Monday, January 2, 2012

Death of a Swordsman



Demon's Souls (DS) was one of those games that, if you believe that games are art, then you should play. Since I fall into that category of people, I decided to buy it with my new PS3 system. It was a greatest hits version so it was only $20 and considering the price of that little black box of processing it was all I could really afford. I got home installed it, created a dead faced old man avatar, and started my journey through a castle (I looked like Danny Trejo after a cheap facelift ).



Then I died.

And I died…

And I died.

If you don’t know, DS is a game that is purposefully difficult. Playing it reminded me a lot of trying to get through that one hall in the first Castlevania (Ryan, Krystn you know what I’m talking about (da da doo, da da doo, da daa)). But I beat Castlevania, I can beat Megaman without continuing, I should be able to handle this.

Apparently, I can’t.

DS refused to offer any sort of help to get through the game. Hell, it took me several hours to figure out that I could run. Also, when you die you get resurrected but with only a portion of your health bar. Most enemies will either hack off most or your life in one hit or they’ll call all their friends for a good ole rat king hello.

At first I guess I was enjoying it. However, I got this nagging feeling that I was giving the game way too much of a benefit of the doubt; that maybe this game is only good because I’m choosing for it to be good. So, I stepped back and reevaluated, realizing that I wasn’t actually having any fun.

To put this into presepctive, I'll quit a game in Modern Warfare because my team is getting pummeled. This isn't because I can't deal with losing but more so that I'm simply not having fun. I've learned that I can pop the battery out of the back of a 360 controller by twisting it enough. Being pissed off isn't fun for me.

Sorry.

I like a challenge but this game isn’t challenging, it’s obnoxious. You remember in Final Fantasy 7 having to fight the Emerald and Ruby Weapons and you had to build up all your characters to level 99, get their best weapons and hope that you got a little lucky when you went into battle? Yeah, I don’t either because I’m not a loser.

I don’t like grinding for hours just to get one stat to go up by one point and quite frankly neither should you.

DS has an illusion of epicness but at the end of the day the game seems grandiose because you have to spend a lot of time doing to same thing in the same place. This processes gets reset every time you have a pack of cyborg skeletons using your torso for a sharpening stone (trust me, it’s nowhere as cool as it sounds). Yeah, you start noticing subtleties in the brick laying of a prison but, at the end of the day, all I’ve really done is dodge a Chutulu-faced wizard a hundred, million, trillion times. I guess if that’s your thing then more power to you.

Maybe it’s a WOW thing.

I have yet to finish DS because when I started playing all of the worlds were white and I was still having trouble (there’s a mechanic that online players control the difficulty of the game, white: easy, black: hard).


I played for a couple of weeks then the worlds all turned pure black to celebrate Halloween or their 3rd year anniversary or whatever (yeah, I know keeping this thing current). I just didn’t have the time or effort. DS is a game for people who like Steven King or Robert Jordan novels e.g. high volume, low content.

Maybe one day I’ll finish it…

but it’s not likely.

I also want to apologize for the gross overuse of parenthesis in this post.