Highlights
- FromSoftware's Souls-adjacent games are highly requested for remakes, but Demon's Souls' success hasn't led to anything new of that caliber.
- Demon's Souls' unique visceral animations are currently under-appreciated in the Soulslike subgenre.
- The riposte attack animations in Demon's Souls are unmatched and set a high standard for future Soulslikes to make weapon animations more distinct.
The Soulslike subgenre is perpetually interesting because imitators and established creators alike learn from and iterate upon each previous entry. There’s almost always something to glean from any Soulslike game, whether it’s a particularly successful implementation or a failure that can either be improved on or kept at a distance for future endeavors. Then, intriguingly, FromSoftware’s Souls-adjacent games are one of the few that fans actually highly consider for remakes. It’s odd and unfortunate, though, that Demon’s Souls’ success hasn’t generated anything new of that caliber.
Demon’s Souls’ original game was obviously a stepping stone to what Souls games and related action-RPGs would become for the developer, and as such it was reasonably elementary. That’s still true of Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls remake, which more than anything was an incredible coat of paint, but the game’s character and NPC animations were also highly distinct apart from the original. Few mechanics need a massive overhaul from Soulslike to Soulslike, and originality in each is where they thrive, but Demon’s Souls’ unique visceral animations are currently under-appreciated in the subgenre.
Soulslikes Following FromSoftware Trends Have Their Pros and Cons
Many Soulslikes are essentially action-RPGs with dynamic combat, but Soulslikes are identified most prominently by several consistencies that imitators make a point of including. The most notable feature is how the player’s riches are stripped from them upon death with players needing to go back and retrieve it before they perish again.
But animations have become cloned in certain Soulslikes, too, with the latest explicit example of this occurring in Lies of P. It wouldn’t be enough to say that attacks or dodges were comparable between it and Souls games, but Lies of P even features the iconic “butt-scratching” animation that the character performs when reaching for an item that is either unequipped or exhausted. This alone shows how dedicated and indebted Lies of P is to FromSoftware’s kit of features, mechanics, and animations in carving its own path when it comes to narrative.
Games like Mortal Shell, Thymesia, or Steelrising all have their own way of making themselves distinguished from other Soulslikes, but because FromSoftware is the subgenre’s author it has gotten away with not needing to alter much in terms of its animations or graphics, whether fans think they are excellent as they are or not. However, even though repeated patterns make for an experience that is familiar, there is still one area of improvement that these games should hope to adapt from Demon’s Souls, and that’s how each weapon type’s riposte animations are different.
Demon’s Souls’ Visceral Riposte Attack Animations are Unmatched
Demon’s Souls was a wonderful visual treat for the PS5’s launch and continues to depict how terrific games can look on the current-gen Sony console. However, the technical feature that stood out the most, at least in its initial trailers and gameplay reveals, was the fact that different weapons offered different animations for when players performed a riposte.
These parry follow-ups or backstabs allow for riposte attacks, otherwise called visceral attacks, that give players a free and devastating strike on an enemy who has been staggered or whose back has been compromised. Demon’s Souls’ remake gave a masterclass in character motion-capture here as well, where the character might plunge their sword into the back of a strafed enemy before kicking their body off the blade and balancing themselves realistically afterward.
This is also the case with a weapon that players two-hand and so forth. It might be a relatively small feature overall and many fans might not even see a great number of these animations throughout a playthrough if they don’t care to experiment with new weapons, but it’s still an attention to detail that should be appreciated on current-gen technology and would help to make weapon animations in future Soulslikes more distinct as a result.
Demon’s Souls is available now for PS5.
