It's not your fault you can't complete Demon's Souls...
But what if we were to strip away the punishing difficulty? Would there still be anything of value in this game, anything original, fun or even interesting? The simple answer is no.
What we have here, in actual fact, is a quite average dungeon RPG hack and slash with a flawed combat system, unimaginative level-design and severely limited Role-Playing options. We've seen this kind of game a thousand times, so why has this game in particular garnered so much attention from the gaming press?
It's my belief that critics have mistaken difficulty for quality. In a generation of gaming where the average release can be completed on normal in under a week, a game like Demon's Souls can seem like a breath of fresh air, and for a brief time, it is.
You will be astounded by how unforgiving the game is when you begin. After years of being treated like dribbling idiots, Demon's Souls hits you like figurative brick to the face.
After a while though, it becomes startlingly clear that Demon's Souls has one or two design flaws. If you are to die at some point in a level, for example, you are transported back to the beginning and have to undertake the level again. In addition, you will lose all the souls you have collected if you cannot reach the point you did previously without dying. This doesn't only make the game extremely irritating, it makes it bland, repetitive and not very much fun at all.
To add insult to injury, the game is without a pause button; the most basic necessity for any game. Unless you have no other worldly commitments, such as the need to urinate or eat, then I suppose that's all very well. For most of us though, it's simply unforgivable.
Of course the determined gamer will push on and tell themselves 'The game is just challenging me. Challenging me until I vomit blood and weep brain-matter'. But in fact, we can see these aspects of the game aren't really intended to be challenging; the game director, Hidetaka Miyazaki even admitted that Demon's Souls was never designed to be difficult.
So stop worrying about not being able to finish the game. Demon's Souls is riddled with design flaws and there is a big difference between a challenging game and one that is repetitive, boring and needlessly frustrating.