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Darmonde

Demon's Souls

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Demon's Souls, PS3- I turned this on Sept 2012 when I borrowed it from Mzo, and beat 2 bosses. Went back to it about a month ago after finally finding a decent looking used copy from GS. Finally finished it Saturday, all trophies.

The game is obtuse. I think the devs kind of made a world, created this system of numbers, and then dropped everything into it. There are tons of ways to legitimately exploit the system. If you have enough souls for arrows, a thief ring, and a lot of time, almost any enemy in the game can be beaten just by shooting, waiting for the guy to forget about you and turn around, then shooting him again, repeat x100. I'll admit I did this for a few enemies. Your soul level just depends on how much you want to farm, and farming in the game is relatively easy. If you really want to just kill some guys for souls, then run back and level yourself up, you can. Maybe this is what you're supposed to do as a new player (leveling any stat increases your damage reduction, so eventually your D gets pretty high, which makes regular enemies much less frightening), but for some reason I really wanted to save souls and not level the second I could.

I basically lived on the wiki, after the first week or so of playing. I think I tried the first level of each world before diving into the system, and the game was rough. The system is so open ended that its hard to say what I did 'wrong', but my play style did not lend for an easy game. Meaning hoard all money, never level up weapons (or my character, in this case) unless you have a goal in mind (eg 18 str and 18 dex for use a certain weapon), and never use consumables.

Once I read the wiki, I went for the vicious bow, basically used the crescent sword +1, and flame shield the entire game. I leveled the shield to +3, then eventually to +7, which in hindsight was probably the best thing for me, since I played the whole game basically blocking attacks and counter attacking. Pretty much any enemy I couldn't block 100% damage (magical, or high fire damage) I had trouble with. I eventually maxed out the bow, which helped for some bosses. I also just straight up duped the best arrows.

So, speaking of duping.. on the ps3trophies site, I found a post about how to dupe items. Quick steps- Stockpile Thomas has none of item X. You have at least 1. Talk to Boldwin, buy something (first grass works) and while on the 'quantity' screen walk away from him so the dialog disappears. He usually gets angry and says something. While he's talking, spam evacuate (or use a shard of archstone, but I had the spell). Actually, I don't think you need to do this at all, but I did. After he's done talking, (I would skip the first line, but you can probably skip both). Cast the spell again, and the prompt (Warp? Yes/No) comes on screen. Press Start to clear that prompt. Talk to Thomas, deposit item X, and your character should automatically start the spell cast, for no reason, and you can quickly notice that the item you deposited goes from original quantity Y to quantity Y+1, and greys out. During your cast animation, you should cancel out of all menus quickly- if you leave all menus fast enough, you don't actually teleport, which would just waste time, and maybe an item. At this point, Thomas now has 1023 of item X. If you do anything to his quantity like take 1 (or 97), his stock drops down to the max (99 for souls, 999 for something like white arrows).

Wow, those steps were NOT quick. I guess I should learn how to be more concise. But there are a lot of tiny details that help that are kind of useful. I guess this is why whenever you look up shit online, the instructions are super vague- not because the writer doesn't notice the details, but that it would take way too long to write it all out. Hm.

Anyway, back to duping. So I duped the best arrows in the game, probably about halfway through. There are a limited # of those per play, so this is probably cheating. Before that, I was using light arrows or hard arrows. But that was only the tip of my duping iceberg.

I ended up duping every boss soul in the game, because I didn't expect to play through the game more than once, and you need multiple souls for all the trophies.

I duped every. single. type. of upgrade stone. Basicailly, you can farm all of these, either from enemies, or the rare pure stones from crystal lizards (which are limited spawns per game cycle also). In my mind, I was just saving myself a ton of time. I probably did save myself time, but in the end duping ALL those stones takes a lot of time.. and I only upgraded 1 of each type of weapon, so.. grats me, on having a box full of shit if I ever need it.

I could go into details on every fight in this, but I guess I shouldn't. I ended the game about soul level 80. Got all trophies in 1 playthrough basically. When you beat the game (good ending) you get the maiden in black's soul, but after the end credits. So to get the last trophy (all spells) I had to play NG+ levels 1-1 through 1-3, so I could give her that soul and learn the last spell.

Did all the tendency events. Pretty complicated system, and they hid only a few things behind them. Kind of strange, and of course, doesn't seem like there is any help in game to figuring it out.

I didn't do any duping online, so I picked up or made all weapons myself. This means I had to farm a couple things, and it was pretty bad. The pure bladestone is not from a crystal lizard, so its super rare.. took me at least 2 hours of farming. The crystal lizard purestones weren't bad, but it was just nerve wracking since if you fuck up the lizards never come back. In fact, I was super worried through my entire time with the game that I would screw something up that would require a second playthrough. The game would have taken me a lot less time if I wasn't constantly planning and checking the wiki.

I loved the online integration. The bloodstains were cool, and helpful sometimes. The notes were great, and even if they weren't they never felt annoying. I played almost always in soul form, so I was only invaded once ever, and I got murdered. Only tried to summon a blue a couple times on a whim and never got a match. Didn't fight against a human for the Monk boss, and tried to invade in that level a few times at the end of my game, but also never got a match, so I guess I was too late to this party (although I did seem to see a lot of white ghosts running around- I wonder if those are recorded, and not real time?).

Really good game in the end. I wish the spell slots weren't so limited- I didn't cast probably 80% of the spells because I never wanted to change out my limited slots just to see how things worked. I only really used a few weapons, I probably tried every type briefly, but never really intended to switch since I had my pattern set already. Any weapon can probably be successful with upgrades, so its mostly preference. Also, there are a ton of attacks that I didn't use (attack from roll, from backstep, etc). I kept things as simple as possible because I like control, and I don't like dying. So I probably played the game really really basic and boring.

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Updated 25 Feb 2013 at 12:41 PM by Darmonde

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