4.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Demon's Souls.

This game is a work of genius. Its spiritual successors may be less flawed, but most of the ideas behind those masterpieces came to be in this amazing game. There are two stars of this game: the amazing combat and the fantastic atmosphere. First, the combat is brutally challenging; animations take a long time, so players must act very deliberately. Patience and learning are the strongest tool in any player's arsenal. There is a wide swath of weapons, magic, and armor available, all of which completely change playstyles and make for an infinitely replayable game. Pretty much anything is viable, from a lightning bolt-shooting wizard, to a knight in the heaviest of armor wielding a sword straight out of Berserk, to a ninja in light armor wielding a speedy katana. Adding to this was the new idea at the time to make souls - both the currency of the game and exp used to level up - disappear on death. Next life, if you don't make it back to where you died, the souls are gone forever. These permanent stakes make for fantastic risk vs. reward gameplay choices that keep the adrenaline pumping. It's very difficult to learn how to play, but once you start understanding how the game works, it and its successors are extremely rewarding to progress in. The atmosphere is also fantastic, with imaginative dark fantasy locations, enemies, and bosses around every turn. The art style is wonderful, and so many areas have amazing and memorable vistas. The designs are just amazing across the board, along with mostly great level designs that reward backtracking and exploration with shortcuts and items, and everything in the game is thematically consistent. The worldbuilding here is amazing and you really feel like part of this dreary world full of powerful demons. The story, as is typical in these games, is minimal. But there's more than enough interesting touches in the world to stay engaged and, for interested players, a strong narrative underpins the game that's there to discover (aka watch youtube videos about). And the amazing, adrenaline-pumping gameplay should keep players extremely focused anyway. A really fun touch here not present in other Souls games is a MegaMan-like level select, where you can choose which world to go to. Each world has 3-4 stages, and you can tackle any world you wish after beating the first level, thankfully giving room to refresh yourself with other levels if you find yourself getting frustrated. Still, there's some flaws here that later games improve drastically. Considering how fantastic and creative this is for what was basically the first of its kind, the flaws here are 100% forgivable. Healing is awful, requiring either farming of annoying grass items that are only common in one area, or proficiency in magic. In fact, I highly recommend magic! Magic is something I have avoided in every other Souls game out of misplaced pride, but here it makes the game so much more bearable. Faith healing to avoid having to deal with grass until late game makes the game far more manageable. Thankfully, estus in Dark Souls fixes this issue. Another issue is that many of the bosses here are gimmicky. That isn't to say they're not fun - although the Dragon God is an awful fight, which is a bummer - but the gimmicky bosses are far less fun to fight than the foes that are built more around combat challenges. Luckily, later Souls games have better bosses across the board to take advantage of the unique combat. There's still a few great bosses to make this game very worthwhile. My biggest issue is some levels, for lack of better words, suck. World 5's stages in particular are misery-inducing with little in the way of reward - visibility is minimal and poison and plague are everywhere, while enemies give off next to no souls, making you barely grow stronger as you fight on. Later Souls games are more consistent in their rewards, luckily, and have fewer outright bad levels. In short, this is where the fantastic framework for Souls is born, but as a prototype, this game is a somewhat flawed but still extremely compelling work of genius. And now that it's on PS5 - the far superior way to play, making the awful load times and chugging of certain areas a thing on the past - there's nothing stopping modern players from giving this a go. I highly recommend it!