Having never played the original, it was ok! It felt weird!
Did I save scum the hell out of this game? Yes. I know there is a discourse of "should Dark Souls have an easy mode?", and after playing Bloodborne and Elden Ring first, my thought is, "but these games do have an easy mode though?" I was a mage, I learned exactly one (1) spell, and blasted through the whole game without having to learn anything.
Because I did not have to learn anything, I did not feel any shame save scumming to avoid going through levels multiple times for each boss fight attempt. I know the point of that kind of experience. I had it in Bloodborne. The idea being that the run-up to the boss keeps your movements deliberate, teaches you awareness and patience, and hones a mindset that actively engages with every boss encounter in a high stakes contest of wit and skill.
But when the same starter magic spell can blast every non-boss enemy from well outside their range to attack me, there is nothing for me to learn from going through these fun-house environments more than once. There is no skill I can get better at for pressing the "spell" button as fast as possible. Boss fights were the only scenario in this game where any enemy had the potential to even engage with me at my attack distance. So why would I waste my time in the real world engaging with this game in any other way?
After reading Backloggd user HylianBran's review of the Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series, I've been convinced that all remakes / remasters should come with the original work in the same package, no changes made, straight emulation and available from the title menu. If you as a developer can't get the original game to run correctly on the system you are trying to remake a project on, you don't deserve to remake it. If you feel threatened by the presence of an older work being compared to what you are creating, then git gud.
Because I really, really want to know if the original Demon's Souls was this easy. I really want to know if this whole "should Dark Souls have an easy mode?" discussion that's been in my periphery for over a decade was a moot point from before Dark Souls existed.
At the same time, I find this game fascinating for all of the felt design philosophies that exist within it as a final product.
The PS3 era was interesting because developers were seriously grappling with the change HD development brought from previous generations. On the PS1 or PS2, games were stuffed with mini-games and one-off mechanics because the ability to create new assets with new rules was achievable within a game's expected development period. In the PS3 era, this was much less viable, but not in a way that developers had fully embraced yet.
There is something alluring to me about seeing PS2-era thinking wrapped up in PS5 graphics. Multiple boss fights in Demon's Souls 2020 make use of gimmicks that completely disregard all the stats and character building relevant elsewhere in the game. My favorite has you pick up a magic sword that you use to swat giant manta rays out of the sky with. It's a mini-game! It's absurd! And I can't imagine any big budget modern game designed from the ground up would feel comfortable completely disregarding myriad complex systems crucial to 90% of the rest of the experience for something like it.
Additionally, the internet was not completely understood to be an expected tool at player's fingertips for engaging with the final product, even in games like this where online play was built-in.
For example, there's a place in this game where players can drop sparkly objects to trade with a crow. This is the only way to obtain several unique items. However, the game gives no indication on how to do this. Players would have to drop something, permanently losing it, reload their save file, and see what the crow gave back. There is also no in-game indication as to what the crow will trade for what.
In 2009, this has a great amount of charm to me. It sounds like exactly the fun kind of thing teenagers would engage with, giving each other anecdotes of successful trades and punking each other over blatant lies. The expectation could not be that a credible unified spreadsheet existed on the internet for what the crow would trade for what. But in 2023, this no longer applies. For this process to remain in the 2020 remake is fastidious to the source material without recognizing how context has changed.
Sparkly the Crow is the most tangible detail I have that Demon's Souls 2020 is just too slick to present the kind of experience it is purporting to remake. It is too conscientious of the player experience elsewhere for me to not think Sparkly the Crow's Sparkly Emporium™ should have been a trade menu.
At the same time, Demon's Souls 2020 is jank as hell.
I'll say it, the graphics in this game impressed me for like 5 minutes until I saw an NPC talk. Like, lol. I immediately thought "man, maybe they should have just given everyone battle helms so I wouldn't have to see their face." And then I learned after I beat this game that the original didn't have facial animations for dialog! Double lol!!
I don't know who needs to hear this, but consistency of art direction is how games become "immersive." Watching 4K gargoyles pirouette in the air as they got stun-locked by my starter magic spell, repeating their same scream multiple times as they looked for all the world like ugly piñatas, completely negated any awe I felt seeing the incredible draw distance of Upper Latria.
And the boss fights didn't fair much better! For a game built around the concept of being hard, but fair, the amount of jank present in these boss fights is, quite frankly, unforgivable. If I had to traipse past the piñata gargoyles every time I got stun lock blind-sided by the Maneaters clipping through their boss arena this game would get half a star. (Seriously, their pathing was so bad! Running in the sky, flying under the bridge, zero consistency whether their charge attacks would clip through a battlement or whether they'd get sent to the bottom of the sky box!) But I didn't, because I save scummed the hell out of this game, so was able to salvage a pretty good time!
3 stars at B rank for my experience feels right to me. I had fun with it! But I also feel like perhaps I was treating it like an easy filler episode of Elden Ring. (They play exactly the same!) I detected no greatness within it, and would not have been able to guess that this was important DNA for how gaming and gaming discussion would be framed for over a decade after its source material's release.
Did I save scum the hell out of this game? Yes. I know there is a discourse of "should Dark Souls have an easy mode?", and after playing Bloodborne and Elden Ring first, my thought is, "but these games do have an easy mode though?" I was a mage, I learned exactly one (1) spell, and blasted through the whole game without having to learn anything.
Because I did not have to learn anything, I did not feel any shame save scumming to avoid going through levels multiple times for each boss fight attempt. I know the point of that kind of experience. I had it in Bloodborne. The idea being that the run-up to the boss keeps your movements deliberate, teaches you awareness and patience, and hones a mindset that actively engages with every boss encounter in a high stakes contest of wit and skill.
But when the same starter magic spell can blast every non-boss enemy from well outside their range to attack me, there is nothing for me to learn from going through these fun-house environments more than once. There is no skill I can get better at for pressing the "spell" button as fast as possible. Boss fights were the only scenario in this game where any enemy had the potential to even engage with me at my attack distance. So why would I waste my time in the real world engaging with this game in any other way?
After reading Backloggd user HylianBran's review of the Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series, I've been convinced that all remakes / remasters should come with the original work in the same package, no changes made, straight emulation and available from the title menu. If you as a developer can't get the original game to run correctly on the system you are trying to remake a project on, you don't deserve to remake it. If you feel threatened by the presence of an older work being compared to what you are creating, then git gud.
Because I really, really want to know if the original Demon's Souls was this easy. I really want to know if this whole "should Dark Souls have an easy mode?" discussion that's been in my periphery for over a decade was a moot point from before Dark Souls existed.
At the same time, I find this game fascinating for all of the felt design philosophies that exist within it as a final product.
The PS3 era was interesting because developers were seriously grappling with the change HD development brought from previous generations. On the PS1 or PS2, games were stuffed with mini-games and one-off mechanics because the ability to create new assets with new rules was achievable within a game's expected development period. In the PS3 era, this was much less viable, but not in a way that developers had fully embraced yet.
There is something alluring to me about seeing PS2-era thinking wrapped up in PS5 graphics. Multiple boss fights in Demon's Souls 2020 make use of gimmicks that completely disregard all the stats and character building relevant elsewhere in the game. My favorite has you pick up a magic sword that you use to swat giant manta rays out of the sky with. It's a mini-game! It's absurd! And I can't imagine any big budget modern game designed from the ground up would feel comfortable completely disregarding myriad complex systems crucial to 90% of the rest of the experience for something like it.
Additionally, the internet was not completely understood to be an expected tool at player's fingertips for engaging with the final product, even in games like this where online play was built-in.
For example, there's a place in this game where players can drop sparkly objects to trade with a crow. This is the only way to obtain several unique items. However, the game gives no indication on how to do this. Players would have to drop something, permanently losing it, reload their save file, and see what the crow gave back. There is also no in-game indication as to what the crow will trade for what.
In 2009, this has a great amount of charm to me. It sounds like exactly the fun kind of thing teenagers would engage with, giving each other anecdotes of successful trades and punking each other over blatant lies. The expectation could not be that a credible unified spreadsheet existed on the internet for what the crow would trade for what. But in 2023, this no longer applies. For this process to remain in the 2020 remake is fastidious to the source material without recognizing how context has changed.
Sparkly the Crow is the most tangible detail I have that Demon's Souls 2020 is just too slick to present the kind of experience it is purporting to remake. It is too conscientious of the player experience elsewhere for me to not think Sparkly the Crow's Sparkly Emporium™ should have been a trade menu.
At the same time, Demon's Souls 2020 is jank as hell.
I'll say it, the graphics in this game impressed me for like 5 minutes until I saw an NPC talk. Like, lol. I immediately thought "man, maybe they should have just given everyone battle helms so I wouldn't have to see their face." And then I learned after I beat this game that the original didn't have facial animations for dialog! Double lol!!
I don't know who needs to hear this, but consistency of art direction is how games become "immersive." Watching 4K gargoyles pirouette in the air as they got stun-locked by my starter magic spell, repeating their same scream multiple times as they looked for all the world like ugly piñatas, completely negated any awe I felt seeing the incredible draw distance of Upper Latria.
And the boss fights didn't fair much better! For a game built around the concept of being hard, but fair, the amount of jank present in these boss fights is, quite frankly, unforgivable. If I had to traipse past the piñata gargoyles every time I got stun lock blind-sided by the Maneaters clipping through their boss arena this game would get half a star. (Seriously, their pathing was so bad! Running in the sky, flying under the bridge, zero consistency whether their charge attacks would clip through a battlement or whether they'd get sent to the bottom of the sky box!) But I didn't, because I save scummed the hell out of this game, so was able to salvage a pretty good time!
3 stars at B rank for my experience feels right to me. I had fun with it! But I also feel like perhaps I was treating it like an easy filler episode of Elden Ring. (They play exactly the same!) I detected no greatness within it, and would not have been able to guess that this was important DNA for how gaming and gaming discussion would be framed for over a decade after its source material's release.