Why Demon's Souls Is the Best Souls Game
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- Опубликовано: 26 окт 2024
- Today, I lap disgusting praise on Demon's Souls, my favorite Souls game.
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This video was edited by Nin (link to his channel in the reply)!
Note: This video was originally written and edited before Elden Ring came out and then was shelved. I don't remember why, but it was, and now it's here! In case you were wondering why Elden Ring is never mentioned, that is why!
Nin's RUclips channel: www.youtube.com/@easy_nin
I love Demons Souls bosses! A lot of them are clunky and experimental. And sure they are often shockingly easy, but as you explained, in Demon's it's more about getting smart, trying different things, exploiting weaknesses, solving problems and watching for hazzards. Not too unlike a Zelda game the more I think about it.
Whereas in future games it becomes a lot more about simply watching boss patterns, managing stamina and gitting gud. Which is awesome as well, just different.
Demon's Souls is basically the type of 3D Zelda game I always dreamed of not limited by old traditions, but it's also a mess lol
I completely agree.
Having bosses all be combat checks with five phases ruins a lot of the potential narrative design that was lost from Demon's Souls. Maiden Astrea made me feel things that no other boss in any other From Soft game has.
bro Gael came inside of me the first time i fought him he was sooo good
The souls games have gotten progressively more formulaic over time. Clearly people latched on to the difficulty bit a lot more than the creative and unique nature of Demon's Souls. I think it's kid of sad, and even though Dark Souls retained some of that creativity, things just became progressively more streamlined (which isn't always a bad thing, ofc). More epic and more difficult, but losing some of that amazing atmosphere and uniqueness that the first two games have with each itteration.
Demon's is definitely a flawed masterpiece. It's not perfect, but it does a LOT of stuff incredibly well. I'd rather fight a unique boss with an interesting concept, than the same concept reskinned and with larger health bars over and over. That's one of the most disappointing things with Elden ring for me, almost all of the bosses fundamentally play the same. Learn the bosses variation of the same core moves (ie one or two strings, a delayed attack to catch roll, a projectile, an AOE and maybe a dash/lunge), then dodge and punish.
The point about how the way weapon upgrades work discourages experimentation is something I heavily agree with. I personally would enjoy every Souls game a lot more if weapon upgrades were universal -- that is, if you upgrade a weapon to +8, then ALL weapons that use that material upgrade to +8.
This would let you try out different weapons to see if you like them, rather than having to gamble all your resources on a weapon only to either find yourself unimpressed with it in practice or be sad as you quickly find another, cooler weapon you'd rather be using but can't because you don't have upgrade materials anymore. And it would allow you to use different weapons to adapt to different situations, which I feel is particularly important to the design of both Demon's Souls and Elden Ring in particular, but otherwise held back by the way weapon upgrades work.
I don't have a PS5, and didn't know that they changed the remake soundtrack so much from the original. That's just criminal.
I'm glad this script finally saw the light of day. I constantly try not to be like the old man yelling at cloud when the DeS remake gets discussed, so I'm glad that this time I didn't have to be that guy since you had that section about the remake soundtrack in there at the end!
Personally I played Demon's Souls before any of the other souls games so it has a special place in my heart. Every time there's a "gimmick" boss in the latter souls games they usually end up being one of my favorite fights (at least when they're not just ripping off DeS wholesale, lol). The rollfests can be fun but I find fights like Storm King and Maiden Astraea are more memorable.
"Demon souls is a fucked up game for sickos" you have such a way with words bopper 😭😭😭
Dang I've never played a souls game but you're making me want to try demon souls now ........ im not much of a "hack at a dude with a zillion hp slowly till he dies" kinda gamer but figuring out a sort of puzzle mechanic to more effectively beat a boss sounds fun 🤔
as usual when it comes to souls content I have no idea what you're talking about but I love when people share their totally correct opinions on things I don't know or understand in a well argued and amusing fashion
I had a friend recently lend me both ds1 and ds3. I played ds3 and the only boss I remember distinctly was Yhorm because i didn’t realize stormruler was an item until I had many pointless attempts. I couldn’t just memorize after countless deaths. However once I found the weapon it was pretty straightforward. Approaching the boss fight in the i just can’t bull my way through at least for the first couple of attempts was one on the most memorable things to happen, making something unkillable very killable
Yhorm is my favorite fight in DS3. The music stands out in the sense of the grandiosity actually fitting when fighting such an insurmountable foe, and the Storm Ruler weapon throws the normal boss pace on its head.
Love to see you branching out! Love your content my man!
Just recently started watching your videos and really enjoyed this, hope you make more fromsoft videos!
I'm super split when it comes to DS3 because its basically symbolizes the death of weird, old from software. No more underpolished, borderline unintelligible but beautiful and creative messes. However, you can *feel* that polish. On a very visceral level it just feels so good to play. It's a sign of the action genre trending more and more towards tried and true formulas and in my mind I'm against that. But.... the nameless king is REALLY fun to fight lol.
I'm honestly not sure about Dark Souls 3's polish. It's faster paced and more streamlined, but it's still jank (it has copious amounts of glitches and balancing issues) and rough around the edges (on a graphical and technical level especially) and it can feel like a Frankstein's monster of ideas sometimes, with some assets looking like they were Bloodborne leftovers, DS1 fanservice everywhere and undercooked additions like weapon skills.
@@nicoloenricorimoldi7425 "Copious amounts of glitches" is really stretching it lol. The vast majority of DS3 glitches are incredibly hard to find if you aren't looking for them. I also don't really consider the balance to be an issue. Sure, whips are worse than straight swords which are worse than almost nothing, but I feel as if that's by design. Straight swords are very easy to use weapons irl so.. y'know. Dark Souls has always prioritized "roleplaying" over "balance" in regards to their weapons, look at how DS1 has several weapons meant to be useful for a certain area and then dropped. I also think the game was very pretty for its time and it actually hit stable 60fps when the previous games in the series were struggling to get 30fps.
What I'm about to say is admittedly an unpopular opinion but I think DS1 earns its fanservice. Rarely does it jingle keys in front of your face saying "REMEMBER, REMEMBER" but tries to tell a story whenever it puts in old references. Old areas and characters are almost always completely drained of life to show that the fire is barely sustaining anything anymore. The return to Anor Londo isn't a fun romp that makes you blissfully remember your fun with DS1, it's just an empty and cold place with the corpses of your favorite characters strewn about. It feels like the amount of fanservice it has is just the bare minimum that a sequel should have to tie things together narratively and thematically.
@@maagic2031 I kind of oversold the amount of glitches, but I played it on PS4 and it felt unpolished on a technical level (sometimes you can see how low-res some textures are). Not as bad as Bloodborne, and at least it received a PC port. I still wish the artstyle wasn’t so drab and that the setting’s realism weren’t ruined by the anime special moves you and the bosses can perform.
I would prefer a less drab
On a balancing level, I don’t like how much focus the game places on roll spam (look at how much stamine you have at the beginning) and fast melee weapons. Sure, heavy weapons are still very strong, but other weapon types feel neutered.
Magic in particular needs half the game to become viable, and still feels mediocre. INT and Faith are more useful for weapon buffing than anything.
I also don’t enjoy how armour is only cosmetic, further removing options from the player, and I think they went a bit too far in nerfing shields and parries (although the latter could be due to me playing the 30 fps PS4 version, admittedly).
I think the argument for unviable weapons was stronger in DS1 where RPG elements were more prevalent and the game wasn’t so linear.
I’m split on the DS1 references because I understand what they were aiming for, and I think they succeeded in some areas like Anor Londo and Ariandel, but they went too far for me on the whole.
I still don’t understand what the point of Siegward being identical Siegward is, and in general, for every well executed reference there’s two groan-inducing callbacks to DS1 that feel forced and unnecessary, even depriving the final boss of any story impact because it’s just a retread of Gwyn.
It feels so damaging to the identity of the game sometimes, given that it treats elements from DS1 with more importance than DS1 itself, sometimes.
It's weird to me how people call bosses that get easy once you know their weaknesses is bad because... That's literally just MegaMan and who doesn't love MegaMan?
Plus the way MegaMan handles boss weaknesses are much less obtuse than the souls bosses due to literally showing you the things that could be weaknesses so in theory MegaMan bosses would be much worse than the souls bosses because of how easy they are to figure out with a little bit of experimentation.
For God's sake, PLEASE never stop being right every single time.
Another excellent video as always. To preface the below, I've never played any of the Souls games, so perhaps my opinion should be treated with a grain of salt.
I absolutely loved your section near the end about the differing scores. The original Maiden in Black theme is beautiful, mournful. If you'd have played that section for me blind and then told me it was a section from Mahler's 4th, I probably would have agreed. The homogeneity of the boss music towards epic confrontation that the remake seems to angle for is disappointing. Like you said, it's good music in its own right. But the lack of variance puts a damper on my enjoyment.
I just love how experimental they got for the final bosses of each area. Like yeah, the Dragon God is... the Dragon God, but having one boss be another player (uh, very occasionally) or well, Maiden Astraea (after wading through poison swamp after poison swamp, no less) was just so cool at the time. Or things like figuring out world tendency. I'm heartbroken that we never got Demon's Souls But This Time We Know What We're Doing. Instead we got an overall more action-oriented series (sure, why not) and then the remake and uh, why is the music so noisy. Like it's not my favorite of these games (that's Bloodborne because I just am Like That), but there is so much potential in the original Demon's Souls and I think that is worth a lot
Dark Souls 1 started the trend of pattern recognition bosses but still had the maze-like map and adventure feel to it. I miss Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 before the focus turned to difficulty as it worked so well for branding. I hope they can again be innovative as they were in 2009 again. Can’t blame them from continuing the formula but I hope they can go being the Demon’s Souls template and surprise us with a truly new IP that’s more than mere pattern recognition.
This is the first time I can agree with someone's entire take Bravo
I feel like the earlier souls games, most of the difficulty was just getting through the level, not necessarily the bosses. I think that helped with pacing in a lot of places. Although it almost killed it for me in the swamp because I had serious trouble getting to the short cut because my damn character didn't want to go up the little ledge on the path to it for some reason, repeatedly. In later games I'll just get to where I have nothing really new to go to in a game except some insanely hard "git-good-or-go-home" boss that just is an insane jump compared to everything before it. In the older games the challenge of the bosses usually felt more in line with the challenge of the level leading up to them. And knowing the gimic/weakness of a boss and being able to stomp them was always a great power trip. This is why I hate that Elden Ring is even thought of as a souls game because having a mount that lets you just hop past everything and solve the combat puzzle that is the level design and enemy placement itself takes away what is, for me, the best part of the souls games.
"...and every other adjective to make a games Metacritic summary cream"
Man I wish I could write this creatively. 30 seconds in and I'm already enjoying this!
I think that's why I don't like DS3 as much, I like the adventure aspect of the older games. Maybe that's why I still occasionally play DS2 even with its frustrating design
That's probably why I love ds2 as well, it's one huge adventure
Ds3 is barely a souls game.
great video but honestly wouldve been a lot more impactful if you used the OG and not the remake for gameplay footage
I'm really glad to see someone who appreciates Demon's Souls as much as me. The experimentation and creativity Demon's Souls was so good and I feel like From Software unfortunately will never try something quite like that again, which kinda sucks. Demon's Souls will always be my favorite Souls despite many people shitting on the game putting it as the worst Souls or one of the worst. It's a not perfect game for sure, but none of the other Souls are anyway. I just love how Demon's Souls has its own thing going on, how the exploration always made me curious and led me to different things and how unique of a feeling the whole game had to me. I never felt that way with any of the other Souls even though each own of them has something special too.
Professor what do you think of fromsoftware approach to storytelling
Have you listened to any of the older From OSTs? I think you'd jive with the abrasive weirdness of the Evergrace 1 and 2 soundtracks and the Armored Core OSTs are pretty varied and fun. It's by no means the 'best' track from the franchise, but I'd recommend "The Bloody Honey Cannot Stop" from AC4A because, come on, look at that name.
I think the issue worth recognizing is that people fundamentally play these games for different reasons. I don't enjoy the bosses in DeS and DS1 as much because past the first playthrough and the novelty of figuring out their puzzle they aren't that fun.
I like replaying these games dozens of time until I'm good enough to beat every boss blindfolded using a potato as a controller. I understand not everyone enjoys that but it's why I play. So the more complex bosses of DS3, Elden Ring and Sekiro are more fun for me. I can fight them hundreds of times and still discover new tricks and openings for different weapons.
For me it's the storytelling. Demon's Souls feels more realistic than the new titles with a survival horror element.
No mythological elements: this is a fantasy world where someone dig way too deep and is now faced with the consequences. No one know what the heck is going on inside, and once you discover what it is you can't go back and are forced to find your way through it.
I had numerous flashbacks to the hbomberguy video about dark souls 2
Hell yeah souls content
Another comment for the music bit and comparison. Yea feel demon souls remake kinda screwed the pooch overall on that demon souls should be demon souls not dks 3/ elden ring.
Though I feel dks3 music is still epic, many due have different tones becouse of horn each is incorperated into the boss in question. Deacon's and the sage have great ost, despite lackluster fights, but the Deacon's ost is eari becouse they themselves (when chanelling their big spell) are the choir. Vordts is bombastic becouse he is a guy who who sees only the nails of the world and he has a hammer. While the legion has a somewhat tone of both cool bombastic energy and dread to them invoking the curse of the undead as they constantly rise to battle you a life of literal hollowness. I mean it's better dks 1 which has like a handful of actual boss ost with most of them being repeated over and over again. Can't say much to dks 2 ost (haven't played it, have heard it and it's good but without context ehh)
I feel that dks 3 being the standard is kind of a poor way of looking at it. It's like saying legend of Zelda breath of the wild is the standard of the brand new genre it spawned. It's kinda backwards.
Dks3 comes off as standard because it created that standard due to being successful. Granted one came argue that bloodborne actually created the action standard but it has a bigger problem of being console exclusive, a much smaller growing community. Darks souls three is for many the first of the souls series to many and hence seen as the most standard by popularity and it's success. Yet that shouldn't be held against it. Which I feel may come up.
Also the equipment stick also is relevant when it comes to dks 3 those who underated the lothric sheild with 95 res lighting and black knight with same for fire undervalue how good those can change it up. Especially moveset changes or higher crit weapons vs bosses which are easy to crit (sister friede gets really easy when you rush backstab her)
Souls games slowly moved away from it's uniquenes, and more about mashing your circle button
And now I gotta keep hearing the same corny "flawed masterpiece" and "git gud" argument from players that missed the whole point of these games. (Yes being difficult was A part of the game, not THE part)
Apparently it's okay to critique dark souls 3 and it's grey and gross color palate, even tho the theme is the end
but blood bourne, even though it's the same gross color palate,you guessed it
beautiful world because apparently you can overlook that when inspired by HP Lovecraft
So if we were to exclude subjectivity as much as we possibly can, and remove the artistic styles of Lovecraft and the medieval ish fantasy, then you're left with the same, gross, color palette
But one is bad, and the other is a flawed masterpiece
In the same breath these "git gudders" will say that BB has the best combat, while giving you literally Less weapons AND less play styles
How is it the best?Because you have a gun? Even tho it functions as a perry, something available since inception.
Because it's fast paced? Something that became a staple to every game after?
So what about if I wanna have a tank build or magic? Oh how dare i of course this is the best combat
I perry and mash circle! It's different
While I don't like elden ring much at all either, the combat in that game is so obviously leagues ahead
But I still hear nerds talk about BB game play, because that's the proper acceptable opinion
After that, all souls games have been pattern recognition and mashing circle
It wasn't that in Demons or DS1
It can be if you choose so
But go ahead and tank in ds3 or elden ring lol
If stripping down your game into, mashing circle at the right time, is a flawed masterpiece, then ninja gaiden 3 on NES is the greatest video game ever made
I was very dissapointed when i heard the series was going faster. It had its own unique gameplay which worked.
I was also dissapointed when i popped in ds2 and it had fast travel at the beginning. So many of their own great ideas have been left behind.
You blame bb, but bb isnt even that fast. It also has good level design and enemy encounters. I agree it has less of everything, guns arent amazing, rally is overrated af and barely influenced my runs. Usually because by time i get up and get back to the boss, rally is done already. Its short, got rid of world interconnectivity. Shortcuts are obvious and only ever work as a circle back to the beginning of an area to avoid boss runbacks.
I could go on, bb gets many of its flaws overlooked and simultaneously i think youre undervalueing its pros.
but the real culprit here is ds3, and the mindless drones who played it as their introduction to the series. They dont want intricate worlds and challenging levels. They want to run to the boss and spam the roll button. Hub world with npcs who dont move. Cotton candy lore and story which disrespects what ds1 did. Its braindead souls, babys first souls game.
@asdfghjkllkjhgfdsa8725
i agree with what you said about dark souls 3 to an extent
They could have done a lot more with the game for sure, but I still enjoyed it a lot more than BB
The theme itself I prefer more
And to me, even though it's a linear experience, i don't think it's bad because of it
Everything I dislike about BB I do for ds3 as well, I guess I just overlook it a Lil more cuz I prefer the dark fantasy setting over Lovecraft and the more ways you can tackle the game
But it turned into a mash circle simulator
And I haven't played BB nearly as much as ds1 and 3 to really have a "proper" opinion, I guess
Most of my comment stemed more so from the delusional masterpiece videos than with the game itself honestly
It's obviously a good game, just feels like a lot of overrating from the community
Overrated doesn't mean bad
Just not as good as advertised
Maybe it's petty but if it wasn't stuck with an unstable 30fps I'd probably enjoy the game just a Lil more
@asdfghjkllkjhgfdsa8725 and I agree about ds3 being too baby proof to appease to a wider audience
Ds1 to me is still the most enjoyable and beautiful
Even though a lot of the lore and game was glued together as they went on, it felt like the world was alive
So many trial and error with ds1 and demons that they brought a true uniqueness missing
Now it's just circle simulator
Despite being the most successful, DS3 is the worst souls game in my opinion.
This is primarily because it plays like the enemies are from Bloodborne but the player is from DS1. The speed and mobility mismatch makes the game feel off and like it doesn't respect equipment choices like DS1 does.
I'll agree with this criticism for elden ring which I think is over tuned and designed to screw you, but I just replayed DS3 and you have all the tools and speed needed to deal with every enemy. If they're too aggressive, use parry or beefy combat arts; and there's no moves the bosses use that can't be reacted to with a roll since there's so many invincibility frames. Every soul's game since BB is just BB again, but that's the direction Fromsoft has taken.
Agreed
Ds3 is the worst one for many reasons.
However the player is most definitely not from ds1. The ds3 roll is broken strong. Its by far the easiest game. Roll 2 to 5 times, spam r1 until its the bosses turn again. Positioning? Irrelevant. Roll direction? Irrelevant. Dodged to early? Dodge again, you have time.
There is a reason we call it dark rolls 3...
@@asdfghjkllkjhgfdsa8725 I just tried replaying DS3 for the past few hours. I forgot how awful it is. Attacks have poor range with significant delay before damage frames. Enemy attacks are near instant, or wide sweeping yet still fast. The enemy tracking is insane.
The roll is part of the problem. It has an input delay because it's triggered on release. I'd much rather have the DS1 or DS2 roll.
So yes, it does feel like the player is from DS1 and the enemies are from Bloodbourne.
Demon souls & Dark souls 3 are better than elden ring
Dark souls difficulty is watching a RUclips videos to see other people die 100 times to figure out where the safe window is and then try it yourself, when people say they like the difficulty they mean they like to like dark souls, lmao I'd rather get more in touch with my taste than get good at that point
This is the least true take I’ve ever read
I thought elden ring sold more copies
This video was written before Elden Ring came out
@ProfessorBopper really? It says it came out a year ago, and Elden Ring came out like 2 and half years ago. I guess youtube rounds up or down when it says when a vids uploaded past 1 year ago
It was published on RUclips almost a year after ER came out. It was originally only on Patreon
@@ProfessorBopper ohhh