The recent premiere trailer for the Demon's Souls Remake has renewed gamer interest in Demon's Souls, the original RPG of deadly traps, difficult bosses, and hard-earned victories. However, how difficult is Demon's Souls compared to more modern Soulslikes such as Sekiro: Shadows Twice?
When FromSoftware game designer Hidetaka Miyazaki took over the development of Demon's Souls back in the early 2000's, he took control of a game project everyone expected to flop. For this reason, Miyazaki was able to go wild and experiment with a number of crazy ideas that would normally never make it off the drawing board, such as high difficulty bosses, loss of experience upon death, deadly traps everywhere, and co-op PVP invasions during the single player campaign.
The critical and commercial success of Demon's Souls catapulted Miyazaki to the upper echelons of FromSoftware and taught the industry a valuable lesson: gamers enjoy difficult, punishing gameplay, as long as the challenges are always fair and the player is rewarded for creativity and mastery. As the prototype for the Soulslike genre, the more frustrating parts of Demon's Souls were unpolished mechanics and concepts that undermined this "hard but fair" dictum.
Hard: Demon's Souls' White and Black World Tendencies
The "World Tendency" mechanic of Demon's Souls was a fascinating idea that was implemented awkwardly. Player actions like defeating bosses and invading players would shift the world towards a "White Tendency," where combat was easier but enemy loot and XP drops were smaller. Killing NPCs and dying while in "Body Form" would shift the world towards "Black Tendency," making combat harder, adding more enemies, but also increasing rewards for defeating them. The issue with "World Tendency" was how it punished inexperienced players, increasing the game's difficulty with each death before they could adapt.
Easy: Demon's Souls' Huge Amounts of Consumables
The Estus Flasks from Dark Souls and the Healing Gourds from Sekiro, which both refill at each in-game checkpoint, are well-suited to the die-and-retry gameplay of Soulslikes; players are forced to ration every sip from these healing items, but don't have to grind for more when they die. In contrast, Demon's Souls players who didn't want to run out of healing grasses or mana-restoring spices needed to farm them from low-level enemies, a time-soaking activity which also let players acquire a practically unlimited supply of consumables, the spamming of which could trivialize enemy encounters. This made some fights much easier, but only through lengthy, unfulfilling periods of grinding.
Hard: Demon's Souls' Strict Carry Limitations
Both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are famed for their huge number of weapons, armor, consumables, magical spells, and quest items for players to experiment with, allowing them to create a fighting style and fashion display that fits their own unique tastes. The inventory weight limit for Demon's Souls characters was a frustrating restriction on this mix-and-match style of character building, particularly when checkpoints and safe zones were few and far between. Far too often, players were forced to drop useful equipment, or blocked from picking up quest-essential items during boss battles, because of these strict limitations.
Easy: Demon's Souls' Powerful Sorcery
Sorcery and Miracles were powerful in the Dark Souls games, but outright broken in Demon's Souls. With the right stat distribution, a collection of powerful items, and enough Old Spice to recharge their mana, players could tear enemy bosses apart at range with a barrage of high-tier magic and negate enemy attacks using protective spells. Narratively, at least, it fits the story of Demon's Souls: King Allant would never have woken the Old One and sought knowledge of the Soul Arts if they weren't powerful in the first place. However, this allows for players to cheese through certain areas which were meant to be much more difficult.
Is Demon's Souls still hard to beat today? Yes and no. Demon's Souls, as the original Soulslike, lacks many of the refinements of future games, which let players adapt to challenges and learn from mistakes. At the same time, certain game mechanics, exploited by canny players, could trivialize boss battles and other fights. Ideally, the Demon's Souls Remake will excise the frustrating features of Demon's Souls while keeping all the original, challenging touches that players loved.