Japan Time: Demon’s Souls Updated Impressions

Last week, I posted my hands-on impressions of Demon’s Souls.  However, due to my relative newness to the game, I neglected to go in-depth on the game’s various online features.  I’ve now made it quite a bit further, so if you’re interested, read on! First off, I’d like to open these expanded impressions by saying this; the game is hard.  Very hard.  Brain-meltingly hard, in fact.  But oddly, in a good way.  Upon beating the first boss of the game, the slime I mentioned in the original article, you regain your physical body, as well as the ability to use your accumulated demon souls to purchase level-ups; each level allows you to raise one of your cardinal attributes by one point.  Like a Western RPG, these points are permanent; once you’ve bought a level up, the only way to go back is to start a new character, or be hit by some very specific conditions that can cause you to “level down”, so to speak.  Anyways, as I chose to play as a Thief, my character’s stat build was biased towards the attributes of Dexterity, Luck, and Stamina.  This allowed my character to move very quickly, gain rare items from enemies at an increased rate, and sprint for long distances of time, as well as attack more often without having to stop to recharge.  It also left me considerably open in the fields of damage output, item carrying capacity, and magic; sure enough, it took me several levels to even unlock the ability to use magic at all.  It also gave me significantly lower defense due to my character’s inability to wear heavy armor with such low strength.  Well, if I can dodge well enough, that shouldn’t matter, right?

Wrong.

Upon clearing the first dungeon, you also unlock the game’s free-roaming aspects; from this point forward, you’re free to continue the game any way you want, moving through the five worlds in any order you see fit and levelling your character any way you choose.  This is all well and good, until you realize how powerful the enemies outside of the first dungeon can be.  Like the classic Roguelike dungeon crawlers of old, Demon’s Souls does its very best to kill you if you aren’t prepared.  And more often than not, it will succeed.

This is where the game’s rather unusual set of online modes comes into play.  Demon’s Souls is a strange RPG, a hybrid of MMORPG and Roguelike dungeon crawler, it manages to teeter on the edge without fully plunging into either abyss.  As you play Demon’s Souls, you’ll likely notice what appears to be white, transparent “ghosts” running about, fighting, and interacting with the world around you.  These ghosts are actually other players.  While not a persistent MMORPG, the game tracks where other players are in the same region as you, and shows them to you every so often, as if you’re getting a glimpse into another world.  Similarly, if another player dies in the same area as you do, a bloodstain will appear in the place they died.  Touch this bloodstain, and a red phantom appears, acting out that player’s character’s final moments.  It’s a good way of judging just how dangerous the area around you might be on your first trip through a dungeon; if a lot of bloodstains appear, you might want to turn back or make sure you’re geared up right.  In other cases, they’re just hilarious to watch.

As I mentioned in the first preview, Demon’s Souls allows you to explore levels either alive or dead, and both modes have their own unique pluses and minuses.  When you’re alive, you’re at “full strength”, your character bleeds when hit, his/her armor clinks and creaks convincingly when you move and dodge, and you can also summon up to two other players to join you to take on the dungeon as a party.  This co-op mode has a few limitations, though.  The two summoned players, first off, have to be dead first, as you’re summoning their spirits into your world to aid you.  Secondly, there are no resurrections; if you die, the link is severed and both allies vanish.  If they die, their spirits fade away as well, leaving you to tackle the dungeon on your own.  In other words, make sure you’re picking allies who know what they’re doing.  There is also no voice chat, though players can communicate with a set of rudimentary emote actions and preset messages that are inscribed on the floor.  Finally, Blue Phantoms can only be summoned in stages within which you have not killed the end boss.  Once the boss is dead, your allies vanish and cannot be summoned again in that stage.  The final downside to being alive is that, well, it’s easy to die, and when you die, you instantly become a ghost.  The only way to get your body back is to beat a stage boss, use a consumable item called an Ephemeral Stone, or defeat another player in PvP.

As a ghost, you are immediately limited by your rather tenuous connection to the physical plane; your max HP is halved (unless you find a special accessory hidden in the first dungeon that boosts it back up to manageable levels), your footfalls and movements no longer make a sound, and you “bleed” spectral essence when you take hits.  However, dying as a ghost simply respawns you back at the portal you entered the dungeon through, with only a penalty of your currently accumulated souls.  Finding and retrieving your corpse gives you those souls back, so if you’re quick, you can stop the loss of progress without much of a hassle.  Being a ghost also allows you access to two special stones, the Blue Eye Stone and the Black Eye Stone.  The Blue Eye Stone leaves a marker on the ground that allows living players to summon you into their world to help them quest, simply by touching it.  This is the only way to battle a boss you’ve already killed, and performing well as a co-op partner with another player will net you a healthy bonus of souls, as well as return you to your physical body.

The Black Eye Stone, on the other hand, seeks out a currently living player and thrusts you, without welcome, into their world as what the game refers to as a Black Phantom.  As a Black Phantom, you’re now on the monsters’ side, and your job is to hunt down and kill the other player.  It’s often not too hard to find the other player; just follow the trail of monster corpses and eventually you’ll make it to them.  Human players are an entirely different beast to take on than the game’s normal enemies; for one, fighting a Black Phantom is a battle to the death – as such, most players will be noticeably more aggressive or defensive when playing against a human enemy.  The living player will also be able to unlock special areas in dungeons by taking on and winning against Black Phantoms, while losing causes them to become a ghost and lose all of their souls.  The Black Phantom player, however, is able to retain his human form by winning, and loses a chunk of souls if the human deals the final blow.  Black Phantoms who fall victim to stage hazards and traps, or fall off cliffs, on the other hand, are penalized by losing a level.  In other words, you’re probably going to want to win.  Just pray you don’t use the Black Eye Stone to jump into a game where the player already has some buddies with him.  That does not often end well.

As I’ve mentioned before, Demon’s Souls is a hard game, and it’s definitely not for everybody.  The dungeons are long, varied, and full of shortcuts, secret paths, and deathtraps designed to prey upon overly curious or greedy players.  There are hundreds of pieces of equipment to find and use, each with their own stat requirements, special abilities, and unique models.  I even managed to make a weapon that looks like Pyramid Head’s sword from Silent Hill! Also, the game’s bizarre menagerie of bosses, running the gamut from duels with humanoids to massive monsters bigger than the screen, each require different strategies, weapons, and spells to defeat, though going in with some buddies definitely makes the experience considerably easier.  Whatever your strategy to take on a boss might be, the feeling you get when the boss collapses and you gain the huge Soul prize is incredibly satisfying, especially when you take down a particularly difficult enemy.  You can even use the unique Demon Souls you gain from killing bosses as materials to forge unique weapons or unlock secret, super-powerful spells.  The co-op modes are unusual to say the least, border-lining between dungeon crawler and MMORPG, but they manage to add an unique layer of personality and solitude to the game that a “normal” co-op experience might not have meshed with.

The game may seem simple in the first dungeon, but as the message commonly found in the chamber of the first boss says, “the real Demon’s Souls begins here!”  I’ve got a considerable amount of progress left to make before I’m done, but once I’ve finished the story, stay tuned for a full One Last Continue exclusive review of this unique title!