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Demon’s Souls – Review (PS3)

Games like The Legend of Zelda and Ninja Gaiden, back in the days of the NES, were what can be classified as hardcore. It was nigh impossible to beat them, and they actually posed a challenge. It took gamers hours and hours to complete mere sections of those games. And here we are today, with games like God of War and Prince of Persia- we can finish off these recent games within hours, with no sense of difficulty and accomplishment at all. There’s no difficulty in these newer games, and they never pose much of a challenge.

Demon’s Souls, one of the latest titles to have been released on the PS3, is a spastic tribute to games of yore. Its difficulty can get maddeningly frustrating at times, and it poses such a challenge, that when you complete even minor sections of the game, you feel a real sense of accomplishment, one that can never be replicated.

What, then, makes Demon’s Souls so tough, you might ask? Well, here’s what- for starters, you can never pause the game. You might be battling hordes of enemies who can kill you off in a single blow, and might be in the middle of something that requires every ounce of concentration on your part, but you won’t ever be able to pause.

Demon's Souls will literally leave you begging for mercy.

Let me expand on the difficulty a little more. When you do bring up the Start Button menu, from where you can access your inventory, equipment and items from both, the dark and light tendencies, all your character can do is run around; all your other actions are used to guide the menu navigation.

Which reminds me of the light/dark tendencies. These tendencies determine how tough the enemies are in every level. Dying causes the world to shift to dark, where the enemies are a lot tougher. So the more you die, the tougher the game gets. Similarly, the less you die, the easier the game becomes.

Which is exactly what makes the game so damn tough. There is almost no way possible for you to survive throughout the game, and not die at least a million times.

You can’t reset the game or start from your last save point if you ever do something that effects your quest in a negative way, like losing money and experience points, or drop vital items and equipment, because the game almost constantly keeps auto-saving.

The world of Demon's Souls is the most gorgeous thing you will ever see on the PS3 in many years to come.

You can level up your character, buy and level up new items and equipment with the help of cash- or souls, in this case- which is very difficult to come by. You cannot sell your old items and stuff, and every time you die, you loose all your cash and experience points. To get them back, you have to get to the point where you died and regain your soul, which is a very tough ask in itself.

When we’re in this soulless form, we loose a chunk of our life meter, which makes the game all the more tough for us.

If you ever try to be foolishly heroic, or do something unnecessarily gutsy, the game punishes you terrifyingly, and everytime you meticulously, carefully and with a brilliant strategy best anything, the game rewards you with some really useful things, and of course, a swelling sense of accomplishment.

The world of Demon’s Souls is completely dark, downtrodden, bleak and dingy, and no-one but you can fix it. Considering all the stuff that’s been written above, that seems to be an unmanageable feat.

But all the maddening difficulty is really worth it, because every time you best a level, or defeat an invincible boss, a blissful sense of relief and accomplishment runs through you, and makes you feel proud of yourself. No game this generation, or even the last gen, perhaps, has ever punished gamers so horrendously, and neither has any game ever delivered such a sense of accomplishment and reward.

What is most commendable about this game is how vast and broad it is in terms of variety. You can become everything from a magician, to a blade wielder, to someone who does both. There are innumerable combinations of moves and weapons and spells and miracles, and all of them are equally powerful and breathtaking.

Every weapon has an animation of its own, depending upon its weight and the hand which wields it. There’s a different animation for the left hand, another one for the right, and a totally different one when we hold a weapon with both hands.

Die, you flying beast! Die!

We can parry or bounce off enemy attacks with the help of our shields and other weapons, or even dodge attacks by rolling or jumping. In short, there’s such a variety of attacks, combos, spells and other things that you simply cannot have delved upon each one of them even after clocking in more than twenty hours of gameplay.

You can also increase your stats, which will help you evade attacks better and more of the like, with the help of your Soul, but with every stat increased, your soul meter gets affected. Do not forget that it is the soul meter which helps us buy all the items and stuff, which prove to be really useful later on in the game.

The scale of Demon’s Souls is nothing short of epic. From the environments and the enemies to the bleak and ethereal world and the epic magical attacks, everything adds to the sense of epicness that this game possesses.

The music is stellar, and with an epic sound score, and brilliant voice acting, and soundtracks that perfectly match the situations, Demon’s Souls becomes the game with one of the best soundtracks this gen. The music always perfectly forebodes hordes of enemies drawing upon you, or perfectly matches an action-packed and intense fighting sequence.

In conclusion, Demon’s Souls is a game that no one can, or rather, no one should, miss. It is one in a million, a kind of game that is rarely seen these days. With unmatched quality and sheen, an awesome sense of epicness, extremely high difficulty and heavy nostalgia, Demon’s Souls is definitely one of the best games to have been released on the PS3 in all its years.

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