I’m still stunned sometimes by just how fully formed and perfectly designed Demon’s is. usually my favorite games are great ideas that are rough around the edges, or else something that has been iterated to perfection over the years. demon’s feels like both of those things in a way that is hard to figure out
whatever anyone thinks about which souls game is the best, I think we can all agree that Demon’s has the best soundtrack
I remember the first time they spoke of shutting down the servers, it’s really pretty cool we got 8+ years.
Absolutely gonna roll through Boletaria and get misty-eyed.
Having never played King’s Field and vaguely knowing FROM from AC, I got it on a very sudden whim. NA release week someone on /v/ gushed about how refreshingly demanding it was, and their stumbling through the first couple areas, trying to get a grip on the details, small victory by small victory. I had to go out and buy it around dusk. Couldn’t put it down for most of October and November. My roommate’d find me going sleepless some mornings into work…think it was my first Platinum Trophy. DeS was the perfect gateway to that kinda shit…for a bit.
For all it’s bigger, better grandeur, Dark always has that inherent element of warmth and being cyclical. Bonfires and all that. Even if insanely tough on visitors to Lordran, it kinda aspires for affection in some way.
Demon’s felt unflinching in its strangeness and minimal respite.
I think tower of latria is possibly my favorite area in a video game. THo i will say all the architecture in this game is just so real feeling, i want to live in this castle city.
discourse had a hiccup when i edited that post so the draft is kind of in a ‘do not want to edit’ state. don’t right click until you open it!
alt: just check the imgur link.
Someone was talking about how much they disliked the swamp in another thread. The swamp – and the roaming black phantom – is one of the things I remember most from first seeing the game being played. It seemed impossible that something so big and miserable would be allowed to exist in a modern day game, and I loved it.
I agree with Courier that Demon’s is distinguished by its bleakness – one of those soon-lost carryovers from King’s Field – although I guess for me it’s not a matter of qualitative comparison but of emotional variance. If Dark Souls felt like Demon’s Souls neither would feel as special; on the other hand, Dark Souls 3 loses something by being the most detail-laden Souls game, especially right after Bloodborne used overwhelming ornament to its advantage. It’s not just the gray-green palettes of the Shrine of Storms, or the world-weary establishing tone, or the sparingly instrumentalized tracks; it’s also that the structures in Demon’s Souls’ world have an anonymous and mundane look about them. Yet the level design and motifs present are good enough to make this a virtue, one that ties back into the opening cinematic showing almost nothing except a violent brawl in some no-name courtyard.
the swamp is, no joke, my favorite part of the entire game.
i genuinely thought that it was raining/really moist in there until i realized the particles were supposed to be infinite insects.
I experienced some Old Monk battles. It has always been really cool in theory and sort of anticlimactic in practice. It pulls in players at random who never signed up or expected it, and the matchmaking is really slow, so you have this very long cutscene typically followed by a pretty awkward and brief fight, where the person entering the boss room won more often than not, due to expectation and motivation I think. And sometimes you’d get the AI even when Demon’s was pretty popular.
I see it as an experiment which has a certain compelling amibition and principled purity to it, and seeing how it played out informed the covenant PvP experiences in the later games (e.g. letting people wear a ring and prepare themselves).
Old Monk gives a massive HP boost to the ‘invader’ to make it more like a boss fight, but really that just skews things even more in favor of invader. On the flip side, the host can bring in blue phantoms.
It works best as a surprise if you don’t expect it, when someone wants to coop and puts down a blue sign, then suddenly finds out they’re going to be fighting a human.
But, well, you don’t necessarily want to win that fight. It’s the kind of fight that’s most fun if the one that gets summoned doesn’t care about winning and just wants to mess around and troll a lot, since it’s easy to just grass munch each other to boredom.
I kind of had a rule that I wouldn’t allow myself to beat Old Monk unless it was a human player. I had some fun fights up there! Most players were not ready for a reasonably competent build. Some were out to Win It and I made them work for it.
My favorite shocker part was when coincidentally, the Nexus background track changed just when that Yurt(?) guy imprisoned in Latria had offed the first NPC.
it’s still not worth it to me to buy a fucken ps3 just to play this game
fuck
i haven’t bought a console since the wii ;-;
life sucks then you perish forever
I’d imagine a PS4 remake announcement is on the horizon.
In the meantime, anyone interested in doing a loosely organized SB book club for this in January or something? I’ve only finished the game once five years ago and would like to maybe play through with that last burst of online activity I anticipate in January.
You can always resell the console after you’ve had enough
I’m setting up my PS3 once this extra HDMI cable arrives and will be getting back into it (at some point). Book club sounds great!
how feasible is it to mod a ps3? i’m too lazy to goog that shit
I’ll jump on a book club and livepost about my woes because my skill was fleeting.
Agreed, it completely rules
it is, though, I gotta say
I didn’t have to buy one to play because I stole my brother’s PS3 for like a month when he was at school. but it still sucks to have not been able to play the game since then 
ps4 remaster plz
fuck why you gotta say this shit dammit
dang
A PS4 revision seems likely, but I worry about what might be changed. There are things in the game that are rough or unfriendly compared to later entries (world tendency, healing, limits on how much you can carry, upgrading) and while I can see the temptation to improve them I also am concerned that one could easily change too much and remove the harsh edge that Demon’s has over the rest of its ilk.