Exhuminator wrote:
Yep. I beat Demon's Souls.
Congratulations!
Personally, I think that
Dark Souls is an across-the-board improvement, but quite a lot does trace back to DeS. Having played it, you'll see a lot of callbacks in the later games that others would miss.
As for the difficulty, the way I see it, there are two ways you can beat Demon's Souls. The Easy Way and The Hard Way.
Personally, I think that line of thinking is a slippery slope.
First, because there are so many restrictions you can work under to make these games yet harder...and chances are, someone out there has succeeded at beating the game under them.
Second because quite a lot of "easy" tactics are simply making effective use of the tools that the game makes available to you. Personally, I think it's more interesting to keep it on all on the table, especially since you can't effectively build for everything all at once (well, you could
eventually, but not in NG). Different builds run into different challenges. Mage builds tend to be squishy, and have MP/cast management, for instance.
Additionally, online is a double-edged sword. Well, even offline later, since the other games are all more consistent with providing NPCs to summon in lieu of other players. Still, if you can summon help, you can be invaded (or you can just plain get invaded anyway in DS2). In DeS, if you're dying in human form, you're pushing world tendency darker. Keep that up, and that world gets harder.
In either case, you're relying on limited items, boss HP scales up, soul reward gets split, etc.
I don't disagree with having a personal challenge or limit. I think doing all bosses with no summoning is common, for example, and is something that I've done for pretty much all of them at least once (the exception is one of the
Bloodborne chalice bosses).
To me though, it's just that, personal challenge. I think when you start labeling things as easy mode, it presents it as the "wrong" way to play the game, which it's not. That figuring out some way, any way to get past a challenge can end up hooking someone. I think at least one of the Youtubers I've watched regarding these games mentions doing cheese strats on his first run through DeS...and he's ended up doing DS3 speedruns. What counts is having fun.
CFFJR wrote:
4-1 is probably my favorite so far in terms of the atmosphere. The rolling skeletons are pests though, heh. I made it a point not to attack the huge monster in the middle of the courtyard here. Seemed like it was asking for trouble at this point. When is it safe to fight him?
You can fight him whenever. Or not at all. He's not very hard on his own - easily taken out via ranged from the wall or the pit behind him, if you don't want to dance around him. The main thing to watch for is really getting speared from the flying mantas, so take them out first.
I know I'm still early in the game, but I'd like to note that so far I've only died one time to a boss (Tower Knight) versus a couple of dozen times in the levels themselves. Not bragging, it just seems backwards to me. I'm sure they're going to get a lot harder though.
I'd say DeS is generally like that. Most of the bosses are easy - whether due to being gimmick bosses, or just fairly passive with simple AI. It's the often long paths to get to them that are more difficult. Might be different in later game cycles though, I don't know.
