DEMON'S SOULS A GAME FOR SONY PLAYSTATION 3

you're doing it right!

I am not used to a From game looking this good, I'm finding it kind of distracting (is the excuse I'm going with). Anyway, unlocked my first shortcut.

Haha, yeah it does look pretty great, even compared to ER. Funny as well because most of the scenery is a variation on "grim stoney rainswept medieval fort" but somehow they manage to make it look stunning

I'm so used to a certain degree of From janky, but this is so smooth. What's wrong with my game, it's totally broken!

I was kinda sad that Elden Ring didn’t have the same extreme dialogue-following face behaviour. Patches just doesn’t hit as hard in Elden Ring!

Yeah, in my reply I'm sad Patches isn't totally demonic

*replay

So, in my totally early hours, what should I be spending souls on? Or should I be saving them up? I haven't fought any real boss yet, just getting used to fighting various scrubs and/or getting two shotted by the knight with red eyes.

I dunno. Might depend on what build you've got. I found I naturally ended up putting points into things once I had a particular weapon in mind. I wouldn't scrimp on Endurance for this game, is the thing I would say, because item and equipment load are a real thing I'm constantly aware of

Yeah, the more things change ...

Anyway, I'm so early I'm not sure I can even level up yet.

Beat the first boss, got a taste of a couple of the worlds. Gonna focus on upping my stats for a bit, at least while I get used to the gameplay. Kind of fascinating to me that From has been doing similar variations on the same impenetrably esoteric fantasy world for so long, with I guess Bloodborne and Sekiro the biggest digressions. I should look up some reviews of the original Demon's Souls release, must have blown/broken some minds.

Tower Knight down! Is every path to a boss a run? Are there ever checkpoints/bonfires in this?

There are no checkpoints, iirc? Oftentimes you can open a shortcut though. Tower Knight is such a great boss!

The big "oh" was realising that the original Demon's Souls release did not have any gear-option to make the swamp area navigable... you had to slog through and suffer. The reissue brought in a (still, fairly well-hidden) ring to make it less of a blargh. It's probably my favourite swamp level! But I can't imagine doing it without a ring

I've been playing a bit of Dark Souls 1 again recently. The boring sections seem less boring now, mostly because I guess I know just to motor on through. Blighttown is actually pretty charming this time around!

a lot of the games and levels kind of blend together for me now, lol. I bet if I played them all a second time I'd be really surprised by how much I've forgotten.

Lost my first substantial chunk of souls doing something stupid, serves me right.

Man, it took me FOREVER to get throug hto the Tower Knight and beat him. Think I bounced off and did another world first. Then someone told me you can actually run the whole of the bridge without doing all that fiddling about in the underground route

It's been awhile but yeah I think some of the 'stage 3' bosses have runbacks, but others put you right at the boss. Luckily most of them aren't too long, or have shortcuts you can unlock.

I played this on a borrowed PS3 and definitely remember Miyazaki's first poison swamp, it was almost touching how unforgiving it was. It made for some good tense moments though, trying to get some item or reach a checkpoint before succumbing. Didn't know they added a ring in the remaster!

xpost That was my belated realization, too. I was so sick of the underground route, and the dogs, and the tedium. But then I realized I can just let the dragon do my dirty work and make a run for it. And then later, in true Souls fashion, spend 15 minutes shooting it with arrows from a safe perch until I killed it.

Giant spider down! I love how from the very start, From is begging the question: is it really cheesing if they provide the means to cheese? Which is to say, if enemies can hide and hit you from range, is it wrong to do the same to them in a game that gives you bows, magic, etc? (The answer: hell no, whatever it takes, if I want to do a future naked and afraid run of any of these games, I will).

Those bloody dogs in the tunnel though

Serious Bloodborne Unseen Village vibes in the spooky prison, with lightning and mindflayers/brainsuckers and atmosphere. It would be awesome if Blueprint remade Bloodborne, but I doubt it'll happen.

Aw man, that was one of my favourite bits of the game.

I surprise myself that I enjoy levels like that and also Stormveil in Elden Ring, because my IRL sense of direction is awful and I get lost and disoriented really easily. I'm really bad at observing landmarks. But there's something about the super-windy architecture of these places that really hits my buttons

I got lost sooooo much. At one point I fell down a deep hole and died, but had so many souls it made it worth my while to retrieve them, and it took me *forever* to find my way back. I do kinda like when that happens, though, because you run the level so many times and kill everything so many times, that when you finally get your bundle of souls you end up with a huge total. Then you level up, though it's hard to take your revenge on gravity.

i've been playing demon's souls for the first time for the past month or so. as i live in a state of playstationlessness i am playing the 2009 version thanks to rpcs3 and online via the archstones. i have a patch so it can run at 60 unmotion-blurred buttery smooth frames per second.

i've made my way through all the x-1's and x-2's, and i was trying not to use guides, but i broke that rule so i could figure out how to access 1-3. i know from the king's field days a bit of from software apocrypha that they want players to use guides (and take advice from online messages where possible) but it's been a nice playing nearly totally unguided. it makes the world feel a bit more overwhelming and a lot more full of wonder. but it has also meant i've killed more npc's than ever before - patches after the pit, the person who drops gloom armour in a cage above the swamp in 4-1 - and meant i've just lost other npc's - the glowing gold fella in 1-1 - and that i'm basically still using the equipment that i started with or found early on. oh also wtf is world tendency. maybe after i beat the game i'll have a read about that before ng+ or re-rolling.

playing on emulator also means i can pause if needed, which honestly, is a nice addition to the gameplay. it's not something i use very often but i love being able to just pause if needed. also the archstones tracks your deaths for you which is fun.

boletaria and latria are some from highlights for me, just remarkably designed, so many times in my first 1-1 run through boletaria where i knew that as i turned a corner i'd end up on a balcony looking back where i came from, just a lovely and well thought out experience.

oh also wtf is world tendency

i've looked it up multiple times and still don't know lol

i love boletaria and think about if often

Moving right along in this and having fun. Seems ... slightly more forgiving than its successors? Maybe? It's neat to see what From kept and tweaked and what they discarded for later games. And of course there is the amusing cognitive dissonance of the first game being essentially the most technologically advanced. Though I will say, as much as I like the graphics and loading times, my fave advance of the PS5 may remain the controller. It's both cool and helpful to have status effects conveyed via haptics; in the middle of frenetic boss battles I often find myself missing whether or not, say, my weapon is still on fire or glowing or whatever, but this way I can actually feel it while I'm focusing on other stuff.

Being able to hear audio in 3D is also a major boon. In 1-3 I could hear the red-eye knights before I could see them

Dragon God boss ruled, reminded me of an "Ori" boss level. Not hard, as such, but stressful and totally epic/metal.

Well, pretty sure I just killed my first NPC. I was in the first zone (1/3?), where I killed a fat guy and unlocked a gate, and it opened up to a rush of red eyed knights that I quickly slaughtered in a panic. But one of them I suspect was my guy. Serves him right for dressing like the baddies, the big dummy. Hopefully I didn't screw up anything major.

In another zone I almost killed Patches. I thought he was a devil monster thing, and because he was hiding behind a shield I didn't see his face (with all my wild melee technique) until it was almost too late.

I take it back, he's not dead! Must have slipped past me in the heat of battle and hid, the coward.

Lol just got to that guy. You already saved him twice! Cruel to end him there!

I put this down for 6 months after dying in that poison swamp, not from poison but by 5 giants guarding an item I now acknowledge I will never get. This is definitely the most forgiving souls game, finding it very very easy right now (comparatively).

I think I’m nearly done? Have four arch stones in every zone except the 1st. I’m scared of this final boss because I saw him drain Dunkey’s levels back to like zero. Is that a real mechanic? Will be so pissed if it is.

Okay he doesn’t drain all your levels, but I just got two taken off me on my first try. Rough

Okay he doesn’t drain all your levels, but I just got two taken off me on my first try. Rough

I think we're around the same place. That said I stopped playing for some reason and picked ER back up becauser.... I just really don't want to play the gloomy swamp level :-/

Most annoying thing (relatively) about this game so far? The way they stick the merchants in these hard to reach places. So much BS I don't want to deal with just to get back to the person that sells ... whatever. Definitely a QOL improvement in subsequent games.

well i finished an initial run through. it took me about 20 hours, i died 11 times (!??!?), had a soul level of 59. i agree with H.P a few posts above, i found it a lot less punishing than any of the other from souls games, and ended up with an enormous stock pile of moon grasses by the end game. i wonder if the remake involved tuning the difficulty. i guess i should go and read what mechanics were changed about the game, and maybe in a decade when you can reliably emulate ps5 games, i'll have a run through of it.

i started ng+ - only because the game immediately yeets you into it - and the damage done by even the 1-1 wee guys is drastically different. i'll probably play through it more slowly, and maybe look some things up (how do i get the blue screaming guy out of gaol) but i'm also going to go back to king's field iv for the first time in maybe 20 years.

I’m scared of this final boss because I saw him drain Dunkey’s levels back to like zero.

Obv Dunkey was playing it up, but I remember facing him my first couple of attempts and losing two levels, which meant I could no longer cast Firestorm (which is laughably OP in the original version of the game, iirc), and having to grind my way back up.

20 hours and 11 You Dieds is very good going for a first run I'd say

Last couple of bosses, Penetrator (?) and Maneater twins, have come closest to subsequent Souls level of aggro.

i die 11 times min each time i sit down to play lol

11 You Dieds startled me, tbh. I can offer no explanation. I'd guess 8 of those 11 happened at Maneater

I found NG+ on Demon’s Souls to be so punishing that I left quickly

xpost I'm shocked that you didn't get more You Dieds due to gravity or other environmental stuff alone. Soul level 59 is kinda modest too, isn't it?

re: soul level, I've no idea, I don't know where one is expected to be by the end of a play through, I just quickly searched and it seems like the internet wisdom is a conventional sl by the end of a first run is ~70, so I don't seem too far off? I know spent a LOT of souls buying shards and large shards and chunks and honeslty just generally anything else whenever I came across a merchant only to use the same crescent falchion +4 that i spent most of my run using, save for the final fight where I switched to a claymore +6. that guy who loves to hold onto your stuff in the nexus has hundreds and hundreds of shards n' chunks in a wealth of flavours in his pockets.

re: minimal number of You Dieds due to gravity or environment that was what happened during a number of maneater fights but outside of that i can't recall many times that environment deaths would seem like an issue? i remember the wall hugs of 4-1 or 2 but there's not a ton of enemies and so not so much risky rolling. I also basically only played for 30-45 minutes a day so daily progress was minimal and I feel like that restriction worked well for cautious shield up exploration. Go forward a bit -> look around -> kill a gargoyle -> quit for the day -> repeat

Yeah, I can see that. I guess a lot of my environmental deaths came trying to reach some intentionally precariously placed item on a ledge, or rushing into an area only to be overwhelmed by enemies. I've still got a ways to go, but I'm impressed you made it past such early PIA enemies as the mindflayers relatively unscathed. Then again, not only is this game generally more forgiving than the others, it's particularly forgiving to ranged combat, and if one is already playing patiently, a good bow goes a long way!

I've been generally following a guide, so I'm attuned to the whole tendency thing, which is of course impenetrable but afaict does demand several deaths (in human form) just to switch the status of the world back and forth.

Soul level 75 on finish today. This goes just bellow blood borne on my personal fromsoft tier list (maybe equally dark souls?). Insane this game got made and blew up like it did, such a stand-alone piece in the gaming world at the time, beautiful that it gained the traction that it did. Give me demons souls 2!

Serious question because I've only dipped my toes into the Dark Souls games proper, but what stops Dark Souls from being, essentially, Demons Souls 2?

They're all essentially the same game, imo, with subtle differences (largely refinements) in gameplay. I haven't finished Demon's Souls yet, but so far it's more or less the same as Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3. Elden Ring is kind of like the apotheosis of Souls games, minus (by necessity) the tight level/progression design. So yeah, I don't know how a Demon's Souls 2 would be any different, more or less, from a Dark Souls 4. Now, a Bloodborne 2 ...

as discussed elsewhere (probably at some length!) DS2 and Sekiro are the weird runts of the litter, the former because Miyazaki was not involved and it's baggy and a bit poorly staged and paced, the latter because it's set in a recognisable though warped version of ancient Japan and focusses very much on the parrying mechanic in combat. Personally I sometimes think Sekiro is the best of the lot...