Demon’s Souls

Demon's Souls is a bit like getting punched in the balls and then having a martial arts master telling you to get up.  After that, you get punched again and told that you lack discipline because you can't stand up afterwards.  So eventually, you learn to take the nutshots.  Of course, after you can take those the master smashes your kneecap and tells you that you weren't paying attention.  That's what Demon's Souls is all about: having the focus, attention, and ingenuity to expect that your enemy will do whatever it takes to conquer, to destroy you while you squirm.  More than that, it's about having the tenacity to keep trying after the enemy smashes your face into the floor and keeps swinging, just to make sure you're dead.  Demon's Souls is a trial of discipline, one that expects mastery from its players.  That's something that's great about Demon's Souls, the unerring way in which it disciplines reaction.  The game is unapologetic about mistakes, and does not much care if you make them, but it will kill you should you ever make one.  The game is an action role-playing game, in which you create an avatar and go on a demon-slaying free-for-all, but what the game is about is enjoying the act of learning through discipline.  The game is structured in a way that focuses one towards the goal at all times and requires a vigilance and discipline to meet it.  The goal of getting past that cliff, and then up those stairs, down that well, and finally facing beasts and the greatest of demons, offers a simple reward: the life that was taken from you.  You will receive what Demon's Souls sees as paltry; your brittle humanity.

Humanity's weakness is quite telling of what fighting in Demon's Souls is about.  Humanity is indeed brittle.  A human is not the strengthened, immortal god of death running about happily, easily wielding egregiously large scythes and swords.  A human can barely lift these real objects and you are meant to feel that.  The weight of each swing, the realization that one misstep will result in your demise and a great loss.  In Demon's Souls, death is a sacrifice counted in time.  Each step is given a sense of value and because of that, the journey of attaining an understanding of your humanity can be acquired here.  Each weapon that you acquire will become a question as to your ability to wield it.  Each weapon will become part of your humanity, part of your maturity.  The player will find themselves not using certain weapons because they put you in needless danger, or using a weapon because of a certain brashness and confidence in the large reward it may yield.  The weapons become a measure of your character on a deeper level beyond simple ability.  Anyone can wield a weapon, as every enemy in the game will show, it is your charge to wield yours well.  The player will be challenged at every turn to make good on their show of ability, and just as importantly, their ingenuity.

Meeting that lofty requirement, you can challenge even the mightiest of enemies.  Demon's Souls lacks nothing for the feeling of conquering the impossible.  When the player steps into the dominion of the greatest demons, there will be a sense of being alien.  It is not that the player is stepping into territory that they cannot conquer (and they will conquer, for even the game is aware of that much).  Instead, when challenging these foes, the player can only feel foreign.  There is a distinct feeling that the player never really belongs to the world, that the world itself is always trying to push the player out.  But nowhere is that feeling more apparent than the boss battles.  That feeling is present not because the bosses are literally unbeatable, but because the bosses are so single minded in their goal that they actually make mistakes.  They act foolishly partly because it is illustrated that they are creatures, demons.  But they also act foolish because their own goals often make their own existences untenable.  These creatures often live as contradictions to what they are supposed to represent.  In order to challenge an enemy, the normal method for conquer is submission.  To destroy an enemy is to prevent its anger or hatred or fear by snuffing it out.  But that feeling never leaves.  It intensifies as the game goes on, each moment harrowing over the last.

Because of that, the feeling the environment exudes is one that is never truly conquered.  While the bosses are permanently killed, the enemies never go away.  They continually come back every time you leave.  There's a sort of seeded fear of having to maintain a vigilance that is ever greater as the game progresses.  Despite expansive views of wind-swept villages that once were, beautiful lava-filled caves, awe-inspiring castles, there is a simultaneous sense of dread.  Indeed, there are also bottomless pits filled with muck that literally poisons you to death and spiraling towers where you hear the screams and moans of spirits long since past.  The sounds can be somewhat maddening at times, for there is never a moment's peace.  There is no music for respite.  That is how it should be.  For a world filled with demons, it would hardly be fitting for one to ever be able to find a place to relax.  The unique irony perhaps is that the player does have a place to go, where they cannot be bombarded with the deathly reality of the worlds.  Yet in that place, there is never a mood that anyone within it will ever be free.  There is a sad acceptance of fate, one which understands that being vigilant may indeed be the only way to prevent the player from going mad.  That is perhaps what is beautiful about the game as well.  The game never loses the single-minded purpose it has, the vision that it forces onto the player.  That you do not belong, and you can never be made to belong.

Demon's Souls subversion of that longing for acceptance, whether by technical merit or by emotional investment, is what makes it brilliant.  By being the cruel master who continually pounds away, who stamps out your weakness, flaws, and imperfections, it achieves appreciation.  The value of impossibility and imperfection, is something Demon's Souls shows to the player, something lost on most games.  The game shows us that we are not accepted and have no reason to expect that we should be.  We must work dutifully and remain vigilant to have some sense of worth.  Even with that sense, it does not mean we are not marred by imperfections, and we will be challenged forever and conquered many times over.  Still, the player will always get back up, they will continue to challenge the wall which is higher, they will smash their fists into the wood until it submits.  The game does not need to coddle us, because the purpose of any game is to help us think differently.  The sense of achievement from punching a hole through that wood or bounding along those walls for the first time is something that cannot be matched.  What's more, we do not need encouragement to take on these challenges.  To do something that seems impossible, all that one must know is that it should be impossible.  That alone evokes the human spirit's desire to overcome.  Demon's Souls invokes that desire.