Demon’s Souls is an excellent game.  I will say that right now. It makes you feel lonely, scared, anxious, desperate, and – sometimes – triumphant.  Although it is impossible to really die, as you will always return as a soul, it makes you feel fragile and tentative, even when you’ve gained many levels and you’re carrying an arsenal of magical weaponry. The combat is kinetic, fast and brutal, without frills or excess.  The character development allows for countless strategies and decisions, most of which are actually viable – depending on how good you are at outfighting enemies by dodging, timing your attacks, blocking, managing your stamina, and perhaps parrying and riposting, if that’s your style.  And style is a huge part of it – you can stand back and blast your foes with magic or pepper them with arrows, retreating as they draw near, or you can stand fast with a spear and jab them from the safety of your shield, wearing heavy armour to absorb their blows, or you can be a real man and wield a giant two-handed weapon to knock enemies sprawling and roll around, unhindered by armour or shield, dodging enemy attacks and dancing nimbly on the edge of horrible, horrible death.

And yet, despite all this, despite even the game’s remarkable online component where you can be brought into other players’ worlds to aid them or to invade and attempt to kill them, Demon’s Souls stumbles at times.  I’d even say it falls right down, flat on its face.

Let me frame the situation for you.  You’ve just beaten your first boss, a weird collective entity formed of black slimes who throw spears and wear shields, and you’ve freshly upgraded your own abilities and those of your weapons.  You’re heading through the next section of the level, and you find yourself on the battlements of this castle.  Suddenly, you hear the flapping of great wings, and an ear-splitting shriek, and a big fuck-off dragon swoops down just in front you, blasting the entire walkway with fire. The screen rumbles, the sound of the fire overwhelms everything, and it’s so bright that you squint, even as you sit there on your couch.  The dragon’s breath just annihilates all those enemies you were just looking at, leveling everything in its path.

You stand there, frankly scared out of your wits, waiting to see what will happen, and a few long moments later the dragon reappears, strafing the battlements again in the exact same way.  “Ah,” you think.  “I have to run for it, in between the dragon’s bursts of fiery breath.  This is going to be fun, isn’t it?”  And you actually kind of mean it.  You take off your heavy, cumbersome armour, and you wait for the dragon to pass, and you run.  It’s longer than you think.  You hear the dragon swoop back to begin its strafe once more, and you start to sweat.  Your stamina is running low, and you’re slowing down, and then you hear the fire start and the screen shakes again.  But you make it! Just in time, you make it, running to the safety of one of the guard towers and sheltering yourself from the flames. And you know you’ll have to do it again later, won’t you?  Of course.  That’s how it goes.

Now, imagine standing on that watchtower, over the bodies of the archers you’ve just killed, with a bow.  Imagine watching this awesome – in the real, original use of the word – this awesome dragon swooping and strafing over and over again, with no variation.  It starts to lose its charm, but still, it’s pretty badass.

Now imagine shooting it, and seeing a tiny bit of damage pop up, and thinking “Hm.”  And now imagine doing that for half an hour, standing there and shooting at no risk to yourself, poking this dragon to death with your arrows, or maybe with a nice ranged damage spell. And then there is a long moment of quiet, and you hear a faint roar, and then +7600 souls pops up in the lower right of your screen.  You didn’t even see the dragon die, because you were still zoomed in with your bow, and you had stopped paying attention about fifteen minutes ago.

Congratulations, you have whittled the dragon.

Now imagine that this is the only way to kill the dragon.  This is not an exploit or a cheap shortcut.  It’s the only way to do it.  This dragon is animatronic.  It’s set on a repeat loop, and it doesn’t change at all except according to your position in the level.  You can shoot it for an hour, and it won’t react.  You can stand right in front of it on the battlements, and it won’t try to get you.  It will just fly right by.  This is a sad state of affairs.

When it comes right down to it, whittling the dragon is just as masturbatory as it sounds.  It’s far worse than masturbating, actually.  At least masturbation feels good while you’re doing it.  Dragon-whittling is exactly the kind of nonsense that we should be striving to eliminate not only from video games and other forms of entertainment, but also our lives in general.  These are exactly the repetitive, boring, mechanical tasks that we will eventually develop robots to do, instead of doing it ourselves. There is no benefit to doing them – no enjoyment, and no dividend.  There is only the benefit of the end result, and that’s the only reason we do them.

Sometimes they’re necessary.  Someone has to sort all those files, someone has to staple all those documents, and someone has to put the tab on the widget on the assembly line.  But it’s not desirable.  If we could get something else to do it for us, we would – and should.  So why the fuck are we putting this garbage in our entertainment, or god forbid, our art?

Sure, it’s hard to design the AI for a dragon that would chase you and breathe fire right at you and reach into the tower with its talons grasping after you, or (yes, yes please) smash the tower to bits and dig through the rubble trying to find where you’ve wriggled to, while you crawl slowly and silently away, wracked with terror, pale and slick with fear-sweat. It would be very, very hard.  But it would be worth the effort, wouldn’t it?  And if the alternative is to put in an animatronic dragon which can only be killed by whittling at its health bar for thirty two minutes as it spins and wheels and never even registers your presence or its imminent death, then I say it would be better to have no dragon at all.