An interesting game inwhich you can feel age in it's designs, but it still feels ambitious. You'll probably never get a game like demon's souls in particular again, for better or worst.

Visually the game looks fantastic, both in bluepoint putting in work and just stellar world designs from the original game, even though I think saying that means someone who really, really prides themselves on the fact that they played DeS on PS3 before dark souls came out is about to enter my twitter DMs. I think DeS is my favorite looking game of the franchise, areas like Shrine of Storms and Tower of Latria are just fantastic, and even areas that would become mainstays like Castle and Another Fucking Posion Swamp level are just swell.

The game is overall easier than the rest of the Souls franchise, but on the other end there's a lot of cool bosses that you won't see from souls games (especially new ones which have a bad habit of making most of their bosses trying to emulate Artorias). Pre Emphasis On Difficulty gave us weirdly designed bosses like Armored Spider, Old Monk and Stormking that rule. That ambitious and trend setting design also gives us shit like Dragon God and Maiden. It's sort've a running theme with this game, being the first of its kind leads to a lot of fantastic design but also some shit that sucks.

Anyways, level design is solid all around, especially for the first game of it's time. There's rough patches, I think most of Shrine of Storm can fuck off, and here's a couple of really bad boss runbacks, but honestly that's on me for dying to Old Hero. World Tendency is maybe one of the worst alignment systems every made and if you defend it I swear to god I will fight you. Souls combat is souls combat, which I like but I know it's not everyone's tea, but it has pretty cool weapons and I already want to do another playthrough to try other weapons.

Fantastic visually, very ambitious design even today, but with a lot of rough patches. Had a good time tho