The 1000 Games I've Beaten (#622 - 630)

 

#622 Demon's Souls (Playstation 3) – Spring 2016

After playing the heck out of Bloodborne, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls in 2015, it was time to backpedal and see where it all began. This predecessor is basically a mood in game form. An overcast, mossy, foggy, rainy mood. The remake of this game is incredible in its own right but I don't think it replaces the original; they're still very different and the original just captures a very unique vibe. Spring 2016 to me means rain storms, FF Tactics, and Demon's Souls.

I really liked the open structure of this game. It's kind of a proto Elden Ring in that you're free to move around and try different areas if you're struggling with one. However, instead of having dozens of options, in this game you have five worlds to make your way through. I tend to bounce between them rather than staying with one.

This is a pretty simple game and might be the easiest of the Fromsoft catalog (outside of Elden Ring if you use all tools available to you). The bosses here are probably the simplest and easiest in the whole series, but you don't have nearly as many options (summons, spirits, etc) as you do in later games. So the foes are weaker but so are you, essentially. Overall I'd say this would be a good entry point to the series if not for the World Tendency bollocks being off-putting for new players who aren't expecting it.

The PS5 version smooths things out a bit so it's the way to go for new players, but damn, the PS3 version sure does still have some appeal for series fanatics to go back and spend some time with. I don't think it's obsoleted at all by the new version; they're two distinct and great versions of the same game that are interesting in different ways.

Still, it's a good game to start the series with, provided you know how to handle the World Tendency stuff beforehand. Playing the game AFTER Bloodborne and the first two Darks, I already saw where the series was headed, so this game had value in going back to see where all of these ideas started and took shape. Despite going back to the now-underpowered PS3, I enjoyed this just as much as the other 3 games I played in the year before this.

Final Time: 140 hours, level 166, reached New Game ++

Favorite Tune: Souls of Mist, the main menu theme. These games tend to have outstanding main menu themes.

Favorite World: Of the five worlds, easily the Shrine of Storms. Most of the game's pretty vistas and good screenshots are from that one world. It's tough as nails, though. Boletaria Palace is a close second, and the way the four levels of that world flow seamlessly together is almost like a proto version of Bloodborne's City of Yharnam design.

Least-Favorite World: Valley of Defilement, because of course the swamp is the worst area. On the bright side, it's really the only bad area of the five. The rest are pretty much hits...mostly. The second half of Stonefang Tunnels kinda falls apart a bit.

Ranking the Worlds: #1 Shrine of Storms, #2 Boletaria Palace, #3 Tower of Latria, #4 Stonefang Tunnels, #5 Valley of Defilement

Path of Least Resistance: Sorcery is really OP in this game and actually trivializes a lot of it if you dump your levels into Magic (spell damage) and Intelligence (MP), with HP as a tertiary stat for survivability because you don't want to be a glass cannon. I'd level at a rate of 2 MAG:1 INT:1 HP. Go to World 4-1 right away and get the Crescent Falchion up on the cliff since it's a rare melee weapon that scales off of magic stats. Boom, you're now both a casting and melee powerhouse without having to spread stat points around, and can focus them in on the key stats.

What Happened To Archstone #6?: Seriously, where is the Northern Limit? Just cut content? It has always bothered me that 1/6th of this game's world is missing, despite being alluded to by characters in the game and even the intro movie. Especially considering it might well have been the best world of the six, if the rumors are true that Frozen Eleum Loyce in DkS2 was the 6th Archstone repurposed.

Favorite Boss: The Storm King. A giant manta ray that attacks during a thunderstorm and would be more at home in Shadow of the Colossus.

Favorite Playstyle: Battlemage that can do a little of everything.

Toughest Part: Farming the Pure Bladestone. One of the rarest drops, if not THE rarest drop in the Souls series, and a requirement for forging a few specific weapons to their max level of +10. Which, luckily, isn't going to affect your game much since +9 functions just fine, and you've got many other weapon categories that are easier to max out, with more common stones. That is, unless you're going for the platinum. Which I was. So I had to find every Pure stone so I could have a +10 weapon of every category. And when I got to the Pure Bladestone, hoo boy. It took me hours of farming in Stage 4-2, sneaking up on this metal skeleton and taking him out, running around the edge of the cliff to get the drop on him every time I reloaded the area to respawn him. Gained tons of levels in the process, and it was actually pretty relaxing, with the stormy sky and foggy terrain of that area. Weirdly enough it's a fond memory, and once I finally got the Pure Bladestone to drop, it was a super-rewarding feeling.

Best Things About The Game: The mood and atmosphere. The sheer volume of super-creative weapons, rings, spells, etc. Healing items being infinite and farmable, so you basically never run out and never die unless you either fall down or get overwhelmed. The way NPCs all have their own stories, some of the weapons you find have THEIR own stories... the amount of effort that went into this game is absurd and it set the tone for everything From Software did after it.

Worst Things About The Game: Any time a dragon shows up. This series was terrible with dragons for the first few games. They tend to be near-unavoidable drive-by jackasses that function more as world traps than enemies. Also, the being stuck at half health most of the time. The Cling Ring mitigates this to 75% which is fine enough, but that means one of the two ring slots is perpetually taken up with that, leaving you just one ring slot to play around with. Given how good accessories in this game are (the element resistance rings can QUADRUPLE your resistance to that element, for example), losing half of your two ring slots is lame. And finally, the World Tendency stuff. If you know about it beforehand it isn't a problem, but if you don't, it's pretty damn lame and can mess up a playthrough.

Cool Note: It took me exactly ten years, but I finally bought this game this past month, March 2026. That's right, exactly ten years after the initial playthrough.

#623 Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (PSP) – Spring 2016

Demon Souls followed by this was one of the best one-two punches of game I've ever experienced. It was more "alongside" rather than followed, really, as I went between the two for most of the Spring. Demon Souls was just the one that got done first, followed shortly after by this one. It's Final Fantasy Tactics with a new translation, a really good one. I seized the opportunity to do posts of the game via PSP emulation, and it was the Spring 2016 series for this site. It was actually my second run at this version of the game; I had it on my actual PSP, and played about 80% of the game on there before getting softlocked at Finnath Creek.

As for the game itself... it's FFT. FFT is never not good. It ranked near the top of my pre-millennium RPG list for a reason. The PSP version's new translation (and widescreen!) gives it a big boost over the PS1 version, but at the same time, I think there were some major slowdown issues with spell casting. So it was hard for me to rank the PSP version over the PS1 version when we had these pros and cons. The modern version we have now gives us a good translation and doesn't have any slowdown issues so that's the new way to do it.

I already talked about this game pretty extensively when I got to the PS1 version. Should I even be counting other versions of it as new entries? It's a big enough game that I'm alright with it. Besides, talking about Demon Souls and not also talking about this would be doing a disservice to the garden of wonder that was my early 2016. They were both big parts of it and both deserve mention. I'll just paste some of what I said about the PS1 version here because it's a good story:

When I first got this game, I had to take the bus in the rain to go pick it up from Let's Play, a small local business that ended up being where I got like half of everything game related (purchase or rental) from this point onward until probably about 2007 or so. They had everything, would let you keep things for like 2 weeks, and would set up systems so you could sit there and try things out before checking them out or buying. I remember being super impressed with the box art and the white background, which conveyed the mood of the game well before it even got started.

I enjoyed the heck out of this game and spent a ton of time micromanaging and grinding job points to try different class combinations. I love the soundtrack, the constant thunderstorms, and everything about this.

Fondest Memory: Random battles with rain and thunderstorms. Playing those was always a good time, especially when it was raining for real outside.

Favorite Tune: Zaland Fort City - One of the strongest pieces of music in any game on the Playstation 1. No, I'm not kidding.

The Terror of Finnath Creek: I got and played this on an actual PSP a couple years before 2016, and got soft-locked at the Finnath Creek chocobo battle. I was about level 90 going into that battle due to doing lots of class-grinding earlier in the game, and the chocobos were completely unbeatable due to scaling levels. And I think this is WITH Orlandu, too! Pretty sure he's around by then. Finnath Creek doesn't get the press that Riovane's fights do, but from what I've seen online it has softlocked quite a few people too. Even IF I had found a way to get past Finnath Creek, there's no way I would have gotten past Balk and his hydras right before the final battle. They're even worse than the chocobos.

I wasn't going to go sit in the desert for several hours de-leveling my characters just to get past this one fight, so that was it for my run at this version of the game until I played it again on emulator in 2016 for posts. This time I was prepared and kept my levels lower (to keep the chocobos lower) and got to Finnath Creek at level 43. Even at level 43, the chocobos were absolute beasts.

Toughest Part: As always, Riovanes Castle, home to a couple of ridiculously difficult fights if you're unprepared. The Finnath Creek battle is pretty awful, but it can be mitigated by keeping levels from getting too inflated before that. Classes, stats, and equipment matter more than levels in this game anyway. Riovanes is tough no matter what.

Posts HERE.

My ranking of FFT's hardest battles HERE. One of the better lists on here I think. There are some dark horse candidates on there.

#624 Persona 4 Arena Ultimax (Playstation 3) – Summer 2016

A fighting game based on Persona 4. It's a great idea for a game, and it looks really good in action. Some of the persona designs in Persona 4 were perfectly suited to pop up in a fighting game like this. I played through the whole thing. All of that said, I found it to be a bit of a slog to get through for one major reason:

There is SO MUCH TALKING. Constant dialogue scenes, most of which is about stuff that I didn't really have any investment in. I like story in my fighting games, but this has so much dialogue that the story:fighting ratio is pretty lopsided. I frequently found myself waiting for the next fight to happen and the whole thing was a little tedious. I guess I just wasn't the audience for this.

#625 Star Fox Zero (Wii U) – Summer 2016

The first thing I played after I started making videos / recording gameplay / posting on Youtube. That's probably the most significant thing about this playthrough, that I played it as I was starting up on Youtube. This and the next game were the very first things I recorded any sort of longplay for, ever.

Despite being a big fan of the original game, and very excited for this as a result... I wasn't crazy about the game at all, and felt like the motion control gimmicks really detracted from it. Especially the "hold up the Gamepad and use it to aim" thing. It was shoehorned-in "waggle motion" that wasn't necessary and just annoyed me more than anything else.

I actually liked the Wii U a lot compared to most, but this wasn't it. The visuals looked pretty antiquated too. We were well into the era of PS4 at this point and Nintendo was still putting things out that looked like they belonged in 2010. Well, that wasn't changing anytime soon, so it is what it is.

#626 Mighty No. 9 (Playstation 4) – Summer 2016

The spiritual successor to the Mega Man series, made by Keiji Inafune. Sometimes spiritual successors turn out to be outstanding (Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night), sometimes they turn out to be...this. An attempt at a new franchise, there was simply nothing appealing about this game...hell, it might have some of the most unappealing character designs I've ever seen. Basically everything this tried to do, Mega Man 11 did miles better a few years later.

Toughest Part: The final boss was so far above the rest of the game in difficulty that I spent probably 30% of the total runtime just playing the last level over and over again to try and take him down. I recorded a full playthrough of this game and it, along with Star Fox Zero, were the first things I did that with. Was it worth the trouble? No, not really. Both games were pretty big letdowns that I was initially excited about.

I guess you could say that Mighty No. 9... wasn't so mighty after all.

Post HERE along with the videos I did. Given this was one of my first real forays into a Youtube longplay, I wish it had gone to a better game.

#627 DOOM (Playstation 4) – Summer 2016

The big revival of the DOOM series, this was a long time coming, and it was definitely worth the wait. Terrific game, and has the distinction of being the third thing I did a youtube longplay for. The first two were games that turned out to be duds, so it was good to get a real hit. While I liked the survival-horror Doom 3 more than most did, the series desperately needed a return to form. This game lands the metal-core aesthetic that original DOOM delivered way back in the day. And speaking of metal...

Favorite Tune: BFG Division - Quite possibly the single greatest battle theme in video game history. This track is pure musical insanity. I've listened to it countless times while playing other things, and it always improves whatever I'm playing by leaps and bounds.

Post HERE. This is just a consolidation of videos from the recorded longplay. It's pretty cool because I got a whole bunch of friends to guest star on these.

#628 Street Fighter V (Playstation 4) – Summer 2016

Something I probably didn't really grasp or appreciate at the time, just another box to check off in my quest to play all the Street Fighter games. This is a particularly gorgeous game from an art standpoint and I really liked the way the environments looked. I only played this when it was fairly new, and it was somewhat barebones at the time as I recall. The idea was that it was a "platform" for later additions rather than a fully-formed game out of the gate, and in that sense it was probably a step down from Ultra Street Fighter IV for a lot of people. All of that flew over my head; I gave it a quick playing one afternoon and moved on. It was fine. Some day I'd like to revisit it and see how it is... now that it's, presumably, fully-formed.

#629 Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS) – Summer 2016

Easily my least-favorite of the four Advance Wars games. What were they doing with this one? Gone are the bright pastel colors of the first three. They switched to a much darker tone and made everything dull browns and muted colors. Basically they Twilight Princessed it. The gameplay stayed pretty solid though, at least, and these games were all a fun time, even this one. It was worth playing through the first two on emulator (I didn't have a GBA) and worth buying the third, no doubt. This one, though, was a rental. I barely remember anything about it, and it put the series to bed for a long time.

"Running on fumes" is the best way to describe this game, because that's what it is. Running on fumes. Come to think of it, this particular post has had some real clunkers in it for whatever reason. Started with two incredible games and everything after has been very hit-or-miss. Hopefully later in 2016 I'd get some better games lined up.

#630 Resident Evil 5 (Playstation 3) – Summer 2016

Played this purely because it was next in line after RE4, which I liked well enough. Being a PS3 game, it looked kinda bad at this point, so to get through it I enlisted a friend/roommate and we played through basically the entire game in co-op. That made it a lot more interesting. I still wasn't really a fan of the series though.

This game wasn't great - everything was so dull and generic, a hallmark of the late 2000's in gaming unfortunately - and it's where the series kinda began to fall off with people for a while. RE6 was significantly worse and did the series in the rest of the way - by trying to be too many things - before RE7 onward revamped it and took things in a new direction. I personally wasn't crazy about this series until RE8 though. That game was awesome, and along with the remakes of RE2/3/4, really revitalized this series into something I could get into.

How Did The Co-Play Go?: Very well, we got to the end and finished the game.

Funniest Part: Chris punching a boulder

Most Memorable Part: Making one of my first Youtube videos, a tutorial on how to defeat one of the bosses, which doubles as a tutorial of how to stimulate the clitoris. Matter of fact, the videos I did on this game are a good thing to close with...

Clit Battle 101: Resident Evil 5 - A tutorial on boss fights AND life wrapped into one!

Resident Evil 5: Fury Road - Just a completely off the cuff, ad-libbed video dub using footage from the game, the first in a long and rich tradition of weird, almost random videos based on the RE series.

Favorite Character: Sheva. She needs to do more in this series. Kind of fitting that she's named after a goddess, given how incredibly gorgeous she is. (Shiva is technically capable of appearing as either male or female in Hinduism, and usually appears male - even having a wife of sorts, Shakti, as a feminine counterbalance to his masculine energy - but Shiva is pretty much almost never the name of a dude in popular media so...goddess)

That's it for today. Go on, get outta here!