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.