A game 4 Pro Players! Masterpiece...
The game is broken up into 5 worlds with roughly 2-4 stages per dungeon, and 1-4 parts per stage. Your main home is the Nexus in which you can stockpile items, increase soul levels/stats, learn new magic, and even receive mini quests depending on one's character tendency. This game has a lot of depth if one is courageous enough to venture that far into it.
Demon's Souls has two separate mechanics called Character Tendency and Soul Tendency (and this is where it becomes confusing). In each world you start out with a Neutral +0 tendency. How you tackle each dungeon is how your character and world tendency is affected. By killing a boss you receive +1 to character tendency. By being above neutral, the player would then be considered in a white world tendency. If a player is to die in a dungeon, his world tendency would drop -1 and possibly cause the character to go in a black world tendency. Depending on the world tendency, new quests, new demons, new armor, and new weapons can be obtained/fought. Most of these require a pure white tendency +3 or a pure black tendency -3. For character tendency, to raise it one would have to kill a black phantom (which is another player playing online), defeat a unique npc, or be summoned into another players game as a blue phantom (coop) and help them out. The character tendency can also fall if one was to kill a harmless NPC, or invading another players game as a black phantom.
The atmosphere, weapons, and dialogue in this game is very well done. Each dungeon gives off a strange medieval eerie feeling (such as the latria prison, boletaria, and stonefang tunnel) and the voice acting goes along perfect with the npcs. The graphics are also surprisingly awesome and all the dungeons seemed to be well laid out with almost no glitches. The weapon system is kind of complex as you can upgrade weapons using boss demon's souls, different types of shards and stones, and unique weapons can be upgraded using primeval demon's colorless souls. The only thing lacking in this game is armor. Through a first time playthrough, a player can wear the heaviest armor and withstand at least one, if not multiple attacks without dying. Once a player ventures into new game+ the best type of armor to use is the weaker/lighter armor so one could be more quick with dodging, as one shot often results in death.
The online aspect of this game is probably the most innovative system this generation. A player can join another player's game as a blue phantom to coop and help assist another player with what he may be struggling with. This also comes in handy for backup when a black phantom player invades one's game. A player can also join another players game as a black phantom in which the two players engage in player versus player combat and battle it off till the death. One of the main reasons a player would want to invade someone elses game is so that they can get their human body back. Once a player dies they lose their soul in which they have to start the dungeon over at the beginning, all the monsters respawn, the player only gets 50% of his or her health pool, and the must get up to the point they were at last to collect all their demon's souls.
Easily one of my favorite games and definitely a must have for this generation.
10/10