Demon's Souls

Demon's Souls is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and released for the PlayStation 3. It is the first installment in the Souls series.

The remake was released as a launch title for the PlayStation 5 in November 2020.

Plot
The game is set in the Kingdom of Boletaria, which was led to great prosperity by King Allant XII with the use of the power of souls, until it was beset by a strange colorless fog that isolated it from the rest of the world and brought soul-hungry demons with it.

After the world was let known of Boletaria's plight, legend spread of the chaos within the kingdom wreaked upon it by a beast from the Nexus and of the demons that grew ever more powerful with each soul they devoured. Many people went to Boletaria, either to save it from its plight or lured by the prospect of the power of souls, but all were lost in its chaos.

Original

 * 1) The game itself is the spiritual successor to the King's Field series and is considered the grandfather of the Souls series, whose successor would be the critically acclaimed Dark Souls.
 * 2) Beautiful and detailed world for its time.
 * 3) Each character class has (or at least, starts with) its own specialty so as not to make any single one stand out (at the start). It should be noted classes really only affect your starting gear and stats, and the player is open to any other playstyle as long as their willing to invest souls into them.
 * 4) * The Thief and the Wanderer: They are similar, but the Thief is focused more on the dodging and running aspect, while the Wanderer get's enhanced damage with their Falcion and Dagger.
 * 5) * The Barbarian: Is armed with a club and heavy strength, but quite possibly the worst starting gear otherwise.
 * 6) * The Magician and the Priest: The Magician focus on Magic (hence mostly damaging magical projectiles) and has high intelligence, while the Priest uses Miracles (various healing spells and buffs to the player) with high faith.
 * 7) * The Soldier and the Hunter: The Soldier is more or less completely balanced, with a focus on melee combat with their decent armor, weapons, and shield. Can be spec'd later in most class archetype. The Hunter is similar, but with a focus on ranged, due to starting with a bow.
 * 8) * The Temple Knight and the Knight: The Temple Knight is this crossed with Magic Knight; they have a very good set of heavy weapon, alongside a powerful halberd and shield, but also begin with a healing spell, with enough faith to wield it. The Knight is a pure tank; with ludicrous health, stamina, and one of the best armor sets in the game. Do not expect to move fast or be able to do anything but fat roll with either of these classes however.
 * 9) * The Royalty: A slightly less intelligence focused spellcaster with a duel dexterity role; they begin with both magic missile, as well as a rapier, encouraging a lot of dodging mixed with magic usage. Most notably for the fact they start the game with the Fragrant Ring; which allows you to regen mana indefinitely and the class most new players should start with.
 * 10) A beautifully orchestrated soundtrack.
 * 11) Deep and addicting combat.
 * 12) Interesting story and lore.
 * 13) Exciting, intense, and hard boss battles.
 * 14) *There are 19 bosses in total with 3 of them being optional (1 is a tutorial boss that you either kill it or die from it while the other 2 are dragons available in world 1)
 * 15) You can fully customize your character with the items you find.
 * 16) Lots of armor, weapons, and items to be found and equipped.
 * 17) Lots of hidden content.
 * 18) The game is very challenging but isn't unfair to the point where it trends on being artificially difficult (mostly BQ#5). Deaths are due to mistakes, and generally your own fault especially when fighting bosses since it's all about telegraphing their attacks.
 * 19) A huge, vast world to explore.
 * 20) All NPCs can be talked to or killed.
 * 21) Armor heavily affects how you play. The difference in defense provided by clothing and metal armor is surprisingly small—it matters a little in the early game, but is utterly dwarfed later on by how much defense you get from leveling up. By contrast, the equipment burden difference is enormous (the Fluted Set weights over three times as much as the Leather Set), going above 50% gives you a worse roll and slower stamina recovery, and heavy armor has its own stamina regeneration penalty even apart from equip burden percentage.
 * 22) Has an New Game+ that as expected makes the game harder and carries over your items from your normal playthrough but the difference being is that the game never truly ends since you can keep initiating New Game+ even after beating it, meaning you can literally play until you've peaked.
 * 23) The game has a death penalty where your health becomes in half after you die, fortunately it's not permanent and can be fixed with many ways.
 * 24) There are two endings for the player to choose upon defeating King Allant.
 * 25) *Good Ending: This ending is chosen by leaving the Maiden in Black after her speech. The player character has resisted the temptation of the unfathomable power offered by the Old One, and in doing so, has saved Boletaria and the rest of the world by aiding the Maiden in Black in lulling the Old One back to slumber. The Old One and the Maiden vanish with the receding fog, and while Boletaria is safe, knowledge of the Soul Arts will once again be lost. The souls lost in the havoc wreaked by the demons will be forever lost, but the world now has a new monumental of unprecedented power to guard over it; the Slayer of Demons.
 * 26) *Evil Ending: This ending is chosen by slaying the Maiden in Black. The player character has succumbed to the temptation of power and will condemn the world itself in order to satisfy their appetite for souls. Sensing a new and powerful demon by its side, the Old One would soon engulf the entire world in the Deep Fog.
 * 27) The online in the game was great where you either attack someone, defend from an invader or join someone to help them, you can also leave messages to give others hints.

Remake

 * 1) The game received a remake, which enhances a lot of what the original had and fixed a number of the issues that plagued the original.
 * 2) The remake is also the first PlayStation 3 game to get a full remake, showing how much we came a long way in terms of technology.
 * 3) The remake allows for omnidirectional rolling, in contrast to the original title only allowing for four-directional. This makes it a lot easier to dodge and counter enemy attacks.
 * 4) The player is able to use multiple soul items at a time, rather than being forced to go into the menu again and again after each use.
 * 5) While inventory weight is still present, the remake now gives the player an option to directly store items in the Nexus, rather than being forced to drop them to make room in the inventory.
 * 6) The player inventory groups and sorts weapons/armor by how powerful their stats are.
 * 7) Weapons all now have a small durability bar underneath their icons displayed on the item selection portion of the screen, and is especially useful for low durability equipment like the various katana's.
 * 8) You no longer have to return to the Nexus to reset monster spawns; you simply have to go to an archstone and select the stone you are at, which will cause the world to reset. This makes farming much less tedious.
 * 9) You can also now select an area to warp too when resting at an archstone as long as it's in the same world.
 * 10) Loading screens have been more or less removed due to how fast everything loads in now, making the game flow much more seamlessly, killing the previous maligned Loads and Loads of Loading when farming and dying.
 * 11) The remake tweaks difficulty in several ways. Bosses are no longer as exploitable, you'll have to finish them off with good old fashioned skill instead of sniping them with magic through the fog gate. Healing herbs also have their equip loads and carry limits adjusted in an attempt to make the second half of the game harder by preventing the player from having hundreds of healing items at the same time, as was possible in the original.
 * 12) The game is in 4K and 60FPS now.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The game's official online servers were shut down on February 28, 2018. Meaning, you cannot play multiplayer, view hint messages or bloodstains, or look at rankings without resorting to private servers. The remake fixes this issue.
 * 2) Hint messages were limited in writing.
 * 3) Bad framerates that can sometimes go below 30fps, a problem with the Souls games in general.
 * 4) The game has a number of game-breaking items, weapons, and mechanics.
 * 5) * The Thief Ring. While its effect doesn't sound too exciting on paper, it's actually incredibly effective, allowing you to sneak right past everything, sneak up on Black Phantoms and soulsuck them and become invisible to invaders unless they move in on you (auras and such are still visible though). It works on bosses too, including False King Allant.
 * 6) * The combination of the Thief Ring and the Poison Gas spell can even let you effortlessly kill the notoriously difficult False King Allant. Poison Gas was also very useful in PvP as it cuts all forms of healing in half, and has a near-instantaneous cast.
 * 7) * Dual Katanas. While not game-breaking for the single-player portion, these had earned a lot of hate in PvP. Their attacks are fast, hard-hitting, and stamina-economic. To top it all off, it can combo a main-hand push into an off-hand attack, back into a main-hand push. The added damage following a push combined with the aforementioned stamina economy makes it possible to kill full-health opponents with one combo. To add insult to injury, it is one of the easiest combos in the game to land, as you can chain into it with three different attacks, all of which are powerful tools on their own.
 * 8) * Almost everything in Demon's Souls's PvP could have be considered a game breaker. By casting Light Weapon on an Iron Knuckle you can kill a high-vitality body form character with Second Chance active when they're at full health by headbutting them. It's an inescapable combo, unlike the Dual Katana combo mentioned above, which can be escaped. Despite all that, it's considered one of the worst set-ups in the game.
 * 9) * Second Chance brings the player back to half health if they're killed via an enemy or a status condition. While it doesn't help with bottomless pits, needless to say it makes PvE a lot more bearable, and also has the handy side effect of preserving a character's human status and leaving the World Tendency untouched.
 * 10) * Warding is a buff that makes almost all physical attacks on the player deal outrageous damage. Roughly 70-80 percent of attacks are physical, and can make some bosses an outright joke.
 * 11) * Firestorm has a huge cast range and will one-shot most enemies and even certain bosses. Its only downsides is that it has an insane MP cost, at least have 18 in Intelligence to accommodate for its high spell slot requirement, and the soul and vendor who grants it are all tucked away in not one but two worlds that are That One Level.
 * 12) Some items can be missed forever, meaning if you lost it or can't find it, then you'll have to try again in the next play-through.
 * 13) Artificial Difficulty: While the game is difficult but fair, the same can't be said when reaching the Valley of Defilement. The problem is that your enemies are fast, painful, and hardy. You can be painful and hardy, but 95% of the second stage severely inhibits your movement, disallowing you from running normally, sprinting at all, and rolling, which is the only thing that keeps you alive in this game. The result is being forced to get smashed by giants with clubs when you're barely able to evade them, and even less able to retaliate, the only exception being if you can engage the enemy on the very scarce land, which isn't possible in some cases. Your best option is to avoid combat by staying away from enemies while wading through the muck with a Ring of Poison Resistance until you get to solid ground.
 * 14) Being the first "Souls game", there are some spots where From were still trying to suss out how best to approach certain mechanics:
 * 15) * The biggest is HP restoration: there is no Estus Flask-style free HP restoration item. All HP restoration is instead handled by a selection of dedicated healing herbs. While there were some enemies who served as "money" targets with dedicated drops of said herbs (á la Bloodborne and its blood vials), part of the problem is that the herbs came in four different tiers – and the higher tier ones only dropped rarely. You otherwise had to buy the healing items you need. To further differentiate the game from Bloodborne, healing items in this game do not drop in every area, and not every variety is a common vendor item, so you can't replenish your stock naturally as you play through the game unless you are in certain levels. Needless to say, this was a generally unpopular system due to how much grinding it required, and all the Souls games which followed would play around with how HP restoration worked and how you gained it.
 * 16) * The other big one: world tendency, the final part of this implementation of the multiplayer system. In short, your actions had an effect on the world at large – act like a jerk (or die) and you'd trend toward "Black Tendency", act virtuous and you'd get "White Tendency". This would have various effects on the world, like making monsters stronger or weaker, and opening routes to various pieces of treasure. Moreover, your personal tendency would affect the "Global World Tendency" toward White or Black. The only way to obtain Pure White Character Tendency is to kill certain Black Phantoms, those being either the Black Phantom versions of NPCs that appear in Pure White World Tendency, or invading players. This means you either have five chances per cycle to raise it, or you'll have to fight actual players. To obtain Pure Black Character Tendency instead, all you have to do is pick some NPCs to slaughter (though invading as a Black Phantom and killing the host works too), with there already being three or four in the Nexus that you won't particularly miss. While theoretically a neat idea, the tying of the concept to loot made true 100% runs virtually impossible and thus made the concept more an annoyance than anything. All this makes it hard to see from a purely mechanical standpoint how sticking to Pure White Character Tendency is really worth it. Later games replaced world tendency with various branching paths in individual NPC sidequests.
 * 17) ** If you're wondering what the reward is for gaining Pure White Character Tendency and that would be the Friend's Ring, which increases damage dealt as a Blue Phantom by 20%. A neat item if you tend to do that sort of thing, but you ultimately only need the one since you can't equip two of the same ring. For keeping Pure Black Character tendency, you get the Foe's Ring, which is the same thing but as a Black Phantom, but on top of that you get two extra Colorless Demon's Souls, which are difficult to acquire upgrade components of which there are only ten per game cycle, including these two.
 * 18) *** At the end of the game, you are given one of two Demon's Souls. For doing as you're told, you get the Maiden in Black Demon's Soul, which gives 60,000 Souls when used or can be given to Yuria for the Soulsucker spell. Instead killing her will get you the Beast Demon's Soul, which has no use for weapons, spells, or miracles, but confers a hefty 200,000 souls when used. Seeing as how once you get any spell you have it for keeps, it's most profitable to be good once, then turn to the dark side for the end of every other cycle. Then again, it's not that hard to make 200,000 souls anyway thanks to the Reaper, so the difference isn't as big as it sounds once you have Soulsucker.
 * 19) * Speaking of the multiplayer: unlike the later Souls games where you can opt to limit your matchmaking to your region, but ultimately everyone worldwide plays together, Demon's Souls has stridently segregated regional servers due to how it was published in each region. JP players play on one server, NA players on another, SE Asia on yet another, et cetera. Needless to say, during the game's more "niche" era this made playing with anyone even more difficult than it should've been.
 * 20) * Endurance increased both your Stamina bar and your equipment weight threshold, making it generally the most valuable stat in the game. Games that followed uncoupled the two and tried various other solutions for equip weight (including Bloodborne discarding it altogether).
 * 21) * There were really just two kinds of equip-weight dodge rolls: normal rolling at under 50% and "fat rolling" at over 50%. Needless to say, this made a lot of the heavier armors rather undesirable and further encouraged tons of END stacking. Later games would get more granular with the dodge mechanics and how it tied to weight.
 * 22) * On that note: item burden. That's right, because the game was patterned somewhat more traditionally off of "older" RPGs (like King's Field), your inventory didn't exist in a complete hammerspace. In addition to equip weight, you had to worry about the overall weight of your inventory. Happily, going over 50% didn't hamper your rolls, but if you went over 100%? Hope you like walking. And yes, the aforementioned healing herbs, not to mention bow ammunition, would contribute to this total. As might be expected, this was tremendously unpopular and made trips back to the storage NPC common (to say nothing of pointlessly hampering bow builds). Every following Souls game would basically implement a hammerspace-style inventory.
 * 23) * Spellcasting was radically different from later Souls games. The biggest was a dedicated magic bar instead of the Vancian charges-per-rest system of later games or Bloodborne's more granular ammo system, and more importantly, there was a ring that granted passive MP restoration. Moreover, casting catalysts weren't honed - spell power was determined purely by your magic stat and by the base power of the spell itself. Even weirder, there were no stat requirements for the spells - the strongest Catalyst had a mild stat requirement, and you'd need enough Intelligence to have the MP to cast certain spells, but that was it. And on top of all this, you could continue to walk during the early part of your casting animation. While all this does allow for a purely-spellcaster based playstyle, in practice it was seriously overpowered for a lot of bosses and enemies, and even the developers didn't like how it trivialized some of the content. Later Souls games would make serious changes to how spellcasting worked, with Bloodborne almost throwing the concept overboard entirely until the Old Hunters expansion.
 * 24) * Character death was a bit odd here, too - you have a "dead form" like other Souls games, but here not only does it make you simply a semi-translucent "soul" instead of a walking Hollow, the dead-form penalty seems severe: you lose half your max HP. This isn't actually nearly as bad as it sounds - most enemies and bosses are balanced around you being in Soul form and thus will do quite a bit less damage than veterans of later games might expect - but a penalty that steep sure didn't feel great and was super unpopular. One of the big selling points of Dark Souls, in fact, was this penalty not being part of the game structure. Dark Souls 2 played around with the idea of decreasing health on death, too, but not nearly as dramatically, and it also made sure that "re-humanizing" was much, much easier than in Demon's Souls (where revive items are rare, and co-op was a bit harder to pull off). Dark Souls III would later reintroduce the mechanic, but frame it differently: Rather than halving your health after death, your health is increased when "embered", the equivalent of being in body form.
 * 25) ** Tying into the "you're a soul-spirit" idea, fall damage was vastly more lenient here than it would be in later titles, barring Sekiro, whose "You are a master shinobi" logic allows you take falls from up to a hundred feet without damage. The idea seems to be that, as a semi-incorporeal ghost, falling down isn't as big a deal for you... though you can still take equally big plunges as a human. Taking levels in dexterity allows you to take even less fall damage. There's a few places where the game even expects you to make use of your generous fall damage allotment.
 * 26) *** Fall damage also works differently in that falling to a certain distance will cause you to always die, no matter how high your health is. Later games would only tie this mechanic to specific, scripted locations, for example, to prevent a player from skipping the majority of Blighttown.
 * 27) ** Tying in to that, the game lacks something that will feel jarring to later Souls veterans: plunging attacks. You can't attack at all while falling, which is likely to feel very, very strange to players of later games. The most you can do is land on an enemy, which will do a little damage and probably stun them.
 * 28) * A number of armor sets were gender-specific, or changed appearance based on gender. This looked cool in some cases, but naturally also led to debate in a few others, and was also a lot more work for the art team. Every game after Demon's featured fully unisex outfits, with a tiny number of exceptions.
 * 29) * The game is structured in five worlds that are teleported to, instead of being a connected open world, which is unlike anything in the Souls series since. This sort of structure would later return with Bloodborne, but even then Bloodborne is not explicitly separated in zones to the extent Demon's Souls is.
 * 30) * Ignores Shields is a property that weapons can have, which never returned in a Soulsborne game because of how stupidly broken it is in PVP. Demon's Souls PVP players usually don't use a shield because of it.
 * 31) * Bosses: while the ability to farm healing items meant you didn't have to concern yourself with rationing your healing between checkpoints like you did with Estus, this was little compensation for the fact that there were no checkpoints except when you beat a boss (which broke the game up into fairly clear-cut "levels"). This meant that unless a stage had a major shortcut that you could open, you often had to bull your way through the entire level to get a single shot at the boss, though such shortcut-free levels are relatively short. Aside from the final boss, which is deliberately easy, and the Vanguard in 4-1 who is defenseless against ranged or magic builds, none of the bosses are complete pushovers to the extent of the Mist Noble or Pinwheel, in that unless you have an obscenely powerful weapon, you will have to put up an actual fight against them, but the game's fairly primitive boss design means that very few of the bosses in the game still stand up as being difficult. Only the Maneaters, Flamelurker, and False King Allant are really considered to offer much real challenge compared to the bosses of later games, with some (such as the Adjudicator) being downright pathetic. Even with the former three bosses, the nonlinear structure of the game makes it easy to encounter them over-leveled and overpowered even if you don't grind, which makes them even easier. There is a good chance you will encounter NPC Black Phantoms that cause you more grief than the bosses.
 * 32) * Story-wise, the game has a pretty cut-and-dried, distinct good and bad ending that is decided by a last-minute decision of the player. Later games in the series and by Miyazaki would have the player instead choose which ending they wanted that are unlocked by levels of specific item hunting and side quests.
 * 33) ** Another note regarding the story is how the density of the lore is lower in relation to later games. For example, this game's Silver Demon's Soul has no lore in its item description, reading: "The Soul of the Demon 'Penetrator'. It radiates a strong power… Grants the holder a large number of Souls when used. Alternatively, it can be made into spells, miracles, or weapons." Dark Souls 's Soul of Priscilla provides a bit more than a list of things that can be done with the soul, reading: "Soul of Priscilla the Crossbreed, trapped inside the painted world of Ariamis. Special beings have special souls. Use the soul of this crossbreed bastard child and antithesis to all life to acquire a huge amount of souls, or to create a unique weapon."
 * 34) * The game allows you to climb up certain shallow ledges by walking into them for a moment. This proved very confusing, as most ledges blocked you even when they looked small enough, thus later games played Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence completely straight until Sekiro and Elden Ring outright added a jump button.
 * 35) ** On a related note, the game's ladder physics do not allow you to slide down or jump off. Once you've committed to climbing a ladder, you have to take it a step at a time to one end to get off.
 * 36) The Master Slasher's Trophy is based entirely on RNG. This trophy requires the player to fully upgrade a weapon using Bladestones. The issue is: only TWO enemies in the entire game drop the Pure Bladestone ore, and the drop rate is broken. The very short version of this is that World Tendency does not go from 1-8 as the game implies, but actually from -200 to +200. When World Tendency is around -100 to -149, the drop rate of Pure Bladestone is in the area of 2/50000, lower than from 0 to -99. From -150 to -200 it suddenly shoots back up to a still bad but workable rate of around 1% to 1.3% provided you have minimal Luck (as, contrary to all logical sense, increasing Luck actually tends to reduce the chance of finding it). Good luck getting it if you don't know that.
 * 37) The boss Maneater is terrible, he charges very fast as well as shoot lots of magic and later another Maneater joins you, to make things worse, you fight him in a very narrow bridge with no walls (If lucky, you can run to a small room though), and the worst part is that the boss is glitched as he can sometimes hide under the bridge for no reason, making him unbeatable.

Reception
Upon its release, Demon's Souls was met with acclaim from critics. Upon release in North America, the game received critical acclaim with an average critic score of 89/100 at Metacritic. The Japanese response to the game, however, was fairly mixed, with Famitsu awarding it a total score of 29 out of 40.