Rinse and repeat

So, I'm two games down. I'm whittling this backlog down, one game at a time. The only one I have immediately pending is Grand Knights History.

Demon's Souls is the one of the games I packed away. I said I'd talk about its flaws and so I will. But first, I want to say that this is actually a good game. I don't think I've played too many things like it, and I honestly can't tell someone they're wasting their time on this game, or that it won't make them a better gamer for playing it. But that doesn't mean there's things that it couldn't do better.

So, that brings us to the one point we all can start at: difficulty. The game is universally lauded as hard, it's really one of the first things you hear about the game, but there's something I figured out about it: If there was something that could one-shot me, it was a threat. If I was being impatient and rushing through levels, I was putting myself in danger. Other than that... barring a Black Phantom attack, I really wasn't in danger of dying a lot of the time. What made the game difficult was the enemies that could one-shot me. Otherwise, there was a really large chance I'd win as long as I didn't throw caution to the wind.

And I gotta ask, is this really good? If you know me, I'm generally against one-shot player kills on principle, but here, the lion's share of the game's difficulty hinged on its ability to take me from full to nothing in one fell swoop. Admittedly, as I always do, I went for as much completion as I could in my first run, which had the side effect of making me hit Soul Level 100 before the game ended. Part of my opinion (it wasn't really hard except in certain cases) could be colored by the fact that I was overleveled, but there were still more than enough enemies that could hit me pretty hard for like, 80% damage. If I were Soul Level 60 or so, yeah that might one-shot me. And the worst part of it is that it encourages cheese tactics and AI abuse against enemies that can strike you down effortlessly but can take quite a bit of damage in return. No straight-up fight for these guys - hang back, pelt them with arrows, sneak up and backstab them multiple times, then head for the hills. Watch as they give up and stand still 'cause they lost sight of you. Repeat. Roll eyes. And if you mess up once... start all over again. And roll eyes.

The other thing is ranged weapons. First, there's no seperate option to reverse the X-axis in first-person mode. Me, I think of the third person view as a camera - I'm not otherwise using it to aim things, the only use it has is to look around. So I think pressing right moves the camera right. But when I go into first-person view, I press right... and look left, despite the fact that I'm thinking of rotating the camera at this point. I actually got used to this, strangely enough, but it had the side effect of hampering my ability to play other games, and it is for this reason that I'm really considering not getting the second game. I don't want to get used to this. I like other games. Sure, this was a minor design decision, but in all of a half day they could've put this in, and they didn't. It's causing a lot of doubt on my continued patronage of this series, and the kicker is that a very small amount of effort could have stopped it from coming up.

But one of the worst parts of archery is that the crosshairs didn't actually tell you what you were aiming at, as the bow wasn't directly below the crosshairs, but to the side. Yes, your arrow would pass through the crosshairs at one point in time, but you'd have to guesstimate its actual path, as it could be that a scant few inches away from the center of the screen was a wall that your arrow would lodge itself into when fired. Or even worse, crappy hit detection next to a rock that would stick your arrow dead in the air, even when you have a perfect bead on your target. Or... if you were shoving your shoulders up against a wall and pulled out your bow, there was a real chance your shoulder would soon be close to the arrow you tried to fire, now stuck next to your shoulder in said wall. These happened too many times to count, and honestly, it got a little annoying.

As for other control issues, I personally think that buffering was way too loose, but that's probably because I'm really used to double-tapping inputs (an old fighting game habit). Here, double-tapping roll causes you to roll twice - the second input is confirmed a mere few frames into the roll animation, before like 20% of it is even over. But meh, that's kinda minor.

About the only other thing I can say about the game is that... well, there really wasn't a whole lot of actions you could take unless you pumped magic. You start with every attack you can do, many of them kinda generic in nature, and combat is generally slow-paced. Perhaps this was a PvP decision when you consider the amount of lag that's likely to be around. You want a bit of creativity, you go magic. Otherwise, you press R1... a lot. This isn't really a bad thing, but I felt pretty one-dimensional until I got a bunch of spells to use. Advancement is pretty slow-paced too, you raise a stat very slowly for a long time, and all you get (with the exception of two stats) is just bigger numbers. No new cool things to play with. Just more damage, more HP. I mean, the moment I saw Allant's sword rush, I thought to myself, "Why can't I do that?" In fact, the moment I saw Allant's anything, I wondered why I couldn't do what I saw. However, in the end, the nature of the game as an action-RPG with PvP elements probably makes the small and fixed amount of actions, as well as the relatively slow pace of combat itself, unavoidable to some extent. Honestly, these things aren't really something I consider design flaws either - it's just something that's not up my alley.

Finally, I'm not actually complaining about this and saying its bad, but I think the ability to know which of your messages got recommended would've been a nice added touch.

And so there you have it - things that Demon's Souls, as good as it was, could have done better. All in all, a very unique game that's pretty good, even if it's not a game I'll spin head over heels about on a regular basis.