games

now why should a cheap-ass remaster of a decade old game which did literally nothing else other than improve its graphics get more love than elden ring? demon souls remake sucks fucking balls. every single creative decision in that game was the least inspired one: doing a "demon souls but its got dem PS5 grafix" is just completely antithetical to what the game actually is: a failed attempt at making the next oblivion that only by sheer miracle and talent got turned into an asset flip with a vision so distinct and new during the seventh generation it inspired dozens upon dozens of copycats. the fact that the game was 80% grey and brown and so much of it looked indistinct and blurry is part of its charm and what separates it from the souls games that came after it. just putting tons of banners everywhere, turning up the ornateness of everything and adding tons of details where none were neccessary is the least interesting thing one could do to its graphics. it just did not in any way lean into what made demon souls demon souls at all. Just compare the intro of the original to the intro of the remake and tell me the remake isn't completely missing all of the style of the original. and that is not even getting into the music, which suffers from everything the graphics suffer from: taking the least inspired choice possible at every step of the way: the original soundtrack being for the most part very obviously cheap midi orchestra libraries is something someone with respect for the original would lean into: skip all the fucking choral bullshit, use the most expensive and full sounding sample libraries you can get, do nothing to humanize it and drown it in strange and unnatural reverb, mix it in 7.1, don't overcompress it to hell and back and you can still make it hi-fi as fuck. I really really think it's a giant fucking shame that this is the version that is going to be carried forward, since its creators clearly have not a single artistic bone in their body (as they've proven with every project that included more than just uprezzing the original games artwork).

The demon souls remake is proof that you can make AI slop without using AI.