Demon's Souls

A few months ago I bought this game. Today I completed it. I hadn't played it since I bought it; I actually only finished world 1, level 1 up until about a week ago. Since then I've been balls deep in it.

It is a hard game, or so professes its reputation. Its reputation isn't wrong, just kind of misleading. It doesn't have any gameplay elements to it that are particularly harder than any other game, in fact bits of the God of War games were probably harder, and were at much faster paces. You also couldn't go back to previous worlds and grind like a bitch until you can take an axe square to the face and defeat your enemy with one flick to the nipple in God of War either. In Demon's Souls you can.

In a vacuum, this game isn't hard. Demon's Souls' difficulty lies more in the fact that it's a dick, more than it is hard. It's "difficult". Difficult describes it well. It's difficult like a child can be difficult when it doesn't want to go somewhere, or difficult like walking in gale force winds, or difficult like breathing on Mars. What would otherwise be a leisurely stroll with frequent breaks is impeded by the fact the kid is winging and staging tantrums, or the cunt wind (not cunt-wind) is blowing your hair all over your face and throwing you off balance, or what would just be breathing on Earth is impeded by the fact you're on fucking Mars.

For one, it has no pause button. I'm sure that morsel of information created some poignant imagery, and as far as I can fathom, this is the only reason there is no pause button - to gesticulate that this game will be a dick to you, and by virtue of that, be hard to complete. No pause button steps over the fucking line. It's effectively saying that the fact I need a piss and can't go and take one during the game contributes to how difficult the game is. That's obnoxious as hell! This is real world shit, this fucking game should know its place. And you know what it does about it? It shrugs. It shrugs while I piss my pants all in the name of proving myself to it.

Secondly, when you die you don't get a game-over screen and load it; you carry on. Due to the game never really being over in this way, any items you consume or weapons you use will remain consumed and worn, so with each death it effectively becomes harder to do what you were trying to last time. You are turned into "soul form" when you die, which basically means you get 50% health in return for +attack and -detection. You remain in soul form until you kill a boss demon. Upon dying, you lose any souls your were carrying, Sonic style. Although, they remain at the site of your death for you to reclaim rather than evaporating. But you know something? There was a reason you died where you did, and in a lot of cases reclaiming those souls is a fucking impossibility. After a while you learn to separate yourself from your instinct to hoard all your souls, and when trying to actually complete levels you forget about the souls, knowing that soul gathering is for the between times when you're grinding for them. Saying that is easier than practising that, because on one occasion I stormed through a level to its final boss and claimed about 50,000 souls (a large amount for my level) and was totally fucking shit-the-bed horrified at the thought of losing them, despite convincing myself on the way in that I could separate the hunger for souls and the need to just complete the level. The gods smiled on me that time, because I beat the boss first try.

That's another thing! The bosses on this game are really quite easy. There were a couple that I struggled with, mainly at the beginning, but almost every other boss I overestimated and they didn't take more than a couple of tries to beat. I don't know if that's deliberately something they wrote into the game or I was just overpowered from grinding, but I didn't really mind; I just didn't want to have to run through the level again to get to them.

That's my biggest beef with the game actually; that after you've collected hundreds of cure and health items indirectly from grinding, and know you don't really need the souls you're gathering when trying to complete a level (for the same reason), the only real fear from drying arises from the dreaded monotony and infuriation of having to travel through the level just to fight the boss again. I wish there was a better, or more relevant, way of making a player fear death than this.

There is no manual save function either; it saves after every action. This is presumably to stop people rewinding and overwriting their fuck-ups. Fuck-ups have no consequence if you can just load it after. Look at Red Dead Redemption - who even plays poker on that game without going all-in, and upon losing, loading the game to do it until they win? Not this guy. I suppose there's the additional difficulty of no manual saves if you consider potential corrupted save files through lack of a possible back-up to be part of the game too. I don't, because that's just retarded, but it's shit like this that makes the game difficult and uncooperative; the difference is they just happen to be deliberate.

I'm at odds with whether or not I consider this an incredible (which is to say not credible) method of altering a game's difficulty. It's like it rigs it. It's like asking you to walk down the street, then stipulates that you chop your legs off first. It's what a game would come out like if the mafia made it. It's like a cruel joke, like the developers are sat behind a one-way window laughing at the mouse trying to escape the maze when they keep fucking with the exit. You know the constraints of the game are arbitrary and it's all the more enraging because the only reason you are being punished is because the game says so, not because it makes sense. It's game-show logic. It's horrible psychological torture, but I wasn't balls deep in it for nothing. My dick was basically stuck in it. I was hooked.

However.

Did you like the pause for dramatic effect there? it didn't make grammatical sense, but it made theatrical sense so fuck you. I feel like before I continue into my explanation of why the volta in this blog decided to descend upon us at this point, I should explain another feature of the game. This being the fact that other players of the game can leave short multiple-choice formulated sentences on the floor to hint at things for other players, or help them in some way with what lies ahead. Along with this, you occasionally see apparitions of other players' final moments, so you don't do what they do and die. It's a nice idea. That is, until they fuck you over.

Here is where the however resumes. Staying true to Japanese RPG tradition - this being the absolute lack of empathy or leniency shown towards their player, gladly allowing them to play for 50 hours into a dead-end, or due to the game's own incommunication, allow the player to be shafted with no lube, right at the end of the game - I was stuck knowing I had finished it, but yet to complete the formalities. The woman told me to leave, but I hadn't really done anything. I killed some boss, but that shit was pathetic so I thought I had something else to come. Nothing was happening, and just leaving didn't make sense to me unless it triggered some arbitrary scene on my way out. I couldn't see that happening though; I was convinced it was one of those rhetorical moments in games where the characters are basically telling you to do something that you then have to not do, or do the opposite of because that's the only thing you can do and the game wants you to wrap up its story.

At this point I saw somebody's wee note on the floor. It said "Attack!". So far the notes had been helpful and it's not that this one wasn't, it just was when applied in the context of what was my opposite intention, although at the time I didn't know this, so I attacked. And so it was that I got the "bad" ending. There was no precedent for alternate endings. There was no karma system or anything that could have yielded one or the other. It was a completely superfluous choice right at the end. I thought that doing what the note said was the only option. I just figured it was some stupid twist. Gahhh. Worst of all, this choice shafted me out of a trophy.

I like trophies; they're like check-lists. Not having that trophy checked off really fucking twists the knife in the side of my relative perfectionism. It makes everything feel incomplete and disorganised. I hate it. It happened with Bioshock 2. I didn't use the camera for the end of like one level, and completely shafted myself out of that "all enemies photographed to max XP" trophy because the one enemy I hadn't done fully only spawned on that level, and the game doesn't let you go back. I only realised this after it was too late to load it.

This is why you need manual saves, Demon's Souls, not so I can abuse it, but just to cover your fucking ignorance towards me. I talked about fuck-ups earlier, but this was meant to be a conscious decision, not an accident. This wasn't my fuck-up, it was you being too cool and vague that led me to fuck up. But, would you consider that part of the game's difficulty? I think to an extent I would, but when it causes shit like this it's just unreasonable. If you're a dick that doesn't tell people stuff of course you're going to be difficult to interact with.

Now I have to complete the game in the "New Game+" mode, which is basically a mode that carries over your stats and equipment, only 40% harder, however it is that they quantify that. I wouldn't mind as much if there was an equal trophy for the "bad" ending. That would be tidy; that would be how it goes. There isn't though; it's like I never completed it at all. I haven't been pissed off at a game like this since Fallout 3 locked me in a room after I finished the final mission, and made me pay £8 to get out of it a year and a half later.