I think you mean 1-3 and 5-2. Both are endurance trials.
5-1 isn’t very hard, but I suppose it depends on when you encountered it. Although I cleared it super early in one playthrough when beelining for the Blueblood sword.
Well, keep in mind, I’m not a multi-run player. This is not NG and I’ve only done (or will ever do) one run. I didn’t find 1-3 that bad. Only took a couple of tries to get the gate open and then it’s pretty trivial to clear out the dudes. Penetrator was a pushover with what-his-name’s help.
5-2 sucked because of slow movement and millions of dudes in the rickety shacks at the far side of the swamp, but wasn’t actually hard.
It’s possible 5-1 was a pain for me because I couldn’t see. Now that I think about it, I beat it pretty quickly after I turned the brightness up. No fun falling over and over because you can’t see the level.
I discovered the same thing with Blightown in DS1. Once I realized you could turn the brightness up and see things it isn’t such a pain.
Hmm, I don’t actually remember any hard fights or difficult situations in 5-1 though since I always breezed through it. I guess if you kept falling to your death there is that. The boss is joke. I don’t think I ever died to it.
1-3 is stacked with Red Knights at the end, has sneaky ambushes, and enemy density is at an all time high. I died to the Penetrator before because his sword impale attack was a one-shot at full health.
Well, I finished it last night and loved it. What a great game. The Nexus design works well, the worlds are all memorably good, with Worlds 1, 3, and 4 my favorites to play. That said, I think the most difficult, sloggy parts were 1-3 and 4-2, which got bogged down by the one mechanic in the game I didn’t enjoy: World Tendency. Having all the extra black phantoms in each location made it frustrating, and it wasn’t until I defeated an invader by chance that I was able to rid myself of a few.
I got used to the Grass mechanic (vs bonfire. Or maybe Grass + Nexus vs bonfire?) and came to appreciate it just as much.
The boss battles are, by and large, a lot different than subsequent Soulsborne games, owing way more to ‘figuring out the secret’ than to just a hard fight. A couple of exceptions, of course, like the penultimate one, but I think I liked the boss mechanics a little better. I dunno, maybe I’m forgetting Dark Souls.
Ultimately, while Dark Souls remains my favorite, Demon Souls is a worthy predecessor, and I can see why many rank it as the best in the series.
Every time I see an update in this thread I hope it’s an announcement for the PC version. :( I’m back running through dark souls 3 again again again.
Sorry, still no PC version.
I’m playing this on PS5. I always forget how annoying the game can be the first time I pick it back up again. Sometimes it’s hard to find the joy when replaying it – unlike later games, it’s difficult to zip through the levels and the boss fights mostly suck.
For me the best part is starting a new playthrough after the first one. Not NG+, which doesn’t work that well, but a brand new character. You’re already in the rhythm of the game at that point, and the hub-and-spoke world design means you can run around building an overpowered character right from the start. It’s fun to see how far you can push that new character using the experience you’ve gained from playing it. There’s a sense of reaching somewhere that your character shouldn’t be able to handle, but you do it anyway.
Then I try to push too far into 4-2 and have to bring myself back to reality! Either way, it’s nice to find the joy again.
huge levels and no bonfires. That was pretty bold game design. But they included shortcuts for the boss runs. It felt to me like some form of roguelike without permadeath. But the terror when going further further down a world level for the first time was amazing.
I can play 1-1 plus boss in one go without dying. There are more difficult worlds.