I'm a retro Fromsoft fan now, nobody can say shit to me about not liking Demon's Souls.
Truly I just don't see what about it is supposed to not have been done objectively much, much better in basically all of its successors. Everybody talks about the atmosphere being so much more haunting and surreal than Dark Souls, and like, I've played Shadow Tower: Abyss and that's the game it sounds like they're talking about when they talk about DeS. When I think about what sets Demon's Souls apart visually from its successors all I can conjure to mind is every texture being greenish gray and every lighting source being horrendous piss yellow bloom. Genuinely fuck ugly game to me, and not because of the polygon count.
Combat is just straight-up bad--people don't really talk much about just how much better the basic gamefeel is in Dark Souls. Yeah, Dark is slow and, affectionately, clunky compared to a lot of games in different subgenres, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's as big a jump in speed, fluidity and depth as Bloodborne was after it. Your dodge roll, even at low equip weight, is such dogshit in Demon's Souls that in almost all situations it's unironically more reliable to just continuously walk backwards while the rock-stupid AI swings at nothing every few seconds instead of doing anything you have to react to. And of course I'd respect this game not really being focused on combat, if not for there being 18 billion enemies in every level. You might as well play Drakengard, which is at least tedious on purpose.
Of course DeS does have some weirder ideas that didn't carry over into Dark Souls (1), and I'm a big fan of weird ideas, even if the execution is really janky. Take World Tendency, easily the biggest example and the thing Fromsoft has made the fewest overtures towards continuing to evolve (although I'd argue Insight in Bloodborne serves a similar function). The ways in which you manipulate World Tendency are incredibly janky and inconvenient, especially now that the game is offline-only, but that's the kind of thing I'm eager to forgive. But the levels changing into "good" and "evil" versions based on your actions is such an amazing concept.
What kinds of things do they do with it? Well, in levels... 1-1 and 3-1, in pure white tendency (and also pure black for 1-1, it's the same) you gain access to a small new area with some important items in it. And in every other, uh, world, not level, there's one NPC you can talk to for a basic fetch quest in white tendency and that same NPC invades you in black... and...
[shuffles notes]
Okay I swear I had a list of all the other cool things that happen due to World Tendency but--hm? Oh. Huh. Hm. Hmmmm.
So, yeah, interesting but janky I can fuck with. But in order to be interesting the game has to do something. That's what kills me about Demon's Souls; I would absolutely adore a weirder, even more unforgiving ancestor of Dark Souls, but it's not actually weirder in any way that matters. All the stuff that would make it so is an empty promise, ridiculously underbaked not just in quality of life but in substance.
Also the remake is fine, I played both versions so I can say that too, I hate this game and I played it twice because I don't want hypothetical people on the internet to think my opinions are invalid why isN'T ANYONE FIXING ME
Truly I just don't see what about it is supposed to not have been done objectively much, much better in basically all of its successors. Everybody talks about the atmosphere being so much more haunting and surreal than Dark Souls, and like, I've played Shadow Tower: Abyss and that's the game it sounds like they're talking about when they talk about DeS. When I think about what sets Demon's Souls apart visually from its successors all I can conjure to mind is every texture being greenish gray and every lighting source being horrendous piss yellow bloom. Genuinely fuck ugly game to me, and not because of the polygon count.
Combat is just straight-up bad--people don't really talk much about just how much better the basic gamefeel is in Dark Souls. Yeah, Dark is slow and, affectionately, clunky compared to a lot of games in different subgenres, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it's as big a jump in speed, fluidity and depth as Bloodborne was after it. Your dodge roll, even at low equip weight, is such dogshit in Demon's Souls that in almost all situations it's unironically more reliable to just continuously walk backwards while the rock-stupid AI swings at nothing every few seconds instead of doing anything you have to react to. And of course I'd respect this game not really being focused on combat, if not for there being 18 billion enemies in every level. You might as well play Drakengard, which is at least tedious on purpose.
Of course DeS does have some weirder ideas that didn't carry over into Dark Souls (1), and I'm a big fan of weird ideas, even if the execution is really janky. Take World Tendency, easily the biggest example and the thing Fromsoft has made the fewest overtures towards continuing to evolve (although I'd argue Insight in Bloodborne serves a similar function). The ways in which you manipulate World Tendency are incredibly janky and inconvenient, especially now that the game is offline-only, but that's the kind of thing I'm eager to forgive. But the levels changing into "good" and "evil" versions based on your actions is such an amazing concept.
What kinds of things do they do with it? Well, in levels... 1-1 and 3-1, in pure white tendency (and also pure black for 1-1, it's the same) you gain access to a small new area with some important items in it. And in every other, uh, world, not level, there's one NPC you can talk to for a basic fetch quest in white tendency and that same NPC invades you in black... and...
[shuffles notes]
Okay I swear I had a list of all the other cool things that happen due to World Tendency but--hm? Oh. Huh. Hm. Hmmmm.
So, yeah, interesting but janky I can fuck with. But in order to be interesting the game has to do something. That's what kills me about Demon's Souls; I would absolutely adore a weirder, even more unforgiving ancestor of Dark Souls, but it's not actually weirder in any way that matters. All the stuff that would make it so is an empty promise, ridiculously underbaked not just in quality of life but in substance.
Also the remake is fine, I played both versions so I can say that too, I hate this game and I played it twice because I don't want hypothetical people on the internet to think my opinions are invalid why isN'T ANYONE FIXING ME