The Hee Ho's Half-Assed Video Game Review

Demon's Souls

The Hee Ho heere ho! Instead of introducing a vague band that you've likely never heard of, I'm going to talk about a video game and how my life is now nothing but servitude towards it.

Demon's Souls is a crazy game published by Atlus and developed by From Software, companies that dedicate their existence to making gaming addictive and painfully hard, yet amazingly fun! The plot of the game is negligible: you are in a world based off of medieval Europe. Some random king decided to be a jerk-face and awaken an ancient evil that killed the majority of everything. As it stands, humans have had their souls sucked from their bodies (;D) and go crazy and kill things. Plus there are demons. Anyway, you are a generic adventurer who sets themselves out to save the world. Then you die.

This is an odd game in that you will spend most of the time dead, but not like a zombie, you have a soul form. You adventure to stop the wrongs and whatever. Anyway, simplifying the gameplay immensely: it's a 3^rd person action RPG which emphasizes strategy over skill. You can power level, but it won't help you much.

When you're dead you're stronger, but when you're alive you can get souls from other people to assist you online! There are other groovier things, like you can leave a note for people warning them about a trap, ambush or tell them about an enemy's weakness. Also when you die you leave a bloodstain that other people can touch to see what caused the death, helping them to avoid it.

On the subject of dying; you're going to be doing a lot of it. Killing things nets you their souls, which lets you gain character stats, buy items, learn spells, mop the floors; anything! When you die, you lose them all. Until you find your bloodstain and you pick up the souls from the last life.

You get to build your character however you want to! You can pick a class at the beginning of the game, but it doesn't mean anything after a few hours. You can grow how you want, pick whatever weapons you want, the heaviness of your armour; everything is your choice! You can choose to carry the huge sword and do a lot of damage, but then you're slow since your sword is HUGE (;D). This game has the perfect balance of letting people play however they want without balance issues.

The game is fun, frustrating and an excellent change from the norm of games out these days. I strongly recommend playing it, under the assumption that you have the patience to withstand dying every half hour.

The Hee Ho