If a Demon’s remaster happens, I think it’s most likely to be in a “Souls Anthology” and be pretty literal-minded as an adaptation. And I think the only reason it might happen at all is that DkS1 also needs one.
Somewhere I have the half-finished blade for a repro of the Baby’s Nail, the only vidcon weapon I ever thought seriously about doing just for?
Never could quite parse the butt though.
Lovely game.
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Select Button
parse the butt
Sony Published
Demon’s
Bloodborne
Namco-Bandai Published
Dark 1
Dark 2
Dark 3
I think it’s unlikely we’ll see Sony-world and Namco-world cross paths but Sony has every incentive to position a Demon’s remaster against/near From’s next game if it’s multiplatform.
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isn’t it emulatable now? I don’t know if multiplayer would work but the couple I times I played the game on a ps3 it was already dead anyway
This is even more complicated in the US, because while Sony paid for and published Demons in JPN, their American office passed up on it, so its US publisher is actually…Atlus? Yeah. Yeesh.
namco published demon’s in europe too
the anonymous archictecture is great but there’s a special place in my heart for the strangely doll-like, deprecated-version-of-Poser-ass character models, which similarly feel sort of chunky and smooth and unweathered and generic. there’s something very endearing about seeing those little dudes run through cavernous grunge labyrinth.
in general i feel i appreciated demon’s souls more than the dark ones because it had this kind of half-assimilated b-game quality, like dark souls made things open up and showed you all these big vistas and evocative names at the very beginning but in demon’s souls the vistas are still there only they’re buried in a level just called “3-1” that you warp into from a big list like crash bandicoot. and the character models and environments frequently had that kind of mostly-functional vibe i associate with arcade games like time crisis 2. like it was one of those big rambling forgotten rpgs with names like Dark Eye: Deceit At Orlmar that had been chopped up and mailed across for conversion into an action arcade game by people who just wanted to cherrypick the better or more garish or interesting parts. i guess it kind of has the vibe of a very accelerated blast through one of those things where you just pick up the incidental details and are just vaguely aware of other stuff in the background that you’re not paying attention to (“world tendency”) and somehow travel fast enough to escape getting bogged down. earth defence force but for convoluted rpg mythologies instead of action games.
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the crash bandicoot thing is funny and also a good observation.
this is just my feeling and opinion, but king’s field never would have warped you into anything. the closest they came were convoluted teleporter sets in shadow tower (or the layer/floor warping in king’s field 1J, which was largely the result of technical limitations), which were used exclusively in the service of making the game more obtuse and labyrinthine. the crash bandicoot approach much more closely aligns with armored core what with its discrete, individual missions. i really think demon’s is a meeting of the minds, in that way - less a direct continuation of KF/ST and more a cumulative, synthetic work.
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Shout outs to the cheap horn synth used in the opening theme. It has always put a smile on my face when I heard it.
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my current (maybe permanent) take on DS2 is that it’s the direct successor to King’s Field that Demon’s Souls kinda wasn’t
i’m so down for a DeS book club revisit to Boletaria
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yep, King’s Field 3 > Dark Souls 2 is so direct imo
Dark Souls 2 is also the most Shadow Tower-ey of the 3 darksouls games, and st is my most favored game ever made, so
honestly i love dark souls 2 for being kind of a subtle black sheep, for rocking the boat a bit - even if it made some queasy. it feels gaiden-esque, especially in hindsight with dark souls 3’s much more explicit links to dark 1. it exists in its own little sphere, and very little else of the souls games seems to penetrate it.
even the stuff in 2 that feels to some like petty fanservice has a reckless disconnect, and somehow that makes it feel even more up its own ass.
the more i have grown in my appreciation and understanding of souls, the less i am able to find the things i like about souls2 in any of the other games, thus far - though i do kind of hope demon’s will give me some of that, too.
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I think accepting it as “the weird one” has helped my appreciation of it. It’s even a 2 like the classic weird game sequels are
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All of the instrumentation in Demon’s is live, excepting Takenouchi’s ambient Nexus arrangement. I think you’re hearing the combination of a small ensemble and the piece’s forcefulness and interpreting that as synthetic sound
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iirc the creator of King’s Field was most heavily involved with Dark Souls 2 actually out of all Souls games.
tbh i have had a long, long history of finding that sequels embody everything i didn’t like about the original game, so it was very surprising to watch ds2 be the black sheep and embrace and build on top of the stuff i did like.
of course it wasn’t without a lot of missteps. too many samey bosses, agility as a concept. but man, fuck the haters, it felt great. i had never felt more in control of my character in a souls game.
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AGI is kind of fucked up, yea. it’s not particularly more fucked up than the way stats work in KF/ST, though, and i don’t get particularly into the balance stuff, i just do what needs to be done to make my character viable for my playstyle. i don’t really resent needing to dump some points into AGI, though.
it’s a lot better than shadow tower, where you would be a damn fool to put points into anything but STR and maybe the damage type of your favorite spell once STR is maxed
i like every boss in base ds2, i think? the gargoyles are annoying…
the extraneous co-op oriented bosses in the dlc are infuriating but also kind of nice to be able to conquer solo
that said, fuck the bonus double pet fight in the dlc frozen shit
ADP/AGI is kind of a minor nuisance – you get a LOT of excess souls in a single playthrough of DS2 and level ups are cheaper than the other games, so dumping enough points to get a half-decent roll (at least 96 AGI imo) is just a stupid obligation i get out of the way early on.
Still really don’t like it on a holistic level! Like a lot of decisions i don’t care for in 2 it seems motivated mostly by multiplayer balance concerns.
(segue segue segue)
Even though i haven’t done any multiplayer in Demon’s Souls, i think it could be the best use of MP in the series. It makes sense that a community grew around it, and FROM expanded on it, and a lot of the covenants are really novel and cool (even the ones that… don’t work). but i kinda love the purity of trying to get through this principally single-player experience, and the multiplayer being something that hangs out at the edge and occasionally breaks in.
Invasions in particular got really watered down in the interest of more “fair” play, but in Demon’s Souls an invasion isn’t supposed to be fair. It’s supposed to be scary when you get invaded, and choosing to stand and fight instead of dashing for the boss fog is risky. You could win and reap major rewards (including a move toward a more safe world tendency), or you could get knocked off a cliff by Storm Ruler, or 1-shot by a meat cleaver, or get all your armor broken and then knocked off a cliff by Storm Ruler. You’re not in an evenly matched battle of wits, you’re up against uncertain odds that quite probably weren’t balanced for PvP combat.
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invaders are at a massive disadvantage in demon’s. because they are in soul form their HP is going to be at 50% base unless they use a cling ring, and then often use another ring to even up the damage differential (foe’s ring). it isn’t balanced. but it isn’t supposed to be either. it’s entirely fine for invasions to be like that.
though, honestly it would’ve been nice if the ‘summon to fight another player’ sign would have made them have normal HP… that and making infinite grass munching less of a thing. those are the only requests i would have made.
i can respect it, anyway. i like it more than the multiplayer in the first dark souls, which was basically ruined by poise for me. poise, as implemented in das1, is bad bad bad, limited the viable weapon pool by a ridiculous amount.
in demon’s, the most amusing joke build for invasions i ever saw was a pure magic build equipped w/ blueblood (insufficient stats except mag/faith) + insanity catalyst + light weapon + graverobber’s ring + cloak spell. basically no hp, but they can’t see you until you’re about two feet away and you have The Death Combo from landing any r1 hit.
I have decided I am ready for the servers to Demon’s Souls to go down forever.
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