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Sam: 4
Dark Souls is a Japanese RPG along the lines of Final Fantasy, with SNES-style sprite graphics. The gameplay is standard JRPG fare: enemies randomly appear as you wander around, you’re taken to a battle screen and fight by choosing attacks or spells from menus. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. The game starts with about ten minutes worth of dialogue to click through, which is riddled with spelling errors and poor grammar. The character portraits are terribly drawn, and don’t match at all with the acceptable sprites and backgrounds. Through the cut-scenes, you learn that you are Gauly, a mercenary on the run from the law, who ends up taking an escort mission from a church. I’m not exactly sure why, Gauly was protesting the entire time, he seems to have a slight attitude problem. I understand that it’s a JRPG, but there was no illusion of being in control, the game only gave me one path to take: I guess I’m more used to the Western RPG approach. The story seemed trite and clichéd: mercenary with a dark past, reluctantly taking a mission with the church fighting “evolutionists”. Besides the poor character art and typos in the dialogue, there’s nothing wrong with the game per say, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better before, and the story isn’t novel or interesting enough to keep my interest. Maybe a lover of JRPGs might find something here, but the demo was a grind for me. I’m sure it took some effort from the team that made it, but they need a bit more polish to make it worth the $20 purchase price.

Kayla: 6
Dark Souls is another turn-based, random encounter style RPG, but it fosters what appears to be a promising storyline that could keep players occupied for a good amount of time. Your antihero of a main character is Gauly, who is not, surprisingly, a spiky-haired teenager with a pompous attitude like one would come to expect. Instead, he’s an older man with serious issues and a past that continues to haunt him. The other characters have their own unique personalities, some stronger than the others, and all of them have the potential to develop quite nicely. As mentioned, the gameplay follows the tried-and-true RPG mold, reminiscent of the older Final Fantasy games. Also, as with Final Fantasy, the music is lovely and changes with each area you enter. The art during battles was very well done: the backgrounds were breathtaking and the sprites were well rendered. A surprising amount of detail was paid to the smallest of things (if you play the demo, view the altar at the church). The drawings beside the dialogue of the speaking character could definitely use some work, as it detracts from the beauty surrounding it, casting a slightly negative shadow on all the effort placed in to designing the world for Dark Souls. Another detracting feature is the common grammatical errors, as well as the blunders made throughout the hour-long demo, one of the best being: “I know what you’re passing through”. Hilarious. If these minor issues were to be patched up, Dark Souls would be another solid RPG, which any fan of the genre would be quite pleased with.

Mike: 4
Dark Souls is an archaic RPG with randomized enemies and SNES style graphics. The music/sound is exactly as expected and quickly wore on my nerves. The gameplay is typical old school Japanese RPG with all the same trappings. Overall the game lacks polish. Why does my character walk fast but have a slow walking animation? Why can’t I use the mouse to navigate the menus? Dark Souls is a decent JRPG, but it follows tradition too heavily and I’m not playing on a SNES.

Caspian: N/A
Wouldn’t run with the message “RGSS Player has stopped working” on my up-to-date Vista 64 system.

Average:  5.33

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