In the recent months, my patience has been wearing out. Other PS3 owners certainly must have felt it… “I bought a Sony console, where the hell are my new high-quality role-playing games?!” Yes, I’ve played through the wonderful Fallout 3, but that’s a year ago already. The last title I purchased in an attempt to become addicted to a console RPG was Cross Edge, and let me tell you my expectations weren’t met. This is probably a rant better left for its own blog post, but I’ll just say I’ve had my fill of slow, overly complicated battle systems, especially when it’s the only thing a game has to offer.

When would I get to be happy again with my PS3? Looking at top sales charts, all I could see was shovelware, family-friendly games; not an ounce of new, not an ounce of challenge. I prayed for a new release that would surprise me, that would make me sit on the edge of my chair for dozens of hours. When I fell into despair, a few moments after I abandoned my console and subscribed once again to WoW, Atlus pushed the cookie jar off the fridge and sent it crashing onto my head. From Software had baked a new, savoury cookie!



Enter Demon’s Souls, a game that shatters any expectation you may have of an action-RPG. The first comment I’ve heard about that game is that it can be compared to the Diablo games. This couldn’t be further from truth, actually. I think I’ll use this shallow, inadequate comparison to express my deepest love for Demon’s Souls and tell her why I’d rather spend the night with her and not her supposed “rival” from the Blizzard family.

Let’s start with the game’s atmosphere. In Diablo, it’s dark alright, but you don’t really fear the dark. Some foes are going to emerge from the darkness, screaming or moaning, but you can face them with the assurance that they cannot kill you with the unbalanced attacks, field-clearing magics and stockpiles of instant-healing potions at your disposal. In Demon’s Souls, you are simply a guy that can thrust and swing with a weapon, that has managed to tediously memorize a single spell with training… and you’re stuck in a world where a single demon can jump from the darkness to your right and take half of your health bar away in a single swipe! Trembling, you tread carefully, because this room might very well be the one where your horrible, unforgiving death occurs.

In the second instalment of Blizzard’s famous dungeon crawler, you have a stamina gauge, but all it’s really used for is limiting the time during which you can keep running. Once you’ve exhausted your stamina, you can jump into a fray of twelve monsters and take them all down … after all, it’s not like swinging a 6-feet iron sword is any trouble. On the other side, stamina is very consistent in Demon’s Souls. Simply swinging a weapon takes effort, and repeatedly hitting on your opponent’s raised shield is going to get you tired in few strikes. Once you’re tired, your blows have no strength and you have trouble soaking damage with your shield, so you better stand back defensively. Oh, and besides leaving you quite open to a deadly ambush, running ahead is a sure way to tire you and hamper your fighting abilities.



I fondly remember running around as a Barbarian that dual-wielded gigantic axes in Diablo 2. The bigger the weapon, the stronger you were; that was about it. But applying Demon’s Souls consistency to this too, the fighting style comes with a hefty cost. It takes you a few moments just to start your swing, leaving you wide open for a rapier or scimitar in your chest. Parrying with an axe in the off-hand is ineffective, soaking little damage. What are you going to do against those archers with the two weapons in your hands? You know that your halberd will glance off walls in narrow tunnels, making you totally ineffective? You intend to roll out of that mage’s firestorm in heavy armor?



This is one of the things that please me most about this game: there’s no “one way” to go for all situations, everything is consistent and realistically balanced. It’s a brutal logic that will certainly anger someone who was looking for a game where he could kick ass like Chuck Norris with swords. This is certainly also going to hurt Demon’s Souls sales, but I for one welcome the change in my challenge-less gaming life. This game is, as VG Cats so vehemently expressed, for old-school gamers who killed the robot masters and saved the f@#%& princess.

Demon’s Souls make no compromise. You learn from your mistakes and other players’, via the warnings they engrave on the ground and their bloodstains that show the last seconds before their trespass. As you advance cautiously in the worlds of Boletaria, you know that other players are also sitting tight in their living rooms. You can even witness their ghosts fight unknown foes ahead of you, warning you briefly of the cost of carelessness. There is a sense of being surrounded by the other people playing this game, yet this is mostly a single player experience. It’s a groundbreaking first in the industry, I believe, and to me the game’s originality of concept and consistency of execution just screams “Atlus”. I must say I’m at a point where I’ll buy any game they release simply because I will be certain it’s AAA material.

Yes, I’m blinded by passionate love. I LOVE YOU ATLUS!

WARNING: Huge storyline spoilers ahead!


Many good things have been said of Bethesda's latest gem amongst RPGs, Fallout 3, and indeed the game delivers with an immersive world, an improved character growth system and the well-implemented VATS. After thirty hours of saving innocents and solving problems across the Capital Wastelands, I finally reached the end of my wonderful (and first) journey in the Fallout universe. As much as I enjoyed playing through this outstanding piece of art, I have been very frustrated by a few key elements towards the end of the game. Scenario slips are often considered unimportant in many other games (such as the much-praised Gears of War series), but I think that it splashes mud on my gaming experience when we're talking about any kind of serious RPG. I make the following rants because as a fan of RPGs since Final Fantasy IV on the Super NES and an occasionnal D&D dungeon master, I believe every scenarist in a role-playing game should stay clear of the following mistakes:



Deus Ex Machina'ed Ending

Until the last moments of the game, the player has pretty much total freedom in his actions, having choice between a good, evil or neutral behaviour in any given situation, which in turn brings a reciprocal consequence. The ending, however, is vastly different. The purification machine that the player must activate in order to cleanse all the water around Washington D.C. has suffered heavy damage and must be activated immediately, or it might not work later on. The catch is, the computer that starts the machine is inside an irradiated sealed room, and while you can easily open the hatch to reach it, for some reason you cannot be let out of the contaminated room once you enter it, even if someone is there by the switch outside. Why? Is it because radiation would spread inside an abandoned place? So what if all the water's clean!

The real joke is, shortly before that last chapter, you meet a character named Fawkes who is incidentally highly resistant to radioactivity and walks willingly in a place that inflicts over 40 rads/sec, which is many times as much as the radiation in the cleansing device room! You may choose to recruit Fawkes as your sidekick (he is very powerful I might add), and you even get the conversation option that asks him to head into the toxic room in your stead (he did it once before, after all). He answers something along the lines that he wants you to be the hero. What?! You'd rather ask your friend to commit suicide than go yourself and not be affected by the radiation at all, just for the (false?) modesty of not wanting to be a hero? Fawkes, you're such a mean jerk!

So what's Fallout 3's moral of the story? In order to be a hero, you HAVE to be dead. It doesn't matter if you have 85% radiation resistance, or if a radiation-immune friendly super mutant is next to you, you HAVE to get in there and NO, you can't get out because... the hatch can only open once *cough*. I am frustrated by this outcome (I guess it shows), because I feel totally robbed of my victory since I had to die even if it didn't make any sense at all. I guess I should've played an evil character, because that one is probably going to walk away just fine from the adventure (rich and famous, too!). Onto my second point of frustration:

Shallow, invisible sidekicks

A moment ago I mentionned Fawkes, your friendly neighbourhood super-mutant which accompanies you if you have good karma. Immediately after you recruit him, you may head back to the headquarters of a group that has been in a war with super-mutants to continue the main quest. Guess what, nobody notices the eight foot monstruosity that follows you around like a dog in there. He isn't shot at, you don't have to stop by the gates to explain his presence or defend his existence, nobody cares at all.

Now I understand that having a sidekick in Bethesda's free-roaming single-player RPGs is a new thing, but it's something they should have thought throughly! If the player character is accompanied by NPCs, they gotta also have their own impact on the world, it's how the player gets attached to them (or hates them - see Yuffie). In Fallout 3, it feels like they're just some kind of disposable automaton with a health bar and swappable weapons, none of them having any sidequest related to their own past or personnal objectives, which is truely a shame because some of them seem to have a nice personality set for them through their few introductory dialogues.

In conclusion, I believe those two points are something Bethesda should work on for their next RPG hit. Those flaws do nothing to alter the countless qualities this game has, and I enjoyed playing Fallout 3 as much as anyone else did, but I felt that these issues needed to be mentionned to balance out the "automatic game of the year! it's from bethesda!" opinions. They may be kings of the free-roaming roleplaying games, but roleplaying games consist of more than freedom in choices...



This is my first blog article, thank you dearly for reading it, I will gladly accept any civil criticism!