Demon’s Souls is a game I’ve had an interest in, despite it’s awkward, unpronounceable name. I’m the guy who punched my balls enough to actually beat both the NES TMNT and Devil May Cry 3, after all, so any game notorious for being extremely hard is enough to catch my attention. The main problem is that I didn’t have a PS3, a problem which was solved around the time Bayonetta came out via my roommate springing for one, so among the games I first tried Demon’s Souls was one of them.

As a sidenote, the name is especially silly because through the entire game any text said “Demon’s souls,” whereas when it was spoken aloud the subtitles said “Demon souls.” If the game couldn’t keep track of the name, why should I?

So, Demon’s Ouls (no, I’m not doing the Muramasa gimmick again). Getting into the game gives me a lengthy backstory involving telling of a good and mighty king who ruled with justice until a big fog dropped on his kingdom and everything went quiet. Hundreds of people went in and never came out, and you’re next on the checklist, but since you’re the protagonist this gives you the god-filled power of plot related importance.

I crafted my character via the randomizer to be a barbarian with shining golden hair and chiseled manly muscles all over his body, and noticing the similarities I dubbed him He-Man. With phallic club and big metal shield in hand I jumped into the game, and the game’s tutorial via little messages written on the ground gave me a quick tutorial, including using left and right hands with L1 and R1, my shield and club respectively. It also told me I could press circle to do a quick backstep, which sounded pretty solid, but most of the controls felt awkward and I was really not liking the dodge button, as it felt like Marcus Fenix’s absurdly long side roll, which didn’t fit well to a close-combat action game when I’m used to circling around your opponent. Worse yet there was a stamina meter, one that drained whenever attacking or blocking, meaning I had to be very careful.

I went through the game and felt like things were alright, but He-Man a bit stiff and rubbery (Okay, I promise, no gay jokes). Most of the actions had a criminally slow sluggishness and I couldn’t abandon any action halfway. Using the healing item, which I think was wheatgrass, involved an unskippable animation of my hero itching his ass before touching his nose, and if you didn’t see an enemy coming it involved all the health you just gained and more being lost.

But nonetheless He-Man trounced through the tutorial, got to the end, and a giant demon ogre thing with an oversized club ass-rammed hard enough to kill me with one blow. That is, his ass-slam attack hit the ground and killed me. He didn’t ram He-Man in the…anyway.

Come to find it was a Supposed to Lose fight, meaning that my win via fail sent me to the underworld, where the little girl from The Ring after a haircut told me to return to the mortal world as a spirit and recollect souls to return back to life with the rest of my health bar. The fine print explained that I had to fight a boss before I could be allowed to respawn anywhere but the beginning.

Confused, but accepting, I went ahead and trudged onwards. It certainly is a sign of requiring dedication when a game says you can have a checkpoint after beating a boss. Even Mega Man gave you a marker halfway through, and that game was infamous for kicking you in the pants over and over. Nonetheless I was willing to see it through.

A long bridge-like hallway with a plethora of bloodstains, floor-messages, and blockades stretched out before me, with the graphics looking something like a goth castle designed by the Dead Space guys. There was all sorts of clutter all around, like barricades and racks and barrels that collapsed, sometimes rendering souls or wheatgrass, this game’s version of health potions. The shaded graphics meant it was impossible to see anything at a distance, giving a pseudo-horror theme to it. I could dig it, and when skeletal monsters attacked it felt at home.

The reason it forces you to go online to play it is because of the online interactions – players can leave notes for each other on the floor, and if you find the note helpful you can give it approval so it will stick around longer. Characters who die leave bloodstains that can be triggered to show a ghost of how they died. These are very interesting mechanics let down by some truly fucking idiotic execution.

For one thing, you can’t pause, and this is done to accommodate the other online players. I don’t see the reason, considering the online ghosts don’t do shit that I could interact with. It was like playing Everquest with an option to watch everyone’s time trials.

The messages on the floor is a novel idea, but it’s all related to which notes you read where and who made them. There was one part where I walked into a hallway and read a note on the ground that said “Watch out!” I looked about to find whatever I was supposed to watch out for and got shot through the heart by an arrow, and the one to blame was an archer standing on a high-risen platform. Thanks a fuckload, player, maybe next time a bit of context would help.

And of course, these are online players, so many of them are dicks for sheer humor. One time while in a barren environment that was another hallway from my next enemy, I read a message on the ground that said “There’s a cute guy ahead.” Goddamn it, I thought Noncon didn’t have a PS3!

The death-ghost thing sounds like a good idea but what it ends up being is watching a red glowing ghost run about in circles for a few minutes fighting off invisible opponents like they have fire ants in their underwear before collapsing on the ground. I don’t mind the idea of showing you how allies died but if the developers honestly thought that at no point would anyone die during combat in this game I am fully allowed to call them up and leave a voice message along the lines of Hitler discovering Steiner’s army was not assembled.

Combat was a more awkward story, like discussing blowjobs with your dad. The lock-on feature was a bonus, especially since it was toggled, but whenever we were in close-combat to each other the camera hung annoyingly right above my head, focusing on the one skeleton, which was cluttering as I couldn’t see any attackers from off in the distance and it caused me my first few trips to Restart Town.

After combating Skeletors and finally working through narrow hallways, blocking arrows and blades alike, I entered a cramped, dark dining room, and got leap-attacked from a skeleton that was hiding outside of my camera’s view, killing me in one hit.

Wait, what? I hadn’t gotten hit once, why did I insta-die? Come to find out blocking, even with a shield, deals damage to you. Oh, wonderful, as if it wasn’t enough I expend stamina to block leaving me less able to attack, I’m also getting wounded just for being on defense and not rolling on the floor like a circus performer. Truly this game is all about realism.

Going around for another few goes I got hit more than once by an attack I didn’t notice; after launching themselves twice the distance of my backstep the skeletons thrash and spaz around, flailing about in a similar manner of a wet dog. This was part of the reason I died a few more times as my frustratingly small health bar – as a barbarian, mind – got chopped down a notch until I followed the incredibly tedious tactic as follows.

The monster leaps at me. I roll to the side, wait for him to flail about, and then step in and mash the melee button. If I wasn’t careful with my roll, he’d hit me after the roll as the enemies track you slightly. What I was getting frustrated by was the annoying camera that hovered over my targeted enemy, giving me no view to see any enemies about to leap at me, as well as the tedium of going through each encounter with this pattern, as it was both the safest and the most effective way to win. It left me no style, no flair of my own, and no creativity. Sure I may have picked the barbarian, but my DND mindset had hoped that would give me more ability to wade through my opponents and bludgeon them to death, not leap about like a flamboyant minstrel before bopping them upside the head.

But I finally trudged through, stepped in the ambush doorway, turned to the right, and battered the skeleton into tiny lootable bits. I was later stabbed by a skeleton from further down a similar hall, a skeleton I couldn’t see due to the darkness.

I’m having less fun now.

By the time I returned to the second door of death via starting at the beginning and working my way through again, I stopped just outside and attempted to lock-on, as I was standing at an angle where I could clearly see where he was. Come to find that this is cheating, as since I haven’t yet ‘discovered’ him, thereby making it impossible to lock on. I instead had to rely on the extremely finicky camera to observe and react to his moves. Relying on pure memorization is something I’d expect out of Super Kaizo World, and the obscene load times made the boredom and frustration even more intolerable.

During the later portions of the first level, there’s long dark hallways with lots of skeletons that pop out and carve you in two. But the most annoying is later on during long staircases, with skeletons holding firebombs that can be launched at you from the top of the staircase. This leaves you with the annoying solution of rolling away from every fight as soon as it begins. Who the fuck thinks this is fun?

I could go on, but you get the idea – over and over I’d go somewhere or do something that would land me not necessarily instant-death but being assaulted over and over again, and none of them would be anything short of aggravating. The one point where I thought I was having fun was confronting a big burly armored dude, and after a swordfight where he kept me on my toes I managed to finish him off and munch on wheatgrass to restore my health. I stepped through the fog, finding myself in a brand new area, while still retaining the dingy castle appearance it was a breath of fresh air to say the least. And as I strolled downstairs I saw large barrels stacked up next to the wall and a skeleton behind them. He swung his arm back to throw a a firebomb, and working off of instinct, I rolled forward to go underneath it. I did this to close the distance so he couldn’t throw another at me before I’d kill him.

The barrels, though identical, were apparently filled with nitroglycerin and exploded from the fire, killing me in one hit. I was sent back to the agonizing loading screen and then the beginning, again, to try once more. Since this was my roommate’s PS3 I didn’t throw the controller against a fucking wall, but I dropped my controller and declared that, much like an order to salute written in someone’s fecal matter, I would not stand for this shit.

Now here’s the obvious thing; what’s so different about this as compared to I Wanna Be The Guy? Well I beat IWBTG completely; if the differences aren’t totally obvious to you, you need to be put in a mental ward.

IWBTG was built with comedy in mind. Getting suddenly killed from off-screen was just as hilarious as it was frustrating, which kept you going. The checkpoints were spaced out often enough restarts put you back about a minute at most instead of fifteen to half an hour. Sure the controls were glitchy, prone to dropping you off a cliff if you didn’t press the jump button in time, but at least there was no combat other than ‘shoot gun.’ And most of all there wasn’t a fucking two minute loading screen every time you hit the R button. Each death was agonizing because you had to restart from the beginning and there was no way to know without experiencing it firsthand, but Ryu’s sudden guest appearance made me laugh as much as it made me bash my fist into the desk, and at the end the restarts were barely a minute or two apart on the standard difficulty.

I’m also going to step out ahead of time to stop people from jumping on me – no, I did not try any other classes. I wanted to play a barbarian and bash things to death with my club, and that’s my choice. If the game decides that this is an inferior combat option, maybe they should have spent some time balancing the classes out. As I have said in many of my reviews, I love carefully crafted gameplay – options cemented by balance are the things that make good games fantastic. I severely doubt that because I picked an inferior class it would make the game harder than it already is, which given the difficulty the game presents sounds like taking a handful of coins from Scrooge McDuck’s personal vault.

So that’s Demon’s Souls, and it can suck on an unwashed hobo’s prick.