So I knew that I was fast approaching the point in the game where I would have no choice but to tackle World 5: the Valley of Defilement. For anyone over 30 you may remember World 5 as being the pain in the dick world from every Nintendo game. The same is true here.
4.2 The Same Thing. Over and Over.
Of course, instead of leaping straight to World 5 and getting it over with I decided to tackle some of the easier levels first. Since I had such an easy job of 4.1 I decided 4.2 was the next logical choice.
This level cheats like a motherfucker. And that has totally nothing to do with my ability to work the controller. Probably.
Here is a transcription of the things going through my head during the many, many times I died:
- Since when did flying Manta Rays hang out right outside the door?!
- Fuck, a grim reaper!
- Goddammit woman! Don't step forward while you're swinging! That's a cliff!
- When did gold skeletons get an aggro range of three miles?!
- I did not walk off that bridge. Musta been the controller.
- Fuck! He respawned!
- Where the fuck is the grim reaper now?!
- Fuck, another another grim reaper!
- Where the fuck is the other grim reaper?!
- Fuck, a grenade! No, fuck, a group of fucking giant attack maggots!
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| His special attack is swinging wildly in the wrong direction. |
While meleeing him is probably entirely possible, the Old Hero is so asking-for-it exploitable I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother. Especially being such an easy target after such a harrowing-ass gauntlet of a level with no shortcuts. That'd be like cancelling a resort vacation you've been planning for months because the hotel accidentally booked you in a smoking room.
5.1 The City of Eyestrain and Bottomless Pits
I zoned into the first level of the Valley of Defilement. The level is a poorly lit nightmare of camouflaged goons, bottomless pits, confusing walkways, camera obstructing scenery, and fucking plague rats that are too small to hit with anything but magic provided you remembered to save some. Which I never do.
Remembering all of this I suddenly had an amazing idea.
1.3 The Brightly Lit Castle of Normal Bad Shit
I would further put off the inevitable stress headache the Valley always gives me by beating up more zombies and Fat Officials.
Level three of this World is nothing much more than a slightly more labyrinthine version of the second level with stronger goons.
Having, for once, remembered to stock up on arrows I had no real problems with this level, as this game is so damn easy, provided you don't mind sniping everything from two area codes away.
After opening the shortcut, I backtracked and released an NPC called Biorr, a level 50 Hypersomniac that specializes in attacking the nearest foe with his face, falling asleep, and being easy to capture.
The point is that Biorr, after being rescued and taking a nap after all of the excitement of someone killing the guard and opening his cell tuckers him plumb out, helps out in the next couple of boss fights.
Speaking of Boss fights, I was now at the Boss fight.
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| Penetrator, most phallic among men. |
Luckily Biorr's strategy of screaming at the Boss, being knocked down, and having 6 million hit points worked long enough to handily dispatch the boss.
5.1 For Real This Time
Remember the character Goofy from the Disney cartoons? The goons in this level look like zombied him to me for some reason.
Having said that: fuck this level. Fuck this goddamn level forever.
Aside from the already mentioned surprise enemies, holes, and eyestrain there are also giant goofy's that always end up being way harder to beat than they seem like they should be.
Also: Fucking plague rats. One bit me and I wound up dying before I could even locate my anti-plague herbs.
After a seemingly endless amount of time spent fail-spamming my way through the level I finally came to the door of the Boss Chamber. The Boss of this particular level is called the Leechmonger.
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| Yes, it is a shit monster made out of monster shit and leeches. |
The reason the attack boost is necessary is because the yucky motherfucker not only has regenerating armor, but regenerating health as well. I think this is because demon leeches eat waste instead of blood and he's standing at the entrance to the sewer of the world. I'm not exaggerating, this World is where all of the piss, shit, abortions, and diseased of the world drain out to.
Anyway, since by this point I had become acclimated to masochism I decided to try a direct assault against the filth spewing giant composed of shit worms. Somehow it worked.
Note to self: Somehow I'm better at bosses and worse at levels than I remember being before.
5.2 The Level Fucking No One Likes
Except for me, apparently. After the eyestrain migraines and frustration of the previous level, being constantly poisoned and slowed down was a walk in the park. It'd be suicide to move above a crawl through this level, anyway.
I had no real problems with the poison swamp itself, as halfway decent preparation takes care of 90% of the difficulty: cure poison miracle, firespray spell for mosquitoes, resist poison gear, MP potions, arrows. That's it, really.
My main gripe with this level was the second half, after the swamp. That part found me back on more goddamn confusing catwalks with more goddamn junk blocking the camera and more goddamn goofies blending into the environment.
Luckily this level also had a shortcut allowing me to bypass the swamp portion of the level so I could switch out gear before the Dirty Colossus Boss and not have to sludge through the entire level again. I did manage to fall off of the bridge though because the fucking mosquitoes got me disoriented.
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| This guy is...what the fuck am I looking at here? |
I think it's sort of a weird decision that FROM decides to constantly put these anti-climactic bosses at the end of fucking nightmare levels. I mean, after all of the precision gameplay and strategy and care I just spent on the swamp it was kind of disappointing facing a boss where the entire fight can be summed up as
- Apply turpentine to weapon.
- Wail on Boss like a motherfucker.
- Win.
I figured I might as well press on into the Plague Swamp, the most fucked up of these fucked up levels. As the name implies, it's a swamp filled with more poisonous filth than the last one. Also: Zombie aborted babies. Fucking infinity of them.
The World is lorded, well, ladyied over by Maiden Astraea, some sort of exiled apostate guilty of some crime too heinous to name (too heinous to name, mind you, in a world with waterfalls of demon sewage and animated baby corpses,) that wound up here, caring for poor, lost legions of undead babies and monster Disney characters. Which would almost be touching if it wasn't buried under such a Japanese level of Fucked Up.
The Maiden herself is guarded by her lover Garl Vinland, the real Boss of the level, as he's the one that puts up a fight. He's also one of the trickier bosses as he combines Tower Knight's defense, Penetrator's offense and Maneater's on-a-narrow-walkway-ness.
On the plus side he's really slow, as his weapon of preference is a 600 pound lump of metal bigger than he is. He's also really, really easy to kite.
After beating Garl the Maiden suicided after I talked to her, the selfish bitch.
4.3 A Clearly Impossible Creature
I know asking for realism in these kinds of games is usually a wish best left ungranted, as it usually leads to tedious shit like farming simulators, first person shooters and every EA sports game, but for some reason I just really, really, really don't buy the flying manta rays that constantly shoot bone spears.
I mean, there's nothing to indicate that they're intelligent, so the flying and the spears aren't magic. And even if they're undead, other undead animals like the face bugs and zombie dogs don't have any kind of super powers that weren't just augmented versions of their alive powers. They just don't make any sense.
I mean, they're shaped like manta rays. That is not a shape associated with the sky. So much so that in reality they are so not capable of flight that the uppest they normally get is beneath sea level.
Anyway, the Storm Castle World Boss is a giant one of these called the Storm King.
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| That should not fucking work! Those aren't wings! They're fins! |
Like the Dragon God, the Storm King has decided to spend his existence hanging out 50 feet away from the one weapon guaranteed to kill it: The Storm Ruler Sword, which shoots giant, manta ray eradicating shock waves into the sky when used in this level.
So the basic strategy is this: Cast whatever they call their Protect spell, dash to the sword, dash to the safe area next to the ruined building, massacre the goons before the King shows up, massacre the King.
Here's how it went for me: Forget to cast the Protect spell, get massacred. Cast the Protect spell, dash towards the sword, impulsively chase after a lizard, get massacred. Cast Protect spell, dash to the sword, get disorientated, get massacred. Cast Protect spell, dash to safe spot, stop to breathe, get massacred because I forgot it's only a safe spot for the actual Storm King attacks. Ragequit.
Later, after calming down, I tried again and managed to take out all of the goons and the Storm King on my second try. Which now that I think about it seems really fucking unfair for the bad guys. I mean, they can kill me all day and I keep respawning every 2 minutes, and they only get to die once. Now, if this game was truly Nintendo hard, then dying more than twice would send me back to the tutorial level with zero everything.
Anyway, at this point I fucked around for a while and completed most of the world tendency events, which mostly involve killing people, suiciding a few times, and then killing their ghost.
1.4 A Random Dead Chick Murders Everyone in the World
The final level of World One is basically just a long path full of mini-bosses.
Right away I ran into the somehow human forms of Phalanx, Tower Knight and Penetrator, which would have probably wrecked my shit if I wasn't still pissed off about the Storm King and not in the mood to fuck around with melee to prove a point.
As it turns out the trio are, just like fucking everything else in the game, weak against arrows from outside their aggro range.
Past a couple of black knights I came to the second dragon which, like the first dragon, seems to spend his entire life spraying fire on bridges if anyone tries to use him. He flew off before realizing he could have easily sprayed fire into the doorway I was standing in and not be slowly plinked to death by arrows.
Past another Fat Official I came to the next bridge the dragon had decided to guard, where Biorr was fighting the dragon using the strategy of screaming, charging directly into a fireball, and then that again.
I remembered from previous playthroughs that there was a certain angle to dash through to avoid the flames. After guessing wrong and slogging back through the level I guessed right and slowly killed the dragon, which was too stubborn to adapt his strategy for a foe from a slightly different angle and too stupid to fly away when its life was in jeopardy because of that.
The final mini-boss was the black phantom of Ostrava, the prince of Boletaria. Which brought me finally to the last real Boss of the game, the False King.
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| Fuck this guy. |
The False King is a fucking nightmare in melee. Not only does he utilize the Flamelurker approach to combat, which involves charging at and instantly vaporizing his opponent's defenses with the force of his attacks, he even has an attack that drains levels off of your character. Since I was both hungry and cranky by this point I decided to be a man and man up and approach the False King like a man and cast poison cloud on him and wander off to make a sandwich while the Boss slowly died over the course of the next several minutes.
The End of the Game
The final level and Boss of Demon's Souls are kind of a joke. It's a corridor inside of a big tree with no enemies that leads to the Real King Allant, which turns out to be a pathetic, almost completely defenseless blob.
So that's Demon's Souls. Overall, it's a lot more challenging than most games that come out these days, but not that hard for someone raised on 8-bit systems.
Playing through it I could kind of tell that this game was made on a budget. Especially after playing through Dark Souls. Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent game, but in comparison one can almost see all of the cut corners and content that had to be jettisoned prior to and during development. And that's good, because it led to a fairly well-balanced and extremely engaging and fun game.
It's not perfect. There are parts that seem really empty, like the Latrian Prison, and parts that feel rushed and incomplete, like the lack of variety in Boletaria and some of the Bosses. And of course the Old One level, while nice to look at, had literally nothing in it. But if you have a Playstation 3 and 20 bucks and haven't played this game, then I can almost guarantee that this would be the best use of your money.
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