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INTRODUCTION SETTING THE MOOD
Hey, I apologize in advance for the super-long review but this is an immense game so maybe it deserves a long review. I'll see if I can abbreviate it a little but I'm afraid it will stay 'long' no matter what I do.
Hmmm... I worked so hard to bring my beloved Uchigatana to a +6 but now Ben, Bladwin's brother they are both blacksmiths suggests that I give it to him and he's going to make a Crescent Uchigatana +1 out of it. A PLUS ONE out of my +6? Yes, my kids advise, go for it. While it's true that the Plus One Crescent does only 75 damage vs. my +6's 153, my current level of magic 35 should add at least 92 points of magic attack to the physical damage and, with the help of a few dozen Darkmoon stones (lots of Grim Reapers had to die for me to harvest them) and less than 10,000 souls (a bargain) I can immediately upgrade it to Crescent +3 and with THAT weapon, my friends, it only takes one quick slash to dispose of a silver skeleton and I can do away more than half a dozen low-level zombies with one swing. And, did I mention that it will slowly restore my MP (magic points) while I'm wearing it so I don't really need to keep the Fragrant Ring on and I could use the Sharp Magic ring instead to further boosts my magic strengths including Uchigatana's power but, true, it WILL lower my magic defenses. Or use the Thieves' Ring while in Queen's Tower prison so that the lovely bell-ringing octopus-head prison guards (good looking girls with a passion for electrocuting and stabbing while hugging you tight) won't notice me. And the Thieves' Ring seems to do well with those giant flying stingrays. They do notice me eventually but it makes them less vigilant so there are fewer of those 15-foot long, self-homing spikes they keep shooting at me when they get angry or suspicious.
Did I say too much? Then, let me say this. Granted, I'm a slow player because I really like to enjoy my games so maybe this is not typical but, after some 400 hours of play, Yesssss... got my Platinum my only so far and, until maybe until Elder Scrolls V comes around, likely to stay this way.
BRIEFLY
Demon's Souls is, in my view, one of the best fantasy RPGs that ever came to a game console. If you don't mind stabbing, slashing, shooting, cleaving, crushing, tearing, punching, scratching, infecting, slicing, burning or poisoning your enemies (and have the same thing done to you) and watching them die as they bleed, scream, decompose and sometimes howl in agony or even beg for mercy. And you'll be facing several classes of zombies, gargoyles, giant flying stingrays, knights in shining or all-black armors swinging what you could safely call 'weapons of mass destrctions' in the shape of ten-foot long meat cleavers at you, leeches, rats, blobs with shields on top of them, daemons of all shapes an sizes, grim rippers, octopus-headed ladies, immensely powerful fire-breathing dragons, giant steel spiders, huge worms with human faces.
Coming from someone who's played the Ultima series way back in the 80's and who's still waiting for the next in the Scrolls of the Elders, having enjoyed Oblivion more than any other console RPG, saying that Demon's Souls is 'awesome' should mean something. But, I was trying to briefly describe the game so, here it is, the story line in a paragraph, as dark and impossibly complicated as it could possibly come out of Japan. A king attempts to keep his kingdom Boletaria prosperous by means of some dark rituals involving the consumption of souls which, eventually, awakens the Old One, a great demon whose awakening unleashes lesser but still immensely powerful demons who quickly begin feasting on the regular people souls themselves while the kingdom is enveloped by a mysterious fog, isolating it from the rest of the world. None but one who went into the fog ever returned and that one told the story everyone in Boletaria is now insane and, unless someone does something, the fog is likely to spread and envelop the entire world. And that's where you, the player, get involved so your mission is to talk the Old One into going back to sleep and maybe save the world.
MY EVALUATION
It's strange how a game that's so unforgiving and that requires you to fight so many battles again and again until you achieve perfection only to have to fight them some more can become so addictive and almost obsessively so. There are three gamers in our family and not only do we wait for our turns but we watch each other playing, share 'funny stories' and tips involving gameplay and lose a lot of sleep when we can afford it and sometimes when we can't. It's probably illogical but, having to fight the same battles many times is not only immersive but it's actually fun and rewarding. On the third or fourth try you know exactly how to defeat the Grim Reaper and you know each individual Gargoyle's style and capabilities and you can play each battle in many different ways by slightly changing your tactics and strategies and the weapons you use until you achieve the perfect stab or slash or cast your spell at the time and place needed for it to hit the mark and to maximum damage. The only thing... before you get to the Grim Reaper you must first annihilate a few dozen other enemies, every single time.
And did I mention that that worlds of Boletaria are simply Awesome? Exploration and discovery are a joy in this game only balanced by the overwhelming sense of fear, dread and desolation oozing out of it. Most of your enemies don't only die when you dispose of them, but they go screaming, screeching or howling. Their bodies bleed and, through the controller, you can almost feel the the flesh tearing apart or stabbed by your blade or their armor breaking into pieces.
Being so hard to master but not impossible because I won't consider myself a great player there is a great sense of accomplishment every time a new boss is defeated, a weapon is upgraded and tried out in the field or a new location is conquered.
I can't give too much praise to the online play elements. You are NEVER alone in Demon's Souls. Other players can watch you and you can see their ghostly outlines as they play. You can leave messages to warn others of dangers and... you can see how they die or sometimes commit suicide. You can help others and sometimes you must defend yourself from those attempting to invade your world and destroy you. And all is smooth and so well integrated into the game's atmosphere that, in the rare occasions when our PS3 loses its network, all seems disturbingly quiet and lonely.
While nothing is perfect and nothing can be perfect and without having finished the game yet, I would say that Demon's Souls is without a doubt a top RPG for the PS3 platform.
GAMESPACE
You act in 5 'worlds' or locations: the Boletarian Palace, the Stonefang Tunnel, the Tower of Latria, the Shrine of Storms and the Valley of Defilement and you can cross from one world into another via the Nexus, a safe space, to the extent that anything built on top of the Old One can be safe, where you do most housekeeping chores. You can move relatively freely inside each world to the extent that you don't mind fighting... everybody all the time and there are gates that take you farther (usually deeper) into the worlds IF you manage to defeat the bosses guarding them.
Along the way, and usually following a fight, you find weapons and armor or items that may help you upgrade your weapons or armor and you decide how to manage your possessions but the main currency in the worlds of Boletaria is now 'souls'. Everyone is after them and the only way you can survive is to get them, usually by killing your opponents and to spend them on things that you need.
But this is only scratching the surface. Your eventual goal is to calm down the Old One by defeating and killing the demons that feed him souls and, as expected, this is not exactly a walk in the woods. How about a walk in swamps infested by some of the most foul and poisonous or disease spreading critters you could never imagine? Or exploring deep and dark tunnels where ghosts and Grim Reapers live, or some immense prison where all have lost their minds and the warden ladies wear tentacles on their heads? Or a mine where... you guessed it right, everyone is insane and they keep acting as if they were working but they will always take a break so that they can chase you around, throw some fireballs at you or drop boulders the size of trucks on you? And if you think that the 'surface' is safer, think huge dragons capable of completely incinerating you with one casual sneeze, or flying stingrays shooting giant ice spears or armored and well-armed skeletons always in a bad mood.
GAMEPLAY
After you create your character name, gender, class, looks you start with very little but, as you gather souls, you pay the blind lady who doesn't look like much but almost everything here is deceiving and she will raise your soul level, allowing you to improve on ability: vitality, endurance, strength, intelligence, magic, faith, dexterity, luck and you will need these abilities to be able to cast spells use certain weapons and generally survive in a world in which there are very few you could call 'friends'.
You progress by improving yourself and your weapons and defeating the various bosses. Doing so is important because the bosses block access to areas where... the next boss can be found.
Once you get killed, something that happens often, you lose the souls that you accumulated and wake up in the Nexus in 'soul form'. And there are ways to regain your body, usually by defeating a boss or... HELPING someone else defeat a boss but acting in human form must be a well-thought decisions. You do have more 'health points' as a 'body' but you are also weaker and while in a body form your world is open to invasion from other players out there. They can show up and kill you and, every time you die (or when you do bad things) the world you died in turns a little 'darker'. And the darker the world, the tougher your opponents become and... you are more likely to find 'good stuff'.
While in 'soul' form, you can volunteer to help other players defeat bosses or simply ride along with them. The reward is that you are revived in body form if, when summoned, you help the other player defeat a boss or maybe defeat an invader who teleported into his world to kill him.
Now, just to make it all a lot more fun, while you are online, the makers of Demon's Souls have the ability to control the so-called 'world tendency' in each of the five worlds, independently of your own actions so a pure-white world may suddenly turn darker and more dangerous or vice-versa.
And this is not all. While playing, you can see the 'blood stains' of the heroes who died on that particular spot. You touch it and you see the last seconds that preceded that hero's death. And you can leave messages to warn others and, you can see in real time, the ghostly images of other players fighting monsters or just running around as you are minding your own business.
And, of course, every time you leave a world for the safety of the Nexus, ALMOST everything other than the bosses and some of the NPCs resets and respawns. So you will be fighting the same battles over and over and over again, using different tactocs, improving your skills until you approach perfection and achieve elegance.
And... how about whole the game resetting itself? It's true, or so I heard that, after you complete the game you can retain some of your hard-earned possessions and skills and go for an 'encore' but a bit harder this time.
THE PAIN FACTOR
This is one of the most brutal and unforgiving games I've ever played. And I'm not talking about the slaying of zombies or slimy creatures at almost every turn and having to do it repeatedly. Demon's Souls is unforgiving to the player because nothing but complete dedication and near-perfection would do.
The tutorial is probably the threshold that's the hardest to cross. You start weak and almost unarmed and you mission is not only to survive which, if you are successful, you won't but also to defeat a mysterious monster that's almost nothing but slime, near-impenetrable armor and dozens of extra-long spears and do it in near-complete darkness. Saying that it's frustrating it's an understatement. I would have given up if it weren't for my kids who won their first victory before I did and motivated me to continue.
And the hardship continues and only grows after that. Unlike most other games, you can't just save once you defeat an opponent and establish a safe point to restart from. You are in that world until you are killed and lose your hard-earned souls or you return to the Nexus on your own but, remember, every time you come back from the Nexus, all the monsters you killed except for the bosses are there challenging you again and you have to kill them again. But, not everything resets itself completely. Usually 'the good stuff' only presents to you once or twice, IF you are lucky but the bad guys are always there to challenge you again and, if the world turns dark on you, to maybe slice you and dice you a few times before you develop some new and better tactics to defeat them for the 100th time again.
VIOLENCE
I believe I mentioned this all throughout my review but maybe the level of violence merits its own heading. There is A LOT of it in this game and all of it is graphic. I believe there is a setting that would hide 'bleeding' but with or without that, there was a reason it was rated 'M' as in 'mature'. So, anyone who doesn't feel comfortable about killing tens of thousands of soulless, computer generated creatures, don't buy this game.
TECHNICAL MERIT
Demon's Souls was made for the PS3 exclusively and it shows. The graphics and animations are simply breathtaking and, unlike the multi-platform Oblivion where 'fire' and 'smoke' could only be done at the expense of slowing everything to a crawl and the objects in the the distance became usually blurred, the world of Demon's Souls is almost always crisp and responsive visually, it rarely skips a frame and it never slows down, even when dozens of characters are present and moving independently on the screen.
Add to the above some of the most realistic sound effects and 'break and shatter' graphics, with the audio-visual experience enhanced by the controller perfectly synchronize vibrations that allow you to 'feel' the blows as your shield blocks them.
Unlike many other RPG worlds where a lot of the landscape and the dungeons are cookie-cutter reassemblies of a limited number of elements, the world of Boletaria appears to be fully, uniquely custom-designed. Very little repeats and every new location you discover is different and usually surprisingly different from anything else in the game.
FIVE STARS
On a 1-100 scale, I would rate Demon's Souls as a 95+. The game is remarkably bug free and the instances where characters do silly things because they can't climb a boulder or can't make a turn are rare enough for the game to stay immersive. I already know that I'll be spending more hours on Demon's Souls than on any other PS3 RPG or any other type of games I own so far.
At this price and considering the added CD, this is as most compelling buy.
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NOTE:
There's a lot of info and a thriving community on a dedicated Wiki site. Can't post URLs in a review but I will add a comment.
It's just been announced (Dec. 17, 2010) that online play support is going to be extended for the foreseeable future.
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>> Brush your teeth, it's the law!
