A Look Back At • Demon's Souls (Analysis)

[Music] in 2009 demons souls seemed to emerge as though by a miracle and elevate again those gamey aspirations was the triple a marquee that began to shun its director Hedda Takamiya saki aspired to express what he had adored about classic see RPGs with a benefit of computational powers vastly superior to anything those games had had access to and what launched was a love letter to a near dead brand of gaming challenge that also happened to be the most forward-thinking video game of his era certainly the rippling effect of this game both directly in the subsequent from software titles and indirectly in the myriad of works inspired by demons souls and successors makes a strong case for demon souls its significance in the larger context at the video game marketplace but I must underscore those five words inspired by demons souls's successors certainly demon souls got the ball rollin but the credit truly belongs to Dark Souls Dark Souls was the iterative spiritual sequel multi-platform hit which made the industry stand up and take notice that game was the one passionate gamers flocked to for sanctuary from the eros personality devoid triple-a military shooters and soulless franchise reimagining 'he's made seemingly solely to sate the appetites of marketing people overly convinced of their own brilliance Dark Souls owes almost everything to demon's souls so one could say it was the more influential game in the end but it seems to me like the conversation about these games always picks up where the industry picked these games up with Dark Souls which is unfortunate because I've always felt it as a complete work Demon Souls came together in a way none of its successors ever did and for this I've always held it in much higher regard than any of its successors hi I'm a CRA aesthetics and in this video we'll be going over demon souls in depth launching alongside this video is an extent Laure breakdown whose contents I'll be drawing on as I proceed if you're not intimately enough familiar with demon soldiers lore or a story then I must recommend watching that video first that's my talk on this games this story picks up directly from that video if you're coming back from that video or if you didn't find the need to watch it grab yourself a cup of coffee and strap in as we take a look back at demon souls prior to launching demon souls from software was mostly known for the Kingsfield games and the armored Corps games when this game entered production it was thought of as an Amash to Kingsfield the team intended to revive a lost period of action game in the vein of their flagship franchise so they got to work on what was at the time just a dark fantasy game while the original Demon Souls team was working on this game it's would-be director hit attack amia Zaki was elsewhere in the company he'd joined from software after leaving his much higher paid job with Oracle and his duties with fromsoft at this point mostly consisted of coding for armored core he'd made the leap to the video game industry after playing eco and realizing that video games were where his passion truly laid the demons souls team had been unable to put together a compelling prototype which was when Miyazaki learned about this project and knew he had to get involved as every after mentioned aspiration of this game appealed to him immensely and he knew he had to get involved as a creative lead he famously reasoned that since the project was already considered a failure there would be the potential for immense creative freedom as outside the box thinking would be the only way to salvage the game and if he turned out a failed product headed the OK career-wise because the game was a failure already in retrospect this looks like the beginnings of a perfect storm a hotshot outsider saves a trouble development and becomes a Titan of the industry a person more aligned to this way of thinking might say that everything was cosmological in lining up for from software to become the giant they are today of course more research reveals that in fact no this was not preordained and Miyazaki knew that he was very careful about not discussing the game's difficulty when around Sony and the game only ever got a worldwide release because Atlas and Namco saw how the word of mouth was forming Sony exacts have said that not distributing this game worldwide was one of their biggest mistakes of that era something I'll refer to often in this video is an aspiration which miyazaki appears to have brought with him to this project as an extension of the team wanting to revive a lost breed of action game and that was a wider focus on taking gaming back to basics he felt that the brand of gaming challenge he personally liked was dying out and by re-examining the games he loved and bringing what he enjoyed from them to the ps3 he could revive this challenge specifically I'll be referring to where and how the demon souls reinvigorate tried-and-true gaming conventions Miyazaki and the gang put together design documents which they barely straight from during production the game did not fully come together in a playable form until late in development which is strange considering how cohesive the thing is but I guess this is a testament to good design from the stories we have of Miyazaki it's obvious that he's a guy who puts some thought into what he says and does and a good example of this can be seen in his response to Demon Souls a success he was asked how it was that this absolute curveball managed to become a hit in an era when Japanese games were failing to meet their sales ambitions Miyazaki didn't claim to have a perf analysis but said that one reason might be that demon souls was and I quote designed and created to directly focus at the core essence that lies within game lovers that commonly exist all around the world instead of focusing on matching gamer preferences according to markets such as Japan the US Europe or Asia creating a game aimed at the sincere element in gamers was one of the policies I have put efforts to maintain throughout the development process and you better believe this policy didn't stop at the game's difficulty the story is also an appeal to a non region exclusive idea [Music] demon souls his story is the battle between good and evil in the human psyche like all subsequent from south games demon's souls explores the horrors that ensue after the natural order of the world gets twisted by an individual or group the Dark Souls games showcased this with the first sin where Lord Gwyn extended his age of fire and doomed humanity to bear the mark of the undead in blood-borne it was the healing churches use of old blood and the hunters communicating with the great ones and insecure oh it's the destructive pursuit of immortality by all parties what immediately sets demon souls apart in this regard is that the horrors actually predate the twisting of the natural world they are in fact why a Lantry awoke the old one he saw the horrible rotten world and the suffering in it and did what he believed he had to do in order to put an end to humanity's tragic existence another aspect of the presentation which makes Demon Souls different from its successors is that its characters are not so much the victims of the plot as they are all microcosms of it our vendors are mostly morally dubious sorts who acquire their bears by theft of the living and the dead our faith mentor the guy who sells his miracles and has said they're the voice of God is incredibly questionable as he assumably was lured into a trap by patches who offered him a man who should be above all worldly possessions treasury to some extent almost every character in Demon Souls and every story in the game is meant to reinforce a very bleak outlook on human nature characters like patches and yurt aren't just a fun way to reimagine action RPG NPCs they also showed just how depraved human beings can be in spite of the immediate circumstances demanding unity yurt is an assassin for an organization which tries to slay all who know of the soul arts because they are in the business of harvesting Souls and want that knowledge to be for themselves people have always enjoyed the way these games - NPCs and this is a great example of fromsoft rethinking conventions their NPCs will straight-up disappear for their own adventures and they have relationships with each other which can get them killed if you do not interfere the usual vendor in a Japanese role-playing game doesn't have a life of their own they stay in one spot at all times and sell their wares for a price which never feels the pressure of inflation local economic stagnation or even response to the player selling them way more loot and they could ever realistically offload that's not to say that the NPC's and demon souls have these votes but rather my point is that the conventional RPG NPC is a simplistic background feature whose sole purpose is their utility to the player but although I like this element of them the true strength of the Demon Souls is characters I don't think is in how they betray conventions but rather in how each one is the microcosm of the games message as a whole this is in the final analysis the story of human beings and our relationship with the world about how we can hold on the hopes who come to despair or become monsters the paraphrase sage frake it is folly think only demons could do demon work from soft did the unconventional and crafting their NPCs but they also understood that the ability to present something is not justification to presented from soft leaves the player to fill in the gaps and it allows us to roleplay and has us engaged with the world on mostly our terms what players get out of this game is what they put in so let's talk about lore an oddity for the time was presenting the lore mainly in item descriptions something which has been possible as long as games have had item descriptions but like vendors because item descriptions were conventionally thought of only as a way to describe items they weren't used for anything else conventionally demon soul seized items descriptions are vague and often includes some really useful tips and facts so players are not just asked to search it out they have actual incentives to do so and this is a very sneaky way to communicate the attitude of the story the worldview and tone of this game was drawing on things field so the story is a bleak look at human beings and that point is made better without chatty sidekicks talking about how saddened they are by the cruelty of the world around them and the game doesn't take for granted any components of its presentation to express this a cursory glance at the environments in this game is enough to get that it's a bleak place and demon cells is pretty long for a first-timer so you take that cursory glance and multiply it by 30 to 60 hours of near uninterrupted playtime and you can see how much the effect of these areas is amplified another old video game tradition which Demon Souls brought back with a vengeance is emptiness Miyazaki based the disjointed presentation of lore on when he was a child reading fantasy novels and because of a language barrier only understood about half of them the worlds from soft creates always feel very cohesive so it sounds like a fairly safe bet that they are created attraction right the story and then strip things out this is only one area in which Demon Souls feels empty another is in the playing of the game there aren't any Waypoint markers or maps to guide the experience there's the note system which I'll get to in a few minutes but the game overall is not at all concerned with robbing the player of their agency or telling them they aren't playing it right players assumably did not buy this game to look at mini maps or read objective lists and almost all the slots usually filled with non-diegetic directing elements are empty here and that emptiness creates a deep sense of agency and ownership you really feel like you own your own accomplishments in this game and it's lack of clutter practically backs you to fill in the gaps which works really well with its aspiration of getting you immersed if you ever felt like demons else's lore was more vague than in its successors consider this it might be solely because of how much more scattershot it is there's no real linear progression of events for the world as a whole I mean there is in the sense that there was the first curse it's aftermath a land relearning the soul art and reawakening the old one but the stories of the worlds of Demon Souls can't exactly be pinned on a clear linear progression which neatly threats together lot Ria's collapse doesn't have an exact time stamp you can't exactly connect it with a lance reawakening the old one or the destruction of the Giants are still the valley of defilement existed in some form when the old one was first lulled to sleep like I said earlier the horrors of this world predate the awakening of the old we were long to assume that only demons could do demon work and the lore in Demon Souls is scattershot because it wants to present this idea as often as it can in as many unique wastes as it can to reinforce it Miyazaki once said in an interview that he loved the European legends such as King Arthur Beowulf and me balloon because they are at their hearts about the conflict between good and evil in the human psyche and they forced the reader to breathe in the unvarnished stench of humanity the stories and demon souls differ from the stories in most RPGs in that they all reinforce the central narrative thrust and because there are simply so many of them with so much detail the worshiper of God and PC in the Nexus is a good example of this if you get her talking she'll tell you that her grandfather was a miner in stone thing and that she would probably not have survived the scourge if not for the miracle stone which he gave her for good luck if you have a high enough faith level before rescuing say in her Bane she'll actually give the stone to you and what do you know this is the only guaranteed way to obtain the pure faint stone if being faint stone is also significant because faint stone is used to upgrade blessed weapons so here we have a difficulty release valve for faith builds dressed as a character which adds to the internal realizing of the world also if you get her to be hostile she actually attacks you with a pickaxe harkening back to her grandfather being a miner and from her short backstory you can infer a lot is it an example of the saving power of faith maybe maybe the stone genuinely helped her survive maybe not assumably others prayed to be saved and weren't statistically someone would have prayed and to be saved correlation is not causation after all and almost every character is this fleshed out this girl is a temporary vendor for a fringe build faith is not competitive but she's completely realized these characters inform the tone and the world without necessarily giving you timelines of events each is a microcosm of the larger theme and every little inclusion in the game seems tailor-made to communicate exactly the game's story I noted earlier that the Bleak worldview of demon souls is brought over from Kings field I will now add to that statement that the unapologetic difficulty was brought over from Kings field as well [Music] difficulty was originally innate to games because the arcades made more money when kids had to put in more quarters to get more money they needed to have multiple failure states and difficulty was one way of achieving that when the consoles emerged difficulty was brought over with them but this time it was mainly because of unquestioned tradition on one hand and on the other because they developers wanted the players to get the most bang for their buck play Thomas in bringing gaming back to basics from soft asked themselves what utility difficulty could have and they knew that it was a way to have the player feel a sense of accomplishment as well as a way of reinforcing the Bleak nature of the world which is pretty great ludonarrative the note sharing system was basically a way of recreating a schoolyard its recreating an era where people shared game strategies it also serves as a way of adding humanity to the bleak world to see a helpful node in such a depressing place a stone Fang or latria is a reminder that they're still good out there and that camaraderie still exists additionally that sense of wanting to create camaraderie is where the online system came from Demon Souls had arguably the most innovative online system ever designed for a video game when it launched maybe the next person you'd meet was an enemy or maybe it'd be an ally his online system added a bit of randomization to the experience and the way it interacts with the world tendency is beautiful I said earlier that this is in the final analysis the story of human beings and our relationship with the world and nowhere is this more evident than in the world tendency system if you want to have full health you must be in body form but body form makes you susceptible to being invaded and if the invader kills you like all deaths in body form it lowers your world tendency which makes the game harder your failures compound in this game and isn't that just beautiful I know I repeat myself but this game clearly prioritizes communicating the Bleak nature of itself over conventional game design wisdom I know that the world in character tendency systems are scorned by some but I think they're among the game's greatest feature of course now that the server's have gone offline this features effect is massively diminished and additionally the world has gotten emptier I relished the thought of one day playing Demon Souls online again which i 100% believe will happen with either a remaster a remake and I'm 100% sure about this because business-wise this is just a slam dunk but one thing I will notice that the game losing such an essential part of itself has added to it in a very very strange way I have fond memories of playing this game online helping people land invading them and now that this component is gone I have an actual frame of reference to compare the lonely offline Demon Souls to and in a sense the oppressive atmosphere of these worlds which were once inhabited by saying individuals is retro actively simulated because I remember these areas full of life as well in that sense there's a silver lining to the server's going offline it's a thin silver lining but it is fair and the effect of it on me at least is strangely powerful I'll get back to the narrative implications of the world tendency system and how it relates to the relationship between people and the world in a few minutes but now I'm gonna take a note from Demon Souls and celebrate a feature which has been unjustly maligned by many I'm inviting you all to chew me out in the comments but I asked that before doing so you give me a few minutes to make my case as much as you probably think I could not be more wrong I know that this exercise will not make any converts because this isn't the first time I've made this argument so strap yourselves in because this might not be very fun to hear I think the highest accomplishments of the grass system blow those of the Estes systems away the early Miyazaki era from shaft games move slowly and hit like brakes they also have input buffering which means you can make demands while your avatar is busy if you attack mid roll your character will attack as soon as they are out of the roll in animation this setup makes the combat more tactically demanding than it otherwise would be and it also makes punishments harsher punishment for failure in combat are represented with health and when you make a mistake you need to consume a health item to offset the liability of low health created by your failure in Demon's Souls these healing items are moon grass collectible and functionally near endlessly stackable items both of these are the features which from saw tried to fix with the estus system in Dark Souls the Estes system places a cap on your max healing items which is much lower than the 99 of every type of grass and Demon Souls and it's also not farmable you get what you get and must make your way to the next bonfire with that amount you can't Kindle the bonfires to increase what you get but there's still a much harsher cat than in Demon Souls as this was a way for from soft to smooth out the difficulty curve by ensuring that each area could not be tanked through by the player stocking up on healing items it ensured that there was a functional cap to health and it also largely eliminated grinding for items from these games and made the experience more focused additionally Dark Souls concerns itself highly with making the player feel lost in the world and the Estes system ensures that they never screw themselves out of healing it also gave from soft a lot of breathing room for enemy placements as they didn't need to justify every area having some enemy which drops healing items or a vendor who sold them insofar as Dark Souls has different aspirations than demon souls I believe it benefitted greatly from the Aster system I really do but insofar as demon's souls has different aspirations to Dark Souls it benefited greatly from the grass system because it imbued a deep sense of resource management into this game as well as a deeper dedication to each run as this replenishes when you reach your objective grass doesn't you need to either farm for it or buy it and whichever you do there's an upfront investment in it wholesale Demon Souls is a lot less concerned with the illusion of Fairplay than its successors and because it is the moments of despair it elicits are much darker items matter here going through the valley of defilement without flowers forces you to farm for them on your way there and unless you have ranged attacks good luck rolling in the swamp with the jellyfish when you die in this game you don't simply need to run to your blood stain and reclaim your souls you also lose your body form and as much as 50% of your health your world tendency can decrease which makes the enemies hit harder most importantly you'll have fewer resources to get the job done than you did before you died charts of art stone are incredibly rare items and when you finally get to buy them they are very expensive much more so than the return to hub items in all subsequent games because demon's souls still has one leg in survival horror it expects you to commit to a run and every failure compounds a note though that there there are definitely some features and demon souls which I dislike and which I feel detract from this aspiration of the game for one you can recover body form at any time so long as you have stones of ephemeral eyes Dark Souls had a much better system where you could only regain humanity at bonfires another feature I dislike is the cling ring because I don't think ring variety is great enough to ever question using it and because I think the health it recovers is too high I also dislike all the passive healing items like the ring of regeneration and the adjudicators shield and finally I dislike how you can kill yourself in the Nexus to offset the liability of lowering your world tendency should you die in a level there is however much more to the demon's souls experience than combat and the unpopular systems like world tendency grass the Nexus hub did a lot of the heavy lifting in making the experience as a whole come together you might not enjoy the world tendency system but it does force you to be careful it makes you experience the dread of dying much more than just losing your soul stars as it makes the game harder and it also gives you an avenue to experiment with once you've gotten a mastery off the game likewise you might not enjoy the grass system but you couldn't really get latria without it from softest ride to recapture that tension in every subsequent game and it just never works because subsequent games don't have a carrying capacity for any systems to get you involved resource management there are isolated moments where items are important like blood borns frenzy high areas or when you get cursed in Dark Souls but for the overwhelming majority of subsequent games I feel that the experience leads way too heavily on combat in Demon's Souls combat is just a means to install a sense of dread which turns into a deep sense of accomplishment but the game also has you commit to items and especially health making this investment is not fun but it's not really supposed to be the investment you made to get the items makes it that much more bleak when you run out and that bleakness can't be replicated artificially I agree that Estes brought a lot to the table but what I cannot get behind no matter how much I try is this notion that since Estes makes it impossible to screw yourself it's better I feel that if you aspire to make the player feel the Bleak nature of the world there needs to be actual bleakness now I'm not saying that all subsequent games would have been better if they'd use the cras system because frankly with the way those games are structured I very much doubt it dark cells his obsession with making the player feel lost in the world probably would have failed horribly if it had included the graph system but it's important to communicate in these discussions the experience as a whole if when elven rig launches you don't want to fight a 3-phase hag of the swamp boss who's a hit sponge when faced to resurrect slave master ho dear for some of that classic from soft gank we were gonna have to signal the from self that the experience of playing these games is greater than the combat as this difficulty and level deserve and we must understand ourselves that often the systems which do the most heavy lifting in making these games so rich aren't fun in and of themselves like I said earlier I know I'm in the minority of people who prefer grass over this and I have had this conversation often enough that I don't think anyone will have their minds changed by this little detour about works hopefully even if you disagree with me and I think you do you'll see that I'm not just a contrarian I really like a lot of the ester system but my affinity for the survival-horror aspect of demon's souls even though it's not as deep as maybe it could be it still runs very deep and I'm very disappointed to see that it hasn't been maintained as this family of games has grown something which has been carried from demon souls all the way to Sakura however is a big focus on environmental and situational awareness at all times this is seen in the level design it's seen in the crystal lizards which lure you to danger but drop rare items in you kill them and it's seen in the stamina system the stamina as you probably know is tied to all aspects of movement run and you'll deplete it have the shield up for safety and it will regenerate slower attack and it drains etc the stamina is pretty much the core of the gameplay and is a fascinatingly simple bedrock to build the game around and it's a resource management system it's not counting frames like in a more dedicated action game it's calculating a bar drop and rise and it's making moment to moment decisions in high-stress scenarios the stamina place incredibly well into the situational awareness game outside of combat - I noted the Crystal lizards earlier but as an addendum you often run out of stamina when you finally reach the lizard and will thus be unable to counter whatever danger it lured you to the game consistently punishes the player for not moving slowly and taking in their surroundings the optimal way to play this game is to listen to the world around you and make sensible decisions and it also capitalizes on this demand for immersion it makes up the player by threading into itself an ambience that at time veers into survival-horror which is another reason I pushback when people discount the grass system because it was very vital to making the resource management aspect of this game come into focus demon's souls has some really involved environmental design my favorite out of all from sub games and is incredibly diegetic and the slow movement and high cost of failure losing yourselves and having wasted the items that got you to where you are are enough to get the heart beating and players really stressed and that is wonderful this is wonderful Miyazaki once said of demon souls that the worlds that inspired from staff were all Western world worlds of fantasy and since Japanese games at the time were moving more and more insular on drawing on Japanese myths it wasn't going back to basics that from Zoff looked to the West I noted already that Beowulf me belong in King Arthur all tales of good and evil in the human psyche and now I'm gonna go over how this idea bled to the world of demon souls boletaria is sun the surface a fairly conventional medieval castle but nuances such as how the draggling merchant is clearly selling items he looted of the dead and executioner morale deserving the demons in imprisoning urea tell the tale of human failure failure to unite to fight the true enemy and instead allowing the depravity of the world to release their dark nature additionally the story of Ostrava our prince ariana land and pure are the stories of two men which faith in the king with in the end was not rewarded as the rumors of a land becoming a demon were in fact true stone fang is the mining facility operating in a mountain where once humans lived and worshipped dragon bones the miners have all lost their souls and the clarity had granted them and are now only functional because the demon fat ministers oversee their actions deeper into the mines we find patches the hyena will gladly send you to your death even though like the Dracula merchant and morale de you guys really should be on the same side [Music] la tria is a mirror to true human tyranny in the past the king was exiled by the Queen for his depraved nature he later returned with an army of demons in tow and transformed the kingdom into a dungeon and a tribute to torture the prisoners dropped spices and latria contains items such as the ring of avarice and what's important to note is that these items are all described as being symbols of royalty but the depraved King didn't just imprison the people see they also dropped shards of mercury stone which to me signifies that he used mercury to rot their brains as a final cruelty the prisoners are made to believe that the Queen can save them and help them ascend but the angels who help the prisoners ascend our demons which the old monk has fabricated and upon ascending the player will see the fate of those who ascended before them they are transformed by the old monk into monsters in the end the king is himself nothing more than an insane vessel for the yellow fabric which is the true cause of all this madness latria has been described by Miyazaki as one of two places of evil in this game specifically though latria is the home of manmade and since it is more so than any other area in the game it communicates the depravity of human nature the art stone we arrive at is clutched by a dead prisoner the environment show the aftermath of torture the darkness and labyrinthian layout draws you in and makes you experience true survival horror shrine of storms was the home of the tempest worshipping Shadow Man who worshiped storms and mourned the dead here the storm beasts fly above and the souls of the Dead inhabit empty skeletons to move about freely this is the most otherworldly environment in Demon Souls but it still revels in the darkness of man patches returns to not be your friend and this area also introduces the magic sword Makoto a cursed weapon with strains the wielders health and has sought after by Satsuki who has no hang-ups about killing you to get it even though and man I repeat myself you guys really should be on the same side in the shrine of storms pagan gods are brought to life by the old one and the shamanic ritual is made manifest as we pass the judgement of the adjudicator through the ritualistic release in front of the body of the old hero and finally we face the storm T was fed by the souls of the deceased the valley of defilement is the other place of evil unlike latria however this place communicates naturally the great sword of moonlight in the Easter al are both revelations from God one is wielded by members of the desert nation who lost their lives one Baz is an amalgamation of leeches and the other is a literal trash but made in Australia rounds up the area with a message that recontextualizes the entire game she is defended by garl Vinland and more importantly what appears to be the discarded children who she revived and who live in the swamp maiden estrellas soul is set to be the most impure of all and it's insinuated that this is because she has cleansed so much of the filth of others sage Frigg tells us that maybe demons aren't all bad and Australia as a great example of this Miyazaki has a personal affinity for the parts which cost the players the most dread but it's not because he's a sadist not only because he's a sadist but rather because those areas display the game's core philosophies the most apparently the Nexus is our hub area and home to most of our merchants if you save Europe and lot reah he'll come here and kill your NPCs this is important because if you kill him and reach black character tendency Malthus staff Elise will reach out to you and ask you to take his place as her dagger methis Tov Elise is a member of the secretive soul Society I talked about earlier and if you do our bidding eventually she will reward you with the talisman of beasts a unique item in that it can be used to cast both miracles and magic and its place in the story is very important because it reads an old wooden amulet resembling the old one it can utilize both miracles and spells the symbol of God was nothing more than the image of the older the spells and miracles of God are both Solon's and thus are both the product of the old one the weapons described as revelations from God all require colorless demon souls to upgrade and those souls you can get by killing black world tendency exclusive demons or doing the work of mephistopheles who only shows up when your character tendency is black you can also get one near execution in morale de and two from sparkly the kraaho but the main way to get them and upgrade the revelations from God is by doing depraved things I'll note though that the colorless demon cells don't just upgrade the revelations with God so I might be stretching to assign meaning to their upgrade material st. urbane is set to hear the voice of God but when the hole opens up to the old one he becomes immensely distraught and claims that the howlings of the old one sound like a hungry child finally sage frake is a former priest who can be made to remark prayer is for the foolish quaint and so to be dead and heaven forbid the day you find out what their so-called God really is the implication behind all of this is that the old one and God are one and the same and that God is there for evil but let's not be too quick to make assumptions it is never said that God and the old one are one in the same but rather that what the people in this world believed to be gone what gives these people the power of the soul ours is actually the old one the intro says that God created the souls and then created the old one and the northern regalia reads legacy of the old boletaria kings the shadow the sword casts is of both the soul brand and the demon brand little is known of its origin even involuntary and royal family law but it is said to have been left in the world along with the old one from malicious purposes so there was seemingly a world created by something before the old one arrived the northern regalia is a composite weapon it's the unity of the sole brand and the demon brand the latter banishing that which the fouls man the former banishing man himself this can be seen as meaning that they represent good and evil but again we must be careful Maiden estrella proves that demons are not inherently evil and King allant reawakening the old one tells us that humans are not inherently good so what exactly is the nature of God in this world was the worshipper of God actually saved by the pure feints tone or was it just a coincidence his frake wrong to ask the player to use the old one for themselves his method offal is wrong to slaughter those who know about the solar considering the destruction the solar spring is black world tendency inherently bad you get it by dying in the pursuit of slaying demons but you can also get it by killing NPCs good or bad Marauder is supposedly an evil character but drops your royal tendency when killed in pure white world tendency killing demons always raises your world tendency but not all demons are evil at times it really does feel like this game is at odds with a moral it intends to express but actually there is a consistent through line and this is where I once again note that this game is about the relationship between human beings and the world we live you're rewarded for healing the corruption of the world and punished for adding to it demons are not part of the natural rubric so it's good to exterminate them human beings are parts of the natural world so killing them is banned fun fact since I mentioned executioner morale de her death always edges you closer to gray world tendency so if your world tendency is dark it gets lighter and if it's white it gets darker Saint Urbain claimed to hear the voice of God right up until his true God starts howling and the voice is unfamiliar to him telling us that he didn't actually ever hear his voice demon souls isn't about the failures of God but man the horrors that afflict the world of demon souls are ultimately man-made primeval demons are born when you corrupt the world enough and what I've always implied from this is that the horrors would end the moment human beings would make it but that humans in this game are too predisposed to sin to recognize the damage they are doing to their world and although the entire game is about this lair of demons mending the torn fabric of reality the story never really lights out remember if morality is in pure white Wilton Z it gets darker and maiden Estrella always drops your world tendency the prevailing moral of the world is that latria the of defilement are okay places the writing on the wall reach humans are screwed no matter what lulling the old one back to slumber is not a solution as it can just be real walking later and judging by how rotten the world was before it was awoken it almost certainly would be again complicating the matter however is the tendency systems insistence on an uncomfortable standard killing demons doesn't always feel like the right thing to do and killing humans doesn't always feel bad and the best the game can muster for a hopeful message is very concerning the game acknowledges that human beings can be awful and it isn't in our will or noble living that the game story finds its small hope for salvation if you bring made an estrellas soul to blacksmith Edie along with a broken blade he will force for you my favorite sword in the game and what I considered to be one of the most significant items in the game the Blue Blood sword it's item description reads a white iron straight sword born from the soul of the demon maiden astray the sword of true nobility endowed with the essential power humans are born with which increases its attack power the blue blood sword is one of the best weapons in the game but is formed from a broken blade like human beings the broken blade has the power to remake itself become more powerful the blue blood sword requires level 18 strength dexterity faith and magic to wield so it requires a character which is very versatile but versatility is not the essential power humans are born with which the swords description hints at rather this sword is unique among all weapons in the game in that once the staff reaches level 25 the blue blood sword will scale with luck and that's the best the game offers for a hopeful message the pure faint stone did not ape the worshiper of God she got lucky Shh frake and her Bane are both saved by the slayer of demons because they get lucky it was luck that the world sees the slayer of demons in the final moments before being destroyed and I think that while it's a hopeful message there's an undeniable bleakman's to it while the morality in the end appears on first glance to be a straightforward expression of Michy's distaste for the master morality and slave morality what with it essentially having two bad endings see my lord breakdown for more info on this one the game openly rejects me cheese appreciation of human capability for self empowerment and instead suggests that luck is the only thing which people can hope for they can pray as much as they want but the only one listening is an ancient poison God made to eradicate Souls I repeat myself the emphasis of this story is on mankind mankind created a horrible world for themselves in spite of their best efforts they brought upon their own suffering and this is represented often patches is a human who goes after humans the old monks insanity spawned the most creative horrors al ant is a man who revived the destroyer of souls in the end sage frake asks the player to side with the old one and by the end you might find yourself conflicted over whether or not that's actually such a bad thing considering how horrible the alternative is [Music] if I had to pick a point of separation between demon souls and subsequent from South games I'd say demons souls had more to say and set it in more earnest although they appear in abundance demon souls whose true enemies are not outer entities or gods but human beings there's the simple stuff like patches will gladly kill you for gain but there's also methis Toph Elise and King allant there are people making complicated dark decisions based on their beliefs and in the world of demon souls this is the norm every fromsoft game essentially tells the tale of the horrors that ensue when someone sought to corrupt the natural world for the acquisition of power but demon's souls is the only one which puts gods and elder beings in the background and has humans in the driving scene and because it does it's the one which has the most to say and this is admittedly a personal opinion the most to say about humanity and that's Demon Souls and in retrospect why I think it might be the best game ever made this game's greatness is its complete rejection of expectations and embrace of a nitch philosophy regarding presentation at launch It was as much a relic of the past as it was a groundbreaking new way to make games it had the hair-pulling difficulty of yesteryear but its online system was so forward-thinking that the online experience of the seventh generation was based on it it's a testament to the power of a coherent creative vision and a willingness to not compromise whether it be the environmental design combat difficulty or Bleak mentality this video is already over 50 minutes long and I've only begun to cover the game it's that incredibly deep a well to draw from and I think it will be for a long time to come I'm a serious thanks if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe for more like it as well as browse around this channel to see if there's anything else that piques your interest I recommend checking out my Demon Souls lore breakdown because I know you didn't actually stop watching this video in the beginning to watch that video I had never listened to disclaimers either and if you want more Souls goodness from me be sure to check out the essays in espresso podcast where we've hardly done an episode yet without getting sidetracked and talking about this series of games the footage I used in this video was applied by blue lizard jello boo Sojin world of long place as played by Ultima raise her hand whom I couldn't contact for permission but I'm thanking them anyways in hopes that they're cool and vari video all of these wonderful individuals are linked below and I highly recommend you check them out for more demon souls goodness also linked below is my patreon account where I give early access to videos to members so if you want to stay at Chuck in as little as a buck I hope this video was worth the time you spent watching it I know I get rambling on the subject of the grass system but hopefully you won't hold that against me for the next few weeks I'm going to get back to work on my super cracked-out Zelda game as the community has named it until we decide what game to cover next tell me your game of choice if you want until next time take care [Music] you [Music]

Channel: AesirAesthetics

Views: 77,217

Keywords: Aesir, Aesthetics, AesirAesthetics, video game, in, depth, analysis, explained, demons, souls, vaatividya, lore, dark, matthewmatosis, zelda, look, back, explored, silvermont, prepare, cry, alexroe, kingk, lost, arts, redefining, remake, ragnarrox, super, bunnyhop, bloodborne, sekiro, elden, ring

Id: UCANeT4cjZY

Length: 54min 8sec (3248 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lucydaydream]

Great video. Although I have always loved the usefulness of the regen ring/adjudicators shield. Maybe they should have had more of a downside, but I appreciate that those items are actually good unlike in most titles where they do almost nothing.

I get what hes saying about grass and how it ties in to the survival horror part, but grinding for souls or grass just sucks. it kinda makes me want to stop playing.

[u/Passivefamiliar]

Ps5 remaster at launch please

[u/[deleted]]

I didnt know des was a thing before miyazaki. Cool! Learned something new.

Agree about its universal appeal. I actually avoided the game because i thought it was a western title, and i dont like most western rpgs. Besides katanas, there isnt much overt japanese flavor. Glad i gave it a chance! God i love this game