Why Demon’s Souls is the most important game of the decade (Xbox, Playstation 3)
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I've actually never played this game (seems too hard for me), but I've seen many walkthroughs of it and love everything about it. The combat mechanics, the visuals, the level design, memorable characters, the list goes on and on.
Apparently this game was so poorly received by Sony itself that they never published the game outside of Japan. Once Atlus and Bandai Namco picked up the game for sales outside of Japan, the rest was history as they say.
Dark Souls may get the glory for influencing a decade’s worth of games, evident by the number of times “The Dark Souls of [X]” has been used as shorthand to describe video games this decade, but Demon’s Souls blazed the trail.
Demon’s Souls is the oft-neglected pioneer that led to many modern games, overshadowed by its more fully realized and more polished successor, Dark Souls. But in 2009, few game developers were taking risks the way FromSoftware had, ultimately reshaping the company and altering the future of game design.
In October 2009, a little game from mid-tier publisher From Software was released on the PlayStation 3. The game is called Demon's Souls and little did everyone know that it would introduce a brand new way to play video games and a new genre. The spiritual predecessor to Dark Souls, this style of game would go on to influence not only other games in this genre but other genres as well. When judging how difficult a game is, Dark Souls is the new barometer. "Is it Dark Souls hard?" "This game is the Dark Souls of platformers." Even the genre it birthed is currently only known as "Souls-like."
It's a pretty neat game for what it was at the time, for what it has influenced since then, and it is definitely is pretty damn difficult. Once you figure out the attack patterns of the enemies and bosses, the game becomes super easy.
I only played Dark Souls since I don't have a PS. A lot of games get labelled as Souls like these days when they incorporate mechanics from that franchise.
I only played Dark Souls since I don't have a PS. A lot of games get labelled as Souls like these days when they incorporate mechanics from that franchise.
There's very few mechanics in the Souls franchise that are original.
About the only mechanic that's arguably original is not hand holding (although is that a mechanic?). That said Steel Battalion (completely different genre) by Capcom (et al.) had permadeath on the original Xbox (it actually deleted your save entirely), and had no hand holding either (and a big-ass controller).
Everything else isnt original, campfires are checkpoints, you gain progression through kills, death causes loss of experience (that can be regained by doing a task with one or more opportunities e.g. Sonic had this just for hits causing you to drop rings you had limited time to recapture), combat is combat sure you have stamina that's used by attacks and defense, just like a number of fighting games.
I've often wondered why these games in particular gained respect when a lot of others with similar mechanics were just ignored.
There's very few mechanics in the Souls franchise that are original.
About the only mechanic that's arguably original is not hand holding (although is that a mechanic?). That said Steel Battalion (completely different genre) by Capcom (et al.) had permadeath on the original Xbox (it actually deleted your save entirely), and had no hand holding either (and a big-ass controller).
There were a lot of games with minimal handholding back in the 80’s. The original Elite and the Mercenary series come to mind, but there are plenty of other examples from that era.
Back on the N64, Zelda: Majora’s Mask had a really unique time based mechanic that I’ve yet to see replicated elsewhere. You had 3 days to complete a set number of tasks before the Moon would come crashing down on the land (1 minute would equal an hour).You could only save by turning back the clock using an ocarina.The drawback is that only certain things would get saved, the rest would be lost.
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Everything else isnt original, campfires are checkpoints, you gain progression through kills, death causes loss of experience (that can be regained by doing a task with one or more opportunities e.g. Sonic had this just for hits causing you to drop rings you had limited time to recapture), combat is combat sure you have stamina that's used by attacks and defense, just like a number of fighting games.
I've often wondered why these games in particular gained respect when a lot of others with similar mechanics were just ignored.
I think it might have to do with timing. Many mainstream titles had become fairly easy. Dark Souls became popular by promising something different and was able to fill in that void.
The IP has come to be known as SoulsBorne.
Witcher 3 and the Souls game are different in what they set out to do, so there really isn't a side by side comparison, more of a personal preference as to the type of game you like to play.
is that mmorpg? looks damn good, but certainly not best game of decade. video just shows another mmorpg
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