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Demon’s Souls : PS3
Sometimes you are led to a game because of something you read, and Demon’s Souls was one such game. It came with the general recommendation that it’s pretty much the hardest and least forgiving game of the current generation and I dove into that headfirst with glee.
Demon’s Souls is an RPG. I’ll start with that. It starts off brutally hard, with no instruction and little clue of what you are doing. There are some RPG standards; a fantasy setting, stats you can view, a vague class system, recognisable weapons, etc. but none of this seems to help in the first moments of the game. After a tutorial which does little but teach which button to press for ‘attack’ and which for ‘get out of the bloody way’, you are thrust into the Nexus, told that you have to save the world by killing demons and directed to the first of these worlds where, if you haven’t done this before, you get instantly mashed.
When you kill any of the bad guys, you get a few ‘souls’ which are used both as XP and currency in this game and, upon that first mashing you find yourself back at the beginning of the stage without all the souls you collected. Yup, all gone. As time and your experience increase, you find that your equipment isn’t reset and that it does in fact, remain as it was when you died. You also find that you get one chance upon each death to find the spot where you died and reclaim the souls that were dropped there, but die again and the first spot is gone, replaced by the newer stain of blood. Slowly, through your frustration, you realise that if you can convert your souls into something permanent, that death isn’t quite the set back it initially seems.
Battling through that first world took me hours. More than simply hours, actually, as the first time I gave up and came back a couple of months later. You get to see an impressive amount in that first world; simple zombie-like bad guys to kill and up your soul count, harder armoured men who take some thought and tactics, strong knights you cannot possibly kill at the beginning and enormous flying dragons which breath fire on entire sections of the landscape, killing everything in their path (including, inevitably, you). Despite this being an RPG I found myself equating it to the first Super Mario Bros., with that feeling of playing the level again and again to get through it and dying again and again and ending up at the beginning. The RPG roots started to show through though, as I felt I was getting better both in terms of skill and in game strength.
One of Demon’s Souls features which immediately impresses is its multiplayer messaging system. Rather than playing directly alongside other players in an MMO way, you see the occasional flash of another adventurer as a bluish ghost as they pass by doing their thing, and you can leave messages in the ground to help (or, if you choose, hinder) those who walk pass. It’s this message system which is so much joy in the early hours of the game as little notes like ‘use arrows on the next guy’ and ‘beware an ambush ahead’ stop you from running into situations unprepared and easily massacred. Through these notes and the ability to see the final few seconds of other player’s deaths, you learn your way and improve your tactics to be able to face the dangers ahead.
I still didn’t quite know where Demon’s Souls fit though, it’s repetitive and grinding nature and almost irrelevant storyline pushes it far from other modern RPGs such as Mass Effect, or newer Final Fantasy games, but its solid RPG underpinnings set it apart from third person action games. It was a friend who hasn’t played much (if anything) of recent computer games who nailed it for me when I described it: “It’s a rogue-like game,” he said, and how right he was. Once this revelation had been made in my mind, it actually changed the way I perceived and played the game (for the better), for this is exactly what Demon’s Souls is, and it explained to me my utter love and addiction for it. Years of playing rogue-likes and now here was one with all the trappings of a modern game.
Demon’s Souls is a game about grinding though, and for many modern players, this is too much. There is little chance that any player (no matter how great) can beat every boss the first time they encounter them; one early boss had me refining tactics after multiple deaths and ended up with me grinding souls for hours in order to buy the 250 arrows I anticipated it would take to kill him safely from distance. He died (I had 40 or so arrows left!), and all the hard grinding was worth it as the trophy binged and the world opened up some more. You learn and refine and repeat patterns many tens of times, picking the places that suit your play-type in order for you to maximise your soul gains. Personally, I found myself killing the first six or so skeletons on world 4-1 literally hundreds of times, enjoying the glee as I got better and it went from a hard fight each time, to three hit kills, two hit kills and finally a single swing to claim the all important souls. It addictive and enticing and calls you back for more even when you are sleeping (the nightmares! The nightmares!).
Ultimately though, you move from being a beginner to a journeyman. Your equipment is better, your skills are honed and it stops being frustratingly difficult and becomes something you can just do. Finally, before the endgame, you push your power beyond those of the enemies and it all becomes a little easy to knock back boss after boss. Demon’s Souls, though, is not a game about completion. The story is weak and utterly irrelevant. This is a game which is all about the journey and the pure joy in playing and it delivers in large amounts.
What’s more, this game breaks new ground (or uses well-trodden ground to new effect). The messaging system is great, but for me the apex oh-my-God moment of the game was when, instead of a boss, the game reaches out to the internet and pulls in another player to fight you. By far the hardest fight of the game, this PvP moment in an otherwise solo experience is frightening; you have no way to learn a pattern, no way to gauge the strength of your opponent, you can’t even be sure that the next time you try it you’ll get the same opponent. After being beaten five or so times I felt stuck and stunned and unsure what to do. I even debated standing outside the door (after the player has been summoned) for an hour in the hope that the other player would quit from boredom and leave me a simple AI challenge in his place, but in the end (and due to some egging on) I pushed through and had the finest fight of my game and was able to feel truly proud when the battle was won.
So shall I conclude my thoughts on Demon’s Souls? This is not a game for anyone, in fact I doubt it’s a game for many modern players. This is a game for people who grew up in the dungeons of Nethack, Omega and Rogue itself. This is a game which harks back to a time when dead was dead and perseverance is an art all of its own and I heartily approve. Sadly, due to a mistake on my part, even though I completed the game, I failed to get the final trophy and now the game taunts me to play through again to accomplish this little task. One day, I’ll do just that, and dance back into Demon’s Souls for another fifty hours, but there are more games on my shelf which demand attention, and the spiritual sequel, Dark Souls, is on the horizon.
[Oh, and as a sidenote, in a show of true gaming excellent, there’s a video on YouTube of someone completing this game (which took me 53 hours) in under 49 minutes. It’s the most impressive show of computer game skill I’ve seen in years and makes all those people playing GH3’s Dragonforce on Expert blindfolded look pathetic by comparison!]
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