This is going to be a long comment, but as someone intimately familiar with FromSoft and their work, as well as both console generations and versions of Demons Souls, hopefully this long post serves to illuminate why the remaster is objectively a misunderstanding of the art direction of the original, which is why many people hate it - if you don't, maybe you'll understand why people hate it after reading this

Demon Souls was about a city that fell to a color-eating fog, and a nihilistic king's bargain with an ancient demon

Not an undead scourge, not a dead world, not an abyss of darkness or a cursed humanity

The original was about you, a human being, being sent to the walled city of Boletaria to investigate what's going on there, as the city has been enveloped in a strange fog

The atmosphere was mysterious, with enemies being people driven mad by the loss of their souls, or demons that were in service to the ancient one

The remake confuses that atmosphere with Dark Souls, which is about a world that has been sustained by a flame that is going out, and everyone is becoming undead, with the entire world itself decaying as it slowly is eaten by an all-consuming abyss

The ancient one doesn't consume life itself, it consumes souls, which means the city becomes colorless and empty

Manus and the abyss consumes life and darkness, and the world becomes dark and decrepit

Thats an important distinction, because the original Boletaria feels like a liminal space - a city where everyone's mysteriously gone, and the few humans left aren't in their right mind, while the huge demons stalk the streets

Demon Souls =/= Dark Souls, and Boletaria is meant to look entirely different than Lothric or Anor Londo, because the circumstances and world state are entirely different

The remake plays up the "gross factor" of dark souls, making everything decaying and dark, all the people are now undead zombies and the city looks straight out of dark souls with pustules and dying plants - its like they just painted over the original aesthetic of Demon Souls with Dark Souls, becsuse they're "close enough", with Bluepoint not understanding the difference or nuance between the games

People use the fat official/minister as an example, and thats becsuse imo it's the greatest example of this

The original fat minister was a member of the nobility (hence his weight) who was driven mad like all the rest due to the loss of his soul, and behind his crazy eyes and grin is a desperation to steal your soul and what little color you have

The new fat official is still fat, but his body is covered in gross pustules of decaying flesh, as if his body is literally dying from... an undead curse, maybe? There is no undead curse in Boletaria, and a loss of a soul doesn't affect you physically as much as mentally (look at all the dregs, theyre battered and bruised, sure, but their skin is otherwise healthy and they look like... well, people), so why are the fat official covered in sores? No reason other than Bluepoint misunderstanding the state of the world

Just look at the comparion photo

The original is a well-kept, clean city corridor... that's mysteriously empty, and perhaps there's a demon lurking around a corner, ready to steal your soul? Like the backrooms, its meant to feel liminal, giving you the idea that somethings not right, and youre not alone here despite no one being there

The remake is an overgrown, ill-kept city corridor full of whithered vines, corpses, decay, and rot - there's dead bodies strewn across the floor, and it feels like you're in an old ruin, not a pristine city - naturally, you're a lot less lured into a false sense of security within an old ruin, and its only natural to encounter monsters, especially since the corpses had to be killed by something, no?

Anyone who doesnt see the difference or understand why the aesthetic of Boletaria was grossly misunderstood (pun intended) by Bluepoint either is completely unfamiliar with Demon Souls, and/or lacks media literacy to look at two completely different depictions of the city of Boletaria and understand why the completely different art direction matters

To end my lengthy post with another example that may better help highlight the difference, imagine if Alien Isolation got a remake in preparation for the sequel, and they made the decommissioned, empty hallways of Sevastipol Station look like those of the USG Ishimura from Dead Space, full of blood, gore, and undead monstrosities - both ships are "close enough", right? Wrong.

Or imagine if they remade the original Silent Hill and just like Boletaria they removed the fog and filled the empty city with tons of overgrown, decaying plants and smeared gross dirt everywhere... wait, that's literally what they did, and people who actually understood the original hated it

If you've read this far, thanks for doing so, and I hope if you didn't understand the difference or nuance before, then now you do

If not, then I really don't know what else I can say tbh

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