Archaic, dull, and frustrating. Those are the three adjectives that best sum up Demon's Souls. Welcome back to the 90s
I rarely do this, but I will preface this review with the statement that I never finished the game. In fact, I never made it past the first main level. If that turns you off to what I have to say, feel free to bail out now. If you would like to find out why a player who compulsively finishes nearly every game he plays couldn't be bothered to waste his time with this hunk of garbage, please read on.
Technically, the game is average. The graphics are acceptable, although that's all I can say about them. The character models look decent for the most part, the lighting is passable but certainly not striking, and the texture work is on par with most RPGs. The animations are also relatively good; in fact I'd go as far as to say that some are genuinely interesting. Everything else, though, is par for the course and maybe even slightly below today's standards.
The sound is also passable. The game sports a relatively enjoyable old-school style soundtrack that at times reminded me of the Diablo games at other times sounded pretty unique. Sound effects are also passable, though again you won't be finding anything to write home about here even with 5.1 headphones. Unfortunately for Demon's Souls, it needed a whole lot more than middle-of-the-road technical features to pull it out of the bog of awfulness.
A long, long time ago in the far away lands of our childhoods, games were hard. Really hard. There were no saves, no checkpoints, and there was certainly no mercy. You had your reflexes, your knowledge of the level you were playing, and maybe a 1 up here and there. That was it. Those days died long ago, and they died for good reason. It's no secret that part of the problem games always had with becoming a mainstream, accepted form of entertainment was that they were just too damn inaccessible and frustrating for anyone other than the dedicated to succeed at. While this did help foster a sense of accomplishment among those who did invest the time and energy to succeed, it also had the effect of seriously hampering the fun factor, which, if we're honest, is really the whole reason most of us play games.
Demon's Souls commits the same sins, but they are amplified by the fact that it has been released in an age of user-friendly games that can be challenging but not frustrating. Essentially Demon's Souls is a stage-based old-school RPG. You select your character and you are then dropped into the world. You get some weak semblance of a story opener that is basically just your standard RPG fare (evil threatens world, your character has to stop it - I missed the details due to total lack of interest in the opening cutscene, but you know the drill). Your very first experience with the game involves you bein killed by a monster that is ludicrously above your level. Yes, that's right. Your experience with the game is prefaced with your death. Get used to it; you will be dying a lot. You then proceed (in spirit form) to a hub area where you are able to chat with other spirits/NPCs and fill in the less-than-interesting parts of your story.
While very boring, poorly written NPC conversations didn't do much to light my fire for the game, but I went ahead and hopped into the first area anyway. It sees your character running up a long flight of steps towards a castle, which you then proceed to scale with bad guys opposing you. Standard fare, but here's the trick: the castle is massive (45 min massive if you were to run the whole thing with a low level character), and it is packed with enemies you have no hope of defeating. If you die, and you WILL die, you will lose all of your experience/currency (souls) and be reset to the very beginning of the level. It doesn't matter if you were five minutes in or thirty-five minutes in, you will be completely reset.
Since you are now in spirit form again due to dying, your health bar will be made smaller, putting you at a substantial disadvantage. Also, since all your souls are laying in a blood puddle where you died earlier (you can pick all of it up again IF you can make it back to the puddle), you will have no real way to upgrade your character or prepare for the challenges ahead. Basically, the game rewards death with an artificial increase in the difficulty level. Sound fun? It isn't. This was my resulting experience: fight through castle, die 20 min in. Respawn, fight through castle, die 20 min in, etc., etc, etc. After 3 hours of this I ripped the disc out and sent it back to GameFly. Any game that frustrates me with a stupidly difficult set-up and then proceeds to punish me for falling victim to it does not deserve my time and certainly not my money.
Those talking about the "accomplishment" and "hardcore" aspects of the game are elitists trying to justify poor game design as old-school. I've been playing games for a very long time and I feel confident saying that the last thing that games today need is a return to the frustrating days of level memorization and sadistic difficulty. You can make an argument that some games today are too user-friendly and are damaged because of it, but that doesn't mean that the opposite extreme, as represented by Demon's Souls, is the answer. I play games to have fun, enjoy myself, and relax. I enjoy a little competition and challenge, but I do not enjoy frustration or endless grinding, trial-and-error tedium. If you like having fun while playing games, avoid this title. If you want to feel "hardcore" or elite by forcing yourself to endure this awful ride back to the 90s, be my guest. I'll be elsewhere.