History VideoGame / DemonsSouls

* UndeadChild: The Plague Babies are this trope ramped UpToEleven. Why? [[spoiler:They're undead ''aborted foetuses''.]]

* NiceHat: The Fat Officials wear them. Also, in order to rescue Yuria, the player has to wear one of these hats as a disguise.

** The Endurance stat increased both your Stamina bar and your equipment weight threshold. Games that followed uncoupled the two and tried various other solutions for equip weight (including ''Bloodborne'' discarding it altogether).

** The game allows you to climb up certain shallow ledges by walking into them for a moment. later games played InsurmountableWaistHeightFence completely straight until ''Sekiro'' and ''Elden Ring'' outright added a jump button.

* EvilPaysBetter: The reward for gaining Pure White Character Tendency is the Friend's Ring, which increases damage dealt as a Blue Phantom by 20%. Neat if you tend to do that sort of thing[[note]]Though it's only applicable on private servers anymore[[/note]], but you ultimately only need the one since you can't equip two of the same ring. For keeping Pure Black Character tendency, you get the Foe's Ring, which is the same thing but as a Black Phantom, but on top of that you get two extra Colorless Demon's Souls, which are difficult to acquire upgrade components of which there are only ten per game cycle, including these two. Not only that, but considering that EvilIsEasy and your Character Tendency has nothing to do with the ending you get, it's certainly the more attractive option between the two.

** Story-wise, [[spoiler:the game has a pretty cut-and-dry, distinct good and bad ending that is decided by a last-minute decision of the player. Later games in the series and by Miyazaki would have the player instead choose between several flavours of DownerEnding, with multiple endings unlocked by GuideDangIt levels of specific item hunting and side quests]].

* YouGottaHaveBlueHair: It's possible to give your character an irregular hair colour.

*** [[spoiler: Those vile things in the swamp? '''Fucking aborted fetuses'''.]]

** Black Tendency is extremely easy to get. White Tendency is ''much harder'' to get, which makes the realization that it makes the game easier kind of a FunnyAneurysmMoment (boosting a world tendency towards White requires ''not'' dying, killing powerful bosses, and certain GuideDangIt moments, in a game that's unashamedly NintendoHard).

** There were only equip-weight dodge rolls: normal rolling at under 50% and "fat rolling" at over 50%. Later games would get more granular with the dodge mechanics and how it tied to weight.

** Tying into the "you're a soul spirit" idea, fall damage was vastly more lenient here than it would be in later titles, barring ''[[VideoGame/SekiroShadowsDieTwice Sekiro]]'', whose "You are a master shinobi" logic allows you take falls from up to a hundred feet without damage. The idea seems to be that, as a semi-incorporeal ghost, falling down isn't as big a deal for youm though you can still take equally big plunges as a human. Taking levels in dexterity allows you to take even less fall damage. There's a few places where the game even expects you to make use of your generous fall damage allotment. Fall damage also works differently in that falling to a certain distance will cause you to ''always'' die, no matter how high your health is. Later games would only tie this mechanic to specific, scripted locations, for example to prevent a player skipping the majority of Blighttown.

** The game is structured into five worlds that are teleported to from a HubLevel, instead of being a connected open world, which is unlike anything in the ''Souls'' series since (games like ''Bloodborne'' and ''Dark Souls III'' included central hubs, but their worlds are still interconnected). You have nearly complete freedom over where to go after defeating Phalanx, with the only restriction being that the second half of Boletarian Palace is locked behind fully clearing any other Archstone. While there is an intended final challenge in the form of Old/False King Allant, the game otherwise can be ended anytime after finishing all of the Archstones, with no dedicated end-game.

** The game only has sixteen bosses and none of them are optional, except for the Vanguard in the tutorial, which the player is meant to die to and not defeat. The game also largely falls into HardLevelsEasyBosses compared to the games that came after it; while reaching bosses is difficult due to a lack of checkpoints (which broke the game up into fairly clear-cut "levels") and a lower amount of shortcuts, most of the fights are fairly simple and slow-paced with a few exceptions. Later games in the same style put much more emphasis on boss fights.

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Being the first "Souls game", there are some spots where From were still trying to suss out how best to approach certain mechanics, and they maybe didn't quite hit it on the head this first time around:
** The biggest is HP restoration: there is ''no'' Estus Flask-style free HP restoration item. All HP restoration is instead handled by a selection of dedicated healing herbs. While there were some enemies who served as "money" targets with dedicated drops of said herbs (á la ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}'' and its blood vials), part of the problem is that the herbs came in ''four different tiers'' – and the higher tier ones only dropped rarely. You otherwise had to buy the healing items you need. To further differentiate the game from ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}'', healing items in this game do not drop in every area, and not every variety is a common vendor item, so you can't replenish your stock naturally as you play through the game unless you are in certain levels. Needless to say, this was a generally unpopular system due to how much grinding it required, and all the ''Souls'' games which followed would play around with how HP restoration worked and how you gained it.
** The other big one: ''world tendency'', the final part of this implementation of the multiplayer system. In short, your actions had an effect on the world at large – act like a jerk (or die) and you'd trend toward "Black Tendency", act virtuous and you'd get "White Tendency". This would have various effects on the world, like making monsters stronger or weaker, and opening routes to various pieces of treasure. Moreover, your personal tendency would affect the "Global World Tendency" toward White or Black. While theoretically a neat idea, the tying of the concept to loot made true 100% runs virtually impossible and thus made the concept more an annoyance than anything. Later games replaced world tendency with various branching paths in individual NPC sidequests.
** Speaking of the multiplayer: unlike the later Souls games where you can ''opt'' to limit your matchmaking to your region, but ultimately everyone worldwide plays together, ''Demon's Souls'' has stridently segregated regional servers due to how it was published in each region. JP players play on one server, NA players on another, SE Asia on yet another, et cetera. Needless to say, during the game's more "niche" era this made playing with anyone even more difficult than it should've been.
** Endurance increased both your Stamina bar ''and'' your equipment weight threshold, making it generally the most valuable stat in the game. Games that followed uncoupled the two and tried various other solutions for equip weight (including ''Bloodborne'' discarding it altogether).
** There were really just two kinds of equip-weight dodge rolls: normal rolling at under 50% and "fat rolling" at over 50%. Needless to say, this made a lot of the heavier armors rather undesirable and further encouraged tons of END stacking. Later games would get more granular with the dodge mechanics and how it tied to weight.
** On that note: ''item burden''. That's right, because the game was patterned somewhat more traditionally off of "older" [=RPGs=] (like From's own ''King's Field''), your inventory didn't exist in a complete {{Hammerspace}}. In addition to equip weight, you had to worry about the overall weight of your inventory. Happily, going over 50% didn't hamper your rolls, but if you went over 100%? Hope you like walking. And yes, the aforementioned healing herbs, not to mention bow ammunition, would contribute to this total. As might be expected, this was ''tremendously'' unpopular and made trips back to the storage NPC common (to say nothing of pointlessly hampering bow builds). Every following ''Souls'' game would basically implement a Hammerspace-style inventory.
** Spellcasting was radically different from later ''Souls'' games. The biggest was a dedicated ''magic bar'' instead of the Vancian charges-per-rest system of later games or Bloodborne's more granular ammo system, and more importantly, there was a ring that granted ''passive MP restoration''. Moreover, casting catalysts weren't honed - spell power was determined purely by your magic stat and by the base power of the spell itself. Even weirder, there were no ''stat requirements'' for the spells - the strongest Catalyst had a mild stat requirement, and you'd need enough Intelligence to have the MP to cast certain spells, but that was it. And on top of all this, you could continue to walk during the early part of your casting animation. While all this does allow for a purely-spellcaster based playstyle, in practice it was ''seriously'' overpowered for a lot of bosses and enemies, and even the developers didn't like how it trivialized some of the content. Later ''Souls'' games would make serious changes to how spellcasting worked, with ''Bloodborne'' almost throwing the concept overboard entirely until the ''Old Hunters'' expansion.
** Character death was a bit odd here, too - you have a "dead form" like other ''Souls'' games, naturally, but here not only does it make you simply a semi-translucent "soul" instead of a walking Hollow, the dead-form penalty seems severe: you lose ''half your max HP''. This isn't actually nearly as bad as it sounds - most enemies and bosses are balanced around you being in Soul form and thus will do quite a bit less damage than veterans of later games might expect - but a penalty that steep sure didn't ''feel'' great and was super unpopular. One of the big selling points of ''Dark Souls'', in fact, was this penalty ''not'' being part of the game structure. ''[=DS2=]'' played around with the idea of decreasing health on death, too, but not nearly as dramatically, and it also made sure that "re-humanizing" was much, much easier than in ''Demon's Souls'' (where revive items are rare, and co-op was a bit harder to pull off). ''Dark Souls III'' would later reintroduce the mechanic, but frame it differently: Rather than halving your health after death, your health is increased when "embered", the equivalent of being in body form.
** Tying into the "you're a soul spirit" idea, fall damage was vastly more lenient here than it would be in later titles, barring ''[[VideoGame/SekiroShadowsDieTwice Sekiro]]'', whose "You are a master shinobi" logic allows you take falls from up to a hundred feet without damage. The idea seems to be that, as a semi-incorporeal ''ghost'', falling down isn't as big a deal for you... though you can still take equally big plunges as a human. Taking levels in dexterity allows you to take even less fall damage. There's a few places where the game even expects you to make use of your generous fall damage allotment.
*** Fall damage also works differently in that falling to a certain distance will cause you to ''always'' die, no matter how high your health is. Later games would only tie this mechanic to specific, scripted locations, for example to prevent a player skipping the majority of Blighttown.
** Tying in to ''that'', the game lacks something that will feel jarring to later ''Souls'' veterans: plunging attacks. You can't attack at all while falling, which is likely to feel very, very strange to players of later games. The most you can do is land on an enemy, which will do a little damage and probably stun them.
** A number of armor sets were ''gender-specific'', or changed appearance based on gender. This looked cool in some cases, but naturally also led to debate in a few others, and was also a lot more work for the art team. Every game after ''Demon's'' featured fully unisex outfits, with a tiny number of exceptions.
** The game is structured in five worlds that are teleported to, instead of being a connected open world, which is unlike anything in the Souls series since. This sort of structure would later return with Bloodborne, but even then Bloodborne is not explicitly separated in zones to the extent Demon's Souls is.
** ''Ignores Shields'' is a property that weapons can have, which never returned in a Soulsborne game because of how stupidly broken it is in PVP. Demon's Souls PVP players usually don't use a shield because of it.
** Bosses: The game only has sixteen bosses and ''none'' of them are optional except for the tutorial ''Vanguard'' boss, which the player is meant to die to and not defeat.
** Additionally, the game was a quite clear-cut case of HardLevelsEasyBosses compared to the games that came after it; while the ability to farm healing items meant you didn't have to concern yourself with rationing your healing between checkpoints like you did with Estus, this was little compensation for the fact that ''there were no checkpoints'' except when you beat a boss (which broke the game up into fairly clear-cut "levels"). This meant that unless a stage had a major shortcut that you could open, you often had to bull your way through ''the entire level'' to get a single shot at the boss, though such shortcut-free levels are relatively short. Aside from [[spoiler: [[AntiClimaxBoss the final boss]]]], which is deliberately easy, and the Vanguard in 4-1 who is defenceless against ranged or magic builds, none of the bosses are complete pushovers to the extent of the [[VideoGame/SekiroShadowsDieTwice Mist Noble]] or [[VideoGame/DarkSouls1 Pinwheel]], in that unless you have an obscenely powerful weapon, you will have to put up an actual fight against them, but the game's fairly primitive boss design means that very few of the bosses in the game still stand up as being difficult. Only the Maneaters, Flamelurker, and [[spoiler:False King Allant]] are really considered to offer much real challenge compared to the bosses of later games, with some (such as the Adjudicator) being downright pathetic. Even with the former three bosses, the nonlinear structure of the game makes it easy to encounter them overleveled and overpowered even if you don't grind, which makes them even easier. There is a good chance you will encounter NPC Black Phantoms that cause you more grief than the bosses.
** Story-wise, [[spoiler:The game has a pretty cut-and-dried, distinct good and bad ending that is decided by a last-minute decision of the player. Later games in the series and by Miyazaki would have the player instead choose between several flavours of DownerEnding, with multiple endings unlocked by GuideDangIt levels of specific item hunting and side quests.]]
** Another note regarding the story is how the density of the lore is lower in relation to later games. For example, this game's Silver Demon's Soul has no lore in its item description, reading: "The Soul of the Demon 'Penetrator'. It radiates a strong power… Grants the holder a large number of Souls when used. Alternatively, it can be made into spells, miracles, or weapons." ''[[VideoGame/DarkSoulsI Dark Souls]]'''s Soul of Priscilla provides a bit more than a list of things that can be done with the soul, reading: "Soul of Priscilla the Crossbreed, trapped inside the painted world of Ariamis. Special beings have special souls. Use the soul of this crossbreed bastard child and antithesis to all life to acquire a huge amount of souls, or to create a unique weapon."
** The games allows you to climb up certain shallow ledges by walking into them for a moment. This proved very confusing, as most ledges blocked you even when they looked small enough, thus later games played InsurmountableWaistHeightFence completely straight until ''Sekiro'' and ''Elden Ring'' outright added a jump button.
** On a related note, the game's LadderPhysics do not allow you slide down or jump off. Once you've committed to climbing a ladder, you have to take it a step at a time to one end to get off.

* MegaManning: You can learn powerful magic or abilities from boss demons by taking their souls to Sage Freke, Yuria or Saint Urbain. By taking them to Ed the Blacksmith you can make powerful unique weapons with different effects and uses.

** 1st stage after the Tutorial, there's a Red-eyed Knight. You are ''not'' supposed to casually take them on until about 30 character levels later. You can, however, position yourself so the character AI walks off a cliff and kills itself from falling damage. This enemy respawns every time you enter the stage, and you get a lot of souls from it.

** The kingdom's name is Boletaria: it's literally a [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Mushroom Kingdom.]]

** You can get some [[Advertising/TheManYourManCouldSmellLike Old Spice]] in the original game.

* ArmorIsUseless: The difference in defense provided by clothing and metal armor is surprisingly small--it matters a little in the early game, but is utterly dwarfed later on by how much defense you get from leveling up. By contrast, the equipment burden difference is ''enormous'' (the Fluted Set weights over three times as much as the Leather Set) and heavy armor also slows stamina regeneration.

* MagicKnight: The game has a PointBuildSystem where you're free to increase magic stats alongside physical ones. An even distribution will make you a MasterOfNone without excessive LevelGrinding, but even the minimum investment in magic unlocks a number of useful abilities, while Moon and Crescent weapons can give any mage power in a melee fight.

** [[spoiler:The Old One, a gigantic, foliage-covered, formless god.]]

** 3-2: Has Gargoyles as a key enemy, forcing the player to adapt to enemies that switch between ground and air, and often attack in multiples. The Maneaters are a paired boss that are highly aggressive and use similar moves to the Gargoyles.

** The Old Monk, [[spoiler: which is a multiplayer duel against another player. However, since the game's servers are currently disconnected, you now just have to fight a fairly weak and unintelligent generic Black Phantom]].

* NotSoDifferent: [[spoiler:Sage Freke and his follower despise Saint Urbain and his followers as fools worshiping a false and most definitely malevolent god. Likewise, Urbain condemns Freke and his ilk as heretics who rely on demon magic for power. ''Both'' sides are absolutely correct!]]

%%* CompetitiveBalance: Each character class has (or at least, starts with) its own specialty so as not to make any single one stand out (at the start).
%%** FragileSpeedster: The Thief, The Wanderer.
%%** GlassCannon: The Barbarian.
%%** MagicKnight: The Magician, The Priest.
%%** JackOfAllStats: The Knight, The Hunter.
%%** MightyGlacier: The Temple Knight, The Soldier.
%%** SquishyWizard: The Royalty.
%%** The various weapons and spells also have their strengths and weaknesses.
%%*** FragileSpeedster: Daggers and Fist Weapons. Unless you cast Light Weapon on them, then they become [[LethalJokeCharacter something else entirely.]]
%%*** GlassCannon: The Morion Blade and Clever Rat's Ring turns anything into one.
%%*** JackOfAllStats: The Knight Sword. The Blueblood Sword is [[MovesetClone similar, but]] [[LightningBruiser has a longer blade and deals much more damage]] in exchange for being [[FatalFlaw dependent on a temporary buff that is difficult to cast mid-battle.]]
%%*** MightyGlacier: The Dragon Bone Smasher and Great Axe.
%%*** LightningBruiser: Dual Katanas.
%%*** StoneWall: Estoc and Spear, when used in conjunction with a shield.

%%* CuteWitch: Yuria.

** Magic is fueled by the energy of souls. The NPCs are pretty verbal about this, and is part of the reason why magic in any form is considered a dark art by the church.

* ApocalypseHow: Class 1. The last time the Old One was released, the world went from a united utopia to a collection of small kingdoms, each given an Archstone to be ready in case it ever woke up again. The rest of the world was destroyed, though the other regions still seemed to do well enough. The regions players travel to throughout the game are all that's left from the last time the Old One woke up, and even when something happened to the northern giants that prevents their lands from being visited, as their Archstone is destroyed in the Nexus.