Demon's Souls Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 9/29/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Demon's Souls

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: SCEI

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PS3

Release Date: February 5, 2009

Every bit of praise I’ve bestowed on Dark Souls has been a lie. Okay, maybe the whole truth behind the misappropriated adulation is that they are half-truths. The first Dark Souls did in fact popularize the idiosyncratic combat, rich lore, and world-building that hundreds of future titles would emulate. However, I’ve been attributing it as a visionary pioneer of its attributes and gameplay mechanics, and that’s not entirely an honest statement. The true innovator, the Nikola Tesla to Dark Souls’ Thomas Edison, is Demon’s Souls, FromSoft’s 2009 title that debuted all of the Dark Souls ingredients that captivated gamers everywhere. Demon’s Souls was critically acclaimed and it gave gamers of the era a stark alternative to the cinematically-inclined titles that ran amok on the PS3. So why is it that Demon’s Souls is relegated to partial obscurity while Dark Souls is the one reaping the spoils of its legacy? The way I see things, Demon's Souls' placement in the Souls family is comparable to how Vladamir Lenin fits in the Soviet Union's timeline. The Russian revolutionary was the governing debutant of the communist empire but was cut down in his prime just as the movement was in its infancy. The immediate successor to the throne (Stalin) reigned the ideals of Lenin’s new world order for decades onward, so it's no wonder that that figure has a clearer association with that particular dogma and political period. In a non-analogous fashion, Demon’s Souls is positioned as a “proto-Souls” game instead of the series’ glorious emergence because its licensing confines it not only to Sony’s grasp but to the now-defunct PS3 system. In order to play it myself, I had to make an extraneous purchase for a used PS3 console. This was an endeavor I never would’ve been forced to do for any future Souls title due to their widespread accessibility as far as their availability is concerned. Given that I’m a staunch veteran who has played through its successors countless times (except for Dark Souls II), I figured that I’d face less adversity in Demon’s Souls. The reality behind my assumption was that the progenitor of Dark Souls threw me around just as violently specifically due to its primitive elements.

To my surprise, Demon’s Souls doesn’t hide narrative context from the player. Every subsequent Souls game makes a deliberate effort to implore the player to seek out the lore and obscured rationale for embarking on this quest through character interactions and organic clues implied by the world’s conditions and general atmosphere. Demon’s Souls blinds the player at first when they are catapulted into the “tutorial” area and a portly beast with a seemingly impenetrable health bar trounces the player with a single swipe of his hulking battle ax. After conquering the feasibly vanquishable first boss, an eyeless woman wearing a black cloak carrying a staff decides that the player has earned the privilege of being informed on what they are experiencing. The kingdom of Boletaria has been poisoned with a noxious fog that carries the presence of soul-sucking demons who have made quick work devouring the inner essences of the kingdom’s denizens. The fog in question is not a thick, blinding wall of aerosol like in Silent Hill, rather, it's a metaphorical malaise that refers to the overwhelming danger that exists throughout. The player’s primary target is Boletaria’s ruler King Allant, who resurrected “The Old One” and his legion of demons to render his world barren out of contempt for it. Naturally, the road up to knocking this tyrant off his prodigious pedestal is filled with gobs of formidable monsters, so this adventure will be an extensive one, to say the least. The mission of quelling the immediate threat that plagues Boletaria positions the player’s warrior avatar into a heroic role, and acting as the kingdom’s savior recalls a more heightened, traditional hero’s journey arc than the mopping up of Lordran the player embarks on in Dark Souls.

At the center of Boletaria from both a gameplay and geographical (in a manner of speaking) sense in The Nexus. The player, on the high likelihood that the “Vanguard” demon pulverized them, would’ve shed their mortal coil at the start if this detached nether realm wasn’t present as a safety net of sorts. The player will only be teleported to The Nexus once upon dying, but they will always be invited to return on their volition because it's the hub of Demons Souls. At the base of the towering temple lies various NPCs that cater to many of the player’s necessities. The aforementioned eyeless figure known as the “Maiden in Black” serves the player in upgrading their stats if their soul count is equal to or more than the amount that she requests. Blacksmith Boldwin will upgrade the player’s weapons and armor given the appropriate smithing materials, and Stockpile Thomas sitting next to him will keep an eye on your overflow of items like a bank. Encumbering the player when they pile on too much bulky equipment persists onward to subsequent Souls games, but Demon’s Souls putting a finite limit on their entire inventory is the first mark of primitiveness the game bestows. The player will “collect” many other NPCs, mostly magicians and sages, after encountering them in the “fog.” The last initial person held up here is the “Crestfallen Warrior,” who does nothing but bitch and complain about how he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his body. Should I inform him that it’s one kingdom over in Lordran, or is my future insight considered a paradox? I not only appreciate the one-stop-shop convenience of The Nexus after the first Dark Souls scattered all of Lordran’s blacksmiths and sages across the map, but it's possibly my favorite hub that FromSoft has ever devised because it's downright sublime. The otherworldly etherealness of this monumental area exudes something of a pleasant dream, making it seem like any harm that might come to the player is ultimately inconsequential. Considering a hub’s utility is to emulate a sanctuary, The Nexus does its job perfectly.

But like all proactive people, they must leave the comfort of their homes and expose themselves to the drudgery of the outside world to work and earn a living. For the player, leaving The Nexus especially exposes them to a world most foul and hostile. I’ve been known to marvel at Dark Souls’ 3D interpretation of a quasi-Metroidvania game displayed as the interconnected world of Lordran. Considering that Demon’s Souls is the primitive predecessor to Dark Souls, one can already assume that its kingdom isn’t designed with the same rich and ambitious world template. Boletaria is divided into five different areas, all accessed through teleporting via the archstones located alongside the arched staircase at the base of The Nexus. Traversing through each area is a linear trek, and each boss conquered is a stamp that marks a significant progression milestone. This is why sections between bosses across all of the areas of Demon’s Souls are conventionally referred to by decimal integers (I.e. the area outside of the castle door in Boletarian Palace is “1-1” and anywhere past the Phalanx boss arena is “1-2”). While the linearity displayed in Demon’s Souls level design doesn’t floor me like Dark Souls’ impeccable world cohesion, I’d equate each area in the game to a rope with tons of knots that interrupt the straightforward pathway. Arriving at the domain of another demon admiral will still involve navigating through several twisted, labyrinthian roadblocks, which still constitutes a deeply engaging design philosophy in my book. Unfortunately, shortcuts and other forms of moderate respite are not prominent tenets of Demon’s Souls’ philosophy. In Dark Souls, surviving past a certain point in an area will often reward the player with a bonfire as another spawn point, or at least they’ll find themselves circling around to an unlocked door or transportation contraption as a more organic form of shortcut. Demon’s Souls, on the other hand, evidently does not subscribe to the belief that the tedium of backtracking upon dying should be mitigated as a reward for incremental progress or astute discovery. If the player is slain in Demon’s Souls, returning to the point of demise, much less the nearest boss arena, usually involves an exhaustive retread. Organic shortcuts are seldom provided at certain extents of progress, but they are definitely exceptions to the general rule and tend to be rather oblique. The pulley intended to transport coal and other materials down to Blacksmith Ed’s workshop in Stonefang Tunnel feels so makeshift that it's as if the developers implemented it as a shortcut unintentionally. For the most part, Demon’s Souls forces the player to hike all over creation without stopping to rest their feet, and conquering a boss to earn that intermission after tiring themselves arriving there is an insult to injury. The “runbacks” to boss arenas are an infamous consistency across all of FromSoft’s output. Still, the lack of any kind of intervals to breathe marks this cumbrous idiosyncrasy at its most austere and unforgiving.

The extent of what Demon’s Souls expects the player to endure for such a lengthy swathe of progress stunned me with incredulity as soon as the “second” level. The area past the armored slug Phalanx and his identical bodyguard underlings in Boletarian Palace is set on top of a narrow stone bridge that directly connects to the next boss arena. Sounds (literally) straightforward, right? Well, confidently stepping into the sunlight after leaving the field archstone will likely incinerate the player to a smoldering crisp. An orange dragon will belch an inferno of flames that engulfs the entire section of the bridge the player is standing on every five seconds, and it’ll switch its flight path to the following portion if the player survives the first fiery onslaught as if it harbors a vindictive grudge against their wellbeing. An underground passage is available to elude the scaly beast, but the ground-level enemies in this musty, dark tunnel will likely eviscerate the player due to their pack-like attack strategy. Once the player reemerges and manages to dodge yet another fire blast from the dragon, an army of soulless soldiers of differing ranks will stand guard to hack the player to bits with a vengeance. Miraculously withstanding all of this strife just to be immediately smote by the gargantuan blade of the stainless-steel sentinel Tower Knight will leave the player quite disillusioned. Before I raised my white flag and wrote Demon’s Souls off as too stringent to even humor, a moment of clarity struck me like a falling apple. I didn’t have to be trapped in this vicious cycle of defeat attempting to conquer Tower Knight, for the other archstones in The Nexus were open and I was free to travel elsewhere. While the individual areas of Demon’s Souls are relatively ironed out to a point of compression, the optional method of tackling them in whichever order the player chooses is the juicy component of nonlinearity that I initially thought hadn’t crossed the developers’ mind yet. It smacks of Mega Man instead of Metroid, but even a less sophisticated depiction of freeform world design is still stimulating nonetheless.

While it's relieving to vacate from Tower Knight’s domain if the player feels like the obstacles are too overwhelming to overcome, I must issue a warning that the player’s ticket out of torture isn’t as golden as one might think. Assuming that the difficulty curve of Demon’s Souls still abides by the order of the numerical integers, shifting from Boletarian Palace to another area presents an entirely different slew of challenges. The leathery, lizard-esque miners in Stonefang Tunnel will be upset if the player interrupts their perpetual labor, and the exoskeletons of both the native rock worms and bearbugs are as impenetrable as a laminated windshield. The eerie Tower of Latria sees illithid guards patrolling the dank prison halls, and they’ll paralyze anyone in their sight to suck their gray matter dry far before the player encounters the mechanized tower that spits rows of arrows. As a melee player, all I could do was evade the torrent of javelin icicles constantly spurting out of the flying stingrays that soar in the skies over the Shrine of Storms. God help you if the Old Hero strikes you down, for the trek back to him with the rolling skeletons and reaper ghouls alongside the swarm of aerial projectiles is possibly the most strenuous journey back to a boss fight across the entire Souls series. If you couldn’t tell, choosing an alternative to Tower Knight is a “pick your poison” scenario and the route is determined by which of these areas presents the path of least resistance. All of these districts of Boletaria are equally arduous in their unique ways but for the love of all that is holy, do not pick the literal poison that is the Valley of Defilement. Take the name of this area as a cautionary warning, for the fifth area that proves Miyazaki had no latency period for his favorite level trope will defile the player at every corner of the sludgy and dismal bog. Still, I think I’d rather invest in a timeshare here rather than excavate through Blighttown again.

The bouts of endurance that the player is forced to undergo to succeed in Demon’s Souls don’t entirely connote that the game is bereft of any accommodations. For instance, the unhinged healing system in this game will stave off any fatal occurrences for a long while. Instead of using the sparkling, possibly tangerine-flavored Estus Flasks, the restorative grass is an item meshed in with the rest of the player’s inventory. Boletaria has a thumb as green as the state of Colorado, for grass is commonly dropped from enemies upon defeat for the player’s taking. The different strands of grass are differentiated by the phases of the moon, ranging from the sliver of crescent grass to the curvaceousness of the full moon grass which signifies the effectiveness of its restoration. Once the player can afford to spend their surplus of souls on other services besides leveling up, grasses are available to be bought in bulk like a Costco member before a hurricane hits. I can definitely see why this method of healing was scrapped in favor of the Estus System with a fixed and reasonably finite amount of uses. The unabated mass of grass I accumulated after a certain point in the game became relied on like a crutch, replenishing any fraction of damage received provided I found an opportunity to distance myself from enemies. My mistakes during combat that resulted in a grave depletion of my health bar became trivialized by the limitlessness at which I could remedy them. In the defense of the grass, perhaps I wouldn’t be desperately chowing down on the plant like livestock if the game didn’t fracture my health bar in half per death. It’s an absurdly uncharitable penalty for failure and I’d chalk it up as another example of the game’s primitive mold if one Dark Souls game didn’t adopt it (it was equally bullshit in that game too). Only conquering a boss or imbibing a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes will mend this unfair affliction, and that particular item isn’t nearly as plentiful as the grass (surprise, surprise). While I was initially appalled by the game’s demerit of death, I eventually discovered that there were benefits to playing with a crappy hand. Another feature totally unique to Demon’s Souls is “world tendency,” which affects certain aspects of the gameplay. If the player is in “soul mode” with half of their total health, the enemies do not brutalize the player quite as relentlessly. On the other hand, having full health comes with the perk of looting rarer items and obtaining more souls per kill with the caveat of tougher foes and frequent black phantom invasions. It’s nice to know that the developers can express kernels of sympathy for the player, but I find the world tendency mechanic to be somewhat condescending. FromSoft can fuck off if they’re insinuating that one death is enough evidence of the player’s skill, or lack thereof, to lower the difficulty.

The bosses will not be affected by the player’s status, even if a good handful of them will have the player questioning if the stipulations of their “soul form” are still seeping into the experience. Surprisingly, the mightiest foes of Demon’s Souls with screen-spanning health bars are the easiest crop of bosses across all of FromSoft’s titles. Instead of seeking out a chance to stab at a boss at a moment most opportune that will ideally leave the player unscathed like the Souls duels we’re accustomed to, several of the bosses in Demon’s Souls are dispatched via methods so unorthodox that they can be interpreted as gimmicks. For example, fighting Tower Knight organically will result in shaving unsatisfactory chips off his health bar. Targeting his ankles and nipping at them like a mangy chihuahua will cause him to lose his balance and fall on his back, giving the player free rein to strike at his exposed head for potent damage. The grotesquely obese cleaver-wielder called The Adjudicator will absorb any and all harm that touches the impenetrable rolls of fat on his body. That is until his bloody fissures are prodded enough times that he’ll similarly fall over and expose the weak spot of the bird piloting this abomination. This puzzle-oriented pattern of boss fights is incredibly prevalent for the so-called “archdemons,” the penultimate boss of an area that concludes the overarching level. The foreboding Dragon God will crumble into the pool of lava below him after impaling him with two giant arrow contraptions found in the arena, shooting the Storm King out of the sky requires unsheathing a special sword with forceful wind properties. The fight against Maiden Astraea is actually with her bodyguard, as she’ll oblige her own demise once the player defeats her means of protection. The aggressive major adversaries that mirror the typical Souls bosses like Flamelurker and Penetrator are few and far between here, and their predictability still makes them pale in comparison. The Old Hero would fit in this category if his blindness wasn’t burdening him, a quirk that situates this boss with the rest of the unconventional pack. At times, it seems like finally arriving at a boss is a relief from the hellish expedition that preceded it, which is yet another amusing instance of Demon’s Souls dipping its toes in the quaint characteristics of retro gaming.

After defeating every demon boss whether they be breezy or a grueling test of one’s Souls prowess, a complete checklist will eventually circle around to continue ascending Boletarian Palace and quashing the king who doomed the kingdom with his hubris: King Allant. The pathway up to Boletaria’s decorated ruler is appropriately one of the most excruciating, with roided-up knights and agile ninjas bombarding the player at all angles and another dragon’s fire to swiftly evade with great precision. Once the player faces Allant, no gimmicks will save the player any strain. King Allant verges heavily towards the belligerent side of the boss spectrum, and his array of sword tactics along with his AOE magic explosion will have the player devouring so much grass that they’d make for a healthy cut of hamburger meat. As epic as this duel is, the formidable King Allant is not the final battle. In fact, this is but a mirage of the king’s glory days. The true King Allant is located in a realm under the base of The Nexus, and he’s pathetically been reduced to what is best described as a sentient turd. Refusing to commit regicide will result in the player taking his position as the ultimate demon lord that will reign in a new era of prosperity for the scourge. On the other hand, returning to The Nexus and letting the Maiden in Black close the portal to the demon world will put Boletaria at peace. It should be pretty clear which decision to make in these final moments considering one ending is concretely labeled as “bad” and the other as “good,” I much appreciate the ambiguous conundrum of ethics that the player is presented with at the end of Dark Souls. Besides, the miserable state of King Allant is an effective forewarning of what is to come if the player takes control, and it’s an existence I can’t imagine anyone would idealize for themselves.

A lesser Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls certainly isn’t. Sure, it’s comparatively rudimentary in plenty of aspects as to be expected from a first crack at an unprecedented type of action-adventure video game. I prefer the seamless world, the frequency of bonfires, the obscured narrative, and the boss fights that require pure skill to defeat rather than the prevalence of puzzle-oriented headscratchers that all became idiosyncrasies of every game in the Dark Souls trilogy. Yet, this is all based on personal preference. None of Demon’s Souls' more “video gamey” attributes inherently make it obsolete, even if working with them made the game infuriating at times. At the end of the day, Demon’s Souls resonated with me on the same scale as any of its spiritual successors because triumphing over all of its challenges gave me the same invigorating sense of personal satisfaction that no other series exudes.