Demon's Souls

• 1. Introduction

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  Demon's Souls, a role-playing game for the PlayStation 3 made by FromSoftware, was announced in early October 2008 and put in front of the public at the Tokyo Game Show the following week. Sony producer Takeshi Kajii later described the reaction to that demo as "nothing short of a disaster." Visitors found the combat so punishing that many assumed it was unfinished. Sony president Shuhei Yoshida sat down with the game for two hours and never got past the starting area. He dismissed it as "an unbelievably bad game." This is a documentary about how that game came to exist. Who rescued a failing project and bent it toward cruelty? Why would anyone design a game that takes your progress away when you die? And how did a title its own publisher shrugged off find an audience on the other side of the world?

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• 2. A Rescued Project

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  Hidetaka Miyazaki joined FromSoftware in 2004 and worked as a coder on the Armored Core series. The project that became Demon's Souls had been proposed and backed by Sony's Japan Studio, and Kajii had floated the idea of reviving a "lost breed of action game." Without a coherent vision, though, the early work stalled.

  Miyazaki heard about a high fantasy role-playing game that people inside the company considered a failure. He reasoned that if he took it over, he could steer it wherever he liked. Because it was already flagging, his own failure would cost nothing. Masanori Takeuchi co-produced for FromSoftware, alongside Kajii for Sony, and the whole effort, early false starts included, took about three years.

  The seed was King's Field, FromSoftware's older series, whose dark tone and stiff difficulty Miyazaki named as his main inspirations. He nonetheless did not want the new game tied to it, and said so. Many players call it a spiritual successor anyway. He also wanted to bring the hardcore feel of King's Field and Wizardry to modern consoles, with online features added. He admitted resemblances to Monster Hunter and Bushido Blade but said the team had no particular game in mind.

  Once the first design documents existed, the concept barely changed. The game did not run in playable form until very late, and even then it suffered from network and framerate trouble. The team enjoyed unusual creative freedom, which Kajii credited to "fortunate timing and release schedules." That freedom let Miyazaki keep certain details away from the executives who held the budget.

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• 3. Dying and Returning

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  When a player dies in Demon's Souls, the level restarts from its entrance and every enemy except the bosses returns to life. The character reappears in soul form, with lower maximum health and none of the souls it had not yet spent. A bloodstain marks the spot of death. Reaching it restores the lost souls, but dying again first erases them permanently.

  Souls serve as both experience and money. They raise the character's stats and buy weapons, armor and items, and the price of each improvement climbs as the player invests. Ore found along the way can be used to upgrade weapons.

  Miyazaki and his colleagues debated this system often. They kept it because a game with no risk of losing souls would drain every achievement of meaning. He worried that Sony would demand changes if it understood the details, so he chose his words carefully in design pitches. He stayed silent about the difficulty itself, convinced that Sony would insist on lowering it. Kajii agreed to keep quiet until release. Yet Miyazaki insisted he never meant the game to be hard. He wanted players to feel challenged and then rewarded. One idea, permanent death, was dropped because staff felt it went too far.

  Between expeditions, the player lives in the Nexus, a hub for trading souls, storing items and travelling. The world has six areas in all. Beyond the Nexus sit five worlds, each split into three areas that end in a boss, except World 1, which has four. After the opening stretch of the first world, the player can tackle the others in any order. Beating a boss unlocks an Archstone, a place to respawn.

  Combat depends on timing for strikes and blocks, and nearly every action drains a stamina meter. Different weapon types change how fast the character moves, a variety the team borrowed in spirit from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players begin by choosing a sex, an appearance and a class, all of which feed into starting stats. Every boss was built on one simple premise and meant to feel varied and exciting. Other players' ghosts could appear in these same levels, which is where the design turned stranger.

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• 4. Strangers in the Fog

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  Miyazaki once drove up a hillside after heavy snow. Cars ahead stopped and started slipping backward, and the cars behind deliberately bumped them up the slope so traffic could keep moving. He left the area before he could thank anyone. He wondered whether the last driver in the line had reached a destination, and he knew he would probably never see those people again. He wanted to recreate that silent cooperation against adversity, and the Phantom systems grew from it. Black and Blue Phantoms were added to widen the range of player experiences.

  Asynchronous multiplayer works through the PlayStation Network. Players glimpse other adventurers as brief ghosts in the same area, sometimes revealing hidden passages or switches. A dying player can leave a bloodstain in other people's worlds. Touching it replays the ghost's final moments, showing how that person met their end. Players can also write short messages on the floor, warning of traps, ambushes or boss tactics. Miyazaki likened them to text messages, and he struggled to explain the idea to Sony until he compared it to the brevity of an email set against a phone call.

  Cooperative play lets up to three characters join a host's world. Visitors appear in soul form and return to their bodies only when a boss falls. Competitive play lets a Black Phantom invade another player's world. If the invader kills the host, the invader goes home to their own game. If the invader dies, the host takes a share of the phantom's souls and the phantom loses an experience level. The team did not want players forming questing parties, so multiplayer was meant to deepen the single-player game rather than stand alone. The Old Monk battle, which summons another player as a Black Phantom mid-fight, produced a pile of bugs.

  Behavior also shifts the world itself. Character Tendency follows the player everywhere and drifts from neutral toward black or white. Killing non-player characters, antagonizing other players and dying repeatedly in a world pushes it black. Helping others and beating bosses pushes it white. World Tendency applies to a single region. A black world gives enemies more health and richer rewards, while a white world makes enemies weaker and drops more items but fewer rare ones. At the extremes, exclusive events fire and new areas open. The tendency of worlds across the servers feeds back into each region as well.

  Atlus first planned to close the North American servers in October 2011. A month before that date it extended them to May of the following year, and later said they would run "indefinitely." The servers were finally discontinued worldwide in February 2018, ending multiplayer, messaging and World Tendency. A few months later, a group of fans launched a private server that restored every online function.

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• 5. Boletaria

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  In ancient times, the misuse of magic called Soul Arts drew the Old One to the kingdom of Boletaria. A magical Deep Fog spread, birthing soul-eating demons that nearly consumed the world. The Old One was lulled to sleep, and some survivors became long-lived Monumentals who warn later generations. In the game's present, King Allant restores the forbidden arts, the Old One wakes, and people who lose their souls turn into raving monsters.

  The player enters the fog, dies, and wakes in the Nexus beside a benevolent demon called the Maiden in Black. Bound there until the Old One sleeps again, the hero travels to five regions, kills the demons ruling them and absorbs their souls. The Allant who waits at the end turns out to be an imposter. The true king lies within the Old One's body, transformed into a helpless blob-like demon, and the Maiden in Black arrives to put the Old One back to sleep.

  Two endings follow. Walk away from the Old One and the Slayer of Demons is hailed as the hero of a damaged but restored Boletaria, becoming a new Monumental as the knowledge of Soul Arts fades. Kill the Maiden in Black instead, and the Slayer becomes a powerful demon serving the Old One's hunger while the fog keeps spreading.

  Kajii said the team aimed to "sidestep preset narrative" and put gameplay first. The world borrowed its tone from King's Field, and both Kajii and Miyazaki loved dark fantasy. Miyazaki turned to European folklore and mythology, rather than the Japanese folklore common in Japanese action role-playing games. He named Arthurian and Germanic legend, the films Conan the Barbarian and Excalibur, the paintings of Frank Frazetta, and old gamebooks as direct influences. The art leaned toward Western titles more than Japanese ones.

  Kajii asked for a heroine, and so the Maiden in Black exists. Because players would see her in close-up and eyes were the weakest part of the character models, the team gave her none. Miyazaki's early designs held more worlds, and the last to be cut were a Library and an outdoor area for the Nexus. The Tower of Latria was built around man-made evil, and the Valley of Defilement around natural evil.

  Shunsuke Kida wrote the fully orchestrated score. He had scored few games but was famous for music in several Japanese television series. Many pieces use solo violin or piano, others a full orchestra, and all vocals are choral. Japanese singer Kokia sang on three tracks.

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• 6. Crossing Oceans

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  Sony Computer Entertainment Japan released Demon's Souls in Japan on the 5th of February 2009. Because of negative feedback from Sony staff and the Japanese press, Sony chose not to localize it for Western markets. Sony and Yoshida in particular later regretted that choice. Sony did commission an English text version for Asia, translated by Active Gaming Media, and a Chinese version appeared on the 26th of February.

  The voice acting was in English for every version. Since the setting resembled medieval Europe, the team avoided American actors and asked Sony to cast them, and most of the performers were Scottish. James Mountain of Active Gaming Media was the main translator and aimed for natural-sounding dialogue. He saw no art or video from the game until rather far into the work. An earlier unfinished localization mixed archaic words such as "thee" and "thou" with very modern terms, and he found it lacking and revised it. He never spoke to the developers. They gave detailed feedback on item descriptions and other systems but accepted his dialogue without comment.

  Sony did not want to license out a game, but a first-party release was no longer possible, and it hoped the game would find a niche. Atlus took on North American publishing. The studio knew the game was brutally hard but admired its quality, and it planned for conservative sales. The localization mostly fixed grammar and accuracy problems in the Asian version. The game reached North America on the 6th of October 2009 in standard and limited editions.

  Europe looked bleaker. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Atlus both announced they had no plans to publish there. Then, on the 16th of April 2010, Namco Bandai Partners signed a deal with Sony to distribute the game across PAL territories. Standard and limited editions reached Europe, Australia and the rest of the region on the 25th of June 2010.

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• 7. Critics Divided

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  Dengeki gave the game 95, 85, 85 and 85, adding up to 350 out of 400. It said that "fans of old-school games will shed tears of joy." Famitsu scored it 29 out of 40. Its editor Paint Yamamoto gave a 9 and called it a game learned by losing, one where keeping at it reveals real depth. Fellow editor Maria Kichiji gave a 6, finding it "far too stoic" and saying it was "not a game for everybody."

  North American critics were warmer. Many treated the difficulty as a virtue that made success more rewarding. GameSpot called it "fair," saying the combat "feels just right." IGN said anyone who missed games that taught through negative reinforcement should buy it at once. Game Informer named it "one of the first truly great Japanese RPGs of this generation." Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine praised it but said it was "best left to the most masochistic, hardcore gamer."

  The online design drew its own praise. GameZone called it "innovative," and Game Revolution felt it "turns a solitary experience into a surprisingly communal one." GamesRadar said it looked more like the old Ultima games than anything from Japan. GameTrailers said it "nails the dark fantasy look" and admired music from real instruments, though it found the physics engine "jittery." ScrewAttack placed it eighth among PlayStation 3 exclusives to date.

  European critics reviewed import copies before the local release. Keza MacDonald of Eurogamer wrote that defeating the boss that killed you within half a minute brings "the purest kind of gaming thrill." Edge argued that if gaming's appeal lies in mastering new skills, then "the medium's keenest thrills are to be found in its hardest lessons." That magazine would return to the game years later with a ranking.

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• 8. Word of Mouth

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  In Japan, Demon's Souls opened in second place with more than 39,000 copies, behind Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 2. That sold through 95% of the shipment and emptied some store shelves. Even so, Miyazaki said early sales were slow, and with the cold reception at trade shows the team feared failure. Word of mouth carried the game past 100,000 copies, which the team counted as success. It reached 134,585 copies in Japan by December 2009.

  Atlus had predicted 75,000 North American sales and sent out only 15,000 copies at first. Then praise spread and demand took off. The game was the eleventh best-selling title in its release month, at 150,000 units, and had sold 250,000 by March 2010. By April 2010 sales were triple Atlus's original estimate. Index Corporation, Atlus's parent company, reported profits of over $3 million, almost all credited to this one game. In September 2010 it joined the Sony Greatest Hits line at a lower price, which implied more than 500,000 sales in the region.

  In the United Kingdom, the special edition sold out quickly apart from "dribs and drabs." Namco Bandai Partners called this a success, given the long wait after the North American launch. With no marketing campaign behind it, analyst Jesse Divnich called the game one of the most statistically relevant releases ever, a test of how a high-quality new property from a little-known publisher would sell. By 2011 it had sold over one million copies worldwide.

  The 2009 awards followed. GameSpot named it Overall Game of the Year, Best PS3 game, Best Role-Playing game and, for its online integration, Best Original Game Mechanic. GameTrailers gave it Best RPG and Best New intellectual property. PC World chose it as Game of the Year, and RPGamer named it RPG of the Year. In 2015, Edge ranked it 20th among the greatest games of all time.

  It is regarded as the first Soulslike game. FromSoftware went on to Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and the studio's tie to Sony also produced Déraciné. The game is cited as an influence on The Witcher series, Journey and Nioh, as well as on features of the PlayStation 4. Bluepoint Games, whose 2018 remake of Shadow of the Colossus came just before, built a PlayStation 5 remake. It launched with the console on the 12th of November 2020.

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