Demon’s Souls Review: From Boletaria With Blood

A few months ago, I took a trip into the enigmatic world of Demon’s Souls to bring you the scoop on the game’s original release.  Now, with the game’s English release but a scant few weeks away, it’s time to brave the fog one final time.

For those readers who weren’t with us back in the early days of OneLastContinue, here’s the scoop on Demon’s Souls.  Developed originally by Armored Core and King’s Field creators From Software, Demon’s Souls was the result of Sony Japan and From wishing to reinvent and update the classic King’s Field formula for a modern audience.  It was released in Japan earlier this year, publishing courtesy of Sony, with a full English voice track on every disc, and English text on the Chinese version.  Thus, it was almost a given that the game would eventually be making it Stateside – in this case, via the helpful, generous hands of Atlus, long known for their symbiotic relationship with quirky, hardcore RPGs.  It’s a good thing, too, because Demon’s Souls is one of the most unique, creative, and risky RPGs of this generation.  It’s also one of the hardest.

A King’s Field Full of Corpses

As mentioned in the original review, Demon’s Souls is less the story of a particular character, and more the story of a place; the cursed kingdom of Boletaria.  Formerly regarded as  a peaceful paradise, the land of Boletaria fell under the sway of a thick, impenetrable evil fog when its power-hungry King Allant made a deal with an ancient demon.  After a single Boletarian knight escaped to tell the world of the horrors he had seen, many warriors and travellers ventured into the fog, but none returned.  This is where your character comes in.  In Demon’s Souls, you play a generic, player-created traveller who journeys to Boletaria for unclear reasons, and is promptly killed.  That’s right, the game opens with a short tutorial, and then you die.  Your spirit now bound to Boletaria’s cursed netherworld, the only way for you to escape is to defeat the powerful demons controlling its five regions; doing so will grant you a chance to contact the Old One and escape the fog.  That’s essentially the long and short of it, story-wise.

Demon’s Souls, like many dungeon crawlers, doesn’t spend its time bogging you down with drawn-out dialogue and cutscenes; instead, almost every interaction in the game, aside from a few specific scenes, is done in the game world, by the player.  Instead of going out of its way to provide you with a concrete narrative, the story of Demon’s Souls is told more through journey of the player through Boletaria, the atmosphere of the levels, and the wide array of bizarre happenings that can occur during the game.  Essentially, when you’re talking to your friends about Demon’s Souls, you won’t be saying “Hey, do you remember the cutscene when Sephiroth stabbed Aeris?”; instead, you’ll be saying “So hey, when I was playing the third level, I made it all the way to the boss, but then a Black Phantom killed me in one hit.  How’d you do it?”  Because of how completely open-ended the gameplay in Demon’s Souls becomes after the first level, each player’s experience in the game is the story.

Hack, Slash, and Die

Unlike most Japanese RPGs, the gameplay in Demon’s Souls is more reminiscent of Western Action RPGs than it is of its turn-based brethren; you might be more likely to compare it to Diablo or Oblivion than Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts.  When you start the game, you’re asked to create a character; much like many modern Western RPGs, this involves a visual customization and a gender choice, as well as a character class.  Your character class influences quite a number of factors, including your statistics, the level you start at, and your baseline equipment.  Players hoping to tank through the game could choose the Knight class and start the game with a full suit of heavy plate; however, this means they will be unable to use magic for quite a while.  On the other hand, you could choose to play as a Wizard, having access to a number of magic spells right off the bat; this will, of course, mean your physical attributes will be considerably less impressive.  Players looking for a little bit of everything could choose the “Royalty” class, which starts with magic spells and melee stats; they also start at a lower level than any other class, which means they’ll be weaker than most other characters at the beginning, but this also leads to an advantage I’ll get to later.

Once you’ve chosen your class, you’re immediately thrust into the game world, where a quick tutorial dungeon familiarizes you with the gameplay, as well as serving as a preamble to your hero’s demise.  The controls  in Demon’s Souls are actually quite intuitive; essentially, you have two hands, and the L1 and R1 buttons control them.  Whatever is equipped in the hand you push the button for, you’ll perform an action fitting that item; if it’s a sword, you’ll slash, if it’s a shield, you’ll block, and if it’s a magic wand you’ll cast a spell.  You’re only limited by the number of hands you have and your strength statistic, which means that you can equip one sword and a shield, dual wield weapons, or carry a weapon with both hands for more powerful strikes; provided of course you’re strong enough to carry it all.  The L2 and R2 buttons perform power attacks and parries, depending on the equipped item.  The controls also allow you to sprint and dodge effectively, as well as lock onto enemies for better accuracy, or jump into first person mode for ranged weapons.  The D-Pad also lets you toggle your equipped items; you’re allowed one backup weapon slot for each hand, as well as the ability to preset a quick list of items and spells that can be changed between with a press of the D-Pad.  This allows you to quickly heal or cast spells without using the menus; a serious plus in a game like Demon’s Souls.  The gameplay essentially boils down to a simple yet deep hack and slash RPG, with an emphasis on careful stat management to ensure the best possible mixture of survivability and mobility.

Survivability is important because, simplest put, Demon’s Souls wants you dead; the stages want you dead, the monsters want you dead, and the bosses want you super-dead.  The entire game is designed, quite deliberately, to be harsh, unforgiving, and brutal.  You will die, and your first time through the game you will die often; there’s simply no way around it.  Nevertheless, the game never feels unfair, as everything in the game has a foil; skeletons are weak to bashing damage, slimes are weak against fire, and almost everything in the early game doesn’t like a good magic missile to the fact.  As I’ve said, you will die; but every time you die, you’ll make a little more progress, learning as you go.  There’s no greater game that can be described as a learning experience than Demon’s Souls; everything you do contributes to a greater understanding of the game until it all just clicks; for example, in my first playthrough of the game, I died nearly 10 times in the first stage.  On my next playthrough, using the New Game Plus function, where all the enemies are increased in strength considerably, I made it through without dying once.  Demon’s Souls will  stomp you into the dirt, but once you’ve clawed your way out of the pit and finished a level, there are few things more satisfying than the simple message “The Demon Was Destroyed”.  I will leave a simple caveat here; if you are a gamer who’s easily frustrated by dying, then Demon’s Souls might not be the kind of game for you.  If you’re willing to stick it out through the tough parts, though, Demon’s Souls provides one of the most rewarding, powerful experiences of any RPG released in the past few years.

Open World Means Open World

I’ve mentioned before how open-ended the game is; this is mainly because Demon’s Souls is, perhaps, the most open RPG of this generation.  The first dungeon (after the tutorial) is the only mandated stage in the game; once you’ve defeated the first boss, the game becomes totally open; you can go anywhere, do anything you want, and more importantly, you gain full control over your character’s growth.  As mentioned before, Demon’s Souls features character classes; these are, essentially, starter builds to get you going in the game, but once you select a class you are in no way beholden to it.  If you feel your Knight needs magic to survive, you can pour your EXP into boosting his magic stats.  If you’re getting fed up with your Thief dying in one hit, then focus on building up your Vitality.  Royals, as mentioned before, have it both easiest and hardest; they start at the lowest level of all the classes, but this also gives them even more customization possibilities.  Essentially, as soon as you beat the first boss, the game lets go of your hand and says “Alright, have fun.”  There are no tutorials, no signs telling you where to go or what to do,  and most importantly, no do-overs.

As the title suggests, the most important item in Demon’s Souls is, unsurprisingly, the souls of demons.  Every monster you kill yields a set number of Souls; these souls function as both your currency and your experience points.  With them, you can buy new items, repair your equipment, forge new weapons, or trade them for level ups.  However, there’s a catch; if you die, you lose every last Soul in your possession.  You keep your items, your level, and everything else, but your Souls vanish.  Like in Diablo, you can charge back into the dungeon and recover your body, regaining all of the Souls you lost, but if you die on the way, they’re gone for good.  There’s no bank to store Souls in, so every dungeon journey can, and may well be, the last time you see your Souls.  In fact, one of the first thing any new Demon’s Souls player should do is distance themselves from their Soul count.  While Souls are certainly important, you will die so many times, sometimes in the most bizarre, sudden fashions, that your best plan is to simply get used to the fact that your Souls are temporal; you may lose them sometimes, but you’re always getting more.

The realm of Boletaria features five worlds, complete with their own sub-zones, branched off of a central hub world called the Nexus.  Each world, accessed from a special teleporter called an Archstone, features unique level design, enemies, traps, and bosses.  The first world, Boletaria Palace, is a simple castle zone, full of corrupted knights and warriors, as well as being the roost for a rather nasty pair of dragons.  Sounds simple, right?  Wrong.  From there, your journeys will take you through the depths of a volcano, an ancient prison tower whose captives never quite made it out, an abandoned monastery infested by skeleton warriors, and other demonic environs.  Each area feels totally distinct, with unique features that set it apart from the rest.  In fact, the level design is one of the strongest points in the entire game; at no point do you feel like you’re rehashing an earlier area – every zone has a new trick to throw at you, a new monster to kill you with, or a new hazard to spring on you at the last second.  Each sub-zone is also capped off with a boss fight; there are a number of bosses throughout the game, ranging from rather mundane battles like a giant slime all the way up to conflicts with demons so large they don’t even fit on the screen.  The boss battles are the main attraction here, each one exhibiting unique, erratic attack patterns and different tricks that you can use to take them down, including but certainly not limited to summoning a few of your friends to help out.

There Will Be Blood (stains)

Speaking of summoning friends, Demon’s Souls includes one of the strangest, but most atmospheric online modes ever seen in an RPG.  Demon’s Souls is both an online RPG and a single player RPG; whenever you start the game, you log into the servers and play online, even if you’re playing by yourself.  As you wander through Boletaria, you’ll come across three online factors unique to the Demon’s Souls experience; messages, bloodstains, and Phantoms.  Messages manifest as little red runes on the floor – clicking on one will display, obviously, a message; these messages are unique, though, because they come from other players and appear on the fly.  These messages can fill a number of functions, including but not limited to warning players of an incoming ambush, keying them in to a hidden item nearby, or for the more cruel-minded players, leading them into a trap.  The genius of the message system is that it both increases the atmosphere of the game but also fosters a bit of a community.   Players can vote on messages if they like what they read; this will not only keep the message around longer, but gives a health boost to the player who originally left the message.  This means that the most helpful messages should rise to the top; however, it still puts in a level of skepticism to every message you read – not every player is out to help everyone else, after all.

Bloodstains are a much simpler, but much more intriguing system; as you explore the world, you’ll come across a number of bloodstains.  Much like messages, these can be clicked on; doing so will conjure up a red image of another player going through the dungeon and then dying.  Bloodstains are, essentially, echoes of players who recently died in the area; clicking on one will show you the way they died, be it in combat, rolling off a cliff, or getting caught in a trap, but they will not show you what killed them.  These echoes are sometimes hilarious and sometimes horrifying, but they never feel forced; clicking on a bloodstain and watching another player creep stealthily through a level only to be felled in one hit by a mysterious assailant can increase the tension of a level quite a bit, and it only adds to the already palpable atmosphere that Demon’s Souls exhibits.

Phantoms, on the other hand, are the most important part of the Demon’s Souls online experience; as you wander, you’ll also notice the ghosts of other travellers exploring the dungeons as you do.  These White Phantoms cannot be interacted with, appearing only as echoes of other players in the world.  However, there are two other kinds of Phantoms, and those two can be interacted with.  After a certain point in the game, players will unlock a certain stone that allows them to manifest themselves into other people’s world.  Using this stone will create a blue rune on the ground that a player looking for co-op partners can click on, instantly summoning the other player into their dungeon as a Blue Phantom.  Blue Phantoms are co-op partners, and they can help you by fighting monsters, casting healing spells, and taking on bosses you haven’t already fought.  Beware, though; if a Blue Phantom dies, they’re instantly ejected from your world, and if you die, then your connection with them is severed as well, as you become a Phantom yourself.    The last form of Phantom is the Black Phantom; these are malevolent players who can jump into other people’s worlds uninvited in an attempt to kill them.  The Black Phantom system is a very novel, unique approach to PVP, and it adds another layer of tension to an already tense, dangerous game.  Those who aren’t in the mood to get ambushed, don’t worry; there are accessories and spells that make it harder for Black Phantoms to find you, and if you’re a Phantom yourself they won’t be able to get to you.

Boletaria Awaits

As I’ve mentioned many times before, both in my original import review and this one, Demon’s Souls is not an RPG for every gamer.  It is not a casual RPG; it will not hold your hand, it will not tell you where to go next, and it most certainly will not notice you’re getting your face smashed in and weaken the AI in order to make it easier for you.  Demon’s Souls takes pleasure in chewing up gamers and spitting them out; Atlus didn’t change a bit of the game’s trademark difficulty when they brought it over to the West.  The game still features the same well-handled European voice acting and dialogue as the Japanese version, with the only major changes being retranslations of some of the more difficult-to-understand item descriptions and messages.  Demon’s Souls isn’t the prettiest game on the PS3; while its visuals can’t compete with visual powerhouses like Final Fantasy XIII, Killzone 2, or Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, they are more than detailed enough to get the point across.  The visuals couple with a haunting, subtle soundtrack, monster design that ranges from clever to downright disturbing, and some very impressive lighting effects to create one of the most atmospheric games on the PS3, if not of all time.

Pluses
+ Unparalleled sense of atmosphere, guided by strong music and visuals
+ Incredibly rewarding gameplay built on a series of escalating learning experiences
+ Online co-op is implemented in an unique, interesting manner
+ New Game + feature allows for infinite replayability with increasing challenges

Minuses
- High difficulty level can, and will, scare off casual and less patient gamers
- Lack of voice chat can be frustrating if players aren’t prepared for it
- Frame rate can chug occasionally, especially when complex spell effects are on screen

Available now on Playstation 3 in Japan and Asia; coming to the United States on October 6th, 2009
ESRB Rating: M
Players: 1 (offline) 3 (online co-op, plus one extra for a Black Phantom)
Completed import version as a Thief; total playtime over 86 hours.  Played localized version as a Royal, defeated several bosses and experimented with online play.
Final Verdict: Demon’s Souls is an RPG for the hardest of the hardcore.  Those willing to brave its difficulty and explore the deepest depths of Boletaria will find an incredibly rewarding experience.  Easily one of the best RPGs on the PS3, and a must-have for all hardcore RPG fans.