It really bugs me that Demon’s Souls isn’t a video game in people’s eyes, it’s something that gets served to the worst possible people in the worst possible parts in hell. I played it, and I can confirm that Demon’s Souls is in fact a video game.

What I feel like happened with Demon’s Souls was that a few people played it and said “Oh my god this is hard”, then other people tried it, died, and went “Oh my god this really is hard”. Getting killed in a video game is nothing new, but since people started playing this with the expectation that it’s the most horribly unfair thing ever, every death felt 100 times worse.

So here’s a few points I’d like to talk about.

FAG…(Frequently Articulated Groans)

#1
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Demon’s Souls only let’s you use half of your life bar after you die, and since it’s a difficult game, that means you only get to use 50% of your life bar all the time! This makes the game very difficult!
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This literally never bothered me. Since I only had half of it the whole time, it wasn’t “half” of my lifebar, that half of it was my life bar.
Your first time through you very, very rarely have the whole bar, so how does suddenly not-having something you never had in the first place make the game more difficult?

Don’t think of it as losing half of your life bar when you die, think of it as gaining bonus health after you defeat the boss.

#2
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Demon’s Souls is bullshit because you spend a lot of time gathering up a lot of souls and then you die and all of it is gone and the entire playtime was worthless
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I played through the entire game and I never ran into a situation where I lost a huge amount of souls. Do you want to know how I achieved that?

I simply spent the souls I had and never ran around with a fortune. Whenever you buy an upgrade for your dude, the next upgrade is more expensive, so if you’re worried that you’re losing too much upgrade money if you die, go ahead, run back to the start of the level and teleport to the hub world and use those souls.

Sure, you’ll have to play through the level you were in again, but if you had an unbelievable amount of souls with you, the upgrades you bought should have made you into Superman.

They didn’t? Of course they didn’t, you didn’t have that many souls.
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#3 It’s full of a bunch of weird systems and features that aren’t explained at all, how can one reasonably expect people to play this, when half of the mechanics are just sort of there without any sort of explanation?
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I’ll be honest here, I played through the game and I still have no idea how the world and character tendency system works. When Vinny said on the Bombcast how he tried to make some specific stuff happen by influencing the tendency, I was like “No wonder he’s not having fun”.

Vinny also said something about trying to make a specific sword by killing geckos and getting the specific materials for it.

That sounds pretty boring if you ask me. The way I played the game was by just playing the goddamn game. If I picked up a new sword I looked at the numbers on it, and if the numbers were bigger than what my current weapon had I switched to that.

You know, just like you do in every RPG ever?

The weird systems are all there, but that’s high-level shit. Getting too hung up on them and completely discarding Demon’s Souls because those systems are there is just like watching the GSL final and deciding to not buy Starcraft 2 because your fingers can’t do that. All the while people who played Starcraft 2′s excellent campaign listen to you and go “What. Garrrrgh”

High-level play exists for every game ever, heck, go and youtube “Tetris master”. Why don’t I hear anyone saying how Tetris is for crazy people who feel like they have something to prove?

I still don’t 100% understand some parts of the game, but I still had fun playing it

#4
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You had fun? How can you have fun in this game where death lurks around every corner, there are hordes of enemies who just straight up murder your ass, and when you die you have to start all over?
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The most overblown thing I hear about this game is it’s difficulty. The game has an above average difficulty level, sure, but I feel like the reason most people find it so hard is due to the fact that they tried to play it as a hack&slash, because it looks like one.

There’s nothing complicated about the controls. There’s a sword button and a shield button. Unlike most videogames though, getting hit in the face with a sword kind of hurts, which means you can’t mash buttons and need to play defensively. 73.4182% (Calculated by pure science) of the enemies in this game can be defeated by running up to them with your shield up and letting them attack, or running up to them and then quickly away and making them swing at the air.

After they have swung their weapon they are open, which is where you should run up and cut them.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know to be at least mildly successful at this game. You shouldn’t try to cut enemies first, like in other games, you need to be more defensive.

You’ve probably heard this point from many Demon’s Souls fanatics, and I’m here to repeat it because it’s 100% true. Whenever I died, I never felt like the game was cheating. I never had anything to blame besides me just being sloppy with my playing.

As for getting killed in a level and having to start over, this was also very rarely an issue. In most levels you can activate a shortcut which will stay there even if you die. If I died too much at a level, I just went ahead and tried another one. When I was back to the one I got stuck at before, I had gained levels and skills and fared way better.

And just to prove to you that I’m not the greatest videogame player that ever lived (With me having no problems with Demon’s Souls and all), here’s a list of games that are apparently way harder than Demon’s Souls as it turns out.

#1 HEAVENLY SWORD
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I never beat the final boss because it quite frankly seemed impossible to me. I just stand there and get beaten to death, without even having a chance to do anything about it. I load it up, watch my lifebar fade away, and see a game over screen. I never plan to go back to this game.

#2 DARKSIDERS
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Played on normal and got horribly stuck at the Tiamat fight, after several attempts and different strategies, I still got hit without understanding what the heck I was supposed to do to avoid it. I might go back to it after I forget all the rage that fight has caused me.

#3 SINGULARITY
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Got stuck at the spot where you first meet the phase ticks. I open the valve, bugs flood in, and I get completely overwhelmed. I tried every single strategy I could think of and couldn’t pull it off. TMD tricks and otherwise. I kind of want to try it with a shotgun, but the checkpoint is after you’ve passed any weapons lockers in your path so there’s no way to do that.

#4 THE SHOOTING RANGE IN DEAD SPACE 1
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There’s a trophy for getting a perfect score (Which means shooting every target that pops up) in the shooting range. I spent over an hour on it and either completely messed up, or missed 1 target.

#5 THE FIGHT AGAINST THE KROGAN BATTLEMASTER IN MASS EFFECT 1
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I quite literally died more in this fight than in a fight against any single boss in Demon’s Souls.

I understand that everyone who already likes Demon’s Souls is going to scroll through this and comment “Yeah” and everyone who already hates Demon’s Souls is going to scroll through this and comment “F off”, but I still had to get this out of my system. Demon’s Souls is an excellent and unique game that has a way too horrible of a reputation.

If I write more of these, the next one is probably going to be about Alpha Protocol. That game is not great, but it gets hate for all the wrong reasons.