Demon's Souls (2020)

2023-07-15
God damn I love this game. I saw Varun playing it at Sam's and all of a sudden had an uncontrollable urge to play the game. I booted it up and just played it near nonstop and finished in a week. It's classic because I did the same thing I do every time: spend hours farming bladestone to make a Sharp +5 Uchigatana so I can cruise through the game. But this time I actually tried some new stuff like the Blueblood Sword which rules and the Meat Cleaver which is ungodly awesome. Just stunlocking enemies right and left.

But anyway let's talk about why this remake is cool. First of all it's unbelievably gorgeous. I mean holy shit seeing Boletaria in 4k for the first time is unreal. Plus it runs buttttttery smooth at 60 fps which is such a blessing for these games (fuck you Bloodborne). I find it kind of insane that they were able to seemingly keep the feel of the game 1:1 but also update the combat to be more line with the newer games with rolls being omnidirectional and other stuff.

On the flip side I have to say the change to make items have weight is one of the worst design decisions I've ever seen in a game. It was ostensibly done to stop people from carrying 99x of the strongest herb into boss fights to make them too easy but this shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how these games work. Having infinite healing doesn't make you win because a lot of the bosses will kill you in a couple of hits no matter what anyway. You won't even have time to heal. All that carrying a ton of herbs enables is some sort of drawn out poke-contest which you can still do with all the other methods of cheese they left in the game. AND not only that you still CAN carry a ton of herbs. I did it. But the real reason I'm complaining about this is because it has the secondary effect of making it so you can't carry plenty of other items that have nothing to do with healing. I have to worry about how many ore I'm collecting or if I pick up too much equipment I can't just pick it up and equip it immediately anymore. I can only carry a certain number of weapons so I can't just experiment with different stuff on the fly. What? Why? Don't do that. Shit Ass Change.

But everything else rules. I mean it's such a great game. It's brutally difficult but so good. The surprise when the second Maneater shows up because I forgot about that after 10 years. Cool to also see that since then that "Second boss shows up in the middle of the fight" move is a pattern they've repeated to great effect in a bunch of their other games. The absolute brutality of the swamp zone. So, so much worse than Blighttown. 4-2 being an absolute trollfest of flying manta rays taking pot shots at you, skeletons rolling at you when you're on the edge of a cliff, and then reapers summoning endless enemies all around you unless you know where they are and shoot them 3 times with a bow. Lol classic. Old King Doran being an absolute BASTARD of an enemy who even at SL90 could wipe the floor with me forcing me to use the Thief's Ring backstab cheese. And then remembering I did this 10 years ago in 2013 on my second playthrough.

What an absolute gem.

(I'm dinging the score from the original because while the increased visuals and frame rate rule, the item weight change sucks and also they tied some achievements to online play which requires a subscription to PSN which was CLEARLY a change made by Sony to force people to pay for a sub. Fuck you, Sony.)