If you missed out on Demon's Souls the first time around, grab it now - for it stands the test of time.

User Rating: 9 | Demon's Souls PS3
Above all, this game is excellent. Even if you find the difficulty to be frustrating or if you prefer more story/character-driven RPGs, you will find that this is a well-crafted game that accomplishes exactly what it set out to do.

Demon's Souls is an RPG that's more about the gameplay than it is about the story. Though the opening cinematic is fabulously gritty and sets the perfect tone, the interpretation of the story is largely left up to your imagination. Which, in this rare instance, was fine with me. Demon's Souls is a game whose story is told in the texture, in the feel of the game - in the lack of music, and the sounds, and the difficulty, the scrape of blade against castle walls, and the dark skies, and the endless, poisonous swamps, and the voices which seem to echo throughout the Nexus, the hub area where you store your equipment and raise your stats.

Perhaps I was okay with the lack of story because the gameplay is so much to my liking. I'm a veteran of RPG/adventure hearkening back to Myst & UO & Breath of Fire, and I've become jaded with boring combat. Demon's Souls does not have boring combat - timing and footwork and awareness of weapon range are essential. Even the lowest of enemies can kill you if you get careless. Yet they are never cheap. Most enemies don't rush you mercilessly, so that you can often live through a mistake. In fact though this game is much vaunted as difficult, it manages to never feel cheap. I only occasionally wanted to throw my controller through the screen. A good thing, by my reckoning, because I prefer to actually be challenged by my games.

With that said, there's a little too much cheese involved in overcoming the game's difficulty. With the proper itemization, everything becomes far far easier. There are many boss strategies that make those bosses absolutely trivial (largely involving archery & cheap blind spots). And once you know the routes and all, the game actually becomes quite easy. My first playthrough took maybe 20-25 hours. My second about 5 hours.

The game is a strange hybrid of multi-player/single-player. Gamespot's review will do a better job of summarizing how that it is, so let me just add - it works, mostly. Though the hints / bloodstains were essential early on, in later stages, I mostly ignored them. The blue-phantom / red-phantom aspect, though, is pretty much spot on.

Unless you're a nancy boy who's scared of a little challenge, then I would recommend this game. At $20 these days, it's basically a no brainer.