FromSoftware's Souls series has long been one of the most popular video game franchises currently available. It didn't start with the first Dark Souls game, however. It all began with Demon's Souls, and now that very first installment is returning to the PlayStation 5 in the form of the Demon's Souls remake. Although fundamentally very similar, it can be hard to compare the Dark Souls games to Demon's Souls. While some people can argue for hours that Demon's Souls is better than any of the Dark Souls games, while others can do the same from the opposite angle, one thing, however, is very clear: Demon's Souls is the most creative of the Souls games.
Although technically the story of the Dark Souls series is completely separate from Demon's Souls, it's clear the latter more than influenced the Dark Souls games. Gameplay, level design, boss design, and various other aspects of Demon's Souls were carried over into the Dark Souls franchise. All that being said, out of all of these games, Demon's Souls was the most unique.
PlayStation has decided to feature Demon's Souls as one of its PS5 launch day titles. That is likely because Demon's Souls is one of the most beloved (yet least played) FromSoftware games of all time. There are plenty of reasons for why that is, but the most important positive reason is because the level and boss designs of Demon's Souls are simply unparalleled in their creativity.
Why Demon's Souls is More Creative
Demon's Souls' level design is much more unique than that of the Dark Souls games. There are five different worlds within Demon's Souls that players can travel to whenever they please from the start of the game, which gives players much more choice right at the beginning. Each one of these areas has completely different and interesting enemy types, settings, and bosses, but they all still cohesively come together to make each of those five worlds a piece of art in and of themselves. While Dark Souls' level design was very interconnected and (at times) varied, many of the areas, like Lost Izalith, felt underdeveloped.
The bosses in Demon's Souls were also much more imaginative than those in the Dark Souls franchise. Each boss in Demon's Souls has a specific strategy unique to it that the player must figure out in order to defeat them. Other Dark Souls games have a bit of this, but the strategies are more or less the same for everyone - try to kill them before they kill you, preferably while circle-strafing and dodge rolling. In Demon's Souls, that is not the case. Also, each one of Demon's Souls' bosses are incredibly unique and iconic in their own right, which is why this game really stands out from the pack, especially when titles like Dark Souls 2 mostly had different variations of "people wearing armor" for enemies.
Between the incredibly original bosses and much more creative level design, Demon's Souls left its mark on the gaming industry as a revolutionary piece of art. When the remake of the original Souls game releases on November 12, a whole new generation of gamers will get a chance to enjoy that incredible experience.