Demon's Souls stands as the blueprint for the Action RPG genre as a whole moving forward, but unfortunately I disagree with the sentiment that this entitles it to strictly praise through nostalgia colored opinion. Some seem to evaluate it more highly solely due to being precursor for the Souls franchise, but after examining it detached from the rest of the franchise I found that I couldn't appreciate it in quite the same way. While its world design and tone are unmatched and deserving of recognition, the atmosphere is for me the main highlight of the game that largely covers its other shortcomings.
Level design in Demon's Souls ultimately boils down to reskinned linear walkways that plays host to repetitive encounters that forces the player to engage enemies one at a time in a row. Sometimes, there's a second enemy stacked on top of the first who will almost always alternate attacks. Even more rarely, there's a third guy shooting arrows at you behind the first two. There's very little room for variety in strategy due to largely only having front and back as options for dodging consistently. This leads to dealing with the occasional larger crowd of enemies being extremely flawed as your only tactics are backing up or blocking until you can sneak in a jab and stagger a few of them with hopes of thinning the herd.
The biggest breakaway from this is somehow also, in my opinion, the worst level of the game, 5-2, which features Miyazaki's first and potentially largest poison swamp. The fastest way through the level is blindly dragging your way through the unrollable swamp water until the end, at which point you can sprint through the remainder of visually clustered and chaotic wooden platforms in a blind fumble for the boss.
Which leads me to the bosses themselves; what about them, after all? They contribute as much to the identity of each stage as the level design itself, so how do they fare?
Well... I can count maybe two bosses that challenge the player mechanically; one being the final real fight of the game, and the other being Flamelurker — who, even then, is terribly simplistic in having just three attacks, but fortunately ramps up in intensity the lower his health gets. The others are a mixed bag. Four or five of the lot have charming gimmicks that offer no real challenge after you grasp the idea — or, even worse yet, the ones who have a frustrating gimmick and are hardly interactive at all. The rest sort of just...don't move from one spot and blindly swing their arms around. There is the exception in this crowd of the beloved Penetrator, who presents as a complete bad-ass initially until you stagger him to death and realize he has no real form of ranged attack or gapcloser to punish healing. The "prey slaughtered" tagline seems oddly more fitting here than it ever did in Bloodborne.
Although Demon's Souls holds a special place as the progenitor of a franchise I'd consider some of the most fun I've had in gaming, I can't hold Demon's Souls to that same level of prestige. It's ultimately a game with little to pick apart in my humble opinion, and little intrigue or variety between runs. I likely won't be revisiting this game a third time.
Level design in Demon's Souls ultimately boils down to reskinned linear walkways that plays host to repetitive encounters that forces the player to engage enemies one at a time in a row. Sometimes, there's a second enemy stacked on top of the first who will almost always alternate attacks. Even more rarely, there's a third guy shooting arrows at you behind the first two. There's very little room for variety in strategy due to largely only having front and back as options for dodging consistently. This leads to dealing with the occasional larger crowd of enemies being extremely flawed as your only tactics are backing up or blocking until you can sneak in a jab and stagger a few of them with hopes of thinning the herd.
The biggest breakaway from this is somehow also, in my opinion, the worst level of the game, 5-2, which features Miyazaki's first and potentially largest poison swamp. The fastest way through the level is blindly dragging your way through the unrollable swamp water until the end, at which point you can sprint through the remainder of visually clustered and chaotic wooden platforms in a blind fumble for the boss.
Which leads me to the bosses themselves; what about them, after all? They contribute as much to the identity of each stage as the level design itself, so how do they fare?
Well... I can count maybe two bosses that challenge the player mechanically; one being the final real fight of the game, and the other being Flamelurker — who, even then, is terribly simplistic in having just three attacks, but fortunately ramps up in intensity the lower his health gets. The others are a mixed bag. Four or five of the lot have charming gimmicks that offer no real challenge after you grasp the idea — or, even worse yet, the ones who have a frustrating gimmick and are hardly interactive at all. The rest sort of just...don't move from one spot and blindly swing their arms around. There is the exception in this crowd of the beloved Penetrator, who presents as a complete bad-ass initially until you stagger him to death and realize he has no real form of ranged attack or gapcloser to punish healing. The "prey slaughtered" tagline seems oddly more fitting here than it ever did in Bloodborne.
Although Demon's Souls holds a special place as the progenitor of a franchise I'd consider some of the most fun I've had in gaming, I can't hold Demon's Souls to that same level of prestige. It's ultimately a game with little to pick apart in my humble opinion, and little intrigue or variety between runs. I likely won't be revisiting this game a third time.