Unfortunately Demon's Souls hasn't aged well.
I feel like Bluepoint should've changed way more things than they did; this game is more than 10 years old, of course a lot of mechanics are gonna be bad and old.
Some changes wouldn't have touched the "original experience": major quality of life improvements were necessary (like the atrocious inventory carry weight); and they could've added way more armour sets and weapons (that weren't limited to pre-orders...).
Also, let's be honest the world tendency system is just straight up garbage and frustrating; that shit literally ruins entire runs after one mistake.
Other aspects of the game like the enemy AI, bosses and level design are just products of its time so there's not a lot to say about that.
I was left pretty disappointed unfortunately, nothing really clicked for me here.

The worst JRPG I've ever played.

- The combat is absolutely trash, even the shittiest enemy is a damage sponge and takes 5 minutes of button mashing to kill (the bad kind of button mashing, not satisfying like a Musou).

- The story is garbage like the average anime, with characters that are so unbelievably boring that I just cringe thinking about their dialogues.

- Level design is stuck in 2008 and there's virtually no RPG aspect to the game: no dialogue choices, no armors and you just need to buy a new weapon every new city.

- EVEN THE MUSIC IS TRASH, how the fuck do you manage to miss the soundtrack in a JRPG? Even the bad or mediocre ones have great soundtracks.

I had to stop after getting all the party members, I wasted enough time on this crap. This kind of game is the proof that videogame journalism and critics have a huge bias towards certain genres like Indies and JRPGs. If you're older than 12 and you've played a game before in your life, this is not for you.

The loop of the base game didn't feel tedious at all. But this? I spent 3/4 of the time going to the Stranger, pushing the raft, getting the artifact from the ghost matter shack, travel to the fire I needed, open the secret door and only THEN entering the dream world. It gets annoying pretty fast. Also some of the spooky parts are way too "horror" and don't fit the rest of the game at all tbh. Overall the story is great and almost on par with the base game, but gameplay wise it was way too tedious and unnecessarily repetitive.

Deserves 5 stars but I can't give it more than 4.5 because the performance on day 1 were disgusting and almost on par with the Cyberpunk problems.
If the game wasn't as good as it is, everybody would still talk about those problems to this day.

I also chose to make a normie dex/blood build because the weapons looked cool, only to find out that they were bugged and didn't do any damage; and it took them like 2 fucking months to fix it, so I did the whole run with normal Quality weapons. NEVER play games on day 1 unless you absolutely can't wait, this shit will happen.

I'm extremely disappointed.

Every character is incredibly boring, but at least the story was half decent before Kraven's death (which was the only good part of the story by far), then it went downhill and felt incredibly rushed. The pacing of the story was trash for the start, but the last act just felt like a long grind until the final fight.
Overall I think they played it too safe with how predictable everything was, and with the corny millennial "MCU writing".

The side content is still complete garbage, especially the rewards, which are either ugly ass suits or little easter egg scenes that nobody cares about.

It feels so rushed and unpolished. No NG+, no character bios, no podcast audios to replay, no endgame options (like weather and time of day change). The graphics are also overrated as fuck, fidelity is useless obviously because who the fuck plays games at 30 fps in 2023, and performance looks so blurry.

Overall a mediocre triple A esclusive that doesn't go out of its way to do anything different or innovative, especially when it comes to the open world formula. I expected more from Insomniac, if I wasn't a big spider-man fan I would've been way more harsh.

P.S. I hope Insomniac is giving us a shit ton of new suits with free upgrades and DLCs because the costumes selection of the base game leaves a lot to be desired. It's mostly movie suits and mid original designs. Seriously I don't know what the fuck are they doing in the design department at Insomniac, 99% of their original designs are trash.

I was loving this until the 2nd Biome, super fun gameplay and smooth controls, but I'm just not willing to invest so much of my free time on it.
The thing I hate the most in Rogue-likes is repetitiveness and you're telling me that I have to basically make 2 hours runs every time I die?
The rogue-like structure of the game is terrible, permanent progress isn't much so every run just feels like a huge chore especially because they are all the EXACT SAME, there's little to no variations to the stuff you find compared to Isaac or Hades.
I died at the first try of the 2nd boss when he was at 1hp and instead of saying "fuck, I'll try one more time" I just wanted to kill myself.
One day I'll find a rogue-like that doesn't frustrate me after a couple of hours...