The upcoming Bluepoint Games-helmed Demon's Souls remake is looking to be a great contender for one of the strongest launch titles for next-gen consoles, giving PS5 a steady head start with exclusives. However, being a remake, the new game also has a history to live up to, which Bluepoint is already looking to surpass if the new Demon's Souls trophy list is anything to go by.
Taking a closer look at both the original set of Demon's Souls trophies on FromSoftware's PS3 version, and comparing it to the new PS5 list should appease players who might be worried. Considering the new challenges and reduction of tedious collect-a-thons shows that Bluepoint Games at least appears to understand what it is about the challenge of the Souls series that has captured players' attention for so long.
PS3's Original Demon's Souls Trophies
The original trophies for the PS3's Demon's Souls is fairly unimaginative when it comes to special challenges meant to guide dedicated players towards everything that the game has to offer. This isn't exactly unusual for early achievements and trophies from games in the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, when most of these extra rewards were usually only handed out for beating bosses and gathering weapons. As a result, many of the newly released PS5 trophy lists are often much more exciting than what players had first been given before it became more common to hand out special rewards for shooting a guy in the face.
In the case of Demon's Souls specifically, all of the original trophies were related to either killing a boss, many of which are mandatory for beating the game, or leveling up weapons, which requires a lot of grinding. This ends up translating to a fairly underwhelming hunt for the platinum trophy, something that modern games often attempt to make much more compelling. So, making sure that the upcoming remake has a quality set of trophies is another prime example of Bluepoint's attention to fan expectations by even focusing on tiny details.
New Challenges and Specific Boss Kills
One of the new trophies that stands out the most among the others is One Shall Fall, requiring players to defeat the Tower Knight without killing any of the archers shooting from above. Naturally, any challenge involving the boss that has quickly become the mascot for early Demon's Souls remake trailers would be memorable, but anyone who remembers that fight from the original might flinch after reading the trophy description. Taking out the archers in the Tower Knight fight is almost the first thing most players do once they enter the boss arena, even those coming at the challenge for the first time are hinted to go after these enemies right away.
Aside from One Shall Fall, there are a number of more trophies attached to defeating bosses in unconventional ways, some of which might require specific builds or unfamiliar tactics in order to achieve. Another one of these, Fists of Legend, almost feels like a pun, especially with the wording of the trophy focusing on a pairing between the Dragon God and the Hands of God weapons. When a lot of these new challenges come together, it makes the process of getting the platinum as interesting as the difficult process of beating Demon's Souls in the first place.
Limited Online Trophies
The new PS5 remake also adds online trophies to the game, something that the original Demon's Souls didn't include even though it did have an online component to the gameplay. While players who prefer to avoid invasions might be disappointed to see that killing a player while invading is a requirement for the platinum trophy, PvP is a huge part of the Souls series as a whole. To this degree, in leu of adding new content to the Demon's Souls remake, making sure that both the summoning and invading systems are represented for the fan base that enjoys both is an important detail to focus on.
At the same time that the remake and its trophies do embrace the online mechanics, it appears that they won't be quite as intrusive on the process as they were in Dark Souls 3. One of the major critiques from the more completion inclined members of the community was the way that the final Dark Souls game required an huge amount of PvP in order to obtain all of the items and trophies related to them. So, with what's been shown of Demon's Souls so far, it would appear that the pursuit of everything the game has to offer won't hold back less invasion prone players as much as previous titles have.
No More Weapon Upgrade Trophies
It would be fairly easy to assume that many of the trophies in the original Demon's Souls were made as an afterthought, just filling out the list in order to make the path to platinum seem more impressive. Of course, this was also done in a time when trophies and achievements to share online or record a player's accomplishments in a game were fairly new, with PlayStation having only had these rewards for a year by the time the game released. So, it's no wonder that half of the trophies that aren't focused on Demon's Souls' bosses are instead dedicated to upgrading weapons with every single type of augmentation attached to them.
The result of these somewhat haphazardly created trophies is that the path to platinum felt like a loot grind, rather than the same triumph of skill that beating the game on its own was. This is what makes it so refreshing to see that Bluepoint didn't follow suit with the trophies on the new remake, made in an era where some players pride themselves on hunting down impossible platinum trophies. While players likely wouldn't have batted an eye to see no change in these achievements, likely being more focused on the updated graphics and performance boosts, it is nice to see that Bluepoint took the time to acknowledge those that do care. It's the little details that make a remake like Demon's Souls stand out on its own after all.
Demon's Souls is set to release on November 12th, for PS5.
