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I'm about to head out to pick up my copy of Dark Souls, so obviously this is a good time to make a post about its predecessor.
Demon's Souls is a game that is renowned for being really really hard, and which a number of people have trouble really coming to enjoy at all.
Part of why has been crystallising for me since I read a comment by Yahtzee Croshaw, in an Extra Punctuation piece where he alleged that Demon's Souls wastes the player's time with the difficulty factor.
The basic setup is this: The currency of the game is souls. You get souls by killing monsters. If you die - and you will die, and die often - you lose the souls you'd collected. You have one chance to retrieve them: a short distance before the point at which you died will be your bloodstain. If you can touch that before you die again, you get your souls back. If you die first, they're gone forever - and since, when you die, all the monsters respawn, this is no small risk.
There are no save points. You can open up shortcuts through a level that make subsequent attempts easier, but that's it.
Souls are used to buy equipment, pay for upgrades, and also to buy levels, which give you stat upgrades. Souls are important.
So, it seems, a lot of people seem to feel like losing souls is losing their XP, is losing their game progress.
And maybe in some games that would be true, but in Demon's Souls progression isn't about your powerups - progression is what you have when you learn to play better.
You see, the difficulty is high, but it is meticulously fair. If you die, it is because you messed up. You moved wrong, or you failed to move. You tried to attack when you should have blocked, or you tried to block when you should have dodged, or you weren't paying attention and walked off a ledge - one way or another, you died because you made a mistake. Unlike a lot of games, Demon's Souls doesn't cheat.
So you learn from your mistakes, and you learn to watch and step with care, and you learn to fight with skill. That is progression. And as a side-effect of that, you start coming back with souls, and you buy your stat upgrades, and they let you do trickier things, perhaps, but you still need to play with just as much care or you're going to keep dying.
Even gamers who say they want a more challenging experience, I think, sometimes don't realise just how much they're used to games coddling them. Including the expectation that if they kill monsters, then they'll get Experience, and they'll get stronger - so that even if they're dying all the time, they'll at least be grinding through levels and eventually they'll win by overpowering the enemy.
Whereas Demon's Souls isn't letting you get away with that any more than it's going to stop you walking off a cliff. The monsters want you dead. The game world, however, doesn't care. It's not going to protect you, not even from yourself, and you don't get stronger unless you get better.
I was playing it this morning, and I was playing a starting character, more-or-less, and I went and accomplished things easily that I struggled with, once upon a time, when much higher level than I am now. The difference is that I'm now good at Demon's Souls, where once I wasn't. I know where every enemy is, and I know how to fight them. (Dark Souls is going to be an interesting new challenge.)
The other thing, of course, is that many people seem not to understand that things work differently in a truly challenging game with the whole stat thing. I've seen an amazing number of people talking about levelling up Vitality and Strength. Vitality gives you hit points, it's true, but in Demon's Souls Vitality is a hard-core PvP stat - if you're getting hit, you're doing it wrong, because a lot of enemies are guaranteed death if you let it get to that point in the first place.
And Strength is a prereq stat for wielding certain weapons, but once you qualify for those, it's a waste. Even if you want to use heavy armour - which I wouldn't, because it seriously impedes your ability to manoeuvre and especially to dodge - the required stat for that is Endurance.
Me? I tend to get Strength 22, for the Large Purple Flame Shield and the Composite Longbow, and Endurance 40, for max stamina, and then load the hell out of Dex (and magic). I win because they can't touch me, and then I kill them with sword and bow.
Also: People often try to upgrade and use the Uchigatana, the best katana available in the game. This is a mistake. While in many Western games, katanas are the best swords, Demon's Souls is a Japanese-made, Western-themed game, and in it, katanas suck. Depending on personal preference, the best swords are European straight swords, or Middle Eastern curved swords.
Personally, I go for the curved swords, although I pull out a rapier for certain fights, as you can use it without lowering your sword. The kilij is, for my money, the best sword in the game - usually a Crescent Kilij +5 is going to be my top damage output - and you can't do better, in most circumstances, than to pair it with a Large Purple Flame Shield +10. (Because it has the best guard break reduction. In the remaining circumstances, you want the Dark Silver Shield, because it has 100% magic block.)
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