Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 246: Demon's Souls

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

In the past decade, developer From Software went from making poorly reviewed oddities to being one of the most important developers in our modern era. And it all started with Demon's Souls, a humble, slightly janky game that challenged the new standard of frictionless gameplay in the HD era, and delivered an experience we didn't know we were so hungry for. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy's Parish, USgamer's Kat Bailey, and Duckfeed.tv's Gary Butterfield as the crew explores the bleak and endlessly compelling world of Demon's Souls. Listen now, so the world might be mended. So the world might be mended.

This week on Retronauts, we go over proper apostrophe use. Hello, everybody. It's time for another episode of Retronauts. Mackey and today's topic is the from software game demons souls and yes it is now a decade old and we all should feel old because of that before I continue who else is here with me on this very special episode right over there it's Jeremy Parrish the dark souls of deadweight okay number one Jeremy you get three strikes with the dark souls of jokes that strike one we're about 20 seconds in that's my only okay there are three strikes total on this podcast if I hear two more of those, I'm shutting down, and the listeners will be very upset. So, Kat. It's the Dark Souls of

Threats. Okay, number two. I'm serious. Don't push me. Don't push me. Please introduce yourself a person to my right here. Yeah, this is Kat Bailey from U.S. Gamer, and it's official. My career is now retro. Yes, I'm feeling that way, too. And who do we have on the line? This is a very special guest. Oh, answering your soapstone message, it is Gary Butterfield. That's right. I'm doing the praise the sun gesture towards you. you. I'm spamming the hell out of it. I'm trying not to knock over any mics.

It's the end of the joke. I'm just doing it over and over. I love that we're making Dark Souls references on a Demon Souls podcast. Well, I mean, that's the game people. No one says, okay, so this is me quoting. This is not me making the joke. No one says the Demon Souls a blank. And I want to, I think I need to talk about that joke now because I don't know how everyone

feels about that joke, but I feel like there was a time in the cultural bubble in which that joke was made to reference people. saying like this is the Dark Souls of Blank or, you know, it's sort of like this is the Citizen Kane of Blank. It was a reference. It was people were, you know, we kind of talked about this on the Etrine Odyssey episode. Yes. Which actually references this episode. So people are trapped in a time loop. Anyway, this one comes out first. Yeah. So we talked about that in the Etron Odyssey episode, just how video game had been pushed more into a casual, accessible space. So, you know, when people wanted to reference something that is, hey, challenging and difficult

and didn't necessarily have, you know, the context of, say, 8-bit games, what was their touchstone? It was Demon Souls, or Dark Souls, because that's, you know, the only game that they knew of at the time that, you know, was in recent memory that actually pushed them and challenged them and made them say, oh, I need to actually pay attention to how I play. It was fine. It was a fine comparison, but it was overused, but I feel like that joke is invoked when you just want to talk about the games, which I find unfair, so I'm just putting it out there. Literally the Kingsfield for the ancient city of discourse. Exactly. Thank you. Finally. As recently as last year, people were invoking dark souls to describe things like

God of Wars combat. Even though they have virtually nothing in common, it's still shorthand for kind of meteor, more tactical combat that's not just hack and slash and that kind of thing. And it's a cliche for a reason at this point, but people are still using it, still beating that dead horse. Well, it does speak to kind of the moment that Dark Souls. souls and before a demon souls had and, you know, what they did to stand apart from basically everything else. So, you know, as much as I, as, as, as, I don't know, I guess you could consider

that a lazy joke, but to me, it really does kind of speak to, one, the quality and, and mind share of the series. And also just the fact that, you know, it, it does stand out for people because it, it challenged them and push them in new ways. I'm not just airing my grievances. The point that that joke exists is that it is very, uh, these games are talked about a lot and they're very important. So I want to talk about the first game in this series. And yes, that is Demon Souls. It came out in 2009. And, uh, again, it is a decade old. And this really kicked off the start of a new era of game design, in my opinion. So, uh, up front and you're welcome to disagree. I want to hear what everyone thinks. I feel like dark souls is one of the

most important games of the last decade in a very loud way in that we make the dark souls of jokes. But I feel like Demon Souls is quietly one of the most important games of the last decade and that it led to that loudly important game. How do we feel about that idea? I think that Demon Souls had a cult following when it first came out. It was outrageously more successful than anybody ever expected. Atlas single-handedly beat its projections mostly because of Demon Souls. They had intended to turn off the servers after like a year,

and they had to keep pushing it back and pushing it back. until last year, actually. Yeah, just 2018. Yeah, this was a game that Sony funded and did not believe in enough to bring to the U.S. And so Atlas stepped in and said, hey, let's do it.

And it was such a huge success that immediately both Sony and Namco were like, we need some more of those. We want that cheddar. So, yeah, like props to Atlas for believing in this game and boo on Sony for being like, no one will play this.

And it's such a positive word of mouth that when Dark Souls came out a couple of years, years later, with Bandai Namco's marketing budget behind it. And it had a pretty solid marketing campaign behind it with the prepare to die and everything that people were ready. And then also, Demon Souls and Dark Souls came out right at the exact right time with the rise of influencers and YouTubers. Oh, yeah. And there was a real show-offiness on YouTube in particular of being able to like, oh, did they say Demon Souls? It's the hardest game. Well, watch me beat it with a pair of Donkey Kong jungle beat bongo drums here you know the whole idea of like the demon souls being super

important because dark souls is so important is you know one of the things we're going to keep probably referencing dark souls the games are remarkably similar um you know dark souls is a real refinement over demon souls you know there are a lot of differences and it's it's i think it's ultimately a better game but a lot of those innovations first came here so in terms of a design influence demon souls is responsible for a lot so you're not a demon souls hipster where you're like oh The Demon Souls is the real best game in the series. I came back to it, but my appreciation has only grown. Like, as the company continues and as I get older,

like Demon Souls just looks better and better to me because it's so weird. And I love how weird it is. Up front, I am a Dark Souls 2 hipster. That's the best kind of Hickster to be right now. Me and you both, ma'am. Yeah, we're hated by our peers. Yeah. I think they're just jealous, though, frankly.

I do think that Dark Souls is the game of the generation, of the last generation. And we'll get into it, I think, a lot with Demon Souls, but the way that it kind of revolutionized the way that we understand online play in particular. Yeah. Yeah. But I do want to talk about, so up next to my notes is production.

I kind of want to jump ahead to just what gaming was when Demon Souls came out because I think it's more important to provide that context first. So the time that I got into Games Press full time was between the release of Demon Souls and Dark Souls. And that was a very interesting time to be alive. in the world of games, because before that... It was a depressing time. It was very depressing.

But the corner, things were turning the corner with Demon Souls because... So we have the HD generation starting in the mid-aughts. Game development is getting more expensive. A lot of Japanese developers, because they are very set in their ways, they can't keep up with the new demands of graphics and the new demands of resources. So we see a lot of Japanese developers crumbling. A lot of Western developers crumbling. But in general, games of this era were being very...

very user-friendly and accessible for the dreaded casuals out there to buy because they wanted so I guess the general idea was like if you buy a game in this period of time you should be able to finish it like anyone regardless of their skill level should be able to finish a video game otherwise they would get frustrated or they will just be turned off of all games in general there was a real fear of losing the market especially when things were becoming so much more expensive to create yeah and the PlayStation 3 stumbling so hard out of the blocks really screwed over the Japanese game development in a lot of ways. And also Japanese game development really struggled to adapt to the needs of the Unreal Engine. You had games like Last Remnant,

which were quite... Journeys into Jank. Yes, exactly. And so the popular narrative was that Japanese games are dead. And this was around the time that actually I was just starting into the Games press in early 2009. And my Demon's Soul story is that it was just floating around the office. like people weren't really playing it. I was running a one-ups RPG blog at the time as a freelancer. And I think Ray just said, do you want to take this home?

Maybe you'll have something to write about. And when I started playing it, I was like, wow, this is really good. Yeah, like, this is really interesting. And so, like, pretty quickly, I'm like, no, like, this is doing cool things that I've never really seen in games before and the way that it's, it handles, especially the online play as I already mentioned, the really pure dungeon crawling and all of that.

And it took a while for people to buy in. GameSpot was another really early champion of it with Kevin and Van Ord and everything. But people were slow to buy into it because they were going, no, it's janky and weird and Japanese and way too hard. And by the way, we got Gears of War II over here. Why would you ever play that crap?

So thankfully, the right side of history won't out. Yeah, famously, our own Ray Barnholt, proclaiming ownership of Ray, by the way. He gave OneUp, he gave Demon Souls an A on One Up, which was one of the reasons why I wanted to play the game. GameSpot gave it Game of the Year. Yeah, that's true in 2009. Yeah. Okay, so Kat, you mentioned the death of Japanese gaming. That was an article I saw a lot from between 2009 to 2013.

I think I saw maybe like 500 versions of that article. I'm sure I wrote two of them. And then in 2015, it was Japanese games are back. Yeah, and now I think, like, things have changed. Outside of the Battle Royale sphere and the Schluterverse, Japanese games are still the dominant game. Really? Yeah.

So, Fortnite and Destiny, those are mega huge games and Overwatch, of course. But I feel like everything else, Japan, is back to dominating the industry, any other kind of genre or any other kind of play style. Circa in 2009, I had just returned from living in Japan for three years. And when I was living in Japan, I almost exclusively played DSM PlayStation 2 games. and I was almost exclusively buying Japanese-only games. And the HD consoles were completely not in, like, my frame of mind at that time. They just were virtually invisible in Japan around that time. It just was a different mindset.

People were playing handheld. DS was everywhere. People were moving on mobile phones increasingly. So it was a real culture shock coming back to America and being like, oh, everybody's playing Xbox 360. Okay, this is interesting. So, Jeremy, you were entrenched in the press of this time, in the time of the HD boom in game development. What trends did you notice the most?

Like, what turned you off? Because there were a lot of things I could tell that you probably didn't like about where games were going maybe 15 to 12 years ago. Yeah, I mean, everything was so gray and ominous and morose and angry and people were cussing. Yeah, I don't know. It was just moving toward that sort of everyone. is ugly and macho style that was very prevalent in American developed games at the time. And, you know, finding games that pushed back against that that were not by Nintendo was kind of difficult to do.

So, you know, I was increasingly focusing on handheld games and import games and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I don't know. You know, I kind of had to deal with the way the industry was shaping up, but I didn't necessarily like it. And there was, you know, definitely like the prevailing attitude that Japanese games were dead and Japanese developers were incompetent. And it was hard to kind of push back against that narrative. But, yeah, I never at any point gave up. But like I said, you know, they need to kind of learn to adjust and recalibrate. But, you know, I kept hoping that they would.

And here we are many years later. And I definitely do think that demons, souls, and dark souls played a big part in that in saying, like, hey, here are games that kind of look like American games. They're gray and sort of gruesome and a little bit ugly. But they play totally different. They're very idiosyncratic. and they don't, you know, like, hold your hand through the entire experience

and basically, like, give you an instant win button. And they show that, you know, you can make an interesting, inventive, and captivating game, even on a relatively meager budget. You don't have to have, you know, like, EA-sized budgets or be something on the scale of Square Enix

with 20 studios working for you on a single game. You can still make a great game in the HD area. era, and this is the pathway to do that. Yeah, for me personally, I feel like Bioshock was the ultimate example of that era of game development and that it was still a very good game, but even the smartest game of that era could only be so smart. So if you compare Bioshock to System Shock 2 or even Prey, which are all part of the

same sort of game design philosophy, it was very dumbed down and infinite would be even more dumbed down in terms of its storytelling and its gameplay. But even with Bioshock, an intelligent game that made you think about. important things, there was still a flashing arrow that you had to turn off that was like go this way, go to that thing. It was still very, very simplified. Again, even with, you know, a big pedigree behind it, it still had to be kind of dumb in order to get a publisher in order to sell. But I feel like Dark Souls and Demon Souls together within those two years taught people that you can push back a lot of these, against a lot of these trends, and people won't be terrified.

In fact, they'll welcome them. And we were just doing an Entry and Odyssey episode before this. and I mentioned that Etri and Odyssey was a fun game for me because it's like, oh, a difficult game. Wow, that's neat. In 2007, you can play a game that's challenging, and that was a novelty. Now, there is no shortage of hard games to play on Steam, on PS4, on Xbox, on Switch. It's very easy to find a hard game. And unfortunately, it's turned around and become full-on toxic, as we saw at the Securo release. Yep. Yeah, I mean, this series definitely has inspired its share of toxicity, which is not a fault of this game.

you know, the community, the audience, certain elements have just latched on to it and said, like, if you can't, you know, do this game, then you are garbage and don't deserve to play video games. Yeah. Anytime you, like, take a something external and make it part of your identity, you're going to get, you know, very protective of it in a way that brings out your worst. Yeah. I feel like, this was, you know, the kind of beginning of this. And it's, it's just been really interesting to see because comparatively, the, you know, and this is, you know, and this is,

getting ahead because this is more things you know you mentioned the sacro release but like as the games have continued to come out from this developer they have leaned into this a little bit more you see it more in the marketing you know dark souls one had the prepare to die thing and then dark souls two had like the hot wings challenge uh you know thing like are you gamer enough to to eat these deadly wings uh you know things like that so they would kind of continue uh to to increase this like dark Souls 3 was a little bit more aggressive with its marketing and stuff, kind of tapping into that. And it is, you know, by and large, the community, I think, is actually really good, you know, but there's always going to be those really loud voices that are absolutely horrible.

And one of the things that Dark Souls and Demon Souls has done is create like a new type of shitty gamer graphic. Like, it feels like the kind of the challenge gamer, like there were always hard games before this. But kind of the, you know, it's a different kind of tone or tenor that you get with the, with the Dark Souls Challenge gamer and that kind of toxicity that can come out. Yeah, and it's definitely not just Dark Souls that attracts that particular segment of gamers. It's, you know, any game that is basically, like, Hollow Night or something. I mean, there are some games that, honestly, I just have to mute social media notices or mentions of those

because like anytime they come up or they don't come up, there's just this contingent of people who just thrust it on you and are really, really obnoxious and it's just frustrating. And I don't blame, again, I don't blame the games on that. It's frustrating that it's kind of endemic to a segment of the gaming audience. But, you know, I'm glad these games exist. I'm glad there are games that challenge people and that there are options to play hard games or not play hard.

games and that, you know, the medium has kind of re-expanded after the initial HD wave, the first wave of HD games to, to, you know, embrace lots of different kinds of audiences and get people lots of different kinds of experiences. It's funny, like, Sekiro, I will admit, is too difficult for me and too punishing, and I feel like how it punishes you is irritating. But I feel like Demon Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborn, and that whole grouping of games, they are, despite being difficult games that challenge your skills and make you think, they are very forgiving because a big part of the system is if you can make it back to where you died,

you get all of your resources back. And even the hardest games on previous platforms, they would never be that forgiving. It would be like, okay, you died, either you continue at the beginning of the world or you don't continue to restart the game over completely. Yeah. I feel like, yeah.

Like a running thing with the Dark Souls games, Neiman Souls, and Bloodborn is that they are very, very difficult. And then the more you dig into it, you kind of see that there are actually really kind of elegant ways that are they assuage that difficulty. You know, we'll talk about multiplayer later. But I think that is one of the most elegant solutions to kind of player control difficulty that I've ever seen in games. You know, you open yourself up to a significant risk, but you can just bring somebody in. And the way that the AI works in these games, most bosses, most encounters are not designed to, you know, for two things. You can basically roll over the game with help.

that option is just available to you. None of the games are particularly stingy with that. There's a resource that's required to do it, but they're not really stingy with it. So they have this reputation for being ultra tough, but early on, the games were as tough as you want them to be, basically. You could always kind of tag in a friend or a stranger and make it, you know, a fairly like easy, kind of breezy game. You know, it's still not a button tapper, but it's significantly easier. Yeah, I will admit to using help for most of the bosses. in this entire series

just because it's like oh the option is there why wouldn't I use it the idea of going through this series alone in single player which you have to do with Even Souls

now that it's offline is kind of terrifying to me like I always want the option to bring somebody in even if you know I'm not completely sure if I need them or not

just as a release valve it's so good because you choose when to tag it in you know you're not choosing a difficulty option at the beginning which I think

would also be fine but that way you're kind of making some assumptions about the game before you played it this is something where you can just

on the fly like hey this part is not you know because of my own particular strengths or weaknesses this is very difficult i'd like to see more of the game now please uh and then just grab in like lead gamer 69 to come you know hit flame lurker for you i was going to say similarly uh the fact that you can find some pretty overpowered weapons and just beef them up uh as much as you really want and pretty much roll over uh the game's content uh without too much trouble you couldn't really do that in Sekiro, it was because it explicitly dropped those elements. Yeah, Sekiro is the, I mean, it is really

the get good game, and I cannot get good. I cannot get that good. My body used to age it. You were a fraud all along, Bob. Everyone knew I was a fraud. But I feel like if you're intimidated even now by these games, and I hope this chat will get you into them if you're not, the difficulty

and how important that is to how the games play is mostly marketing. It's mostly a way to sell these games and to sell them, to people who think finishing a video game is an important achievement in their lives. But I feel that these games, despite their reputation, they are extremely user-friendly in some surprising ways. So I do want to talk about, so we established just where we were in time that games are becoming

very frictionless because of development costs, but Demon Souls was an outlier that did influence things greatly afterwards because it did show us all that, hey, people are ready to play difficult games again. They don't want the cinematic experience as the only way to experience a video game. So now that we've established that context, I do want to talk a bit about the production of Demon Souls. It is rather interesting as a rescued project by From Software. So we all know From Software now, they're one of the biggest developers in the world as of now, just because of the pedigree. Yes, I will say that. If there is a From Software announcement, it will be as big is like a new Last of Us, the new Capcom game.

I feel like they now have reached that rank in 10 years of... They're working with George R.R.R. Martin. That's true. He would not just work with anybody. He's not making a Kingdoms of Amalore game or whatever. No. He's a brutal dig to R.A. Salvatore. Yeah, he's more interested in making a video game with from software than finishing a

song of ice and fire. That's true. That's how big they are. I will say that I do enjoy the story of Dark Souls. I think they're definitely of the same tone and theme as his stuff. I know that's jumping ahead, you've got it later in the notes, but it's such a good match. Because they're both really good at really compelling tiny details that suggest more than they explain. You know, like you kind of learn about these areas off screen just from, you know, their shadow, just from their imprint.

And both creators are really good at that. That's for sure. So developed by From Software, back then they were known for Kingsfield and Armored Corps. 3D dot game heroes Yes Although they just published that That was developed by Silicon Systems or whatever

I knew about From Software because of Armored Core Because I was playing that in college Especially Armored Core 2 and Armored Core 3 Which were very enjoyable games And then they just kept cranking them out And Armored Core 4 Which Miyazaki did not

It actually worked on Not so great And I think From Software was a bit of a running joke especially in the games press circa 2009. It's like, oh good, here comes another freaking armored core game, okay. They were also super experimental too.

Some of their coolest games were met with a lot of harsh criticism, like Echo Knight. That game is really, really cool. But no one knew what to make of a first person Japanese adventure game. They just had no context for it, so they were just confused. They were also happy on the jank. I mean, even today. Even today,

they are still a little janky. But, Gary, like, what was your knowledge about from software before the whole soul's phenomenon? Without really knowing it, one of the first PlayStation games I ever had or played was Kingsfield 1 in America, which is the second Kingsfield game.

And I bought it because it was a cool-looking RPG on the back, and I like medieval nonsense. I hadn't heard about it. But I played through it. There was something compelling to that to me even then and really enjoyed it, like along with, you know,

playing Final Fantasy 7, Resident Evil 1, you know, all these great early PlayStation games when I finally got a hold of one. And then didn't think about them until Dark Souls. Basically, I'd forgotten they existed to that. And then have gone back

now and played a bunch of their older games and they're really cool. Kingsfield 4 is great. Shadow Tower is great. You know, Echo Knight, you mentioned. That game is awesome. They'd done a bunch of really, really awesome stuff before this that was really strange. But I missed it all. I basically had Kingsfield, the first Kingsfield game

and then all the way to Dark Souls. Yeah, when Demon Souls came out, seeing from software, it made me think, like, oh, yeah, those guys, I had no idea that they were making a game like this for the PS3. So, yeah, this game was, I believe, partially funded by Sony because they published it in Japan, but they chose to not localize it for U.S. release, thanks to people within Sony who hated it, and also it was reviewed very poorly by the Japanese press. And I thought in America this was a divisive game or a polarizing game in the press. And I was looking at Metacritic, and surprisingly, to me at least, forgetting about what the reception was, it was almost universally positive across all of the big websites. Even sites you would think would skew a little more towards, you know, accessible games. They were giving it nines and tens.

And of course, this was GameSpots game of the year 2009. I think that the people who were getting the game were maybe the most predisposed to actually like it. I mean, as we already mentioned, like Ray was reviewing it for one of, So, I mean, you had to kind of go into it with an open mind, I think, so. Yeah, and the reviewers reviewing it were probably the most, you know, they were more skilled than the average person or had more experience with difficult games. Or were just drawn into weird things. Yeah, yeah.

I would say maybe the lead reviewer of your average AAA Action Fest, not casting aspersions or anything, just might have different tastes and therefore not be super interested in picking up an extremely weird and kind of niche, you know, Japanese dungeon crawler that nobody cared about. So this was not localized by Sony. They said, no thanks. We didn't even want this in Japan. But for whatever reason, there was an English text version produced for Asian countries.

And the voice acting for the game was always in English. And this is really where it caught on in America. People were importing that version. And I was following a something awful forums thread about it, just reading about the game and all this weird stuff. And it made me really want to play it. Like, it was a very grassroots amount of hype based on people importing that Asian version of the game with English dialogue and voice acting. It's really where the game took off online.

And so Atlas would eventually pick up the game for a release and then the series would eventually immediately actually grow too big for Atlas. So the release that we're all familiar with did come out in the fall of 2009. And I wanted to ask everybody before I going about production, how did you play this game and when did you find it? It really stood out, I think the moment that really stood out to me was you're running through this tutorial area, you're killing some skeletons and that kind of thing, and you're cast as a hero who's going to kind of rescue the world from shadow, and I'm like, okay, cool. And you're running along, and then all of a sudden you kind of fall down into a pit or something to that effect, and you come across this giant demon, and that demon kills the hell out of you. And my first thought was, oh, man, I really screwed up. I'm going to reload. Oh, no, I'm actually going into the underworld.

I'm dead. This is taking on a very different tenor than I was kind of expecting and the spookiness of it all. People love to talk about the atmosphere of dark souls and the atmosphere of demon souls. And that was really the first time I really got it. Like the fact that it didn't really have a soundtrack when you were exploring how you're footsteps would echo heavily on the on the floor um how it was janky but at the same time an eerily beautiful game as well so and then i was i mean i'm sure we'll get into it a lot more but it just really stood out in a multitude of ways versus uh the really kind of overblown

set piece driven uh games that were really in vogue at that time jeremy do you have any experience with this series? So not as much as I'd like. I followed this game a lot when it was first announced and before it came to the U.S. because the fact that there was a Japanese studio making an HD game

was actually really novel at the time. It wasn't a known brand. It was not from a major studio that, you know, was like a Square Inix or a Namco Bandai or something. It was a much smaller kind of plucky sort of game.

was really curious about it and I heard good things from people who had imported it. And, you know, when Ray got a hold of an import copy from Asia, I spent a lot of time just kind of looking over his shoulder and watching him, you know, like climb up narrow paths and shoot arrows at dragons and things like that. And that looks really interesting. So as soon as the game came out, I, you know, picked up a copy. I had very bad luck with it because of my home network or maybe because of Sony's really bad networking on PS3. Probably both. I mean, I'd been able to. able to play some, some online games in my home situation on Xbox 360, like Halo 3 and ODST online and, uh, uh, crackdown. I played four player, multiplayer and had a great time.

But anytime I tried to play a PS3 game online, my, my connection would always drop out. So I kept like rebooting or, you know, starting up this game and getting a little ways into it. And then my connection would drop. And I would basically lose everything and have to start all over again. So after that happened twice, I was just like, I can't play this game. It wants to be online, and my online does not want to be online. So I ended up not spending any time with it and then just never catching up with it. So unfortunately, I'm the outsider here. I know if anyone's sick of people telling him to play games, it's Jeremy Parrish,

but everyone tell Jeremy to play these games. They're perfect for him. And also, Holland, you should play that too. It's a great honey trap for me to mute you on Twitter forever. I've got a list of games Jeremy should play, and it will be delivered at the end of this podcast. But to be completely honest, like, the Soul series just isn't my style of game. I like the world and the concept behind it, but I really don't enjoy playing action games where your characters are slow. What about Castlevania?

I just owned you with my own logic. Castlevania? Yeah, slow whips. Not really. I mean, compared to this. Okay, okay. Come on. Come on.

Are you calling Alucard slow? I'm talking about the scoliosis Simon Belmont. Yeah, but it's different with a 2D game. It just has a different feel. When you move into the third dimension, I really don't like playing as sluggish characters. I really want speedy characters. I'm going to ask our fans to make a diagram of Jeremy's argument and post it online.

That's true. I'm not allowed to have opinions. That's true. Now, Bobby, just need to tell Jeremy, debate me. Debate me within this room. No, I feel like Jeremy would love these games. Give them a chance, Jeremy. I have.

Okay, give them another chance. That's my challenge to you. More chances. More chances for everybody. I mean, in fairness, if there's one game you would want to pick it up, maybe be blood-borne because you're not nearly as sluggish in that game. That is the true 3D Castlevania, actually. You do move pretty quickly in that game. And you get faster as these games go on. They also get harder, so it's a little bit of a trade-off. And similarly, it depends on the class that you choose because certain classes are a lot faster, speedier than some of the heavier classes.

Gary, I think you work for way backers, I did. Yeah, I'm a poser. So for people who don't know why I'm here at all, I do a podcast called Bonfire Side Chat, which is a podcast dedicated to this series of games and this developer and games that they have influenced. And we started with Dark Souls. And I mentioned this just this line before this anecdote. But that was a game that was so good, we felt like we had to do a show about it. It was just all we could talk about anyway. And, you know, we thought it lent itself to the format. So we were able to go back to Demon Souls after. we completed Dark Souls. And I was, you know, I'd miss the PS3. I had an Xbox 360, but in 2009, I was playing fewer video games than I do now, obviously. So I'd miss the PS3 and I bought it just for this game. And my PS3 remains basically at this point, a Tokyo jungle slash Demon Souls machine. Yeah, mine is still hooked up because I just have too much software that I can't access anywhere else. Yeah. And it was fun sliding a disc into that thing this morning to play Demon Souls just to refresh my memory. Yeah, I was actually working at Atlas when this

game was really taking off. And as an Atlas employee, I didn't get health benefits or days off or vacation days, but I was able to buy games at a discount. So I got this for $10. And I did like immediately fall in love with it. I think I did put it down after being frustrated with certain parts of it. But after I played the E3 demo of Dark Souls, I made it my mission to finish the game before Dark Souls came out and I did. One of the cool things about the series is that, like, a lot of the games, especially in comparison to we're talking about the cinematic HD games at the time, is that a lot of times in Soulsborn games, the ending sequences are, you know, the games don't front load. They're cool stuff. So the times that I have taken a break or walked away or had to delay finishing a game, when I come back and actually push through, it's not like a wet fart at the end.

You know, there's still really cool things to see in this game. Like, I think that, you know, probably the best fight in terms of just the mechanics of it is the emboss of this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you get that at the end as opposed to just kind of having, and just all the narrative twists that kind of come through in the end. But a lot of times with video games, you know, I remember I played, when I first played the Last of Us. And that's a game I actually liked quite a bit. But when I first played it, I fell off near the end.

And when I finally came back, I was like, oh, like, this is kind of out of tricks. Like, I like the very ending of this just fine, but it's just a bunch of hallway shooting here at the end. Souls games don't really do that. So I want to talk more about the development before we take our break. It has a very interesting development history behind it because it started off as a failed prototype for a fantasy action game. So the director of this series as a whole is Hiditaka Miyazaki. He took control of this failed prototype project, and he basically knew he could do whatever he wanted with it. So he did exactly that.

It wouldn't matter if it failed because it was already a failure of a project. So that is what he took advantage of, the fact that he was in charge of something that already failed. So there was really nothing to lose for him. So this whole game was developed with Kingsfield in mind, though he did not intend this to be a successor to Kingsfield. In case you're wondering, or I've not played them, Kingsfield was a first-person RPG series that From developed starting on the PS1, but I believe Kingsfield 4 was the last one on PS2. Correct. So he and his team wanted to steer clear of what were then current trends

and revive a lost form of the action genre and they really only intended for a small audience to get the game like this was for I guess what you would call the core gamers out there in the late aughts who were sort of missing what they were used to in earlier platforms and earlier eras of gaming

so at some point during development Miyazaki felt he had gone too far with their idea and wondered when Sony would try to rein them in but that never happened. I guess they had a very good producer in terms of the amount of freedom that they got. But Miyazaki admitted in some interviews that he never actually explained the death mechanics and the high difficulty in full to Sony because he thought they would demand things be rained in a bit. And I thought that was very, very nice. Always lie to your bosses, everybody. So there's a good story by Miyazaki about

one inspired the multiplayer mechanics. And there's a little quote from him. So he says the origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck and the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill. That's it. That's how everyone can get home. Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill

and I managed to get home safely. But I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home and I thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place, we'd become friends or maybe we'd just fight. And that is the entire basis, that whole story is the entire basis of the semi-anonymous multiplayer mode in which you are communicating in very limited ways and you are just kind of ships passing in the nights.

Yeah, I've always loved that quote. Like most of the games that he has done have like one of those key quotes that he has about it. I can't remember it's for demon souls or dark souls where he talks about wanting to design bosses so they have the sense of dignity to them. You know, like these are these are powerful creatures that are fallen low. They're not just like grotesqueries. Yeah. And I've always loved that quote too. And as we've all seen through the various YouTube videos made about every character in the game, everybody has a tragic backstory.

Even the most disgusting boss character has some sort of humanity to them. Well, that all starts here too. Like that's definitely something that we double down on in Dark Souls and Bloodborn. But here, you know, a lot of these bosses, there's a lot more to them. Not all of them. Some of them are just monsters. But this entry is an outlier in that. But you do get to see the kind of peaks of that kind of.

quiet dignity. And that story, the pushing a car up a hill story thing, I've always loved that because it is, it's almost so you couldn't design a more perfect metaphor for like how it feels to just get randomly helped in this game or randomly hurt in this game because you generally will not know anything about those people. And it is just somebody else taking time out of their day to help you out. It feels like giving directions or something. I guess they're a really good feeling.

The most you can do is look at their online name and send them harassment messages or something which has happened to me plenty of times I believe there was a Tumblr all about that the horrible messages Tumblr.com run by my friend Jeremy the yeah I had one of the first times

this has ever happened to me somebody messaged me on Xbox Live because I had gotten invaded and I remember I was like near a bonfire near a trip point and I remember sending him a message and begging him not to kill me basically and he just laughed

and did it anyway Which was a bummer. I've never tried to reason with people that way. Yeah, it was a low moment. It was pathetic. So this, Demon Souls had a notoriously bad showing at TGS 2008. Who was there? Were you there, Jeremy?

TGS 2008? I was, but I don't remember. Oh, man, I was too. But I didn't see Demon Souls at that show. I don't think they were like, they were very triumphant about showing it off. I think, like, they didn't really know what to do with it. So the demo was bad. and these games all demo poorly.

I played, you know, Dark Souls 2, 3, Bloodborn at demo stations. These are games you don't stand and play for like eight minutes at a time. These are games that you really get into. So I'm not surprised that people with no knowledge of how these games are supposed to be played didn't react well to the demo. In fact, many of them thought the combat system wasn't done because they just weren't used to how these games the combat plays out in these games. Well, by Dark Souls 3, they wised up and just had a full-blown capture event

that went on for like three or four hours and so you could more experiment and have a good time with it and by that time the Dark Souls community had quite matured and so it was a different thing but yeah these are definitely games not games that you stand and play at a kiosk for five minutes

it's like an RPG in that respect yeah I could see someone playing this for I don't know five minutes before dying and thinking is this game broken like is this an alpha is this a prototype what am I playing here so before our break I wanted to go over the director of the game. He's a very enigmatic figure.

He's very elusive. I think he immediately stopped doing interviews after Demon Souls and Dark Souls took off because there are so many Demon Souls interviews. I feel like they're more rare now, though. Because if you look, like, I feel like he was just being passed around. Like, oh, yeah, it's the Demon Souls guy. Go talk to him.

So there's like 20 Demon Souls interviews, but with every passing game, there are for you and fewer. But I think it's because... He's also risen up quite high from software's infrastructure. That too. And I think it's just like he never. has a free time to do anything

because there are so many back-to-back games that he's working on. And so he had a very interesting life in that he grew up according to himself, poor and unambitious. And the roots of the storytelling in the Souls games is because he is

a Japanese person who doesn't speak English and he would take out a lot of English language fantasy books out of the library while growing up. And he couldn't understand all of the words or basically he pieced together meaning based on the words that he knew and the illustrations in those books, which is essentially how the player

pieces together the meaning of storytelling and the Souls game because you're given fragments and a lot of the, many of the narrators are unreliable. Specifically, Steve Jackson's sorcery series, which, you know, I went back and covered some of those

for our show, and they do have a little bit of this weirdness. Like, you can actually see the influence. And we mentioned this in our Ico episode. Wait, is it Eco or Ico? I have to keep going back. It's Eco. It's Eco.

Damn it. It's the non-dolphin. Ico is the song. Iko, Ico, I know. Okay, there we go. That's why I don't want it to be that. So we mentioned this in the Iko. God damn it, the Eco episode.

And that was a major influence in his life. And if you play the Souls games, you can see the direct comparisons to just like the melancholy world, the world after a tragic event has happened, and just a lot of tragedy and humanity baked into characters. But he had a very boring job. He was an account manager for the Oracle Corporation, a friend, him to play Eco. I did it right that time. And that basically changed his mind where it says, like, I have to stop being an account manager and start designing video games. And according

to him, the only company that would hire him was From Software. So in 2004, he was hired by From and began work as a planner on the game Armored Core, Last Raven, as it was halfway through development. I don't know how much of your account managing skills can apply to game development, but it seems like that is a major job. Armored Core definitely, yes. I mean, I imagine I imagine a lot because, I mean, half of game development is just using spreadsheets and laying everything out. It's a very organized process. People think of it as this bursts of creativity. No, it's spreadsheets.

I can see that. Yeah, I think it's kind of very romantic that ECO made him change his life. He said he was, like, very unambitious. He just had no goals. But he played this one game. He's like, I want to design video games now. Thank you, Eco. Yeah.

I mean, already thank you, Ego, but especially that. And he's made more games than Fumito Oeda did in like five years. So, yeah, so he directed Armored Corps 4 in Armored Core 4 Answer. And yes, there are armored core references in the Soul series. I believe the Moonlight's Blade is like the biggest one. Is that correct, Gary? I think you've talked about that. Moonlight Blades started in Kingsfield, I believe.

Oh, wow. So it's like a dragon enemy, but Patches is from Armored Corps. That's right, yeah. Yeah, so there are Kingsfield references, obviously, in the Soul series, too. So he has basically had an amazing decade since Demon Souls released a decade ago. So he has directed Dark Souls. He supervised on Dark Souls 2. He directed Bloodborn.

Then he directed Dark Souls 3. And then he directed Sekiro. And then he also directed the VR title, Daracine, or however you say that. I don't know which accent that is. So he has directed quite a few games in 10 years, and he's currently working on Eldon Ring with some help from George R.R. and Martin, which, as we talked about before, is probably the perfect pick for world building for these games. If you played these games and know a bit about Game of Thrones, you can see some major similarities in how these games tell their stories and how these stories present themselves, rather. Any other thoughts on Miyazaki? He is, again, it feels like both from software and Miyazaki became some of the most important figures in the game industry in, like, the past 10 years.

It feels like Miyazaki is on the same level as your Kojima's and to help me out here. And so I'm always a little cautious about getting into tour theory because obviously a lot of different people work on these games. But I think that he definitely managed to push the games industry in a different direction just by putting a game like Demon Souls out there with the team, like having that kind of vision. So I don't know much about Miyazaki personally. he seems to be a little finished with the Soulsborn games in some respects, but at the same time, like he's always going to be kind of tied to this genre that he helped to create. He's like Akitoshi Kovazu except popular.

That is true. And his games do make some kind of sense, I think. And money. And money, too, which is even more important. Which is funny because the Soulsborn games, I mean, they've never really sold that much, right? They just... I think Dark Souls did bonkers good.

The original Dark Souls did just over a million copies. That's, for this kind of game, that's bonkers good. Yeah, but people were treating it as like, you know, a super mega hit, right? It was more of a cult hit to start. That's because it is a game for us, capital, you. I see. So, I mean, but certainly its influence has risen and risen and risen. But as far as I can tell, like, its sales have actually remained relatively stable for the most part.

Like, because the same people come in and play Dark Souls every freaking time. And then there's a huge drop-off afterwards. That is ultimately why casual gamers and more accessible games were such a big deal. Because, you know, as audience or as expenses and development costs go up, you have to reach a larger audience. And there is a, there's a finite number of people who are, you know, core gamers and will continue to buy core games. It's a blue ocean. So it's, you know, again, kind of like we talked about. about in the Etterian Odyssey episode, it's about finding that point of sustainability, like,

you know, for the amount of money we're investing in this and time and resources, what can we sustain, like what kind of sales do we need to be able to keep this going? So this series has found that in ways that, you know, other series haven't necessarily managed. I mean, like Rise of the Tomb Raider sold how much, how many copies, like $8 million, and somehow it was a failure. So, yeah, do the math. will be a really interesting game to watch because it might end up being the most accessible version

of Miyazaki's, like, kind of visions. Yeah, I mean, I think they're definitely going to lead with George R.R. Martin and then also mentioned in the same sentence, Dark Souls. So I feel like they are going to pull a lot more people. So hopefully they'll be able to keep up the philosophy that they've had with their past six or seven games.

Well, rumor is open world game. Ooh. I do want to see what he can do with that after getting a tiny taste of that. And when he talks about interviews and stuff, too, when he talks about open world, I don't think that, you know, the nightmare vision that a lot of people have is that it's going to be an Ubisoft checklist nightmare. You know, just like, oh, here's a bunch of tasks on a map. I don't think it's going to be like that. I think it's going to be like a bigger, I think, you know, from what I've read and everything, my imagination makes me think it's a bigger Dark Souls. Yeah.

You know, Dark Souls is essentially an open world. Like Shadow the Clauses, except with a lot more bad guys to fight. Yeah. So we're going to take a break really quick and come back with some talk about. and souls. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So we're back, we're talking about the video game and Demon Souls, of course, and I've broken down this discussion into a bunch of different categories. We don't have to start with any in particular, but since it's first on this notes I'm looking at, we can talk about the story of this game, and essentially we're going to be talking about the entire souls and souls born games as a whole, if you want to call them that, but we're going to talk about where it all began

because everything that starts here is carried forward in a major way in future games. And the first thing is a story, because this game tells a story in a very non-traditional way in that up front you're told about what happened to this land. But throughout the game, you're not really having any direct conversations about, you know, the entire timeline or what's happening. Everything you're learning about this world comes from the brief bits of dialogue you pick up, again, from very unreliable people. Also from item descriptions, spell descriptions, armor, and weapon descriptions, and from just environmental details. you're never expressly told everything you need to know about the story, but all the details are there in some way. And that's the major kind of innovation.

And I think a big reason why people who latch on to these games do and the reason why there is a cottage industry of people who professionally, you know, learn about the story of these games, of which I am one. You know, that is a life-changing thing the way these games tell their stories for me in a kind of a literal sense because it allowed us to podcast about it.

And there are a series of YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and a couple of other podcasts as well that do basically this, who do this kind of after-the-fact archaeology to figure out the story of these characters and these places. Yeah, I already mentioned how Demon Souls fit perfectly into the rise of YouTube because of its show-offiness. And that is another aspect that fits in perfectly with the social media trends at the time. Because, I mean, how many YouTube explainers are there out there of people explaining? exactly what happened in Demon Souls or exactly what happened in Dark Souls and whatnot.

So as you said, there's an entire cottage industry based around the Demon Souls or Dark Souls lore, and we can thank YouTube and such for that. I know and have met people who make a living explaining things about Souls games that are mostly left on set in the games themselves.

We talked about how Miyazaki wanted to go against the trends that were happening at the time, and I feel like any other RPG designer or director would say, well, like to tell the story, we need to mocap some actors, write a thousand pages of dialogue, and make a lot of cutscenes. And in this game,

in a time where there were a lot of cutscenes, a lot of things being more cinematic, it was very refreshing that the story rarely interrupts the game. Almost never. Yeah, it's true. There are, I mean, the dialogue you get is very brief. I think you can even walk around a bit while you're talking to people if you're sick of standing there. But you have to really

opt into the story. You can play through the entire game and not even care about the story, but if you want to opt in, it's up to how much time you want to spend exploring it, and you can even explore it outside of the game. But I find that every game has flavor text, but this is the flavor text that I crave. I want to read the descriptions for even, like, lesser healing items.

Well, yeah, it's the train to flavor text. It matters. It's interesting. And there's something that we talk about on Bonfire side chat a lot, which I call like the 40, 70, 90 problem of this kind of exposition, where, like, a lot of games with mysteries, if you explain 40% of it, there's not enough there. And for anyone to figure it out,

they have to basically make a lot of unsupported guesses. And if you explain 90% or 100%, which is what a lot of video games do, it can be very boring. Like there are a lot of scenes in modern, more cinematic video games where two characters will explain something to each other that I already know. And I find that experience very frustrating because it's just like, I already know this. This is a pacing nightmare.

Like, please move a little bit quicker. Or you run into something like Okami where like, you know, that's a really beautiful game, but it has a really long cutscene in the beginning that is really, really kind of slow. But if you get that 70%, where you just give the player enough kind of tantalizing hints, here's this atmosphere, here's this reference to this far-off area that sounds really interesting. And oh, like this keyword was actually in another item description. So I learn a little bit about this faction or these people.

It draws you in. It gives you just enough to beat the hook. And it can be just really, really, you know, absolutely irresistible. This is the only game where I do the series where I read all of the, essentially, like, what the codex would be. Like if I play a Dragon Age game or something like that, and I'm rewarded with encyclopedia entries as I'm walking around, it always feels a little strange to me.

Here, like making me do the work a little bit, it's like you're almost playing like a small game of her story while you're playing Soulsborn, you know, to put these things together. And I find that really compelling as kind of like a long-term goal on top of my short-term one. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Kat.

On the flip side, it only works if the world itself is compelling and the environmental artistry of Demon's Souls is extremely strong. Everybody loves to praise the level design in particular. The enemy design is like really rich. You meet really interesting bosses who you just naturally want to learn a lot more about. And so art plays a huge role in making the world of demon souls and dark souls compelling enough that people want to dig into these mysteries.

Yeah, after you kill the boss, you get their soul and you can read about like who this boss was, but things like where the boss is in the level and what their arena looks like will also tell you a lot about what the boss's role is in that world or what it used to be it even. Yeah, there's a dungeon ecology to a lot of this stuff.

You know, there are places where people live. You know, like if you end up in the fifth world of this, you can find these hobbles where these creatures live and kind of see like a little bit about what that society is like. You know, when you actually get to the boss and see what the horrific secret of that boss, what they are doing, you know, the people who live in the five area.

Is it fair to say that Demon Souls has a real Lovecraftian bent down to the fact that the final boss is kind of an old one that you have to put back to sleep? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I will say like blood-borne, it doesn't just lean into it. It just like becomes that. And not only that, but when you're in the tower, forgive me. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's populated with freaking mind-flayers, right? So very Cthulhu-esque.

Yeah, everything in that area is basically like a Lovecraft homage, you know, down to the unboss, which has, you know, obvious, like, kind of King and Yellow, iconography to it. And normally, because it is so overdone, there are so many, like, cutesy Cthulu things and it's, you know, people are really taking advantage of that's, you know, it's in the public domain so we can do our Lovecraft anything. But I feel like it is subtle enough and so well done in the Souls games, especially Bloodbourne, that it doesn't irk me or feel like, oh, I've seen this. before. Well, I think the trick is you need to capture, tap into the spirit and kind of the terror. I think sanity is a big thing

in the Demon Souls and the Dark Souls games. A lot of the bosses are Yeah. There's flat out crazy. Yeah, there's flat out crazy, right? And sanity is obviously a big thing in the Lovecraftian things. And so many games just lift the Lovecraft

iconography without really following through on a lot of the themes. of those books. So let's talk about the mechanics now. There are a ton of interesting mechanics that would be carried forward and refined throughout the series. And one of the more important ones

is the sort of human slash undead system in which you start the game as a human. When you are killed, you are... Is it called an undead in this one, Gary? You're a soul. It's your soul form. Soul form, that's right.

So when you are in soul form, you have less maximum HP and you can't do certain things in the game. You are restricted. And I think it is so kind of unexplained in this game within the game itself. I think it took me maybe 10 to 12 hours upon my first play-through to realize like, oh, this is how this game works.

I mean, it was the same in Dark Souls as well. Yeah. You go into undead form and you don't really understand what that means because nobody really tells you. Yeah. You're not punished as greatly in Dark Souls, though, as you are in Demon Souls. No, yeah. In Demon Souls, you have to psychologically think of, you know, being in your human form as a buff. if you think of being in the sole form

with the reduced health as a debuff, it's really demoralizing. You know, because it is very punishing. And the system, when you say you're locked out of things, it's the multiplayer. You know, so, and that is a double-edged sword, which is really cool. If you're walking around in human form,

other players can come into your world. Like, well, we'll talk about invasions. But that is also when you can get health. So you get this huge health bump, and you can get help. You can summon people in your world when you're a human. So it's a really interesting kind of risk-reward thing that plays into the player set difficulty of the game.

Oh, Jeremy? I was just going to say, I'm trying to think of games that have done anything like that before, and the only thing that comes to mind as a precedent is that terrible Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for N.S. Where you play as, like, Dr. Jekyll for a while, and then you take too much damage, and you become Mr. Hyde and you're thrown into the spirit world,

and you, like, can't progress past where you've made it as Dr. Jekyll. But that game is terrible and horrible, and no one should look to that game as an inspiration. Wow. It's remarkably complex in terms of what you can do with both of these forms. So if you're a human, if you're alive and you're a human, you can both summon people into your world and also you can be invaded. And I believe if you are in soul form,

the way to come out of soul form is to kill a boss or to help another player kill a boss by being summoned. Or an item. Oh, or an item, that's true, which are kind of hard to find. A femoral eye. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in Demon's Souls, the Estes is, flask system doesn't work the same way. No, all of the...

So the Estes Flask is one of the huge, like, really good improvements because they're sort of like Mega Man Energy tanks in which you have like health bars like in your system and you can just refill them at bonfires. With Demon Souls, all of the health items are pickups. So you have to do a lot more farming in this game than you do in future games, unfortunately. And I think like I drop Sekiro pretty quick, but is it Sekiro, are there Estes Flasks than that or some versus... Estes, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. You also have like a slow, slow healing

item, but you have a limited number of those you can have. So it has consumables and anestis similar to Dark Souls too. That's true. And the other major thing that would carry on throughout the whole series are Souls, of course, because this game is about one demons, many souls, according to the title. So it's a universal currency in the game. You spend it on both leveling up and also buying things. And the major hook of the soul system is that this is a very difficult game. And you die, you basically leave a soul puddle behind. And if you can reach that soul puddle again before you are killed again, then you get everything back that you, you know, lost there. And that's a very easy way to sort of grind. If you find a great spot where you can kill a bunch of

enemies and then jump off a cliff, just keep doing it again and again and again and building that soul puddle up. It's a great way to get a lot of that resource. Interestingly, we think of this as a fairly forgiving mechanic in the grand scheme of things. But I remember in 2009, people were losing their goddamn mind over this because if you died you know your souls would be there and if you died again for some reason it's actually pretty easy to die again on your way back to your souls you lose everything and in the grand scheme of things you're not losing that much it's pretty easy to get all your souls back but people would freak the F out uh shout out to Ryan O'Donnell um he he's come he's come around since then he was like

like going, ah, Dark Souls 3, it's so good. I'm like, I remember, you were not a big fan of Demon Souls at the time. And he's like, yes, I know, I know. I'm glad you pointed out, Cap, because we take all these things for granted now, but they were huge deviations from the whole this is like the recharging health era

of games. Yeah. Well, and you talked about Bioshock, and Bioshock, you literally just respawn with no, you're like, you lose your ammo, but you don't lose any permanent progress in Bioshock, you literally just come back in a Vita Chamber. Yeah, this is, you know, I think kind of one of the things that pushed gamers and game design into the rogue light space,

the idea that, hey, there are steep penalties for death. There are, you know, things that you cannot get back. You know, I feel like Demon Souls is kind of, the soul system is kind of like a midway step between totally losing, like, complete wipeout forever and no penalty whatsoever. It's like you've lost something, but you can gain it back if you play right. It would say it went really heavily against the prevailing trends at the time. I mean, if you think about Final Fantasy 13, circa 2010, where you would lose to a boss and then it would just dump you right back just outside the boss area, right?

And the general thought what process was, well, being, killing somebody and then having real penalty for it was unnecessary punitive, and it keeps players from me. able to enjoy your game so let's increasingly do away with it and you still see some of that today like Mario Odyssey like drop the concept of like lives for example but so demons for for demon souls to go so heavily against that made people like some people automatically write it off as being like retrograde or an aceristic or not like you know up with the times as it were Yeah. And I feel like this is the one mechanic that thing, I feel like this is the one mechanic that modern games borrow the most, this idea of if you make it back to the point where you died, you will benefit in some way or you will be forgiven in some way. Just the idea of death can come easy, but there is also forgiveness if you can, you know, achieve a certain skill level. An interesting thing, too, about the way the system works is that a lot of the conversation is always about what you lose when you die, but a lot of things are actually pretty permanent.

you know there are bits of progress you know bosses don't come back many bosses don't come back you get to keep any items you kept and you can commit that experience to levels basically anytime you can get back to the hub so you know Jeremy your comparison to a rogue like is really pretty apt you know that idea that you have this XP and you have to commit it similar to like a bank in a roguike and the idea that like oh I have this item this item will stick around like in a roguelike you might be able to pick one item and have it you know have a continue from play through to play through. In demon souls, all items stay, you know, and this changes the strategy in so many interesting

ways. So not only do you have that tension of trying to make it back to your soul, you know, having to be careful not allowing, you know, laying your guard down, but you end up with things like suicide runs where it's like, hey, I know I'm going to die. There's a shiny object over there. I know I need. It's really difficult. I'm just kind of run and go grab it.

And if I die, I die, I get to keep it, though, when I respawn. That's true. Yeah, I was thinking of suicide runs because if you have no souls to lose or very few souls to lose and you're in a new area, you can just say, I'm going to run to the end of this area just to see what is here and grab everything I can on the way to wherever I'm dying. And then you don't have to even worry about picking up souls because you're not really losing too many of them. It's very freeing. Japanese RPGs have experimented with this idea since Dragon Quest, where if you die in Dragon Quest, you get to keep everything except half your gold. You just get

sent back to like the king who says, oh, be careful not to die anymore. And, you know, The later Dragon Quest games, after I think Dragon Quest 3, introduced the bank where you could deposit gold in chunks of 1,000 pieces. So if you had a huge amount of gold on you, you could save it safely in the bank, and when you die, you would only lose what you had on a hand. So, you know, like the idea of punishing people for failure, but not making them lose so much and, you know, take such a steep penalty that they give up on the game has always been something that Japanese RPGs have experimented with and explored.

And this is just another iteration. And I feel like it's, you know, a successful one and very popular. If you look at how many games since Demon Souls have copied that over, like shovel night and so forth, you know, where they just like straight up take the mechanic. They're like, hey, it's the same thing. So does combat fall under the mechanics section? We can talk about it. I mean, combat is next in my notes, and I do want to talk about it because we were talking

about how this game, a common theme in this episode is like, how does this game deviate from the standard of 2009? And I feel that the, how complex the combat is and how basically like every button does something and even like L3 and R3 do things, that it's very different than the games that were coming out around this time. We also, sorry, we also didn't mention the World Tendency System. Oh, that's coming up next. I do want to talk about combat up really quick because World Tendency is super complicated.

I was watching YouTube videos about it, and I still kind of don't get it. But yeah, combat was very different than what we were expecting, because at this time, I want to say, like, if you were playing a non-shooter, the action buttons would be on the face of the controller, not on the triggers. So I feel like that was something I heard a lot of people complaining about in that one trigger is whatever is on your left hand, the other trigger is on your right hand. And that is essentially how all of these games have controlled since then, and that it's a very almost literal interpretation of your two-hand. on the controller. And what's more, I think that we were really thinking at that time in the context of Devil May Cry 3, for example, or Devil May Cry 4, or Bayonetta, honestly, where these games were very fast, very combo-focused, like, that's what we were thinking of, and Demon Souls was

the diametric opposite. It was very deliberate, very tactical. You want to keep your shield up at all times. You don't want to just rush into the action. if you could get around, I believe you could backstab in Demon Souls. I mean, I'm always conflating Dark Souls with Demon Souls

like everybody else. And I think that in, maybe not as much in Demon Souls, but big heavy Great Swords and being able to stagger enemies was definitely a big thing. Oh, yeah. It's huge in this game, actually,

because no enemies really have like kind of poise in this and you don't either. obscure mechanic from the series. But Poise is one of the most important mechanics in the series. Absolutely. Yeah, it's just not very well explained. Again, like any important mechanics in these games. But it's whether you get interrupted when you attack.

So the, you know, as opposed to something like, you know, you mentioned a character action game like a bayonetta where you are stun locking enemies. You can do that to a degree here. But because you're always racing the stamina bar that you have that determines how many actions you can do, you have to be you know that stamina bar is used for offense and defense it's it's used for every swing but you need to save enough to block the inevitable counter attack that comes now magic was somewhat op in dark souls would you say that's kind of the case in demon souls oh absolutely i think so too yeah they changed it a bit in that dark souls and i believe future games would give you a number of uses before you refresh them uh demon souls has a magic points meter that's a bit harder to read but you can um let you you can buy herbs that recharge it. Right, right, yes. They have unlimited spells if you spend a little bit of time gaining currency.

Yeah, magic is OPE, and just the amount of things you can do with this combat system, I think, really impress people in the time when things are becoming much more simplified. So, of course, you have basically four attack buttons, but you can combine that with, you know, rolling and running and charging, and you can do backstabs using stealth. You can do paris and repos or repost, however you say that word. It is a very complex system that would only get more refined over time. And in many ways, you don't have to engage with a lot of this stuff. Like, I am terrible at parrying. In every Souls games to date, I have been able to basically parry the first set of enemies and I give up.

Because the window of times you have to sort of memorize or sort of have to be very precise within are just, I don't want to learn them after a certain point. Well, no wonder you bounce off to Kiro so fast because parrying is like the entire game. It's the parrying game, which is why I don't really, I can't get into it. Yeah. One of the things, too, that we kind of mentioned. this in generally, but I think it's just really important is talking about how different this feels

is the way that actions will actually queue up. So if you do just tap attack twice when you only mean to attack once, you can get locked into that second animation. You know, so different moves that you'll do will kind of preload as you do them, which really, really means that you have to slow down

in this. Like the quickest way to die in this game is to treat it like an old god of war game. You know, and how was the other thing? It was dark God of War came out in 2005. We think of it as a fairly old game, but at that time it was only four years old. So, yeah, God of War really impacted our thinking God of War II was two years old at that point. So, yeah, no, Demon Souls was so different.

Yeah, it was a very, all the combat's very slow and methodical. I mean, you doesn't have to be, but that's the best way to approach things. And in fact, like, the one thing you have on your side in this game is that the AI is very stupid and can only go so far from the predetermined locations of the enemies. So if you want to take things slow and steady, you will always have your shield up and you will also pull away or at least try to pull away one enemy at a time in this game.

Yeah, the combat in this series has always kind of made me think that they took like, you know, Wind Waker Combat and added a lot more weight and gravity to it and then took away all the cues. The din, ding, ding! So you have to figure those things out on your own

without help. But basically you kind of are using a lot of same tools and like the same mental toolbox just without all the cues and the prompts and the help at a much slower and more deliberate and pace with much greater consequences. Yeah, things aren't intentionally signal as much. I mean, the signaling is all just, okay, what enemy am I fighting? What is their animation for this attack? What is the best range I have to be in to get a backstab?

All of these things are things that are more subtle in this game than in Winwick. But I can see the comparison, definitely. But yeah, I guess we could talk about, so there's a large variety of. of playstiles and builds. Of course, when you begin this game, as with the other Souls games, you choose a class, but the class determines nothing but your starting level and where certain skill points will be allocated

and that would carry over throughout the history of the series, or the future of the series, rather. But the next system is something they did thankfully get rid of, and I do want to talk a bit about this. It's very interesting. I feel like there's a really cool idea here. It's implemented poorly and signaled extremely poorly to the player to the point where

I still feel like I don't completely get it. I was watching YouTube videos about this. And it's very confusing, but... They would have press releases when they changed it. It was such a big deal. They were like, hey, guess what it is today? This week, it's only this tendency. Yeah, because it was so hard for the players themselves to change within their own abilities

that they would have special days like this week, the world tendency is black or this week it's white. Gary, you've done a Demon Soul's podcast series. Please help me out here because I still can't figure this out. World tendency and character tendency. And please compare it to the chrono cross element system. the field system. Oh, God. That's the only way I'll understand it. So, yeah, this is the part I was born to play, baby.

The basically world tendency is when you do certain actions, primarily dying as a human in a level, the world tendency shifts to darker. And the corresponding things that happen are you will, enemies will do more damage. Certain geography features will change. So doors will be open or closed at different tendencies. And eventually Black Fantasy,

so additional enemies will spawn. And the way that you lighten world tendency is by beating one of the bosses in that world. And the same thing happens at pure white world tendency. Certain items will spawn, certain doors will open and things like that. And they're really esoteric. There's nothing to hint in game that if you die a certain number of times in this level, it will unlock content for the level.

It's just stuff you have to kind of know or stumble upon an accident. and it leads to a really ridiculous kind of meta game where if you go, you know, we talked about, or we will talk about multiplayer in this and how there are phantoms that show what other people are doing in their worlds all appear in your world. And people, it is a tradition in this game is, you know, when you become a human after beating a boss,

to kill yourself in the hub area so you don't risk darkening a world tendency for yourself. So you go up to this like this suicide ledge and just see dozens of phantoms throwing themselves, off the office ledge in the nexus yeah in the nexus and then you do the same thing because i don't want to go into this world human because i'll mess up my world tendency uh unless you're trying to black in it and then you just become human and kill yourself over and over and it's really artificial and gamey it is not meant to be gamed i feel like it is only kind of the you know the ideal experience

is you notice something really weird and you don't you have a sense of mystery to it like you don't actually understand why it happened uh because that's not how uh people play games though it has become a thing to be manipulated and kind of made your own as you play through. Yeah, I feel like the meter they give you to read character and world tendency. This is getting super deep into the game, but it's not like a meter. Saying it's a meter is giving too much credit. It is just basically, it looks like a brightness test for your television. And there is no legend, like what is black, what is white?

Like, I was never able to read it. But it sounds so cool and it sounds so fun. But I think they eventually, what would replace this in future games would be the guilds or the, what would you call those? Covenants. Covenants, right, where you join a certain gang within the Dark Souls world and have certain goals and certain things you would have to do in order to achieve more within that group. So it's kind of like the morality system in Mega Man Legends 2, where if you did good things, Mega Man would become lighter. And if you did bad things, his color would darken. and, like, prices would change.

You need to have different options for weapons and stuff. Yes, but that is more clear than what's happening here. Like, your actual character has not become darker, which would be cool, I guess. Because I guess in future games, like in Dark Souls, the more you dies and undead, the more, like, decomposed you get up to a certain point. Yeah, and it would end up to a sin system in some of the later games as well. So, like, when you'd kill certain NPCs, you would acquire this stat called sin, and then that would make you a target for certain gangs, you know, different covenant.

in the system. So I think you're right that that is the successor to this. It's so different than this, but I think that they wanted to try to accomplish some of those same goals.

Yeah. You know, I think, really, I think the goal for this was to be something that you didn't manipulate to be something that you,

you know, made your playthrough different than everyone else's because there is an element to the Souls games of like emulating that school yard, you know, trading rumors on how to revive ERIS

kind of feeling, you know, these kind of like, man, yeah, I don't know, you know, that door that's always closed in one one, I walked by and it was open.

It's very similar to Pokemon, actually, because famously, Pokemon has all of these hidden stats, like IVs and EVs and such. And I believe they were put in specifically to vary up the Pokemon. There was no real end to vary up your playthrough. Right. It wasn't intended to be something that players would have any transparency into. Yes, but then players started data mining everything and min-maxing.

Those damn miners. And min-maxing the hell out of the character. And eventually, Pokemon, Game Freak just kind of shrugged and said, whatever. Yeah, sure, EV training, it's a thing and codified it. But it reminds me of the World Tendency System in that they were going for something organic and ended up with something that got manipulated the heck and back. And people were mad that they couldn't easily manipulate it. Yeah, well, because it was kind of oblique.

But in the case of the World Trade Tendency Center. World Trade Tendency Center. The World Tendency Center. The world tendency system, it could kind of screw you because the game would get markedly harder. And, I mean, Demon Souls was already a pretty damn hard game. It's a work-up horror mechanic for sure. Yeah, like the game gets harder when you die. Yeah.

I do want to talk about a few of the things that the series dropped because unfortunately we're going to have to end with multiplayer. There's so much to talk about with this game. It's a really interesting game. There's a reason that it's lasted so long. I underestimated just how much time we would need for this stuff. Now how the worm has turned, Mr. I always finished my podcast. I underestimated this.

Now you understand. Now I'm a fraud, Jeremy. Yep. So let's talk about a few of the things they lost. Thankfully, they lost a few of the mechanics like World Tendency. Some of the things they lost in the series were item burden was a really annoying part of this game where you could only carry so many things. And if you were in a world and you wanted to pick something up and you didn't have enough item space, then you couldn't. get it and often it was lost forever.

And it's tied to stats as well, so it punished you for doing a light build. Yeah. And also, this was the game where repairing your items and equipment was much important. Like, it is still a thing in future games, but it is just so negligible that like every, I don't know, 10 hours I'll repair stuff

and not really understanding why and it'll be extremely cheap. But in this game, you have to keep a close eye on the state of all of your equipment. Another thing is, it didn't have the bonfires, which was, you know, such a I mean, because Dark Souls opened it up so much and made it so much more seamless, it made sense to have bonfires.

I think one thing we haven't really mentioned is kind of the level structure that Demon Souls ultimately went with. And there is a small but not insignificant number of fans who prefer that structure. Yeah, it was brought back a kind of with Bloodborn. I can see that. But I feel like it was, again, another deviation from the trend of the very cinematic focus, like linear games in which you start, Demon Souls, you can optionally play the tutorial, but after a bit, you can essentially make a man your way into any stage that's available, at least to the beginning. And the levels themselves, you know, instead of having multiple checkpoints, there's one checkpoint,

and then the level contorts to allow you access to that checkpoint. And they also change, the levels have impact on one another, right? Yeah, yeah, well, the levels have impact on themselves. I'm trying to think, is there a thing you can look at... But you can open up shortcuts in the levels for sure. You can open up, yeah, within the level, but you don't open up, shortcuts in other levels. I was thinking of it was going to be like a

Storm Eagle, you know, a Megamac's kind of thing, but I don't think it does that. One of the most interesting things was that you would play through 1-1, and then everything opens up, right? And you can go to pretty much any other starting area. And your natural inclination is to go to 1-2. You don't

want to go to 1-2. Yeah, yeah. That's where a lot of people just stopped playing the game because there was a famous dragon set piece in which the least likely thing you will do is say to, you know, to get past his dragon, I'll take off all my clothes and run from safety to safety point. But that is really just like, really the trial by fire moment in the game is just like,

I have to try multiple solutions, some unorthodox ones, in order to understand what this game wants of me. We could snipe the dragon, or is that Dark Souls? I can never remember. You can snipe it. It takes a long time. Because I did that. I snipe the damn dragon.

I did it too, eventually. Just see if I could do it. But I want to talk about multiplayer before we leave. It's very interesting. And I feel like it's, in my opinion, it's the most interesting in this game because they make you opt into it the most. So we talked about the summoning system in which you can summon people into your world if you're alive and you can be summoned into other people's worlds if you're a soul. And if you help them defeat a boss, you become alive again. But there is also the invasion system, which is very interesting.

And I feel like future games would offer ways to opt out of being invaded. but I did enjoy the tension of knowing like even if I'm doing well in Demon Souls I can be invaded at any point at any time and there's no way out of it and I will always lose. Yeah, so this is this odd kind of PVP that's added and what's interesting is it's set up

this kind of emergent gameplay as well like there are people who just do kind of fight clubs in these games where you go to specific kind of good arenas that are meant for you know what single player play but it also would be good for multiplayer player and you just everyone stays in the same place and sets up to invade and then people will be in that world and watch sometimes and this is continued throughout the entire series when you're actually playing single player though what it does is it adds this unpredictable dynamic difficulty where you're making your way through an area and all of a sudden you hear the sound and you get the little message at the bottom you know like the gamer gamer 24 or whatever has invaded and now there's somebody in your world hunting you and you don't know exactly exactly where they're at. You don't know exactly where they're coming from. You don't know

what their build is. And it is like a marvellously, marvellously like tense experience that is pretty unmatched. Like I get a little annoyed by it sometimes. It can't be annoying. I'll play a single player. I'll play offline. But when it works, I think it's like it's pretty phenomenal. It's really fun to have souls on your side and then be summoned by a guy who's completely out of luck when you have two other people with you. But I feel like other games have pulled back from this. And I don't know why they would make it, again, you can opt out of this system in I believe Dark Souls 2 and 3 in certain ways

And Dark Souls 1 as well So if you're undead You cannot be invaded That's true Oh yeah I forgot if you're undead You can be invaded or a soul You can be invaded in this game But I kind of missed that risk

And I feel like the multiplayer functions Were much more in your face in this game Like for example in this game You can leave messages for other players Based on a pre-established series of You know words you can drop down So you can't like put any slurs down Or anything nasty

But in this game that is mapped to one button. In future games, that is an optional item you can equip. So you can even opt out of the leaving messages system. So this game, I feel like, had the most multiplayer interactions and the most messages left by other players, just by virtue of you couldn't really get out of it. And that system is so cool because these worlds are designed to be full of secrets and to be full of traps.

So you don't have to necessarily trust somebody from another world. You know, somebody might put down a message that says, hey, a secret door is here. And, you know, that's great to find out. they can also say, hey, try jumping off this cliff. Yeah, you see that a lot in the very beginning area. I remember that. It's like just people saying, hey, jump from here. And in this game, I believe you can also vote, upvote, like on Reddit, the comment left on the ground.

So if you see, like, try attacking next to an MPC and there's a bunch of downvotes, like, do not do that. As a rule. People will make messages referring to other messages, like liar ahead. That's true, yeah. So, yeah, I feel like whatever, we can talk about Eldon Ring when we wrap up, but whatever Ellen Ring is, I hope that there is. is it similar multiplayer function, but I hope if it is in the game, it is much more upfront than it was in Bloodborn and Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3. I feel like for whatever reason, they pulled back from that, and I don't know why.

A big change is that in the later games, you could turn, so you can opt out by not being human and you could turn human at any point. So what you would do is you would go to the boss you need help with, turn human right there, and then summon help, and then go into the boss. Whereas in Dark Souls 1, you had to turn human out a bonfire, which meant that the entire run between the bonfire and the boss, you had to be vulnerable to invasions. Yeah, every game has a slightly different take, but I think I prefer this one the most, just because I had the most interactions with people, often negative ones, but they were always fun and exhilarating. And I remember one that I'll leave us with before we talk about Eldon Ring is that I was in the last level and I was invaded. I was like, I just want to finish the game.

This sucks. and the guy just like stayed just out of reach of me and I was trying to attack him but he never tried to attack me and he was just sort of following me throughout the level and then he never attacked me I'm like what is his game we got to the boss gate

he dropped a bunch of items and then waived and then left so like he was an invader he was not someone I summoned but he was just there in a way to mess with my head but he was also there like I'm actually going to help you in this last level which was a fun interaction that I think about

every time I think of the series most of the series have had some people, you know, a series of people who come through who name their character something along the lines of fashion police. Oh, yeah. They invade your world, they take a look at what your character is wearing, and then drop items that would look better

and then leave. That's awesome. It's very funny. Well, as I alluded to, the multiplayer really blew my mind back in 2009. I mean, and we forget that multiplayer as a concept in console games was still a relatively fresh and new thing, circa at that

time. And we were used to lobbies and a very structured kind of environment. So to have online be so seamlessly integrated into the world, it wasn't just invasions or going into other games to help people. It was the messages, as you already said, but also the bloodstains where there's a moment very early on where you see the red-eyed night and you inevitably saw a giant puddle of blood and you would just click on it and you would watch somebody run in and then and they go, pop, bu, blah, blah, and then they would drop dead.

And the sense of danger that you got from that one scene alone, or you would see little phantoms running past, giving you a sense that there were other people in the world. It was phenomenal at the time. And a huge step forward for the way that we kind of understood online environments. And I think we take that for granted a little bit now. So before we wrap up here, I want to talk about Eldon Ring really quick. I want to know what everybody wants from this game,

having talked about Demon Souls for so long and having known what the series and other offshoots have done in the past 10 years, I was a little burned out by the time I got to Dark Souls 3, and I got through that game, but I didn't even touch the DLC or whatever, even though I still feel it's a very good game. After Sekiro kind of let me down personally, because I realize it's a really well-made game, but not for me. I kind of have a craving for another Dark Souls game, especially after refreshing myself on Demon Souls once again. And we haven't talked about it yet. there's been no remake of Demon Souls and so the only way to play this game

is to play it on a PS3 the servers are offline, you cannot get the ideal experience and I feel like there is a real hunger for that. So I'll just throw that out there too. So I'm excited for Eldon Ring and I am hoping Sony will look kindly upon Demon Souls and give us a nice HD remake like Bandai Namco did for

Dark Souls last year. Gary, what do you want from Eldon Ring? I want a return to esoteric weirdness as the main Demon Souls thing I want to have happened because as the Dark Souls games have continued, even though I've stuck with a series and really love them, there is a greater emphasis on really tough fights, like kind of excessive dual-style boss fights, which I love, but that is just kind of increasingly become the focus.

And in Demon Souls and a lesser extent, Dark Souls, there is a lot more weirdness, just gigantic setpiece battles, bosses with really, really strong concepts to them. They're very unusual bosses you're supposed to feel bad about killing, you know, bosses that kill themselves bosses that you have to kill through rain you know through like almost like a cover shooter um there's a boss that is an invader um you know as we mentioned uh that engages the multiplayer i want a lot more weirdness and i'm hoping that this kind of broad open world fantasy series and having uh kind of some world building stuff from georgia r martin is going to suggest weirdness um and we move away from here's a guy who's roughly my size using a weapon that i

could also use yeah fighting me i really want to be surprised again so jeremy you are a fan of the famous throne games. I've seen you tweet about it. Does this make you excited to jump into Miyazaki's game design at all? Or are you still going to stay a little back from it? I don't actually don't know how Martin's narrative style, like his sort of trademark Game of Thrones style, is actually going

to translate it into a video game. Because a big part of what makes it so compelling is the fact that every chapter of his books shifts to a different perspective. You are constantly having a different point of view character and seeing the world piecemeal through these people's impressions and experiences

I feel like that's a big part of what makes Game of Thrones or a Song of Ice and Fire are so compelling and I don't know if that can really come through in the game but I will say George R.R.R. Martin, put it on Switch, you coward. Oh, man. That's even more controversial

take than the Dark Souls of Blank. Put it on Switch. Another hated gamer phrase. Although I agree with you now that I become a full Switch convert. So, Kat, I know you love Game of Thrones, and you also love Souls games. In fact, some of the first conversations I had with you when moving to this area was about we were both reviewing Dark Souls.

Oh, my God. Way back. Yes, eight years ago. Oh, my God. It was a long time ago. I still have PTSD from that. Reviewing these games is not the ideal experience, believe me. But, Kat, are you excited for Eldon Ring? Do you want to review it? What is your hopes and dreams for Eldon Ring whenever it comes out? I honestly, just refreshing

what has become a very stale genre, in my opinion. in the open world genre has become every bit as kind of codified as the action game was circa 2009. And they are the most accessible, most open-ended, and ultimately the most boring. I believe that you, Gary, were the one who referred to Ubisoft Checklist Hell. Yeah, yeah. Give me the opposite of that. That's one of my least favorite game genres.

Yeah, if Miyazaki can find a way to do that, I expect that it would. This is going to be a cliche kind of comparison, but I would expect it would look like something like Breath of the Wild, where it is very open, very mysterious. You're traversing the world, but you're not really sure what's going on or why you're going to a different place. You see something over the horizon, and you're like, why. And in Breath of the Wild, it was a cool puzzle. In Eldon Ring, it's going to kill you. I enjoy that. Actually, yeah, so I didn't really believe in open world games anymore until 2017, and that both The Evil Within 2 and Browell 2 and Browell.

of the wild both changed my opinion on what an overall game could be. So I am excited and I hope the best for the Soul series and whatever Eldon Ring is, I will play it and hopefully enjoy it. But as for us, this has been another episode of Retronauts. Thanks for listening. As for what we do, if you want to help support the show, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up for the low cost for three bucks a month, you can help support the show. It supports everything that we do.

And for three bucks a month, you can get every episode one week at a time and add free and at a higher bit rate. And this show is completely fan-supported. We couldn't do any of it without you. We're coming up on our fifth anniversary of being on Patreon. So thanks so much for being a part of this. If you are, and if not, please consider it. Gary, you are our remote special guest.

Please let us know what you do. And please plug up on Fireside Chat. You've done a number of episodes about all of these Souls games. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we could have, you know, I don't know about everyone else in the room, but I could have talked about this game for like another two hours. Oh, me too.

Me too. There's so much stuff we didn't cover. And luckily, you know, if people are listening to this and want to hear that covered, We did a whole season on Demon Souls on our podcast, Bonfire Side Chat. We've done a season on all of the Soulsborn games. We have covered a lot of the predecessors, covered a lot of games that were influenced by. We've covered the manga Berserk, and we've talked about, you know, Uzimaki in reference to Bloodborn. A lot of kind of side material and everything.

In 2019, we put that show, we brought that back, but it is part of our Patreon. If you go to Patreon.com slash DuckFeed TV and join us there. You can hear our coverage of Securo and Immortal Unchained and that's where our Eldon Wing coverage will go as well.

But all the old episodes are not behind a paywall and I encourage people to check them out. We've had a lot of good guests, including you, Bob, on several of the episodes. And I'm really proud of the work. Like it is, you know, pretty exhaustive. It's a great podcast.

And that's how I think I met you was through that podcast, or at least becoming a fan of it. So yeah, check out BonfireSide Chat and Duckfeed.com. How about you? Hi, I'm Kat Bailey, editor-in-chief of U.S. Gamer. We have covered Demon Souls in a fair amount of detail. Shout out to our contributor, John Lernid, who is kind of our soulsborn person.

He had the unenviable task of reviewing Securo, but he finished it. Good for him. I'm really glad I didn't review that game. He did a full blow-by-blow diary of the last days of Demon Souls. So if you want to kind of go back, like have a deeper look at Demon Souls and also the final moments in which the servers were still up, I suggest you go there. Also, I run a podcast

called Acts of the Blog Got as our RPG podcast. We recently did a top 25 RPG countdown. Dark Souls wasn't on it, mostly because we're like, Dark Souls, RPG, and a lot of people disagreed with me. If you want to yell at me about that again, you can follow me on Twitter at the underscore Capot. I will yell at you immediately after this recording,

how dare you leave it off. Jeremy, how about you? You can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite, and on YouTube as me. That's one R in Parrish. And I think if you're listening to this on the public feed, this episode, the next episode on my YouTube works series will be The Legend of Zelda, Links Awakening Deluxe, just in time for the Switch Remakes.

So you're going to want to watch that because you love that game. I know I do. And as for me, I have been the host for this one. Bob Mackey, I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo, my other podcasts are also about old things. Not old video games, but old cartoons. Those are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. Please find those wherever you find podcasts.

All people in this room and on the Skype have been on any number of those shows, so check them out. And also we have a Patreon. It's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Go there to check out all of our bonus stuff, including exclusive miniseries. One is coming very soon if you're listening to this as of the time it is posted. So look forward to that. As for us, we will see you soon for another episode of Retronauts.

Umbasa. I'm gonnae. ...you know, ...and... ...and... ...you know. ...and... I don't know.

But... We're going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know.