620th played so far

Genre: Role-Playing
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment/Atlus Software/Namco Bandai

The Dark Souls series has its own particular reputation for difficulty and requiring learning by repetition. I’ll be honest, while I think I would enjoy parts of it, it also sounds like something I would get too frustrated with to keep going.

Demon’s Souls is the serie’s predecessor, not a sequel (not that I’m quite sure why that is, probably story reasons) but setting a lot of the wheels in motion. And this is where I get to see how that works out for me for real.

Our Thoughts

Having heard about all the difficulty in this game’s sequels, I was ready for something tough but fair here, and I wasn’t disappointed. I mean, it was frustrating, because I clearly didn’t have the skill to make it that far, but the challenge felt so good. I mean, I would have loved a checkpoint in a level here or there. I would have loved some of the mechanisms that made the level a bit easier (in some of the sequels, killing an enemy a certain number of times removed them). It would have been really useful if there was some signposting that an optional difficult enemy was in this direction, rather than the main level. And yeah, that all happened before I could unlock the game’s full feature set, not yet being able to being the first boss.

From the bits I know, the Dark Souls series might have made everything a bit more fair.

But the game pulled me in. Because it was difficult, but fair, it kept me wanting to try, constantly pushing further to get through – although a few times I got far, died, lost all my souls, and couldn’t get back in time. Those were the moments where I stopped playing for a while, too frustrated to go on. I did jump back in, but it might be a bit too much for me.

I wish I had made it to the final boss, but right now I don’t have the patience to do that, and there are other games still waiting for me. I believe the first sequel is still coming up and I’m hoping to see where that leads for this game. It might work better for me. If not, I’ll just have to invest more time later.

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