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This is my final entry on Demon's Souls by FromSoftware, published by Atlus.
Tonight I completed this title. Until the final boss the game was much like trying to pull a dime out of a briar patch. The final boss, however was an entirely different story. The game ends with an obvious point to be cinematic. The final boss fight is meant to be difficult to lose. You listen to the narration of the character responsible for the demon invasion, while beating senseless a lumbering blob carrying a sword. The battle comes on the heels of one of the most difficult boss fights in recent gaming. Until this point the game had earned its notoriety. The final boss is a slump in a progressively difficult game.
Rant aside, the game accomplished many excellent points as a title. The 3rd person dungeon crawling is as fluid and responsive as an action platformer, assuming you keep an eye on the stamina gauge. The action combat has a strong element of strategy, which eliminates the frustration and boredom of button-mashing. Every encounter tests your combat prowess. If you prefer close-quarters combat, a shield allows for repost attacks, and two handed weapons can parry. If you prefer ranged attacks, you can manually aim a long bow but can only use lock-on for accurate cross-bow and spell fire. I would've liked to have the ability to aim with more than just the long bow, but I can understand the design choice to make long-bows unique as weapons. As an RPG, the amount of resources you must manage can be staggering at first. Aside from the basics (Health, Stamina, Mana, Consumable Items) you must keep track of weapon and armor durability, soul count, spells carried, equipment weight maximum and carry weight maximum. Skill in the game depends in no small part on mastering monitoring your resources. The ability to upgrade weapons, provided you possess the correct materials, adds a nice level of customization to gameplay, especially the different types of upgrades available to each weapon (Shown as prefixes such as Sharp, Crushing, Quality or Dragon). The game only follows linearity within each world. Worlds are divided into chapters, which each end with a boss. The only story linearity is that certain chapters can only be accessed after certain events. The third and fourth parts of the first world are only accessible after defeating a world boss, or archdemon. The final boss can only be reached after defeating the fifth archdemon. The most rewarding part of the title is the sense of merciless difficulty, which results strong feelings of accomplishment. At a first glance, the auto-save feature sounds like a blessing. You do not have to worry about losing progress when you die. This blessing quickly turns into a curse during later parts of the game. When you die, and cannot retrieve the souls you dropped because an enemy got the better of you those souls are gone for good. Overall the game not only accomplishes the goal of being difficult, it exemplifies how to make a game that truly challenges players. The title is by no means perfect, but if you own a Playstation 3, like RPG's and want a challenge look no further.
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