Demons's Souls's - Alant got sniped from the fog door. Doesn't actually take that long though you do kind of have to arc the arrows over the stairs a little. Achievable with +5 Stick Short Compound Bow and 12 dex. Had bought a few hundred Light Arrows thinking I would be plinking for a long time. Not quite as bad as expected. Killing the Dragon took more patience. Both done with Clever Rat's Ring and Morion blade (Safe to assume everything was killed with this once I got them both). 4-2 was actually pretty breezy because I was doing it at end game and wasn't chasing any of the loot. I did get some of the shiny things. The slugs that cover the Moonlight Greatsword are fucking stupid. So many of them and they clip into the ground so you can't target them properly. Died to Dirty Colussus because I didn't know his attacks and went in with super aggressive setup at first (try out this fire storm spell!11!). Died when I killed it as well, but meh a win is a win. Garland got fire thrown in his face until he fell over.
Overall, I am glad I played this just for personal reasons, but holy shit this game is no where near as good as Dark Souls. I would say if you are interested in the series as a whole concept I would just go to Dark Souls and give this a skip. It is just completely archaic compared to Dark Souls in nearly every way. It isn't just that it is designed to be harder, the entire system that both games leverage is significantly more clunky in Demons's than it is in Dark. You can only evade in 4 cardinal directions, there is less kinds of attacks in combat. The difficulty is more punishing in some pretty shitty ways. Dark Souls has the rep of if you die it is your fault (which I still think is a bunch of wank, but whatever), you should have paid more attention (or more realistically, now that you know how something works you know how to deal with it next time). Demons's on the other hand punishes you significantly more for things you can clearly see coming, but you failed on execution.
For example in 3-2 you can see most of the gargoyles from ages away and hear them from even fucking further. When one is flying nearby they are amazingly loud and actually use up so many audio channels that other audio starts to not transmit. SO you know there is a gargoyle there, but you can't target it because of reasons. Now it is going to attack you as soon as you step off an elevator WHY DIDN'T YOU KILL IT YOU BAD GET GUD FGT. Ignore the fact that you are restricted to the game's targeting system. Even if you block it as soon as it appears you are still entirely at the whims of the camera. Did you successfully target it? I hope so because otherwise you have forced focus of the camera in some random direction (this is a control thing that needs to fuck RIGHT the hell off if you are going to restrict target lock range as much as this game does, it should be on a different button completely for this game. Or you know they could not make the lock-on range pissing distance). My Camera Souls jokes were 100% serious, that is hands down the most difficult part of the game and is my biggest complaint of the game. I figure it is pretty apparent, but I will say the obvious anyway, when the camera in your third person action game is shitty it really brings down the quality of your game and it is something that third person action games have been struggling with for a very long time. It isn't Kingdom Hearts bad or Soul Reaver bad, but frustratingly it feels like something that they could fix way easier than those games could. Most of the majour issues they have with camera controls are handled well most of the time. There is still rare cases where camera will clip through things obstructing your view or the camera NOT clipping through things jamming your view up your butt hole, but they are few and far between and when they do happen they don't directly impact your ability to control your character. It is nearly always a problem with the lock-on. It is inconsistent and flaky as hell. Some enemies it will lock on to a million miles away, other enemies it won't lock on to even when they are in plane view because you are more than 3 meters away or because there is a stick between you and them. Then there is the times where it does actually impact your ability to control your camera. There is a couple of points of this in Dark Souls as well, but no where near as common. 4-2 is explicitly designed to make players walk off cliffs because the game targeted a Manta thing flying off the side of the cliff instead of the skeletons they are trying to target. This is abusive and just shitty. Yes it is From Soft being trolly devs lololol, but this is actually literally the definition of artificial difficulty that people complain about rather than challenging gameplay that people actually like from the series.
That is to say, a lot of things got tidied up in Dark Souls, the chunk of it (up to O&S for reference) hasn't had a ton of these issues, the lock on is mostly consistent in the game except for dark areas of the Catacombs, where even there it was quite reasonable most of the time (still to do Tomb of the Giants though).
My initial assessment of Dark Souls respects my time more really holds true the whole game I think. Demons's Souls's levels are just too long with no real pacing to them and the game mechanically reinforces slowing down a lot. Both in the deliberate slow pacing of the combat (Shied is your New God) and in how punitive it is along with slow degenerate tactics that it makes open to you. Did you take any damage at all? Grab that Regen ring or a Blessed Weapon and sit around for a bit. Did you spend mana? Sit around. There is actually a ton of healing items and MP restoring items around that you can use, but I hope you wanted to do that tower full of Lovecraft Horror and Mindflayers early on, otherwise you won't know about them. Everything is super super segmented, so where the game drives you to try and spread out thinly across the levels, it also asks you to make no progress while you do so. Spending resources adds risk to your run, do you want to waste those Spices to get MP now when you don't know if you will die to random hidden things? Is this level going to have a one shot mechnanic 2/3 of the way through it that you can't realistically expect to see coming as well? If you waste them it comes with the penalty of your time spent in the level, the possible penalty of your souls if you can't progress equally far again (and you just had to use an item...) and if you need to replace it, the time spent either getting the souls for or grinding the item directly. I am all for interesting choices in the game, but the choice of "doing I sit here and wait now or do I go do grinding later which has its own inherent risks" is a pretty fucking shitty binary choice.
On the topic of interesting choices, boss souls! I have heard a lot of praise for this system especially compared to Dark Souls. The reality of it is actually super underwhelming. Yes you do have a few souls that you are presented with a valid choice between two choices of spell or a weapon, but in my estimate, that is only the Arch Demon's souls that do it well, and even of those it is just Dragon God and Old Monk. Astraea has interesting and very flavourful choices, but none that are actually that compelling (2 multiplayer spells, a super niche sword and a status spell that doesn't work on many things (more things are effected by Poison Cloud which comes from the first boss of her area and it is competing with Cure, which has the same effect as a cheap consumable). The False King Alant Soul doesn't even have any uses other than the NG+ only weapon wouldn't have minded seeing Soul Sucker put there). Storm Beast's Soul only has two options, one of which is obtuse to how good it is (because it is intuitive to make a sword you can't use to take advantage of its low HP damage boost on other weapons....) and the other which is kind of questionable niche use and cuts both ways.
The rest of the souls either have only 1 real use per build or only really do one good thing, even with the multiple options. The only other one that has multiple choices I think is the Armored Spider one (a first boss soul, for reference later). You get to choose between a bow or two spells of questionable niche use. The bow is generally considered one of the best items in the game. A difficult choice.
But at the end of the day that is fine right? You just make your choice and eat the soul and move on. But you can't even fucking do that. The game doesn't TELL you what any of these fucking things do. It tells you on every soul "this might be used for weapons or spells", but it tells you dick about the weapon you might get and it even tells you this on souls that can't be used for weapons/spells as appropriate. So do you just eat them? Well you also don't know how many souls they will give. For example your choice for the Adjudicator's Souls is a Regeneration spell (which is okay I guess since it fully heals you? But slot intensive and give you the fun of sitting around for a minute and a half to regen that health on and the MP you spend as well), the Meat Cleaver which is also considered one of the best weapons in the game (which you need to know make it from a Club/mace) or 1500 souls. The choice there when you are informed is incredibly clear. 1500 souls is fucking nothing even at the start of the game. The Regen spell is niche as fuck. Without google though? Your fucked. You have no way of knowing any of these things. To identify boss weapons you need to go to the Blacksmith on 2-1 with the base weapon at the appropriate level and SPECIFICALLY at that level. If you got something nice towards the end of the game I hope you didn't buff that sword up to +9, because now you can't turn it into that boss weapon. You need to start from scratch either by wrecking this weapon (WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER DO THIS) or by buying a copy of the weapon type and grinding up shards to level it.
Fuck this game. That just wound me up when I wasn't meaning to go on a rant about it. The item upgrading in this game is FUCKING TERRIBLE. And the worst part is, the Meat Cleaver which seriously is STUPID GOOD can be made from an unupgraded club. Club +0. That you can buy for 500 souls. Shit's fucking crazy.
Okay. I stopped making sense about 20 minutes ago so I am stopping now. After mentioning the highlights of the game.
- The moment I realised Pure Hardstone is going to be my DJ name when I start making dupstep.
- The Tower of Latria end to end. The Mindflayer prison, the metal as fuck giant heart suspended at the top of a tower by chains magically held in place by tortured slaves, the centipedes made out of human heads that have their heads pop off when they take enough damage even if they die in one hit, the Old Monk possessed by an interdimensional being inside a piece of yellow cloth sitting on a throne atop of every chair in a kingdom because it is the King of Kings and best of all the sound design in all these places being amazing. The mindflayer's check in bell tones and the incredibly prolonged wet squelch of the heart and related organic matter any time something happens with them would be the real high points, but the whole zone's audio stands out as well above any of the other zones.
On the note of sound design though, where it is all aces in World 3, everywhere else it is super patchy. I hated every time I was human because I had to put up with those foot step sounds. No surface feels right and player's footsteps are mixed up way too high (it is good that enemy steps are loud! The player's shouldn't be generating the same volume though with directional audio, because you are literally on top of the noise source your player foot steps are incredibly loud and the only footstep you will hear).
Also last thing, New Game + is terrible in this. The only drive to do it is either trophies or grind for the sake of grind. No more loot is worth going for, you can't upgrade most of your gear any further. So you may as well just approach the levels going as directly as possible and that guts a huge portion of the actual "time" investment in the game. For such a staple of the series it is pretty shitty and boring thing to do really. Dark Souls 2 seems to get some of it right by mixing things up on the first play through an unlocking stuff normally tucked behind covenants on the third. It still probably has less progression, but at least it is changing things in more ways than multiplying all stats by 1.5 and calling it a day.
Soul Hackers
Game of the year.
