Sooo, I completely misremembered Demon Souls and thought the game was 5 worlds x 4 stages each. So after doing stage 2 of most of them I thought I was midway and had a lot left to build my character out and upgrade.
Then I went and did Stonefang-3 and realized whoops 3rd stages are just bosses, only world 1 has 3 stages + final boss. So kinda blew through a lot of it.
At first I was like how the fuck do I beat the Storm King as melee this time around. Then I did the storm sword thing and it was kinda cool.
Ok, so Allant I remember being brutally hard and making me miserable in the original. I think it took me days to beat him as a caster. Now 10+ years later after all these Souls games and bosses like Orphan of Kos and Sekiro stuff...he's still tough but his AI and moveset are really simple compared to those other Souls fights. A couple moves come out real fast and are still brutal, but otherwise most of his stuff has big windup tells. The toughest part is just that he has a lot of HP and he has that AI where if you try to heal he will attack you, so it can be frustrating trying to heal.
The worst part is the run up to him. It's not super long but it's tedious to do over and over with the stairway of red eye knights to roll past.
I accidently found a cheat when I rage quit after he got a couple soul level stealing attacks on me in a fight. If you close the game from the OS during the fight, even when you're about to die and restart the game it loads at the elevator right before the fog door. So you can keep retrying the fight without having to run back to the fog gate. Once I found that I didn't mind retrying a handful of times until I got the fight, if I had to do the boss run each time I probably would've saved it for another day or done it co-op.
Also my biggest problem with the fight is that I keep doing moves I don't want to do after dodging and having an opening. I just want to SLASH FORWARD but I do like a 0 damage push or a ground smash where he's out of range. I'm not really good at precision with slashing and this fight definitely made it tough. I took a video of the fight. Nothing special, but mostly solid:
VIDEO Anyhow, yeah, Demon Souls is a lot shorter/smaller game than I remembered! It makes sense for Bluepoint to have tackled this one vs Dark Souls because it's just a smaller game to do. I'm at 21 hours now with just Latria 2 and Monk left to clear. Usually souls games take me about 25-35 hours including DLC expansions.
Also 2nd chance was amazing. Having it on let me be more risk taking and aggressive in stage progression and boss fights and since you can just use an MP item and cast it again and again after you die and it activates you can really use it as a progression crutch. Probably why I blew through 4-2 and 1-3 so easily.
I ended up getting INT 18 so I could use cursed weapon for +50% physical damage enchantment, but I don't have the NPC to give it yet and there's only 1 stage left so it's kinda pointless now lol, have about 31 VIT/31 END/31 Faith/20 STR/18 INT ~SL72.
