Taking the Demon's Souls formula and adding even more to an already amazing game franchise.
It turned into a massive sucess, and will, no doubt, be praised and unavoidably be seen as a classic in years to come.
Now, with the release of Dark Souls, people have high expectations for this game, and boy has it delilvered.
Dark Souls is essentially its older brother; harvest large amounts of souls and make a run to your camp fire to level up your character, will killing big hard bosses along the way and purging the land of evil.
It moves, acts and feels the same as Demon's Souls, but also gives and takes stuff away from it, too. For instance, the game doesn't go into blocked off stages and sub-stages that you teleport to, like Demon's did; instead it is a massive open-world that is an absolute joy to explore.
It does go into stages, though, i.e moving from the bright castle stage, but go under the castle will lead to the sewers, then deeper into Blighttown, and so on. It's all very fluid, and you will spend hours and hours exploring all the great areas on offer.
The bosses are of the plenty, as was the last, and are just as scary and fun to defeat as last time.
Weapons, armour and items are of the bucket load aswel.
There is a huge amount of enemies to defeat, and all require a different tactic to win the battle.
Now the question is, "is it better that Demon's Souls then?" and the answer is going to be, "no". Only marginely so, though. The problems I found with this game is the removal of the magic metre, and are left with ex-amount of times you can use the item, before you have to go back to your campfire to refill it. It made me want to really avoid the magic approach, as it seemed to give me less insentive to do it. I still ended up doing the magic thing, but it was less fun this time round.
The auto-lock this time round is oddly worse. I don't know why they didn't just keep it the same, but you can't switch between who you attack next, without geat difficulty. The only way I found to do it, was to click off the target, and move closer to the enemy I wanted and auto again. It was a real pain and a bloody shame to tarnish this epic game with something so small. The camera also goes alot more chaotic when the enemy moves round fast and alot of the tiimes causes you to die. There is quite alot more cheap kills this time.
The game is also, dare I say it, easier than Demon's Souls. I completed the game with little frustration. That's not to say the game wasn't a challenge, far from it -- Just the thought of Blighttown sends my blood pressure up -- but it was just slightly easier to take down enemies, alot of the bosses just rolled over after just a few tries on them. So in alot of ways I'm disappointed in that sense. Also after completing the game I started it up for the second time to expect it double as hard, but was very left down, as it felt like minial difficulty had been brought up to suit my stats.
All this is just nit-picing though. The game is still supurb, and the only reason I point these things out is because the game is near perfect at what it does.
Graphics: Alot more vibrant and prettier to look at. With alot more emphsis on epic scale. 8.5
Sound: Geat voice-acting and musical score. 9
Gameplay: Near flawless, and one of the most rewarding systems in games today. 9.5
Sh!te Box: Auto-aim is not as good. The changed magic system. Ever so slightly easier.
Overall: GOTY for me by a mile. It's Demon's only on a broader scale. It does things better in alot of ways, but takes a couple of things away from Demon's at the same time. It's a whisker short of bettering Demon's, but just falls short due to a couple of niggles. Not a fan of Demon's Souls? You won't be won over here either. But fans of a challenge or fans of Demon's will rejoice over this brilliant fantasy RPG. Essential.