The Deadpool said:
On his defense, Yahtzee never said the game was BAD. He said it was too hard for him...
Well, to be fair what he more or less said was that he felt the game wasted his time. He elaborated on his review in "Extra Punctuation". His major complaint more or less being that every time you die you need to restart a level with all the enemies respawned. Meaning that it can take up to 30 minutes to get back to the part you actually need to work on, and it becomes rapidly repetitive, and repetition leads to you making mistakes in your haste to get back to where you were.
On some levels he is correct about that, but if it wasn't for that element it would be a very short game, and quite probably way too easy. For example the boss fights in many cases wouldn't be anything special if you could just zerg them from a checkpoint (even if their health came back).
The problem being that his comments on how to fix Demon's Souls would basically ruin the entire experience, which I see as being similar to oldschool sidescrollers like "Shinobi" where you need to do a whole level including the boss perfectly in order to progress. The remake of Shinobi being called "the game that hates you" simply because it kept the old school attitude.
More checkpoints, and a difficulty reduction (though honestly I have no idea how since the way the game is set up it would be an all or nothing desicians) would have made this just another action-RPG with some horrible physics (running past a corpse which then blows around like a leaf on the wind, and maybe even getting stuck on your avatar for example).
Now personally the part of the game that I think can go frakk right off is the farming. I can understand wanting the trophies and such to not be a "gimmie" but most of them aren't skill related, but patience related. Involving running through the various worlds once you master them hundreds of times waiting for "pure" ores and such to drop so you can forge weapons and such. So basically not only are you going to spend 8-10 hours clearing a section of a world (especially if your bad at it like me) but then your going to hang around killing millions of skeletons in hopes you'll get a pure bladestone or whatever. I don't mind a bit of a grind, but this is totally ridiculous.
What's more one point I think reviewers NEED to slam the game on is that the whole thing is based on an online gimmick, with the spirits and messages of other players all over the place. The problem is that to get everything you need to be able to control world tendencies to spawn pure white and pure black events. It's not a hard concept to work with, but the game is bugged so it has a tendency to reset the world to neutral when your online, and so far they have found absolutly NO way of fixing it. This means you can either play offline and lose out on the biggest gimmick of the game, OR you can hope you can find time during a server event when the company hard-sets the world tendencies on the servers.
I wasn't planning on playing Demon's Souls again (got an American copy to replace my broken Asian one) until I finished a couple of other games, but have been goofing off with a couple of characters specifically to get some of the pure white items so I'll have them when I play more seriously later. I for example just developed a female Royal with the binded armor suit who is working on building the stats to use that spear from 4-1, and a male soldier who is developing into a tank with the Brushwood armor suit (ring of great strength until I can grind enough Stamina).
This is a big deal because I have no intention of playing offline, and that means I would otherwise never have had a chance to get any of that stuff simply because of how badly they frakked things up.
Truthfully I'm a little disappointed that as a reviewer Yahtzee (and noone else I've seen for that matter) didn't talk about how badly they dropped the ball here. As a professional he SHOULD have figured that bit out.
