Games that Atlus have not only made, but also brought over from Japan and I have had a very rewarding friendship together: Atlus gets rewarded for their brilliant localization of charming yet brutal selection of games--like the Disgaea and Trauma Center games--and I get to enjoy some of the best RPGs of all time--Persona 4, anyone?--without having to deal with the fuss of importing and actually having to learn Japanese. Once again, Atlus shines with their localization skills and brings over a rewarding game from The Land of the Rising Sun, this time in the form of Demon's Souls, an action-RPG made by From Software. And as much as I'm going to recommend it to any fan of RPGs and go back to play it some more, I'm going to once again mention the phrase "brutal selection." Because, goddamn, this game is hard.

Remember when you picked up Mega Man 2 or Contra for the first time, and you would get dominated repeatedly at the early stages of the game and, slowly but surely, worked your way up the ladders of difficulty and learned every nook and cranny and felt accomplished when you finally beat the game? Back when I was a kid, the slang term for completing a game was "conquering" it, because the era's game design philosophy rewarded memorization and gave players little to start off with, eventually getting to the end boss and fighting an epic battle to claim victory. Demon's Souls is a lot like that, only much harder and definitely more rewarding.

The aim is to reunite a kingdom torn apart by demons, and you need to collect their souls in order to fight them off (Clever!). The only thing holding you back is you dying repeatedly. Seriously! After a breif, five-to-ten minute tutorial, you get to fight an unstoppable boss who drills you in the face and kills you. Granted, this is a story-driven battle, but you eventually roam around as in what's called "Soul Form," where you retain all your items but your maximum Health Points are about 50% of your "Body Form's" HP, among other powers taken away. You can earn your Body back fours ways: Kill a Boss Demon, help another player kill a Boss Demon, kill a Living Player, or use a rare item.

You'll be in Soul Form a lot though. Just saying.

You earn Souls by killing enemies and collecting a few specific items, which can be used to either purchase Stat Points or items. Using monetary currency as an Experience Points (meaning you need souls both to buy items and to buy stat points.  It is both currency and XP) has certianly been done before in RPGs, but never as brutal as it stands in Demon's Souls. If you purchase a Stat Point, your Soul Level goes up by one, causing the required number of Souls to purchase another one increase. Spells, Items, and Repairs can cost a lot of Souls, even the low-end ones. You also cannot sell old or unused items back for Souls, nor is there is a banking system to store Souls,  And, get this, if you die (and you will), whether in Soul Form or Body Form, you lose all of your Souls. Not cool, From Software. But you can get them back if you go to the exact spot where you died and activate your blood pool, but the entire level resets and every enemy respawns. And there's no way to go back and undo your mistakes, because the game will autosave your stats every few seconds. Frustrated yet?

You won't be when you get to the very clever online interaction. There is very little traditional multiplayer action, and virtually no way of knowing who you're interacting with when you are with them, but you'll know when it's working. Occassionally, other players' spirits will manifest in the area, allowing you to see what they're doing at the same time but not help them or communicate with them in any way. Pools of blood will show you how another player recently died in the area, giving you hints of environmental hazards or enemy ambushes. Scribbles on the ground by other players will give you short, but sometimes extremely helpful...or trollingly awful...hints of what's to come. In Soul Form, you can offer to help out Living Players in the hopes of getting your body back, or collecting Souls. Or, you can invade another Living Player's world and try to kill him to get your body back. The fact that you can't talk with anyone at all makes it seam together well with the single-player campaign. You always feel like you're in your own game, the world revolves around you.

And just like that, everyone's out to get you. The game's difficulty borders somewhere between "throw the controller at the TV" and "I want another go at this." Rationing your healing items and magic will be crucial, and figuring out how to Parry adds a whole new dimension to the game since most enemies have different attack patterns. The difficulty doesn't really make the game bad, but it does make it frustrating, especially for first time players. At the same time, it makes it rewarding to finally beat a boss. The key here is to figure out how you like to play the game. For me, it took me my third character to finally find a character set up that worked well with my style of play (The Magician, if you must know), as the stats really do matter in the game. Your speed, HP, whether or not you can use Magic, these are all legitimate things to consider as you play the game in order to figure out if you have a natural advantage as you get further in the game.

Sometimes enemies can seem too powerful, and they will often catch you off guard if you're entering a new area or don't heed the words of others...or heed the words of griefers...and if you're in Soul Form with few healing options left, you probably won't last long. Boss battles are pretty unfair but you can summon a few Spirits to help you out if you're in Body Form, but if you're in Body Form enemies will be much more aware of your presense and there's always a chance that somebody can invade your world and try to kill you in a bad spot. Environments can also get the best of you, and sometimes the controls are so clunky that they're just begging you to fall off a cliff. There's always an opportunity to come back and "conquer" any of these problems with some awareness, so you never feel like the game is unfair.

One of the things that really irked me was the story and the characters. The story is told through short cut scenes narrated by the characters as you complete levels, but to me the characters never really seem fleshed out and only seemed like they were hollow vessels that wanted to hide a lot from any development. The voice acting is okay, but the writing isn't engaging enough to keep RPG veterans interested in what's going on behind the scenes but rather wonder what's going to happen in the next level. Normally, this would kill an RPG right from the get-go, but the least From Software could do is vastly make up for it with its gameplay quality and keep the storytelling to a minimum. There's no Persona 4 story here, that's for sure.

Once you've gotten accustomed to all the gameplay elements and can figure out how to make the best of things, it should take you around 15-20 hours to complete your first playthrough, but this doesn't take into consideration that there are non-mandatory levels and other side quests, as well as interaction with other players. All in all, you could expect maybe 50 hours if you want to get really involved with the game.

Basically, if you love Action games with RPG elements, and don't mind putting up a fight to get through, you're going to love Demon's Souls. It's a fun, engaging title with a lot of replayability and enough to make you come back for more. You can certainly do a lot worse in this day and age. But be prepared to die. A lot.