I, like many people, saw Demon’s Soulless at the PS5 reveal and was disgusted. My friend, who’s favorite game is Demon’s Souls was equally disgusted. Yet, a few months later, he had a change of heart and bought Demon’s Soulless for full price. Upon playing it, his opinion was that Demon’s Soulless is a fateful enough remake that it didn’t distract away from the quality of the original Demon’s Souls. With that in mind, I made the financially reckless decision to buy a PS5 and Demon’s Soulless.
From my view, the things that people are complaining about with regard to this game are either misdirected hate from the game industry itself or nitpicks that become elevated to flaw status due to a personal connection to the original. If you are truly offended by Demon’s Soulless for misrepresenting the original in anyway, I want to say that your complaints are likely valid and I’m not here to tell you that you are wrong. All I can hope is that you will hear what I have to say on the matter.
Here’s an inconvenient truth: games are economic products. Even arthouse student films can be made with little more than some $10,000 these days, but a game that goes anywhere beyond something to submit at a game jam will require a budget that easily breaks six digits. It’s a sad reality that the new generation can’t reaccustom themselves to the fidelity we had in the PS2 era, but it’s a reality that video game companies have to face. Just see the backlash of the long anticipated KOF XIV. Now, Demon’s Souls was released just at the point where video game budgets blew up to the point that people stopped making movie tie-in-based shovelware. I’ve personally talked to younger friends who have said they would not play the original Demon’s Souls even if Demon’s Soulless hadn’t come out because of its graphics. Thus, I think it was completely justified that Sony let Bluepoint remake the game, especially since they had Miyazaki’s approval. I think this situation presents an interesting solution to the problem of video game budgets, quietly release a game with late-PS2, early-PS3 graphics at a discounted price and years onward, release a remake that will be mass-marketed. Sony has seen now that their unintended use of this tactic payed off handsomely, but I doubt they will take away this specific lesson if it is not more vocally recognized and commended.
Some may think that it is unethical to make a game with such a strategy, original artistic choices may be removed from a remake and mislead a whole generation of gamers about the original’s content. Let me offer some words that might be helpful: video games are intellectual property. That means, at their core, the implementation of the ideal of a video game is separated from that ideal itself. I am reminded of Superbunnyhop’s video on gaming in East Germany, where young gamers would try to memorize how games like Pac-Man worked to later attempt coding their own versions on their dinky-ass Soviet computers. The existence of Demon’s Soulless has not retroactively undone whatever experiences you had with the original Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Soulless may be officially published by Sony, but in essence, it is no different from any mod or unofficial remake of any other game. Customization is a core part of the video game medium, which is why we have remakes, mods, and remasters in the first place, to recreate the same ideal in some different way. To judge Bluepoint more harshly than any fangame creator just because they’re a big scary corporation seems silly to me. In any case, the original Demon’s Souls will still be available to be enjoyed by anyone due to fan-created emulation, albeit in an unofficial capacity. While the general state of game preservation is tragic, Demon’s Soul’s case is no more or less tragic than the average old game. I feel it is misguided to blame Sony for doing just as bad as a job as any other video game company in this regard.