Day 26: Ifs and Whens

Tonight's really going to be something.

Either A: I stay up to 3:05AM (or so) and watch as a video game shuts itself off and brings me back to stark title screen or B: it doesn't, and I have to do the whole thing again tomorrow night. I have the day off of work tomorrow specifically for this purpose. I don't have the day off on Thursday because I may have wildly miscalculated. Please, if you are reading this, send your happy thoughts that it happens tonight, even though I don't want this to happen at all.

Regardless, I still have the entire day tomorrow (whenever I wake up, I suppose) to begin piecing together the larger story, with or without the grand ending. I'll be lifting whole sections of this blog from the last month and plugging in the good bits while also expanding them, going along the plan that I had yesterday. It's easy for me to get stuck in the weeds with this, so I have a feeling that the editors that I'm working with are going to chop the hell out of it. But editing makes good writing great. I'm not even barely good, so let's hope that we can Voltron a really good story out of this.

The plan is to also record the final moments and post them onto the story as well, so I need to find a good picaresque place to mosey around and take in the sights, maybe the ocean side of 5-3 unless the Discord regulars I've met have a better idea. 

So we have a plan in place now. If I don't post anything tomorrow, know that I'll be writing anyway. If the servers are still live, though, you can probably expect something.

Or we'll talk about it on Thursday.

Day 25:

It's time to start wrapping things up. At this point, while there have been a handful of days with little in the way of my active, 28 day diary (with one day completely absent. Sorry), I have enough content that I can cherry pick the good stuff for the USGamer story I need to turn in over the next few days. Plus, I have whatever experiences that come over the next 48 hours, whatever those wind up being.

But I'm getting concerned with the actual shut down now, even more than I was a few days ago. I tried reaching out to Atlus on Twitter for some clarification of the end will come late tomorrow night or 3AM (my time) on March 1. Nothing. I've reached out and screamed into the void of Discord for opinions. Nobody's been weighing in. I know I might be off base with this, but I took the day off on Wednesday thinking that we'd be looking at 3PM on Wednesday, and then felt a little better about it when it might 3AM tomorrow. But there's no way to tell for sure from where we're sitting until a few hours past my bedtime tomorrow night. If I'm wrong, I'm really going to pay for it this week.

Regardless, it's time to start combing through the notes to formulate the story, which will most likely be modified excerpts from this blog. I've been going back and for about the formulation and direction of what I'm getting paid for a lot since last week. The way I just described it almost seems too easy, or cheating in a way. On the other hand, I think it might be a neat format to get some ideas across about player interaction, community engagement (and maybe uprising), and this lost generation of brand new players that just came to Demon's Souls over the past few months. It's probably the way I'll go, but I still have time to mull it over before getting down to writing a draft.

But the timing is going to be a problem. If the shutdown is tomorrow night, I'll have the whole day to get some sleep and head to my favorite bar for some daytime typing. If not, Thursday's going to be a long day.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Day 24: Skipped

This is a little granular, but if I had to choose, my favorite thing about Demon's Souls is the moment I talk to the Maiden in Black to level up. It's not the first time you can speak to her, and as a scripted interaction, you're forced to converse with her as you're awakened by the candle maiden when you first enter the Nexus. But, after killing the first boss of the game, Phalanx, and then engaging the Monumental near the top of the hub area for your charge in the scenario, interactions with the Maiden are transactional; they have meaning and weight. Most of all, like much of the game as a whole, they have consequence. It's time for you to make a decision on your character build as you start dumping statistics into your character. 

Of course, this is a process, not just a singular moment. You're forced to not only run through the un-losable tutorial on your first playthrough, you're also required to finish level 1-1, which is the actual tutorial of the game. The "journey to the Nexus" (as the tutorial mission is called) may have taught you the mechanics, but 1-1 gives you tough love. You may acquire items to help you along the way, but your first trip through 1-1 is a combination of skill and drive. Meeting with the Maiden, then, to add levels to your statistics list, is payoff; a reward for a job well done.

But it's that process that makes the game fascinating from run to run. Really, it's a puzzle that the larger meta game works itself to a metaphorical bone to solve. The learned player will settle on what kind of build they want before finishing 1-1 so they can plan their course through the game. Should you make a magic build? Then you should dump your levels into the Magcic stat and then unlock some spell trainers. Will you try to bulldoze the game as a Strength build? Then, it's a good idea to run into 2-1 immediately for the Crushing Battle Axe, a weapon that scales well with the STR stat, that's found in the first five minutes. As a subset of a subset, whole corners of YouTube have been set aside for the Souls games' "best possible start" videos. Where to get powerful weapons early and how quickly you can overwhelm the start of the game with the lowest possible stats is a draw for a lot of people.

This is what keeps me coming back to the game. Maybe I want to run a Faith build, as I did for this month-long experiment. I wondered that if the servers were cooperating, then I could blast through 5-1 and double back for Istarel, a powerful spear that opens up under pure white World Tendency. If you've been keeping up with these stories, you know that this didn't happen (not even close) since the servers needed some maintenance last week. But that's part of the fun, I suppose; that feeling that the best laid plans might not work in your favor.

Yesterday, I skipped a day of writing. Part of it was because I wasn't feeling well. The truth is, though, that I can talk about this game forever, but I'm hitting my saturation point playing it. I've done a fair amount of co-op, I've fended off and have participated in my share of invasions for PvP. But I've gone through this game dozens of times at this point. Yesterday, as I logged in for a few minutes between family obligations, I sat in the Nexus looking for players to co-op with, ultimately doing nothing at all. I did the same today, too. At this point, I'm left wondering if there are any more roads to travel here. I'm sure there are, but everything has an endpoint. I'm feeling that, now with only three days left, I may have found it for myself. 

I thought about deleting a character and starting a final run. Maybe it would be a Dexterity build, poetically calling back to the first character I finished the game with all those years ago. That's when I actively decided I didn't need to write something yesterday. Another cold truth is that I've never finished a blog-a-day. When I would skip, I would double up and go a little overboard the next day. This isn't quite that, either. Like everybody, my eyes are usually bigger than my stomach in this instance. In the case of writing about one video game for a solid month, even a short one, I guess I'm more like Don Draper: I only like the beginnings of things. 

Essentially, though, things are ending.

That's sad.

Day 22:

At this point, it almost feels as though we're at the victory lap. The only crowd seems to have comfortably settled in for their roles for the next five days; who is going to co-op, where we can fight in PvP, what last bit of forging material can be traded online. But something is wrong.

Having gone through both Discord and the DeS subreddit somewhat thoroughly, it doesn't seem to have occurred to people the actual timing of the shutoff. The in-game communication that appears whenever a player connects online states that the game will go down at 3:00 EST and then midninght PST. There seems to be a sense that this is read as normal civilian time. But the timing there is incorrect as Eastern Time is three hours ahead of Pacific, making "3:00" more likely to be "03:00," or 3AM.

That changes my plans a bit. I have taken off of work to be there during the final moments, myself erroneously thinking the death knell would be in the afternoon and not in the wee small hours. I suppose it's somewhat poetic that it happens the other way around, but that alters my plans to stream and try my hand at commentary. While I can still do the former, with a sleeping wife and toddler, the latter is a bit more of a challenge at that time of the night. The walls are thin in my house, man.

This, ultimately, doesn't matter, though. I'll be on hand one way or another according to the original plan. I've tried tweeting Atlus on the matter for some clarification, but haven't heard back as of the time I wrote this. I'm hoping for afternoon, actually, but I guess we'll see.

I sort of doubt that we'll talk about this tomorrow, but who knows?

Day 21: A Lost Generation

As I've made a point to play either co-op or PvP as much as possible over the last few weeks, I've been struck by a consistent recurring appearance in the online DeS community-- the brand new player. Seriously, they're popping up everywhere from Reddit posts about just buying the game a few days ago to our friend the Discord high schooler.

Sadly, I need to stop writing this for Reasons. I promise that I'll come back around to this subject, though.

But we won't actually talk about this tomorrow

Day 20: In Terms of "No"

It is Day 20. We're just over a week to go.

At the beginning of the month, or maybe even when the announcement was made to shut off the servers, I began to think in terms of "if." I did this against my better judgment, but so it went. If I play this game again, I thought, I'll do this. If they fix the servers for the month, I'll do that. It was optimistic. Wistful, maybe. I knew that the end was going to come, but it felt good to be excited again, to know that others would embrace it like me for one last time.

Now, I think in terms of "when." Mostly, I ask myself, when the servers are off, and knowing that I almost never used them to their fullest potential until these last moments, will I ever play this game again.

Soon, I'll be thinking in terms of "no."

I have a complex relationship with this game, as has been widely documented and easily read on the internet. I've also written tens of thousands of words about it and the series it spawned, most of which you'll probably never read. None of that really matters, right now, I guess. In my honest heart, when I really reflect on my life and where it's headed, the odds that I'll turn this game on and play through it after the servers are gone get longer all the time. It won't be for a lack of wanting, I suppose: Lately, I've had a strange and perverse interest in replaying the first Kingdom Hearts, but I know I'll never do that. Nobody has time for that shit anymore, to put up without unskippable cut scenes and other niceties that modern game design provides. I'm glad I have my memories of that game, and I do kind of long to see some it again on my own, but responsibility, waning interest, and most of all patience for something like that has long since siphoned away from me. I'll never replay Kingdom Hearts, or probably most other PS2 RPGs unless someone is paying me to do it. This is something that I've made my peace with, regardless of any kind of itch to scratch.

Demon's Souls will soon join that crowded Valhalla. Sure, there will be pangs of regret, maybe. There will be forlorn looks at my PS3 collection from time to time. But while this game has, in large part, made me the person I am today, I can feel a finality to things. Right now, and as next Wednesday rolls along like any other ho-hum, 2-4-1 burgers, wish-it-was-the-weekend, lots to do/ never enough time hump day, the binding on this cracked, dog-eared book is stretching to a close. For me, it might be one of the more melancholy, bittersweet moments I have with this, my chosen hobby, my most loved obsession. To everyone else, it will be Wednesday.

Yes, the rumors persist that Demon's Souls will get a remaster. Sure, I'll probably play it. But it can't possibly be the same game that I'm playing right now, with these same people. This final month should be encased in amber and preserved. I wish I could have done a better job of conveying that to you. Feelings are ephemeral, after all. It's one of my more sad moments to let it drift away with a message that I'll be playing, forever, in offline mode.

Maybe we'll talk about that more tomorrow.

Day 19: The Waste

Last night can probably be called a wasted effort. After making my way through 1-1 yesterday morning for the new STR/END/VIT build, I spent a lot of time on my own while the Discord regulars were off fighting in high-level PvP. Since I didn't have a character at the level threshold they were at to scrape with them, I fiddled around on my own to move this new blunt instrument of mine through the game.

At first, I didn't mind. I like being left to my own devices, and I would happily ask for help if I really needed it. I even lent a hand to other randos that needed some co-op when I could. After about an hour, though, I paused: I wasn't really doing anything other than going through the game as normal. I've all but given up on significant PvP at this point, and I was quickly sliding back into old habits that offline-me would be using. Or will be using again. I didn't like this so much.

I forced myself to ask for unnecessary help from the Discord chat. We couldn't get it to work out because I didn't properly set myself up (because I'm dumb). But with only a few days left (next Wednesday!), I'm wondering if this is symptomatic of a larger problem, or I'm just getting burnt out because I've been going almost nonstop for close to three weeks.

Maybe tonight will have to be all low-level invasion. I need to spice the game up for myself at this point. I also needed to request off a day of work next week. The servers are shutting down at 3:00pm EST, which is where I live. This would mean that they go down at 6:00pm Pacific, but curiously, those are staying on until midnight. I'm honestly not sure how they got so lucky.

Maybe we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Day 18: A Post-Nerd World

Since I barely played more than 30 minutes over the last few days, we're at a point in this month-long experiment of mine where I'm practically all caught up with the gameplay. I only halfway expected this. Knowing that I was going to blog about the game every day for a month, there was bound to be the occasional hiccup period. Something was going to sink, one way or another, and I'd be in a lurch for either writing that day or interesting things to do in the game.

But Demon's Souls is dense. With only nine days left for the servers, we can take this time to look through a deeper lens and see the game for some of its minor intricacies. After all, we live in a post- Dark Souls/ YouTube/ Vaatividya world where the average player is used to over-analyzing anything that series producer Hidetaka Miyazaki's made to this point, and doubling back to Demon's Souls with a more knowing eye is really fascinating.

I used to think of the game's meta narrative in very broad strokes, that the player was the Monumental and that every play through was yet another cycle in its endless, circuitous death march. I still do, much like how I feel that Dark Souls's "age of darkness/ age of man" conceit was a way of saying that the only way to win the game was to not play it at all. Still, Demon's Souls has subtle layers of story that take a more trained eye to see. Thankfully, our internet video deconstruction culture has given us that arguably much-needed boot camp, and we can now see deeper meaning in the smallest details.

Take, for example, the Royalty class. At the character creator screen, classes dictate what the starting stats and equipment loadout can be. The average DeS player know these to be general guidelines, though, since a player with a plan can make any kind of demon slayer they like as the game carries on. But we can glean small pools of depth here. The Royalty class starts with with wizard's armor set, the Fragrant Ring, a Silver Catalyst, and a powerful magic spell that can kill enemies in one hit in the first level of the game. These are powerful gifts in comparison to the other classes. As a member of a royal family, it's telling from a snobby, Gen-X, class warrior perspective that the Royalty has the worst starting stats in the game but packing powerful objects like the weak, though well-funded blueblood that it is.

But in the context of the game, there's more to this story. The Tower of Latria, levels 3-x, is a palace that was overrun with demons and turned into a prison. Inside, we find various instruments of torture along with caged, insane inmates. We also have four very interesting inhabitants. The first is Lord Rydell, the ghost of a knight of Latria locked away in a cell bent on escaping to obtain his earthly remains. He is equipped with a powerful magic fighting staff-type weapon. Above him is the incarcerated Once Royal Mistress (or so is her name in the DeS community). Through her dialog, we find that she was part of the royal court that was thrown into the prison, but remained there as her singing was a balm to the other inmates. Curiously, she sells a rapier and buckler, part of the starting equipment of the Royalty class. Further into the level Sage Freke, one of the two high-level magic instructors of the game, rotting in a cell that can only be opened after obtaining a key from the end of the level, obviously making him a high-profile convict.

Far to the end of the the level, the archdemon boss in 3-3, is the Old Monk. The archstone story of the game goes that the king of Latria, a neighboring kingdom to Boletaria, left on a journey and returned with a brilliant yellow garment. He was changed; cruelly imprisoning his royal family and banishing his queen, making a living doll to take her place. Obtaining his soul and exchanging them will grant either the most powerful spell in the game or a catalyst that multiplies magic power.

Knowing that we also find the rest of the Royalty class's starting armor in the level, we can surmise two important aspects of the game's world. First, Latria is the seat of magic in Demon's Souls. The royal social class is learned in spell casting here, and are bequeathed with magic-enhancing artifacts, perhaps as a birth right. Second, as other members of the royal family of Latria were either banished or locked up (or maybe even killed), you can make an easy leap that the Royalty starting class was part of the Latria bloodline. They didn't make it out of the colorless fog that is mentioned to partition off the Northern Kingdom. Perhaps this person is directly connected to the old king and his parasitic yellow Monk's Collar and is now out for revenge. Maybe they're the child of some doomed member of court, unable to break free of the horrors that surround them since we know that only one person --an unseen minor character-- broke free from the colorless fog. The game gives the player the opportunity to role play while setting up certain parameters to adhere to. They're granted just enough leeway to figure out where these players come from while also concocting what their goals might be without spelling them out completely.

Tonight is back to the grind. I made another low-level build and went through 1-1 this morning planning on a strength/endurance/ vitality build; the most meatheaded of meatheadedness. I'll try for both co-op and PvP with this build.

We'll talk more about it tomorrow

Day 17: No Shirts, No Shoes

Even though I took a short break yesterday from the writing, I also found myself taking a bit of a break from the game, too. I only get a chance to play about 20 minutes' worth when my wife was giving our daughter a bath, but this was enough to power through most of 5-2 to open the shortcut. The truth is, I'm fighting some sickness off, and have been for weeks now, so I just wanted to spend some time with the fam and hit the sack early. I was in bed by 9:45. I am an adult.

But I actually did try to get some co-op in this time, and I think that's telling. I've been trying to play some PvP over the past few days, but without getting into some dedicated fight clubs with other players, the only online scraps I've been in have been happy accidents. And that's ok! The game is set up this way. There aren't any lobbies, menus, or dedicated areas to fight other people online, making the threat of another person coming in a real event. Later games of the series would embrace it a little more and at least include arenas, but here in its infancy the series chose to have enemy invasion be cryptic and terrifying.

But now that the servers have been fixed, it seems that the entirety of the online community is more interested in co-op play, and is evident by a global shift of world tendency toward pure white given the server median. It's hard not to be swept up in this, especially now that I've come to rely on Discord when the servers were in worse shape. When I get back to it tonight, though, I need to set myself on a mission; I need to either find a fight club or start one, because I feel I need more significant online competition. It's possible that this is overkill, but the clock is ticking (only 10 days left), and the deadline for the story is looming.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Day 16: Probably

I'm taking a bit of a breather today, but last night's adventure is still worth talking about. Hours along with Nate, the loquacious high school student, prattling in my earpiece, I find myself missing cooperative gameplay more than I thought; the excitement to do so overwhelming my plans to fight other players entirely.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Tonight, I should probably sleep

Day 15: Amused

I write these blogs at work, usually during my lunch. It's probably obvious at this point, but as I detail the previous evening's Demon's Souls frivolities, I'm obsessively rediscovering the game while not playing it- digging through wikis and interacting with other fans via Reddit and Discord. Over the last week, I've met some of these fans in the heat of killing archdemons, and I found the that interaction lacking (if I'm being nice).

Yesterday's research period was different, though. The online servers for the game were tidied up on Wednesday evening, and while there wasn't an endgame event running globally (as the devs and publishers have done in the past), the Souls-centric nooks of the internet were all aflutter that online functions were working the way they should be once again. There are curiously few players active on the Discord channel, but the remaining faithful were emphatic.

And so, as I set myself for a few merciless invasions, I took some time to co-op with a few players anyway. I knew that it went against my grand design to do this; I wanted to make a new build every week for a different purpose, and Week 3 would be for abject cruelty toward other players via PvP. I felt a little guilty to go this route, actually. But last night, I had the best of both co-op and PvP, the servers working their magic online magic. I still hate listening to people talk when I play these games, but we had a great time all the same.

In terms of what I was there for, the hot and spicy player vs. player action, it's impossible not be even slightly taken by the prospect of another player invading your game at nearly any moment. With equal measures of thrill and irritation, any preset plans through a level are forced to be adjusted on the fly when the message scrolls along the bottom of the screen that another player found their way into your world. No longer will you search for useful, speedy routes from points A to B. Instead, you quickly survey your surroundings for the best place to take on another human mind with the armament that have currently equipped. You may have time to adjust things according to what you have in your current inventory before this other person finds you, but it's not as if you have an opportunity to run back to Stockpile Thomas for gear more appropriate for what's about to go down. Invasions force you to think on your feet and prepare (or re-prepare in some cases) on a moment's notice. Winning the "match" and killing an invading player is that much more rewarding given these circumstances.

This happened to me twice as I ran the co-op game with other people last evening. The first time encounter was not a happy story: stuck at the beginning of 4-2, I decided to try to kill the Grim Reaper and using the area around his corpse as something of an arena. The other player caught wind of this, and backstabbed me to hell and back for it. The second time was a trip through 3-1. The other players I was with were killed off, and on my way back to summoning them, I dealt with a dual katana-wielding opponent that met the business end of my magic stat. Let's take a quick moment, I told the Discord voice chat channel, to bask in the glory of beating this other player's ass, unprepaired as I was. They were amused

Day 14: Reset

Last night kept me in a holding pattern. With the maintenance continuing when I finally switched the game on, there wasn't much I could do except to go forward with the Faith build I had cooking in offline mode. Fun, if a little normal for me, and not exactly what I was doing this for. But, we already know that.

Tonight should be a gas, though. I plan on starting a new character and getting into some PvP scrapes. This is something I've never done. Sure, I've been invaded once or twice and have fought with another player in the Old Monk boss arena, but this is as far as it's gone.

But let's take a second and talk about that boss fight specifically. As most already know, it's not really a boss fight as it is about forced PvP when in online mode. Originally, it was unique and frustrating; every time you die in the fight, there was a possibility that it would be an entirely different player on the other end when you made another attempt. Imagine that for a second. At the game's online zenith, it was a spoonful of randomness in an otherwise painstakingly constructed world. It was messy and imprecise, too. You never knew if you or the other person had a good internet connect, apparent skill gap between the two of you notwithstanding. You could never plan for it, and only prepare by simply getting good at PvP on your own time. Of course, you could cheese the fight by going into offline mode. The dummy AI that the game generated for the fight was a pushover, but like last night's solo run of a few levels before calling it a night, that wasn't the point. The point was to get into the thick of things.

But there was also a tangible reward to do this. For players wanting the thrill of fighting something with reason and self-awareness, letting yourself be summoned for this encounter as the antagonist gives you the opportunity to obtain the Monk's Head Collar, a piece of equipment that will boost magic spell potency. As a prize for an online fight, this item will, effectively, no longer exists outside of hacking the game going forward. So chalk that up to what will be lost in this whole transition phase. Maybe play some PvP, like I will tonight, go get yours right now.

But we'll talk more about that tomorrow.

Day 13: With a Warning

"Why is this game shutting down? Why isn't the maintenance already done? Fucking-"

The voice on the other end of the microphone was cut off. We had finally gotten three people summoned in for the Armored Spider boss at the end of 2-1 --an encounter that at least one of these people didn't think we'd win-- and things were getting a little hairy. Not knowing the giant arachnid's tell for the area-consuming fire breath it was about to spew, my insistence that it was time to run to the safe zone at the back end of the arena was enough to shut everyone up. The sentiment was clear, though, and not exactly wrong.

Last night, I finally found players on the Demon's Souls Discord servers to play online with. This was a welcome relief from the past few weeks' worth of blindfolded dart-throwing in the hopes of finding a more organic co-op experience. It turns out, doing it this way was both some of the better and worse adventures I've had online with the game.

It didn't take long to secure like-minded players looking for some jolly cooperation through the online chat system, though it looks like I may have just been lucky. One of them, we'll call him Nate, was ready and willing to start a new character and shamble through the game. He'd already finished it once, and it didn't sound like it happened in the most efficient way. Nate simply wanted the experience of playing with other people before the door swung shut on the servers at the end of the month. Nate wanted me to get on voice chat, something I've only done a handful of times playing online games, so I dug out the crude single earphone-d mic that came packed in with a PlayStation 4 and plugged it into laptop.

It was immediately lambasted. The second player, we'll call him Kurt, agreed with Nate that it was now the Year of Our Lord 2018 and that I should be using a proper headset. Poppycock, I silently said to myself while joining in on the gentle ribbing of the earpiece. Kurt was noticeably older than Nate, but I discerned over time that it wasn't by much. Both of them were intelligent and even quick witted, Nate something of a motormouth high school student and Kurt keeping personal info on the sly. They have been fighting with the game for online co-op for a few days, they said, doing battle with the janky server and its frustrating habit of disconnecting people from it and not telling them. We would continue this melee as the night went on.

Demon's Souls isn't meant to be played this way, something I cannot stress enough. The game has limited forms of communication by design to maintain a certain mystique. Co-op and PvP are entirely silent affairs with the exception of the series' famous systems of pantomiming gestures to show emotion, much to the consternation of players of more traditional online experiences. Personally, this was the way I wanted to keep things, too. But servers in desperate need of some TLC and a looming deadline for a story make for strange bedfellows, and heading to something like Discord and its "Skype for gamers!" modus operandi was a pill I had to swallow. Maybe it should have been with Scotch.

We each rolled up a new character while going through quaint pleasantries, but nothing with any actual depth like where we are in the country or even to what time zone we might be adhering. The small talk, then, was all business as we individually took a new character --something that was agreed upon in Discord's text chat ahead of time-- through level 1-1 so we could then be granted the game's personal permission for co-op play. We were assessing each other's knowledge of the game and, perhaps coyly, our individual skill. Kurt wanted to know how many times I had been through it before proudly proclaiming to have finished the Maneater boss from 3-2 solo. I replied with the fact that I have only once played this game online (outside of the last few weeks for this story) over the dozen(s?) of times I've completed it. He and I were therefore cordial with each other, but shared a mutually suspicious condescension going forward.

It became obvious through conversation that nobody was exactly new to the franchise, though maybe more green with this particular game. Upon return trips to the Nexus hub world, Nate began vocally berating the forlorn NPC Stockpile Thomas. "This fucking pussy," was his launching point. "Do you know this guy? Do you know the lore behind him?" A loaded statement. There's very little dialog in Demon's Souls. Getting to know a friendly NPC was a matter of hitting the "talk" option when in a dialog window two or three times. Yes, then, we knew Thomas' tragic journey to the Nexus and his guilt for leaving his wife and young daughter to die. Knowing The Lore, though, means that Nate had watched his share of Souls-related YouTube videos; something that's become a cottage industry unto itself even adjacent to the normal (or maybe "normal") explosion of internet video celebrity. The further games in the Souls series purposely obfuscated not only overall plot but also minor characters' back stories, meaning that Lore videos for Souls games were as common in hardcore gamer circles as crying Michael Jordan memes.

Kurt dug deeper, something I could tell was occasionally on the competitive side with me, the least verbose of our new misfit threesome. Nate obviously knew this game from a single run through and what he read on wikis. Kurt did his best to extrapolate on minor items of conversation with varying degrees of accuracy. I found it best to keep the inconsistencies to myself. Closer to 40 than I am 35, we had to get into the shit since it was starting to get a little late for me.

Nate had a yen for finishing 1-2, a reasonable request for low-level characters. I hemmed and hawed over the type of character build to use for the evening's activities, and upon finally settling on a mage (that poor, underutilized battle priest I had been slowly nurturing for weeks too strong to sync with new players) was then peppered with enthusiastic questions: "Wait, why are you in 4-1 right now? What's a 'crescent falchion?' Ok, how do I get magic? Do you have another falchion to give me? This game, man. THIS GAME. My other Souls friends are full of shit for bagging on this." I was quickly summoned into Nate's game after some coordination. Kurt had larger problems.

"Just go on ahead, I'm not connected," he began repeating. Nate and I stood around a small indoor castle battlement passing consumable items to each other while Kurt began the process of quit game/ reload for his character to finally appear on Demon's Souls' North American server. This is a waltz longtime DS players have had to endure for years as the game's already rickety online features seemed to decay over time with fewer maintenance periods between them. I was quietly confident enough that we could take on 1-2's boss, the aptly named Tower Knight given its height, with just two people having done it solo several times in the past. But that was stepping on the point of the whole affair, especially hearing the rapturous tone of Nate's voice when Kurt's summon sign finally appeared on the ground beneath his feat. The server finally deigned Kurt his entrance. The Tower Knight was killed.

I had relayed to Nate, and with Kurt's agreement, that we would run him through some more levels; we didn't need the extra help ourselves. The next target, shaky as the collective confidence seemed to be, would be 2-1 and the Armored Spider. The topics of conversation were becoming looser. The "Best Final Fantasy," -type starters and "I don't want to go to Math," -style prestige. Kurt broke into a protracted, if impassioned screed regarding his Linux, Windows, and Mac machines. Nate took five minutes for an ice cream break, giving the two of us who remained some time to kibitz. "Are you playing the new Dragon Ball game," he asked. No, I replied. It looks really good but I'm not sure I have the time to commit to learning it these days. "Time... to commit...? You don't have time for...?" Nate returned and promptly made a crack about living in mom's basement. One of us was conspicuously quiet.

Finally, the boss arena, and another 15 minutes of playing Ross and Rachel with the NA servers. All three of us, finally in-game, delivered the killing blow to the Armored Spider on our second attempt (somewhat vindicating Kurt and Nate's initial trepidation with the whole venture). On Nate's emphatic, though unnecessary insistence, someone else should be given a hand with 2-1. We return to the boss, and got into it with the server once more. Flustered and tired, we eventually call it a night without stepping into the battle proper, one of my two ephemeral comrades exiting Discored with a warning against the potential danger of homosexuality. It was, somehow, a joke.

Day 12: The Break and the Lie

Last night, I took a little bit of a break from playing the game. This may not have been a smart decision since the maintenance is happening tomorrow right in the middle of my pre-budgeted game time (thus giving me an unintentional break), but I needed to see some old friends, and that meant (strangely) some Garou and not Demon's Souls. Trust me when I tell you that this is something I will probably never say again.

I felt a little guilty about stepping away. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I had a plan, and I wanted to stick with it. 28 days of playing one video game and writing about it is a bit much, but not ridiculous, I think. I even really hit the Reddit and Discourse pavement pretty hard yesterday looking for some good co-op partners. I mean, it's going to happen again tonight, but there was a lot of wasted effort yesterday setting things up when I wasn't even around to follow through.

But this gave me a little bit of time to reflect, too. There's been one topic that I've been alluding to ever since I started writing this continued odyssey, and I suppose that now's the best time to get to it and reveal the truth: this has all been built on a lie.

Alright, maybe that's inaccurate given that I legitimately have a freelance piece to write at the end of the month about the twilight of Demon's Souls online community. But for me personally, I haven't played DS online since maybe its first year of release, and for several years after that, playing online was just never in the cards. I found playing offline to be both more rewarding, and much more fascinating. It all had to do with changing the world.

Of the hidden mechanics that were built into an already dense game, perhaps the most opaque was the concept of world and character tendencies. In broad terms, these are the measure of how "good" or "bad" you and the levels can be based on the actions a player takes. In more minute detail, it works kind of like this:

The game starts in a state that all world tendencies (they're separate for each archostone level of the game) are set to neutral. Kill a boss, and it shifts toward "white." Kill a friendly NPC or die in body form, and it will shift toward "black." The careful manipulation of tendencies toward pure white (PWWT) or pure black (PBWT) will adjust many facets of the game. In PWWT, for example, enemies take fewer hits to kill, will drop more healing items, and will unlock certain NPCs or sidequests. On the contrary, in PBWT, enemies are harder to kill, but rare items dropped from them are more common with their experience point rewards being greater. Certain "black phantom" NPCs can also be found in PBWT, which also drop rare and unique equipment. For an easier game, then, players will want to maintain a PWWT, but a smart and adventurous player will juggle the risk/ reward of PBWT for the better loot and quicker gains in strength. It's a neat system, if needlessly obscure for first-timers.

Character tendency is basically the same, but more so based on specific player actions. Killing bosses and invading black phantoms (read: other players) will shift toward PWCT, which grants a HP boost and access to a rare item when PW is reached. Invading other players and killing them, along with murdering the named NPCs in the game, will shit the CT to PB, which opens up a very dark sidequest for high-level rewards at the price of reduced total HP.

The twist here is that world tendency is linked to the online servers. Whenever you start or reload a game (meaning, you disconnect and reconnect DS's servers), you are subject to whatever median WT all online players are currently enjoying. When the game was relatively young, the fact that the vast majority of people were there for PvE and bosses were dropping left and right meant that there was a natural shift for all levels to be closer to white. People were unwittingly helping to make the game ultimately easier, and so it wasn't uncommon for you to play through the beginning of the game, kill the first boss, and then reload 1-1 to find the PWWT events opened up for you --which includes some of the strongest heavy armor of the game for free. Not a bad gig.

The problem was trying to see everything that the game had to offer, or with careful character building, which had a lot to do with mucking with world tendency. If every time you fired up your PS3 you would shift ever closer back to neutral or even PW, it would make for a lot of wasted time and effort, and in many cases permanently poo-poo any opportunities for PWWT (so, yes, it's ultimately harder to walk the straight and narrow) for a given game cycle. Most serious DS devotees, then, choose to play the game in offline mode, gallantly committing suicide in the Nexus while in body form as to not accidentally infect a given level with any negative WT. This is the way I have chosen to play the game since the end of my first run lo these nine long years past.

The reason for tethering this feature of the game, esoteric as it is, to its online connectivity was that the devs and publishers were able to interact with the players in a limited way. Atlus (and I assume Bandai and Sony in EU and Asia, respectively) would shift the WT to a permanent PB for the week of Halloween, for example, while bumping everything to PW for Valentine's Day which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the date of the finally server maintenance. I'm absolutely feeling a global shift to one side or another happening tomorrow, but will we be dressed in black for the funeral or drenched in white as a more fond goodbye? I guess we're going to see.

For tonight, the race is on for some legit online co-op. I have to use this Faith build for something, so it's back to the online communities for me and what kind of teammates I can find.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Day 11: Uuhhhhhh...

I needed to do some quick touch ups to yesterday's post, but it didn't help anything. Last night's play session made it abundantly clear, and re-reading what I wrote about 12 hours ago just drives things home. It's been 11 days and no co-op of any kind. I'm about to spin into full-on freakout mode.

I've been racking my brain over this for a few days now. First of all, I know that the servers are a shit show, and have been for years. The DS reddit community has been complaining about it off and on for quite a while now, but switching on the game and not seeing any sent messages, not to mention any summon signs, had been bad tidings from the start. But I've been dropping blue summon signs of my own all over the goddamn place since I started two weeks ago, and there hasn't been a peep from the great beyond of other players' ISPs. I mean, I've never been a great player, but they wouldn't know that!

The end result of this entire exercise is an article about the end of DS's online play for USGamer, and I didn't want it to be entirely from my own recollection. Without some significant online interaction over the next few weeks, though, it's becoming more and more likely that the story's going to turn into that, which puts me in an awkward position. I want to be online at the end when the shutdown happens. If I can't play online even now, then I don't want to say that this was all futile, but it's going to make the whole month a bit hollow.

Well, we have some server maintenance coming on Wednesday, and that will hopefully clean some things up. Today will be about begging redditors to play online with me over the next few weeks. I have a feeling that this week's server cleanup will come loaded with an all-white or all-black event, but I guess we'll see.

But we'll (finally) talk about that tomorrow.

Day 10: More With Less

Picking up from yesterday, it's very obvious that the Faith builds in Demon's Souls are built for a single purpose: co-op play. Outside of healing, the vast majority of miracles matter little in PvE, with the exception of its one offensive spell, God's Wrath. Even that, though, is somewhat situational-- there aren't many instances where a wide area of effect spell is worth the MP drain and the vulnerable time it takes to cast vs. the damage it can cause. In confine spaces like the occasional PvP fight club, though, it can be a real asset, I suppose.

But yesterday's discussion started off with things about the game the I normally forget, not the merits (or sometimes lack thereof) of the pious-minded. And, if we're being both honest and objective about Demon's Souls, is that the game looks like shit. It always has.

2009 was the year of Uncharted 2. It was the year of Modern Warfare and Assassin's Creed II and InFAMOUS and Borderlands. It was a year where the PlayStation 3's real muscle was being unlocked by talented developers. These devs were also well-funded, something From Software could never claim regardless of its long history and connection with the Sony brand. Demon's Souls was a game made on a fairly middle-of-the-road budget, and it shows. Character models looks cheap up close and have strange anatomy. Textures look flat to the point that areas in and out of the normal play field can be hard to discern. The frame rate, on- or offline, can sink in a handful of specific areas, especially if you're running through them too quickly for the game to load. You could say that the game has a distinct art direction, but even that's a stretch, if we're being even handed. There are knights with armor. Sometimes there are dragons. That's about as far as it goes.

Miyazaki and the team at FromSoft knew how to work with less to produce the emotions they wanted from the player, though. The feeling of dread from not knowing what was around the corner. The satisfaction of sneaking up behind an enemy and planting your sword in their back. The frustration of dying again, and it being a death you could have avoided. If they couldn't get the job done with graphics, then, they knowingly used the next best thing: sound.

The sound design and direction in the Souls games aren't cited enough for their importance. Each game is basically silent, the key ingredient to some of the best horror movies for imposing a sense of tension upon the viewer. For an interactive medium like games, though, the stakes for this tension are much higher. Not knowing if a ghost is under your bed in the dead of night is terrifying. Getting killed by what might be under your bed, though, is not a feeling that can easily translated to the viewer. In the scope of a film, there would be nowhere else to go with that character; they're dead. In games, the drip of water in a catacomb will start the screw turning. The laughing of an unseen threat around you only ratchets that up. The loud slicing sound that finally rings through your speakers when you are killed by a phantom catching you unaware illicits an actual feeling of loss; loss for the progress you made in the level, or the dropped souls that you may not be able to recover. In more ways that many of its peers, Demon's Souls was a horror game. It expected the player to learn from their mistakes and to drive careful, thoughtful progression, but it taught by fear. It wanted you to think that the boogeyman was in your room at night, and you could only hear him move.

The game felt weighty and dramatic when the music finally did sweep in, though. Again, if we're speaking objectively, the orchestral score sounds distinctly low budget. This was before the bell-toned sweep and ominous choirs of the conspicuously better-funded Dark Souls games. But when the soundtrack did kick into gear for a boss fight, or when the low-tempo drone of the Nexus background music changed into foreboding single organ past the halfway point of the game, you knew that you were in the shit. When I was teaching, my instructors and team teachers used to tell me that no matter how angry or disappointed I was in my class that I should only raise my voice when I meant it, when something was seriously wrong. When I finally did, though, those kids would know that something was definitely, horribly awry. Demon's Souls feels like that. The music is sparsely littered in to the game for maximum effect, and that effect is to amplify your dread.

The latter FromSoft games keep to this philosophy, a decision I applaud. But it's a subtle decision, really, and one that doesn't --by design-- jump right out at you. It's easy to forget, then, what's not ever there to begin with. Other games that have tried to ape the formula (Lords of the Fallen is an easy example) have a constant din of orchestral score, which sounds obvious and out of place. It never thought to jettison that, never realizing that the Souls games, for all of their sense of doom, can take their Ico influence to heart and design by subtraction.

We're close to halfway through the month, now, and no co-op so far. I'm going to have to try to be more active with it if I'm going to have anything of real substance to say outside of my past memories.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

Day 9:

Even though I just ran the game last week, there are still a few things I forgot. For one, the Faith builds are very frail. If you know the game, that may sound a little odd given the starting classes that come equipped with miracles --the priest and temple knight-- are also packing some nice, heavy armor. The problem is that their damage output is relatively small, and a lot of enemies can simply outlast you. This is especially troubling since the early miracles in the game offer you nothing but healing options, meaning nothing can augment your offense like the spells can.

But sorry, we're going to have to talk about the rest tomorrow.

DAY 8: Net. Work.

I didn't have a lot of time on my hands last night. For reasons that aren't worth getting into, I didn't sleep much over the last week, and I could feel my body starting to shut down. I needed to pound out a new character build, and I needed to do it quickly so I could grab some much needed shuteye. Demon's Souls, sometimes a wily dickcheese made manifest in video game form, thought it best to mess with me. I did't sleep well last night, either.

For my part, it was a sound plan: I had decided to roll up a Faith build. I would start with a low-level miracle, boost up a few stats for as much protection as I could muster, and then maybe jump into 5-x to score some Faith-based super weapons like the Large Sword of Moonlight. The odds of going through all of it last night seemed a little long, but I could at least tear through 1-1, maybe even start using the bastard sword found there to get used to playing with a heavy weapon.

But, again, the point of this final month of online connectivity was to play, well, online, and this is where the problems manifested. A few days ago, I wrote about how playing in online mode can affect serious performance issues. Last night, while also trying to stream the game on Twitch, these issues went overboard.

The frame rate plummeted to maybe single digits at times, the auto-save indicator on the top right corner of the screen in a constant, furious shimmer. It happened midway through 1-1 (I skipped the tutorial this time and most of the cut scenes), which was almost sad because things were going perfectly smooth up to that point. As I finished the level, I could almost feel the struggle my PS3 was experiencing in my own heart, which only got worse as loading screens between locations crawled into the minutes. That's way outside of normalcy. Sometimes these things clear up, though, so after checking the world tendency screen and seeing that 1-1 was close to pure white (which, again, I'll get into soon because I know that looks like gibberish), I tried skipping back into the first level. Then the game locked up on the loading screen and I knew that something was terribly wrong.

Reboot the PS3. Reload the game. Find that nothing saved since maybe the first five minutes of playtime. In the realm of big deals, this is relatively small considering that it's just the beginning of the game, but this is indicative of a larger problem here. These servers were never built to last. Over time, the maintenance on them has become fewer and further between. The game, when online, has been slowly killing itself for years.

I ran back through the rest of 1-1 in short order, things loading and moving as they should. I bailed out the first friendly NPC from a sticky situation, opened up a few shortcuts, and made puddle out of the boss, Phalanx. But the nagging feeling that none of it mattered was in the air. Are things saving as they should? Am I just spinning my wheels, here? Is all of this a convenient metaphor for the deeper themes of the Souls games (actually, yes)?

The good news to all of this is that Atlus will give the world a rare server maintenance next Wednesday, perhaps doing a global adjustment to world tendency for an event. Without something like that happening, I was seriously considering playing the game in offline mode for this run to avoid these kinds of problems, even though that gets away from my motives. I can always play like that starting on March 1. Guess I need to grit my teeth and tough it out for the next week or so with this build. It's clear to me now that DS was a game that needs some updating to survive, the network functions especially for how well they're integrated into the larger meta game. Maybe letting poor network maintenance that caused real, sometimes lasting gameplay issues was a sign to the community that ending them may be a mercy killing. Good things end. Nothing lasts.

But we'll talk more about that tomorrow.

Day 7: An End Has a Start

Nobody likes to dredge through the muck.

This alone is the thesis statement that drives the Valley of Defilement, levels 5-x. Specifically, it refers to 5-2, which is a giant, open pool of poison. There's novelty here amongst the larger game: for one, the first 2/3 of it is a wide open area. There are no corridors and few walls or staircases. Once the player finds themselves at ground level, they can suffer laps around it like a kid being punished at football practice.

It's other unique quality is that actual movement in this sprawling state is hobbled. As far as the eye can see --which isn't very far; it's a dark, foreboding place-- your character is walking through a shin-deep poison bog. Normal jogging is reduced to a slow walk, and holding down the run button will only bring them to the jog (while still depleting stamina). Rolling is completely verboten, so in combat situations, you will always be at a severe disadvantage unless you can come across solid ground. Enemies that you encounter here, though, are back on their bullshit. They can move around however they please without the threat of being inflicted with poison. 5-2, then, has garnered a rightful reputation for being the DS community's least-favorite level of the game.

But the twist is that it's pretty easy when taken on a macro level. Once you find a secure route through the environment. It doesn't take too long to rush from one end of the swamp to the shanty town on the other side. It just takes the guts to get into the sludge and to avoid certain encounters. If you've come prepared with enough curatives to stave off the poison, a trip through the swamp isn't all that bad. Since I would venture that most players wait until close to the end of the game to get through 5-2, this is practically no sweat since they would have collected enough poison-curing consumables along the way. If you fight it at a distance, the boss at the end of the area is a pushover, too. So, sure, it's slow going and kind of a pain to meander through, but while 5-2 sucks, it only sucks if you don't have the stones to put up with its baloney.

Since this was my first time through it in a few years, though, I took my time. I wanted to be thorough and collect as many items as I could. This meant a lot of methodical pacing, but aside from a few idiotic mistakes, Finishing it and the major boss at the end of 5-3, Maiden Astraea/ Garl Vinland, took longer than a normal spin through, but wasn't all bad. In fact, I used a boss soul to forge the Insanity Catalyst, which is a magic wand that pumps up damage output at the expense of cutting your MP in half, which was actually more of a hassle than if I just used a normal catalyst. If this was the only thing I'm complaining about, I thought, it's probably time to clear out the game.

So this is what I did. I took an hour or so to do some end game collecting and a little experimentation (a +4 crescent falchion has stronger attack stats than a +5 Epee Rapier. That's kind of bunk given the trouble it takes to find the latter and then build it to that point), most of it to satisfy my own curiosity. I then jumped into 4-4, the final level of the game. This is a short stretch, but layered with endgame challenges and heavy rewards as it should be. I muscled my way to the finish line fast enough, witnessed the tragic end of maybe the only completely benevolent NPC in the game, and paused. The boss of the area, the False King Allant, was a rough fight. Since I was doing all of this to put a pin on the online functionality, maybe I should head over to the DS subreddit, find a player that wants to jump in and summon some help. Or perhaps I'll drop my summon sign and give other people a hand.

Then I looked at the clock, found that I had been streaming for 3 hours, and said "screw it." It's the end of the first week, not the last. I made short work of Allant with the might of the sorcerer that my Magic stat clearly says I am. I then followed the Maiden in Black down beneath the Nexus and killed the final boss, the actual King Allant; a battle meant to be a snap. The Old One was lulled to sleep, the credits rolled. The first run of the game is down.

The last week was cracking my knuckles. I feel fast and loose, now, stretched and ready for the power lifting. We're at an impasse, though: Should I continue on with New Game Plus, or roll another character and find another ideal route. I honestly don't know.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 6: The Hard Shit

I briefly recapped my awkward reacquainting with Demon's Souls internally. Done with 1-1 to 1-3 without much trouble. Finished 2-1, 3-1, and 4-1 ably, but it wasn't pretty. Blasted my way through 5-1 because I needed a break from the torment I was living through with 4-2. Old Hero and Storm King down, so 4-x is finally over. Farmed souls in 4-3. Acknowledged the cancerous elephant in the room. As seeing old friends goes, it was a lot of forced conversation about the weather with only hints of flirting. Now, it's time for the hard shit.

I had two challenges to overcome with Day 6: First, I decided to heed my own advice and start streaming the playthrough. Yes, I probably should have done this from the beginning, but better late than never. Since I've only streamed via Twitch once or twice with the Castlevania stuff and not using a PS3, I wasn't sure how things were going to go. Thankfully, Twitch and Elgato have been around the block a few times so things are streamlined, and it was pretty easy to set up with only minor fiddling with the interfaces to get cooking.

The real issue with the stream, though, was the crazy, years-long problem with Demon's Souls servers. Without trying to really suss out the hows and whys of it, DS was the definition of "sleeper success" for both From Software and especially Atlus, and neither had any idea the game's online functionality would last this long. Because of what I can only assume was an overload of players on a rickety engine and a subpar server from 2009, playing in online mode will occasionally cause debilitating performance issues to the game. Voices and sound will go out of sync. Loading and saving will take noticeably longer than it should. Occasionally, the frame rate drops so badly you'll think Don Draper is trying to sell you your own nostalgia. The Demon's Souls community have tried cockamamie ways of dealing with this over the years, but the long and short of it is that you either tough it out or quit out of the game and restart.

This is something I don't often deal with in video games anymore, a network connection that hobbles the actual game. When I encountered it again on Day 1 for the first time in many years, I was starting to have heart palpitations. Was this, my fifth PlayStation 3, about to go to yet another busted console cemetery? After all, most of my PS3s have gone kaboom shortly after finishing a Souls game, I supposed it would probably be poetic that this one dies during my final month with the game that inflicted the curse to begin with. Do I even replace this thing, though? After February is over, I was thinking of retiring it altogether. I hated having to think about this, and was seriously expecting the worst. Thankfully, an audience member from the stream reminded me of the game's long-running issue with staying online. I don't think I need to push this old horse any further than it needs to go, so I'll try to keep play sessions short going forward. But sigh of relief all the same.

The second major challenge of Day 6 was what I can only call the worst boss fight of the game, the Maneaters. This is somewhat infamous in the DS community for continuing the game's tendency for bullshit. Essentially, you're on a bridge, and in flies a large gargoyle-type thing with a snake for a tail. It's a tough customer, and only made tougher by an environment that you can easily fall off of if you're not spacial aware (or the AI just gets sick of playing fair and it bum rushes you off the ledge). Sounds kind of lousy, but negotiable with some practice, right? Well, smart guy, a second gargoyle-type thing flies in to double the fun when you get the first down to 50% of its health or a certain amount of time happens. 

I suck at this. I start a new game and dread this fight like I just broke an antique vase and my parents are on their way home from work. There are times where I've done better with it and finished it after half hour of slamming my face into a brick wall and there are times where it's burned whole nuggets of my own happiness away. In a game that I love so much, I hate this fight like I hate Kid Rock singing the National Anthem. It's a urinal cake on top of an actual cake. It's the worst.

But not this time. Armed with the Soul Ray spell and a whole lot of nerve, I dropped the first Maneater before the second one flew in. Knowing the fight and the arena well enough to remember that getting to the middle of the bridge was the best area to move around in, I maneuvered past the first gargoyle-type thing in anticipation of needing more space to breath and I chucked enough spells at it in the process that it was good and dead by the time I made it to the sweet spot in the arena. This sunk my stress level by orders of magnitude. It was still a tense fight, and I almost botched it a couple of times on the bridge, but then, something magical happened: the servers decided to start acting up again, ratcheting down the frame rate and moving everything to a crawl. My knee-jerk reaction to this was anguish and that the Maneater was going to get a win it didn't deserve, and on my best ever run at it to boot. But it stopped dead in it's tracks, the enemy data streaming to and from the server had frozen it in place. I don't care if you think I cheesed the game. My flashing this fight and plowing through it on my first go was a cathartic moment. It has, and will never, happen ever again. I peppered that motherfucker with so much magic you'd think we were at a Liberace farewell show. 

Another hurdle down. At this rate, I need to start thinking of future plans for the rest of the month. I suppose I could roll another character and start from scratch, or I could just head into NG+. That might be getting ahead of ourselves, though. Now that the worst boss in the game was dead, I needed to move into the worst level of the game.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 5: For Old Time's Sake

I have a lot to unpack when it comes to the Storm King.

Typically, it's the Greater Demon boss that I tackle first. Since I laid out my usual itinerary yesterday in regards to getting through 4-x for the easy level grinding, plowing through the Old Hero drops you on the doorstep of what might be easiest boss in the game. If you know what you're doing and know the layout of the arena, the Storm King is both a trivial challenge to overcome and bountiful horde of insane experience grinding.

It also reminds me of having cancer.

Now, I have a lot of memories of my time with cancer: throwing up in a hospital chair, shoving food into my face as fast as I could after chemo so I wouldn't throw up at home, watching my then- brand new wife watching me fall asleep, those kinds of things. Deeper stuff. Personal stuff. But when I think about cancer as a period of my life, the most lasting, continuous phantom of that is the Storm King arena.

We generally spend Sundays with my wife's family. At first it was more utilitarian; we lived in an apartment at that point and wouldn't say no to free laundry. Over time, it became the norm, especially in the warmer months. It sounds cliche, but a few beers and some grilled food was a routine that most people can abide by. And we certainly liked to have a few beers or more. But cancer and its treatment will wag its finger to that. I was placed on a pregnancy diet of no uncooked lunch meat, no shell fish, and most importantly, no booze.

I stopped going to my in-laws on the weekends. It wasn't a matter of people being shamed into imbibing or not, but trying times in people's lives have a strange way of playing guilt reversal. People would feel bad for me because I was sick. I would feel bad for them because I might ruin their good time. I know it's not entirely right-thinking, but the longer the treatment carried on, the more I wanted my wife to have some sort of release from what was happening. If she wanted to do it with her parents and a few drinks, I call that the best possible situation.

This left me a lot of Sundays in our apartment alone. Not long before coming to this decision, I had started to use Demon's Souls as a way to cope with what was going on around me, I started digging deeply into what else was going on in the game in regard to character builds, hidden magic spells, and world tendency events. I was using a character I had already built to test these things, thinking that it would be easier to sort of bolt new abilities onto a something instead of running through the game with an avatar built for specific things from the ground up (though, I did that eventually). This meant a lot of time grinding for levels to mess around with this spell or that weapon, effectively turning my first character into a jack-of-all-trades that could steal your life with a stupidly unfair bit of magic or crush your skull in with a meat cleaver.

Most weeks were research periods. Most Sundays were sitting in the shack in the back of the Storm King arena as I silently killed flying monsters. I carefully manipulated the world tendency for maximum experience farming. I outfitted my character with gear best served to double that. For hours and hours and hours at a time, the only sound coming from the room was the occasional "well, fuck" if I were to accidentally get killed off (because of that I finally discovered podcasts). It was a redundancy that I found myself craving, a routine my body could adjust to while I sat in my own malaise. I missed being with my new family, but grinding over and over for all these long hours felt safe and comfortable. Getting stronger as I grew weaker, if you want to slap a metaphor on it.

Yesterday, I killed the Storm King yet again with ease. Like everything else with Demon's Souls, the first time was the most challenging, nearly everything that followed propped by the scaffold of prior experience. I remember cheesing the fight during my first go round by worming myself into a glitched chunk of the environment and screwing the game's physics. I don't need those things any longer. I hit the archstone to return to the Nexus, and while I was leveled beyond the need for it, I couldn't help but come back to that lonely, broken house by the sea, murderously obliterating whatever flew above me. After the previous day's frustration through the catacombs of 4-2, I was taking back control. It was satisfying and bittersweet. Any extra help would be welcome at this point, too. I was gearing up to take on the worst boss fight in the game.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 4: It Knows Neither Friendship Nor Loyalty

A few things happened with this trip.One, I should have been recording or streaming what was going on here. I mean, I'm supposed to write a story after the month is over, so I should probably either begin to promote it somehow or at least have some footage I can refer back to and personal screenshots to use. I guess I'll start doing that.

Two, I was right to be afraid. I decided that running 4-2 was the safest bet after how things were going over the last few days. Not that I'm particularly intimidated by what's left of the game (5-2 notwithstanding because it sucks), it's just that 4-2 is prime real estate for early- and mid-game level farming. Right in the beginning of the stage, you can buy cheap arrows from Grave Robber Blige, a vendor that can be freed from a cell in 4-1. You only need between a handful of them for this exercise, but I tend to buy in the low 200s for future purposes. Anyway, just past our shiny-domed friend is the entrance to the actual level, which is a scaffold of narrow stone walkways overlooking an altar below. Standing in front of said altar is a Grim Reaper enemy, who has the handy ability to summon ghostly giants to come after you. But we want that to happen. Armed with a few things to shoot and the knowledge that the dope is right below you, you can rain down some misery on the Reaper before dealing with the phantoms, killing him and making his sidekicks disappear. The payoff for this is a range of experience starting at around 4500 souls depending on your world tendency (which, I promise, I'll get to in a future post), and since this whole affair takes place mere steps after you enter the level, it's easy to kill this guy, head back to the Nexus, and repeat ad nauseam.

When the game was new, I wrote a small "getting started" document for friends of mine that I would convince to play the game because, let's face it, it's kind of a hard nut to crack for first timers. After explaining the ins and outs of character builds, weapon scaling, item vs. equip weight and all kinds of other junk, I would carefully walk them through 1-1 and then immediately suggest that a person bum rush 4-1 with the explicit plan to get them to this one spot. In a way, this is weirdly cruel because 4-1 is super hard the first time through, but I am nothing if not a strict task master. Besides, this little bit of muscle-building should feel like a reward for toughing through such a hard level. Things aren't entirely a breeze after putting the Reaper loop in play, but it's as good a way to easily build some soul levels until you feel like you're comfortable enough to go on.

So I circled through this a couple of times, already a little advanced for the payoff since I had already flattened a few early levels with relative ease. I even augmented it with killing the black katana-wielding skeleton behind a hidden wall not far from where the Grim Reaper stands. I bought some spells, I bumped up my Magic stat, and sat back telling myself, "yes, old friend. You were a wild stallion that I have since tamed. Let's ride off into this internet sunset together, assured that we're both a little older, a little better. Maybe, even, we're a little kinder. We're more ourselves than we were all those years ago." And then I remembered that 4-2 can go right off and fuck itself blind. 

After the success of the further Dark Souls games and especially Bloodborne, the larger gaming populace has found that From Software's series of pitch black fantasy action RPGs are hard, but fair experiences. In a lot of places, Demon's Souls is only one of those things. Enemies frequently ignore the same rules that your character must adhere to, and specifically in terms of stamina loss. I can't just sit there and continuously swing my sword before a little green meter informs me that it's time to stop. Monsters, especially a few in the Shrine of Storms, don't subscribe to this law of nature. Worse, they have some fairly wily AI, so there are occasions where a literally unstoppable death machine will come tumbling before you on a narrow cliff face while another guy is pelting you with arrows and a giant flying stingray is shooting magic spears at you. It's a lousy setup, and worse knowing that the death machine is prone to accidentally falling into the cliff itself, and when this happens, you will wander off of it with it with absolutely certainty. There are times when you can meticulously plot your advances and ward off foes far ahead of you. There are other times where you are the mercy of the random flight patterns of flying fish and their asshole friends on the ground.

Demon's Souls can get a little bullshitty. People forget this, and everything in 4-2 past our first lucrative encounter with Death is there to remind you of that. You'll meet other Reapers and their ghostly henchmen. Sometimes they'll shoot giant, damaging lasers at you (because, sure). Other times they'll just stumble around. This is the only area of the game that's perhaps more infuriating than thrilling because you just never can tell how things are going to react to you foraging for items and poking your head around corners. It absolutely killed 90% of my playtime for the day just fumbling along to the boss, the Old Hero. As a guy with a house, a wife, and a small kid, getting stomped on by a game that I used to think I knew pretty well was making me seethe in fury.

Then there's the Old Hero himself. This is funny fight because the adversary is blind. This way, you can let him wander off and pelt him with arrows or magic from afar. When he figures out that some jerk is behind him shooting shit, he comes running. If you're in soul form (which I assuredly was after dozens of deaths in this level), you're quiet enough that you can sprint to the other side of the arena before he drops his giant sword down on you. Well, that's how it's supposed to go. I've never gone toe-to-toe with this guy before after figuring out what to do, but for whatever reason, my tried and true plan just kept screwing up. He'd figure out I was running past him and swipe me for an easy kill (magicians are frail, you see), or peg me with a long jump that I had trouble reacting to. There were many, many times where I wanted to just put the controller down and tell 4-2 to eat shit for the day, but I dug deep and remembered that I had a ring that made me harder to detect by enemies. I put it on finally, more than an hour of my day wasted, and triumphantly beat the snot out of the Old Hero. It wasn't the bittersweet death of an enemy that shared some genteel mutual respect with me. It was a curb-stomping. I earned it. It was time for my first major boss demon, and a lot more power leveling.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 3: Stonefang Funky

Day 3: Ok, Then

After my initial burst through several opening areas, I was sitting on what you might call a false sense of security. Knowing that I now had a handful of forging materials to strengthen the sword that I scored from 4-1 that made melee fighting tenable, I dipped into 2-1 to meet with the blacksmith Ed, fixing that I should probably also finish the level while I was there.

Then I nonchalantly walked off a crude elevator and remembered what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.

Demon's Souls is perhaps the most straight-up when compared to the games that followed it. There are levels that are basically straight line partitioned off by bosses, which denotes each sub level (though, you can logically run and entire level front-to-back if you want). Further games in the series are what many consider 3D "metroidvanias" where you roam a giant world with smaller environments that interconnect and circle back to each other. This added a deeper layer of mystique to the games as exploration was now a major concern. But the first Souls game was, in many ways, the most opaque in terms of what was running under the hood. We'll get into this more down the road, but the most obviously difficult concept to grapple with was body vs. soul form, which drove some of the game's heralded multiplayer functions.

It works like this: Kill a boss or use a certain item and your character is "revived," which means that they have twice the amount of hit points. While in this body form, you also have the opportunity to call in other players over the internet to give you a hand, be it killing further bosses or helping you through sticky situations in the levels themselves. The game never explains any of this to you, though, so while this seems relatively straightforward (and having all further games in the series use practically the same method), the onus is on the player to suss out how things work with strange items that never leave their inventory or rare consumables that only restore more hit points on the surface. There are some distinct advantages to staying in soul form, but that's what we'll come back to later.

This tumble off the elevator (and right in the begging of the level, too) was the first real death I had encountered up to this point; scripted tutorial doom notwithstanding. I was pretty irritated, to be honest. I thought I was doing well for being in body form for so long, and a dumb mistake like not accounting for momentum when I tried to drop onto a wooden lift was just about the last way I wanted to experience the first (of what will still be several) deaths. But it reminded me of that the whole point of this exercise was to say farewell to the game's network functions, not to tumble through it for the eventual final showdown with an end boss.

The truth is, I almost never play this game connected to the internet. Yes, this is bit ironic regarding the task at hand, but I feel as though I have good reasons. When DS was released in the US in 2009, I had come off a solid decade of playing nothing but one-player, story-driven, death-march-to-the-end Japanese RPGs like your Final Fantasies and Suikodens. Even the occasional action RPG like the Kingdom Hearts and Fable games were entirely solo experiences. My first initial impression of the obtuse multiplayer functions of DS was to ignore it, then. It wasn't worth wrapping my head around it if I were just going to go through the game myself anyway, so I brute forced my first character past the end credits, and to much consternation. This was a mistake in hindsight, but that first run of the game was enlightening in many ways. Eventually, I learned the game well enough that a second player never felt necessary, the advantages of playing it offline seemed to outweigh the disadvantages. I had some fun multiplayer experiences over the years, but to me, Demon's Souls was a lonely, solitary endeavor. What I'm doing now can't be. This first death slapped me upside the head to remind me of that.

I wove my way through the rest of 2-1 (in my opinion, the best designed level of the game) in soul form, knowing that the rare Stones of Ephemeral Eyes that returns you to body form were still a scarce resource and not worth dipping into just yet. The Armored Spider at the end of the level wasn't even close to the hardest boss of the game, so I decided to drop my summon stone just outside of his arena to see if anyone needed the assistance of a budding wizard. After 15 minutes of waiting, though, there were no takers, and the giant arachnid died painfully like it should. I didn't see the need to stick around Stonefang any longer with it dead and in the ground. Plus, it was time for some power leveling.

But we'll talk about that tomorrow.

DAY 2: Slooww Doowwwwn

Demon's Souls, amiright?

DAY 2: This is going to fast

I left this out of the first post because things were getting a little lengthy, but after three hours playing (still sick on the couch), I found that I remembered a whole lot more about this game than I thought. The roll move in DS as well as early game magic spells have gotten a rep in the community for being fairly overpowered, something later games have since addressed. But once I fit back into that old suit and began running through levels, this knowledge came right back to me like I was getting my ass to Mars. Enemies --nearly all humanoid-- in 1-1, can't handle the starting Soul Arrow spell that the royalty class comes packed with, so even though I slid right back into the old habits of melee attacking most things, when life was low and mobs got hairy, one-shotting enemies with low level sorcery almost made me feel guilty about how I was steamrolling this early level. Almost.

The royalty comes equipped with some weak armor to counterbalance the unfair offensive output, which means that I'll drop dead if a larger monster so much as gives me a funny look. But 1-1, the first level of the Boletarian Palace and the actual tutorial of the game, was easily overwhelmed with these weaksauce duds and the rush of old memories regarding the level layout. Enemies came and went, Red Eyed knights left alone and a noble NPC saved, and the first boss was stomped on with a handful of firebombs and some turpentine. Everything felt good and right.

Now was the time for follow through. Demon's Souls is a game that greatly benefits from a carefully formulated plan, and its discretely separated levels and the rewards/ hazards therein can be tackled in more advantages manners depending on what kind of character you want to build. Want to swing heavy weapons? Next stop: Stonefang Tunnel and their copious forging items. Feeling devout and miraculous? Better head over to the Shrine of Storms to bust out Saint Urbain and learn some higher-level prayers. Scheming that magic was my weapon of choice, I knew that I had to go through the Tower of Latria, affectionately known as 3-1, but the learned player needs not be so dogmatic; there are strong weapons strewn about a many environments that can give a big boost in the early game, it just takes a little forethought and a lot of guts to go get them. For me, then, running into the first section of the Shrine of Storms (4-1) was worth the trouble to grab a sword that scaled with my magic stats vs. the normal stuff that bumps in effectiveness via Strength or Dexterity. I felt that it was worthwhile to just tough it out and finish the level now that I was swinging a melee weapon that doubled my damage output, and then there I was. Two down.

The Tower of Latria was a pushover, then, irrespective how lost I get every time I play it. But the point wasn't to finish the level, it was to meet Sage Freke, a high-level magic instructor. But getting him out of the the level and back to my Nexus hub world meant that you've run the entirety of the level anyway, so killing the boss became an easy bit of side work. Three levels done. This is going easier than I thought.

Car doors closed. I could hear them through the thick brick walls of my house as the sound traveled past old windows that still need to be replaced, the thud of my wife's wide swing slamming the back passenger side shut with a toddler in her arm. I come to, the fugue of replaying this game snapping. Had I seen too much too soon? Am I going to destroy this game? Do I need to start thinking of another character (and maybe one named after a more poignant album title?)? I'll need to stop today, and this was as good a place as ever to do it. I probably wouldn't need to be so concerned, though.

We'll talk about that tomorrow.

The Demon's Souls Farewell Tour DAY 1

So, the day after I announce to myself and the gaping black void that is the internet that I'll try to resurrect a February blog-a-day, I skip the first day. In fairness, I got sick yesterday and could only muster sitting on the couch for several hours before going to bed.

This is ironic, actually.

The real reason I'm doing this is because Demon's Souls --maybe the best video game of the last ten years-- will have its servers shut off on February 28. I have an intense personal connection to this game, and while it will still be playable in an offline capacity after the end of this month, it will be a different, almost hollow experience. Effectively, Demon's Souls will be a husk of its former self; it's ability to connect to other players for eerie, otherwordly multiplayer opportunities stripped away will lobotomize it. I have been contracted by USGamer.net (a website I contribute to and that you should read) to witness the surgery.

Like all articles I write on the internet for money, I began to have a small panic attack about it. I've written a lot about this game in the past as well as its successors, and a whole lot of other people have done the same. Demon's, and especially its follow up, Dark Souls, were born into a screaming YouTube age where whole careers have been made out of people dissecting them, and it's hard at this stage to have something new to add. I could rehash a terrible year of my life and how I used the game as a perverse coping mechanism, but that's already been done, too. But I have things in me about this video game that need to get out, even though I'm having a little trouble finding them at what is now its twilight.

I have concluded, then, that we're going to find them together.

DAY 1 (February 1, 2018):

It has been more than five years, or maybe more, since I've played this game, which is a realization that came to me early in the morning before I would have a chance to sit down and play it. To some, and definitely when I try to look back on it, five years is no time at all. In video game release terms, though, five years is more like ten. Three Dark Souls and a Bloodborne later, I was wondering yesterday morning how much I would recollect about DS. There was a time that I literally knew the game backward; I played it once this way just to see every level from every angle. But after doing the same with the first two Dark Souls games (plus, you know, playing other video games because that's my thing), I had both a lingering fear and childish delight that maybe I won't be coming back to it from scratch, but I won't recall as much as I would have a year or two or three ago.

So, I began to plan ahead, but without spending the morning looking through wikis or message boards. What build should I make for my character? Most playthroughs for me were hybrid melee concoctions, so should I branch out? What about an archer? A priest? Will I have enough time to finish the game in the month that I have with fewer and fewer hours in the day? I can't mess with that when I have a deadline looming. I decide to compromise, then: I only played a magic build once, but I'm too much of a chicken to start with the mage class. I chose to start with the royalty class (essentially, the game's only sort of "easy" mode).

This was only the first of many small-potatoes agonies, though. While it's the first time I've played the game in years, it will likely be the last time I play it ever. It needed to be momentous, almost monolithic. As the only game in the series that had gender-specific equipment, I wondered if I should make an avatar that resembled me physically --a bald, blue-eyed man with an athletic physique-- or should I take a more feminine course to enjoy the few advantages the game will offer me? Feeling the crunch of time as I nursed my illness on the couch, I chose the latter. But it got worse when I was instructed to choose my character's name, which gave me actual pause.

Choosing the name of an on-screen avatar is not the sort of thing to make a person pensively stare at a wall for close to ten minutes in total silence. Typically, it barely registers as an afterthought for me. I could go the wacky, funny route, my "Doc Brown"s and "Butfface Magoo"s running around and terrorizing hapless demons and crazed soldiers in the Boletarian Palace with reckless, fluid impunity. On the other hand, there have been times when I realize that names have been effectively meaningless as a practice. I am the title-free savior of this wretched Northern kingdom, strolling in and out of tunnels and mines dishing out the kind of No-Name justice that would make Clint Eastwood blush. But this time, this final stretch, needed to mean something. I need to capture that finality. I settle on "Dynamite Step," the title of the last Twilight Singer's record. She ventured into the colorless fog, and I played through the tutorial.

This is my fifth PlayStation 3, I think. Over the course of the last decade or so, these small supercomputers had a habit of dying in my home. This is something that has always bothered me, as you might guess. I tend to take care of my belongings, and I fucking babied these things over the years, but foul luck or cosmic injustice decided that they needed to die at my feet every other year or so. This meant that saved data is long gone for old characters (the first one died before my buying into PS+ and cloud saves), which meant that the game was going to force me through the tutorial, which can normally be skipped. I didn't mind, though. The mechanics of a Souls game is branded onto my inner being now, but I don't think I've gone through the trouble of letting the game teach me how it worked or watch the brief intro story sequence since my early days with it. It felt right to start from the beginning, this joke of an opening area. I even tried my hand at killing the Vanguard Demon at the end. That didn't turn out how I wanted, though, and I was really getting the sense that I was right to be concerned. Going through the game again after all of these was going to be a rough ride, and I would see that no matter how much I may have loved this game, and how much it helped me through the hard times, Demon's Souls knows no loyalty.

Turns out, I was wrong all along. We'll talk about that tomorrow.