Demon’s Souls is a very important game. It laid the foundation for a hole genre of games coming after it, not only FROM SOFTWARE games, but also spinoffs in both 2D and 3D. That is why it is really worth a remake, and it was about time.
What I love about Demon’s Souls is the many original ideas. The creators were not scared to improvise, and test new things out. There are so many ideas in this game, and you cannot really compare it with the successor Dark Souls that is more of an iteration on these ideas. But it was in Demon’s Souls they were founded.
Like the brilliant idea that fighting is not hack’n’slash, but rather a deliberate exchange of hits, parry, block, roll. In the era when this game was released fighting would mostly consist of hitting the X button as fast as possible, but Demon’s Souls brought back the finesse of it.
Another brave thing that Demon’s Souls brought was the idea that you would loose all your progress if you die in a level. The game wouldn’t even let you save your progress before a boss fight. Either you make it through the boss or you loose all your souls. Today, this is no longer seen as an issue, but when Demon’s Souls was released, holding the players hands through the experience was top #1 priority.
Think about this. You play 1-1 and 1-2 and manage to kill the Tower Knight. That is a huge accomplishment for a new player. Then you get to 2-1 and you make no damage at all to the enemies there. That is because you need to learn that different enemies are weak to certain type of damage, and this is now a problem that you must solve. This is a also a very brave thing to do, throw a wall in the face of the player and say “I trust that you are capable enough to scale this wall”. Because that is what the game wants, it wants you to succeed.
Except all the brilliant ideas that Demon’s Souls brought, you have to appreciate how little repetition this game has. Five long levels that are completely different from each other. Bosses that are not even close in terms of how you should fight them or their attacks. And a story that is truly epic.
So that is why this game really was worthy of a remake.
Bluepoint has done a good job. They’ve remade all the 3D models with much more details, added all the cool graphical effects that are now possible with the PlayStation 5 and they have made the gameplay much more fluent like Dark Souls 3. The framerate is also a huge improvement compared to the PlayStation 3 version. The game looks great and it plays great.
Even if they have remade the whole game, they have managed to preserve the atmosphere of the original. It is still there. I get chills as I enter the Nexus, and the Prison of Hope in Tower of Latria still scares the shit out of me.
The criticism I have of the remake is that Bluepoint didn’t show the same amount of bravery as FROM SOFTWARE did when they first created the game. There are parts of the game that is clearly dated and could be made much better with PlayStation 5, but Bluepoint have decided to keep them as they are.
For example the flying enemies in 3-2 had a really jerky behavior in the original PS3 version and Bluepoint decided to keep it. They fly straight away, and back and get stuck under bridges and such. It doesn’t make much sense that they couldn’t fix this. If you remake the game, I think these are some of the things you should fix.
There is a blue dragon boss at the end of the game, and it is really bad. You need to stand in a certain spot and shoot something like 200 arrows in a particular direction to hit it. There is no other way I know to win this fight. Bluepoint decided that this is fine and they kept it in the remake. Why not remake the broken dragon fight into something more interesting?
So in the end, I think Bluepoint managed to amplify the parts of Demon’s Souls that are really good, but they fail to fix the issues were Demon’s Souls is lacking, which I think is a missed opportunity, but at the same time I understand that they didn’t want to upset fans of the original.
I rate this game as EXCELLENT
Replay 