A couple of extra thoughts on the new Demon’s Sous that I left out of the previous post.
First, I forgot about a couple of standard FromSoft tropes that started in this game:
Creepy lady who you talk to to level up: check.
A cut scene where gargoyles that fly you up to a high perch in the next area: check.
Next, I spent the week running the game again on a melee and bow build … and made sure to set up to get a certain large sword in the end game so I’d have it for NG+. I think my favorite melee weapons are the straight swords and the Uchi, because they are fast. But the end game sword that I worked so hard to get, Northern Regalia, is also pretty great if you get it set up right. It works best if your character tendency is Pure White or Pure Black … mine was neutral so I murdered an NPC in NG+ to get Pure Black. I’m a bad person.
With this preparation I headed into NG+ again (I had done part of it with my magicky character).
One thing is clear, of all the Souls and Borne games Demon’s Souls NG+ is by far the hardest. Lost is the pleasure of melting all the early game bosses with your end game weapons. They hit you like a brick and you barely dent them.
This is especially true of the one hard boss in the game: Flamelurker. Even my pure black Northern Regalia just slowly chipped away at him while his fire punches almost killed me in one hit.
So, I did what any reasonable Souls game idiot would do. Bored of burning heals I set up my character to go into “hyper mode” at low HP. Unlike Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls has two items that do this (The Clever Rat Ring and the Morian Blade) and they stack. In all a two hand swing of the sword went from doing 375 damage to doing about 1,200 damage. This sort of setup is also great for bow sniping, as illustrated in this old run through NG+7 at Soul Level 1.
Now I just had to hit Flamelurker six times without getting hit …
I can quit now. I’ll never play any of these games better than that. The one fast punch that I somehow rolled through near the end should have killed me and in any other run would have killed me. I have no idea what happened.
Update to Update: I did False Idol (duh) and Maneater (tricky) too.