Monotonous and poorly designed hack fest that lacks much of anything interesting.
I was one of the people who was anticipating a challenge, and an interesting gameworld.
Instead what I got was a lame hack n slash adventure game with poor clunky controls, predictable ai, minimal plot with no memorable characters or twists, and a dull boring world with almost no exploration.
For the most part, the games difficulty comes from the poor controls and that the enemies deal a great amount of damage.
I really don't see this as actual difficulty because the design itself is very basic, and only requires that the player has enough healing items and fast reactions.
Not much strategy is required, just hack, retreat heal, repeat.
The game's environment consists of standard dark fantasy locales such as castles and mines. These environments are uncreative and are generally uninteresting so much like other elements of the game.
The gameplay as a whole is too Boss battle centric, which is something that may work fine for MMOs, but for a mostly single player game like Demon Souls, it's no good.
Graphically, the game isn't too impressive which is to be expected from most Japanese developers, but what really puts salt in the wounds is that it lacks style outside of the bosses.
I really think that Demons Souls could have been a great game if it had more depth with the game world and characters, I really think that a truly open world would add alot to a game of this style, but that's not how it is.