DEMON'S SOULS A GAME FOR SONY PLAYSTATION 3

It's been awhile but yeah I think some of the 'stage 3' bosses have runbacks, but others put you right at the boss. Luckily most of them aren't too long, or have shortcuts you can unlock.

I played this on a borrowed PS3 and definitely remember Miyazaki's first poison swamp, it was almost touching how unforgiving it was. It made for some good tense moments though, trying to get some item or reach a checkpoint before succumbing. Didn't know they added a ring in the remaster!

xpost That was my belated realization, too. I was so sick of the underground route, and the dogs, and the tedium. But then I realized I can just let the dragon do my dirty work and make a run for it. And then later, in true Souls fashion, spend 15 minutes shooting it with arrows from a safe perch until I killed it.

Giant spider down! I love how from the very start, From is begging the question: is it really cheesing if they provide the means to cheese? Which is to say, if enemies can hide and hit you from range, is it wrong to do the same to them in a game that gives you bows, magic, etc? (The answer: hell no, whatever it takes, if I want to do a future naked and afraid run of any of these games, I will).

Those bloody dogs in the tunnel though

Serious Bloodborne Unseen Village vibes in the spooky prison, with lightning and mindflayers/brainsuckers and atmosphere. It would be awesome if Blueprint remade Bloodborne, but I doubt it'll happen.

Aw man, that was one of my favourite bits of the game.

I surprise myself that I enjoy levels like that and also Stormveil in Elden Ring, because my IRL sense of direction is awful and I get lost and disoriented really easily. I'm really bad at observing landmarks. But there's something about the super-windy architecture of these places that really hits my buttons

I got lost sooooo much. At one point I fell down a deep hole and died, but had so many souls it made it worth my while to retrieve them, and it took me *forever* to find my way back. I do kinda like when that happens, though, because you run the level so many times and kill everything so many times, that when you finally get your bundle of souls you end up with a huge total. Then you level up, though it's hard to take your revenge on gravity.

i've been playing demon's souls for the first time for the past month or so. as i live in a state of playstationlessness i am playing the 2009 version thanks to rpcs3 and online via the archstones. i have a patch so it can run at 60 unmotion-blurred buttery smooth frames per second.

i've made my way through all the x-1's and x-2's, and i was trying not to use guides, but i broke that rule so i could figure out how to access 1-3. i know from the king's field days a bit of from software apocrypha that they want players to use guides (and take advice from online messages where possible) but it's been a nice playing nearly totally unguided. it makes the world feel a bit more overwhelming and a lot more full of wonder. but it has also meant i've killed more npc's than ever before - patches after the pit, the person who drops gloom armour in a cage above the swamp in 4-1 - and meant i've just lost other npc's - the glowing gold fella in 1-1 - and that i'm basically still using the equipment that i started with or found early on. oh also wtf is world tendency. maybe after i beat the game i'll have a read about that before ng+ or re-rolling.

playing on emulator also means i can pause if needed, which honestly, is a nice addition to the gameplay. it's not something i use very often but i love being able to just pause if needed. also the archstones tracks your deaths for you which is fun.

boletaria and latria are some from highlights for me, just remarkably designed, so many times in my first 1-1 run through boletaria where i knew that as i turned a corner i'd end up on a balcony looking back where i came from, just a lovely and well thought out experience.

oh also wtf is world tendency

i've looked it up multiple times and still don't know lol

i love boletaria and think about if often

Moving right along in this and having fun. Seems ... slightly more forgiving than its successors? Maybe? It's neat to see what From kept and tweaked and what they discarded for later games. And of course there is the amusing cognitive dissonance of the first game being essentially the most technologically advanced. Though I will say, as much as I like the graphics and loading times, my fave advance of the PS5 may remain the controller. It's both cool and helpful to have status effects conveyed via haptics; in the middle of frenetic boss battles I often find myself missing whether or not, say, my weapon is still on fire or glowing or whatever, but this way I can actually feel it while I'm focusing on other stuff.

Being able to hear audio in 3D is also a major boon. In 1-3 I could hear the red-eye knights before I could see them

Dragon God boss ruled, reminded me of an "Ori" boss level. Not hard, as such, but stressful and totally epic/metal.

Well, pretty sure I just killed my first NPC. I was in the first zone (1/3?), where I killed a fat guy and unlocked a gate, and it opened up to a rush of red eyed knights that I quickly slaughtered in a panic. But one of them I suspect was my guy. Serves him right for dressing like the baddies, the big dummy. Hopefully I didn't screw up anything major.

In another zone I almost killed Patches. I thought he was a devil monster thing, and because he was hiding behind a shield I didn't see his face (with all my wild melee technique) until it was almost too late.

I take it back, he's not dead! Must have slipped past me in the heat of battle and hid, the coward.

Lol just got to that guy. You already saved him twice! Cruel to end him there!

I put this down for 6 months after dying in that poison swamp, not from poison but by 5 giants guarding an item I now acknowledge I will never get. This is definitely the most forgiving souls game, finding it very very easy right now (comparatively).

I think I’m nearly done? Have four arch stones in every zone except the 1st. I’m scared of this final boss because I saw him drain Dunkey’s levels back to like zero. Is that a real mechanic? Will be so pissed if it is.

Okay he doesn’t drain all your levels, but I just got two taken off me on my first try. Rough

Okay he doesn’t drain all your levels, but I just got two taken off me on my first try. Rough

I think we're around the same place. That said I stopped playing for some reason and picked ER back up becauser.... I just really don't want to play the gloomy swamp level :-/

Most annoying thing (relatively) about this game so far? The way they stick the merchants in these hard to reach places. So much BS I don't want to deal with just to get back to the person that sells ... whatever. Definitely a QOL improvement in subsequent games.

well i finished an initial run through. it took me about 20 hours, i died 11 times (!??!?), had a soul level of 59. i agree with H.P a few posts above, i found it a lot less punishing than any of the other from souls games, and ended up with an enormous stock pile of moon grasses by the end game. i wonder if the remake involved tuning the difficulty. i guess i should go and read what mechanics were changed about the game, and maybe in a decade when you can reliably emulate ps5 games, i'll have a run through of it.

i started ng+ - only because the game immediately yeets you into it - and the damage done by even the 1-1 wee guys is drastically different. i'll probably play through it more slowly, and maybe look some things up (how do i get the blue screaming guy out of gaol) but i'm also going to go back to king's field iv for the first time in maybe 20 years.

I’m scared of this final boss because I saw him drain Dunkey’s levels back to like zero.

Obv Dunkey was playing it up, but I remember facing him my first couple of attempts and losing two levels, which meant I could no longer cast Firestorm (which is laughably OP in the original version of the game, iirc), and having to grind my way back up.

20 hours and 11 You Dieds is very good going for a first run I'd say

Last couple of bosses, Penetrator (?) and Maneater twins, have come closest to subsequent Souls level of aggro.

i die 11 times min each time i sit down to play lol

11 You Dieds startled me, tbh. I can offer no explanation. I'd guess 8 of those 11 happened at Maneater

I found NG+ on Demon’s Souls to be so punishing that I left quickly

xpost I'm shocked that you didn't get more You Dieds due to gravity or other environmental stuff alone. Soul level 59 is kinda modest too, isn't it?

re: soul level, I've no idea, I don't know where one is expected to be by the end of a play through, I just quickly searched and it seems like the internet wisdom is a conventional sl by the end of a first run is ~70, so I don't seem too far off? I know spent a LOT of souls buying shards and large shards and chunks and honeslty just generally anything else whenever I came across a merchant only to use the same crescent falchion +4 that i spent most of my run using, save for the final fight where I switched to a claymore +6. that guy who loves to hold onto your stuff in the nexus has hundreds and hundreds of shards n' chunks in a wealth of flavours in his pockets.

re: minimal number of You Dieds due to gravity or environment that was what happened during a number of maneater fights but outside of that i can't recall many times that environment deaths would seem like an issue? i remember the wall hugs of 4-1 or 2 but there's not a ton of enemies and so not so much risky rolling. I also basically only played for 30-45 minutes a day so daily progress was minimal and I feel like that restriction worked well for cautious shield up exploration. Go forward a bit -> look around -> kill a gargoyle -> quit for the day -> repeat

Yeah, I can see that. I guess a lot of my environmental deaths came trying to reach some intentionally precariously placed item on a ledge, or rushing into an area only to be overwhelmed by enemies. I've still got a ways to go, but I'm impressed you made it past such early PIA enemies as the mindflayers relatively unscathed. Then again, not only is this game generally more forgiving than the others, it's particularly forgiving to ranged combat, and if one is already playing patiently, a good bow goes a long way!

I've been generally following a guide, so I'm attuned to the whole tendency thing, which is of course impenetrable but afaict does demand several deaths (in human form) just to switch the status of the world back and forth.

Soul level 75 on finish today. This goes just bellow blood borne on my personal fromsoft tier list (maybe equally dark souls?). Insane this game got made and blew up like it did, such a stand-alone piece in the gaming world at the time, beautiful that it gained the traction that it did. Give me demons souls 2!

Serious question because I've only dipped my toes into the Dark Souls games proper, but what stops Dark Souls from being, essentially, Demons Souls 2?

They're all essentially the same game, imo, with subtle differences (largely refinements) in gameplay. I haven't finished Demon's Souls yet, but so far it's more or less the same as Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3. Elden Ring is kind of like the apotheosis of Souls games, minus (by necessity) the tight level/progression design. So yeah, I don't know how a Demon's Souls 2 would be any different, more or less, from a Dark Souls 4. Now, a Bloodborne 2 ...

as discussed elsewhere (probably at some length!) DS2 and Sekiro are the weird runts of the litter, the former because Miyazaki was not involved and it's baggy and a bit poorly staged and paced, the latter because it's set in a recognisable though warped version of ancient Japan and focusses very much on the parrying mechanic in combat. Personally I sometimes think Sekiro is the best of the lot...

Sekiro is the biggest deviation by far. Only one weapon, the parry/posture system, the setting, the lack of a DLC, etc. Sekiro is the only one I stopped short of truly completing, because I found it kind of exhausting, though I can totally see why some would consider it the best. Certainly the combat is probably the most finely tuned.

I don't know how I would necessarily rank them all at this point, since they all have their pros and cons. Even DS2, its relative jankiness in many ways helps set it apart!

I am very intrigued by Sekiro. I have DS2 bought during a sale but only gave it a quick cursory go before dying to the first enemy I encountered. Some of the exposition was a bit "lol" in that, well, it was exposition and I'm not used to that in Souls games. Having three Weird Sisters cackling about how many times you're going to You Died felt really jarring and a true sign it wasn't a Miyazaki project. Still, I know it has its protractors and many people will exalt it above DS3

Sekiro never seems to be available for cheap, does it?

I think (like a lot of From games) it's never gone much below $20 or $25 or so.

I loved DS3, though have forgotten a lot of it. DS2, I want to say a huge challenge in that one is that the iirc many (all?) enemies have seemingly infinite aggro range, so you can't just zip past everything unless you want to lead a parade of baddies that want to kill you.

It was a bit of a shock going into DS1 straight from Elden Ring, I will say. Those skeletons near the firelink shrine sure like to chase you for AGES!

yeah, in an open world it's almost always an option to just run away!

Serious question because I've only dipped my toes into the Dark Souls games proper, but what stops Dark Souls from being, essentially, Demons Souls 2?

― the forces of darkness making making us laugh ourselves into DEATH?? (dog latin), Monday, March 6, 2023 9:05 AM (four hours ago)

I think Demon's Souls being a PS exclusive kinda tied their hands a little bit, like if they wanted to make multi-platform games going forward they'd have to create a new franchise. So Dark Souls is more/less Demon's Souls 2 in everything but name.

Funny seeing this thread right near the De La Soul thread in New Answers.

De La Soul is You Died

(NB: that was a play on the album title "De La Soul Is Dead" btw, not a bas-taste joke on recent events)

xxp otm

sony own both demon's souls and bloodborne, which is why the former got a new paint job for ps5 without from's involvement. i don't know if from has any vetoing power over what sony chooses to do with DeS/BB

demons souls ps5 is kinda too nice imo.. i love the aesthetic of the ps3 games

Does anyone troll harder than Miyazaki? You come across a vendor selling the Ring of Avarice pretty early on, in 3-1. The only thing the Ring of Avarice is good for is farming. And yet, it's being sold for a whopping 50,000 souls, but the only reason you'd have that much that early in the game to spend on something other than on leveling up is from farming. So one might find the vendor, see the price tag, spend hours farming just to get the farming ring. And then the game just gives you the ring anyway, iirc in the very next part of the level.

There are certain aspects to Miyazaki's games where the challenge ends up being so interestingly specific that I wonder if he planned it

I think I know what you mean. Like the thing that only happens if you do the thing after the other thing when you have the thing from doing the other thing. It can be so byzantine it almost seems like happenstance. Certainly loot placement has always seemed more or less random to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a method to the madness.

I know that often a lot of bosses are highly allergic to their own weapons. In ER you can merk Placidusax in seconds using his own lightning strike. Of course, this only works if you've beaten him in a previous game

The prevalence of unbalanced bosses (and their possible cheeses) drops off extremely after DS1. I do think Miyazaki is thinking things through

Certain optional plot advancement requirements still remain extremely esoteric (“click ‘change action’ to hold up a different medallion at Rold”) but I think this is a desire for synergy between solo unspoiled play and consulting the online community for secrets

(There is nothing as obscure in these games as what Zelda 2 or Solomon’s Key desired of a player in a pre-internet age, anyway)

Nevertheless, there are some “things” that might seem like trolling but I think are in fact just The Way Things Turned Out

I don’t think (for example) that Miyazaki anticipated in DS3 that the PvP play would be so competitive, and that covenant items would be impossible for 95% of players to obtain via normal means, and that players would be farming the same Silver Knights for Concords and Tree Things for Wolf Grass

So yeah like, sometimes I think a pertinent challenge is deliberate and other times it seems like a result of an experiment