eyed knight a few feet behind them. If you are blocking while sprinting (both of which the game clearly teaches in the tutorial), then the arrows will deflect, you'll make it off the breath tract safely and can promptly tear the 4 guys apart before they reload. If you're careful about your positioning you won't even aggro the knight, who honestly attacks very slow and is only hard because he has a shield to block with (meaning you have to time your attacks to break his guard). It should also be noted you can clearly see all these guys before you ever start running down the breath tract. Then again if you're rushing through the game and not looking where you're going...then yeah you're going to die a lot.
Now, if you read all that, it should be abundantly clear that this game punishes players who are unobservant and prefer to "Rambo" their way through games without thinking. I totally understand Yahtzee has deadlines, but if the review he gave of this game is the equivalent of Roger Ebert walking out of a movie 5 minutes in and then writing a full witty review on how much the movie's opening scene sucked, all because he already decided beforehand the movie sucked without having seen it. It's ok for Yahtzee to not like the game, but Yahtzee didn't even make an effort to even try to play this game much less make an effort to review it right.
All those that have played Demon's Souls would also be upset that he complained about his experiences playing badly instead of the game's actual flaws like bad ragdoll physics and slow downs and occasionally bad camera angles and misleading lighting in some stages.
To correct a few things here starting at 1:20 minutes in...
1:20 - The game has two types of dodges that are both clearly explained in the tutorial, Rolls and Backsteps. Backsteps are simply pressing the button without directional input and are mainly used for dodging a SINGLE attack and then following up with your own counter. Yahtzee was attacked with a 3 hit combo which means he should have either did one roll OR 3 backsteps to completely avoid. This is once again user error on Yahtzee's part and it's flat-out embarrassing he would lie that the game was at fault here. Demon's Souls' combat system is one of the smoothest comabt controls amongst action game the past several years, so much so it makes games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry look clunky.
2:40 - The game's worlds are divided into stages with Archstones (teleport nodes/checkpoints) that drop off bosses as the dividers except for the first one at the start of each world. Every time you die you are sent back to the nearest archstone, HOWEVER there are numerous shortcuts in each stage you can unlock and stay permanently unlocked until new game+. World 1 Stage 1 which is the only stage Yahtzee played has 3 of these which he failed to mention and they are all in plain sight with a very bright white phantom player showing you need to activate the switches. This is not the game's fault, but Yahtzee having very poor observational skills (as if he was rushing through the game).
3:00 - The first boss Yahtzee is describing is a black sludge monster composed of small black sludge that have metal shields and spears to block/attack you with. The name of this boss is called Phalanx appropriately and the mini-phalanxes it is composed of move/attack very slowly and generally can't keep up with the main blob. Their main weakness is their unguarded backsides and while they are very weak to fire attacks, it's a ridiculously simple fight to complete without since it is nothing but kiting around pillars and killing all it's pieces. The stage leading up to the fight gives you a speedy approach however by having numerous Fire grenades and Fire oil to put on your weapons throughout the stage. In fact there is even a vendor in the stage that sells both.
3:25 - There is no pause in this game, this much is true. However the reason is the same as why they don't put a pause feature into multiplayer games including MW2 and WoW. If Yahtzee had returned to the Nexus (the game's hub area), he would have recieved 2 stones that enable co-op play with other players and eventually would receive a 3rd stone later on to enable oneself to invade another's realm for some harsh PvP action. The game was designed around the online play so there is no opting even while in offline mode.
3:40 - Instead of returning to the Nexus, Yahtzee pressed onward into the first part of World 1 Stage 2 (he must have not read that part where archstones were explained early on). Upon walking out onto the ramparts what Yahtzee really saw was a ton of charred corpses and the familiar sound of dragon flapping it's wings nearby (the same dragon he already encountered in stage 1 and saw what it could to a bunch of npc foes). Ignoring these obvious danger signs, Yahtzee runs out onto the rampart and gets roasted instead of waiting 5 seconds and seeing the dragon breath a well choreographed line of fire down the rampart. It should be noted that the dragon does this as soon as you step within 10 feet of the start of the "roasted" area. This is once again the game punishing Yahtzee for both not being observant of his surroundings and for rushing through the game.
3:53 - In the tutorial the game teaches you how to sprint and if you sprint starting as soon as the dragon finishes it's first breath run, you'll easily make it to the next safe area before you get roasted. There are 3 total stretches of breath tracts in this stage, the 1st and 3rd are the only ones you have to run across. The 2nd tract is avoided by following a tunnel under the rampart that is immediately accessible after running past the 1st tract. If you failed to learn how to sprint, I can see this being very hard...but seriously this is just Yahtzee rushing through the game again.
4:00 - In the previously mentioned tunnel there are 4-5 wolves that attack you and they don't do so out of nowhere either, you hear and see them long before they attack you. However these are easily handled since you are given a very long narrow corridor to work with before this, allowing you to block and stab their stunned faces as with every other enemy encountered previously. However if you rush into them instead of drawing them out, they will surround you and kill you easily. Yahtzee rushed into the game and promptly died, no surprise there since he obviously has a deadline...
4:04 - This is the end of the 3rd tract of breath he is describing. At the end of this tract there is 4 low hp guys with crossbows and one blue eyed knight a few feet behind them. If you are blocking while sprinting (both of which the game clearly teaches in the tutorial), then the arrows will deflect, you'll make it off the breath tract safely and can promptly tear the 4 guys apart before they reload. If you're careful about your positioning you won't even aggro the knight, who honestly attacks very slow and is only hard because he has a shield to block with (meaning you have to time your attacks to break his guard). It should also be noted you can clearly see all these guys before you ever start running down the breath tract. Then again if you're rushing through the game and not looking where you're going...then yeah you're going to die a lot.
Now, if you read all that, it should be abundantly clear that this game punishes players who are unobservant and prefer to "Rambo" their way through games without thinking. I totally understand Yahtzee has deadlines, but if the review he gave of this game is the equivalent of Roger Ebert walking out of a movie 5 minutes in and then writing a full witty review on how much the movie's opening scene sucked, all because he already decided beforehand the movie sucked without having seen it. It's ok for Yahtzee to not like the game, but Yahtzee didn't even make an effort to even try to play this game much less make an effort to review it right.
All those that have played Demon's Souls would also be upset that he complained about his experiences playing badly instead of the game's actual flaws like bad ragdoll physics and slow downs and occasionally bad camera angles and misleading lighting in some stages.
Pub?elvor0 said:Turn the difficulty down then if you find it too hard, dont complain that putting it on hard is too hard for you, it obviously means you havent got the hang of using proper tactics yet. I liked playing it on hard because it meant I had to go off and do some side stuff before I could defeat the final bosses of each section or whatever, also HOW did you miss Zevran (Zevran is perhaps plausable given your disposition or Liliana? You didn't go to the pub in an RPG, What kind of maniac are you? Besides the chests aint that great most of them dont have much of value in them aside from some potions.yzzlthtz said:I keep assuming I'll find one.sanzo said:You can't open the chests? What kind of adventuring party are you running without a rogue of some sort. For shameyzzlthtz said:
But I haven't. I'm especially annoyed, since I rolled a mage, and picked the exact same spells that the mage who joins you early early in the game starts with. Apparently, it is far better to roll a rogue. Why did they even let me create a mage or fighter? Or why not change the npcs you meet based on what you rolled? Why do I even need a stupid lockpick skill in the first place? Talk about tired tropes. Most of those chests looked like they were made of flimsy wood.
Dragon Age Origins is a table top RPG pretty much, that's the way it is, don't like tabletop rpgs? Don't complain.
...
well, potions are useful, since they seem to be the only thing ultimately standing between defeat and success, at least at these early stages.
I like table top RPGs. I even like DA: O, despite my frustrations. I'm just not particularly impressed with it. It really doesn't bring anything new to the table, and it's nestled way deep in the uncanny valley.
What my point is that challenges in Demon's Souls can be overcome with actual skill, while most challenges in Dragon Age can only be overcome by leveling up enough.
There isn't a lot of tactics to be had in DA: O, I'm afraid to say. Battles are clusterfucks, and tactics (micromanagings) seem to involve telling your party to attack this guy instead of the other guy, and using powers that it normally wouldn't occur to them to use on their own - or just programming them to.
The biggest flaw about Yahtzee as a reviewer is that he is a very biased one. This show is more for entertainment purposes than actually watching an open minded review for a game.Turbo_ski said:
This is also very apparent when it comes to J-rpg/RTS/fighting games and how openly he has stated he is biased against, and there for you can't take Yahtzee's opinions too seriously unless you particularly share his point of view.
As for Demon's Souls, the argument I heard brought up by him over the reason he didn't like this game was the way the checkpoint system was handled, now you can either agree with him or not.
But to all those that really have no opinion except the one some reviewer gives them are the ones I really feel sorry for, and even Yahtzee has joked about in the past.
To be honest I think it's just the Witcher argument again in that he didn't find it fun. In the end you play games to have fun, and if you don't have fun playing a game you shouldn't be playing it.
I would have loved it if he progressed up to Flamelurker, just to see the INCREDIBLE RAGE it causes people in their first game
And he never even went over the GLORIOUSNESS of the online mode, being able to turn into a black phantom and invade another world, engage in 5 minutes of intense combat only to get a lucky roll+ backstab on the other guy or turning into a blue phantom and joining other people to take down the boss in that level
Feels good man
And he never even went over the GLORIOUSNESS of the online mode, being able to turn into a black phantom and invade another world, engage in 5 minutes of intense combat only to get a lucky roll+ backstab on the other guy or turning into a blue phantom and joining other people to take down the boss in that level
Feels good man