Demon’s Souls and some thoughts about the Remaking-Industry
The opinion I want to express could be easily annihilated by the definition of “Remake”.
For those of you who don’t know what it means, in gaming, a “Remake” is simply a game that has been “remade”. The main reason for this is to make older titles more accessible to the modern gamer, so that important works (some more, some less) can be enjoyed without going crazy with emulators, and to make the look much more pleasing. A Remake is not only a high-definition re-mastering of a title (and in this case we would talk about a Remaster), but a real reconstruction of the models (in the case of 3D graphics) or drawings (2D) that make up the visual component of the work. But what happens when a title has contemporary graphics and outdated design?
Every year titles come out with wonderful graphics and gameplay and design that were born ‘old’. But in this case we’re talking about a game by From Software, the parent company of masterpieces like Dark Souls and BloodBorne, a software company that I personally have always considered (after having played the most modern titles) not only up-to-date, but part of a vanguard as far as the conception of the game world is concerned. The myth of the interconnected world of Dark Souls is now established even among those who are not very accustomed to the game genre and its challenging way of telling a story has become a status.
What BluePoint’s visually stunning Remake does is bring back the proto-souls, the debut work of Hidetaka Miyazaki, who took over the director’s position in the process.
But what are the compromises you have to accept in order to fully (or almost) enjoy this work?
One of the sensations I had in the first hours of the game, after a strong wonder due to the impressiveness of the work done in the purely graphic field, was a strong dissonance between what I saw and what I was playing: after a series of clashes with the strangest game mechanics of the title I was no longer able to forget that the framework of the work I was experiencing was from 2009.
Going in order, the first obstacle I encountered was definitely the management of the weight of the inventory: unlike the following titles of the souls-borne series there is a division of the weight into two distinct categories, the one worn by our avatar and the one of the inventory. The latter in particular obliges us to start on our path with a very limited amount of objects (if you don’t choose to invest experience points only for the increase of the inventory space), forcing the player to tedious examination of the objects to understand which is worth carrying or not. After several hours of play every return to the Nexus, the central hub of the game, always started the same way: with the routine emptying of all found objects. What a pain in the ass.
Right from the first world we get a taste of the checkpoint system used to allow the player to move more maneuverably around the game world. The wonderful and functional system of the Dark Souls bonfires (multiple checkpoints present in the various game areas, which can be activated once the player is near them) had not yet been “invented”. To activate a new checkpoint, in this case represented by archipietre, you have to kill the boss of the area. That’s right, a checkpoint for each boss. Whenever we find ourselves hunted by a complex boss, which will require N attempts, and a map developed “for long”, the amount of time needed to reach the boss after each death will not be negligible, making the situation frustrating not because of the boss itself, but because of a system designed, in my opinion, badly.
To all this we must also add the management of cures, which I do not think it is evil in itself, but it is prehistoric compared to the fantastic management that allow the subsequent Dark Souls (the same management of cures was taken up in BloodBoorne and is in fact one of the few defects inputable to the title). The model is obviously that of the classic “potions” of role-playing games that can be found around or bought, and in this case the prices are exorbitant at the beginning of the game, although the very first area provides a good drop rate for those less powerful.
It’s clear that my argument makes little sense: if you make a Remake, by definition, you take an “old” game and repropose it with a new look. But it is also true that video games are a young medium, an art form so recent that you are often taken for a fool by outsiders if you are seen to be taking them seriously (you are always taken for a fool at first, for everything). They are therefore a medium that is evolving, thanks primarily to technological advancement, and with them our way of experiencing them is also evolving.
How far, then, would it be legitimate to go to smooth out the edges of the original work to make it more modern? How much do these edges define it? Can we imagine a Demon’s Souls that updates itself and incorporates the winning mechanics of later titles? Could we still call it Demon’s Souls?
These are questions that I honestly don’t have a definitive answer to. But I know for sure that in the future, before accepting the challenge proposed by a one-to-one remake of a dated game, I will think twice, paying more attention to those situations of “Active Remaking”, where the goal is not only to revive the original work, but to try to make it accessible, improve it without distorting it (easy to say, certainly less so to do).
As BluePoint is showing us, the industry of “remaking” old games is active, and will be increasingly so.
Who knows, maybe one day the field of “Active Remaking” will lead to the emergence of real creators, bringing competition among the various proposals to breathe life back into an outdated title.