Introduction

Demon's Souls is a cult-classic Action RPG by Japanese developers FROM Software. It was directed by Berserk fan Hidetaka Miyazaki and takes inspiration from FROM's older franchise King's Field. You're most likely more familiar with its spiritual successors, Dark Souls and Bloodborne, or its remake Dark Souls III.

Demon's Souls is a Japanese take on the Western RPG. In a break from the usual frenetic pace of most action games, Demon's Souls doesn't like when you rush into combat willy nilly. The game demands a slower, more methodical pace where you carefully take in your surroundings and learn how to survive an area long enough to reach the boss. Killing enemies nets you souls, which you can cash in to increase your stats or upgrade your weapons, but if you die, you lose your souls in a bloodsplatter on the ground that you must survive long enough to recover, lest you die again before you reach them and lose them forever.
To mitigate this somewhat, the game includes creative spins on online cooperative play: players can leave messages on the ground to warn other players of traps, enemies, or a hidden item, but most often it's to simply ask you to rate the message so they can get health back. You can also summon other players into your world as spirits to aid you, or vice versa, which benefits both players as the guest also earns souls from enemies. However, there's also the possibility of players invading your world to kill you instead.
The difficulty is punishing, you will die a lot, and the game relishes in killing you.
This turned many a gamer off early on, but those who stuck with it found a gorgeously grotesque series of worlds dripping with dark atmosphere and ghoulies to stab in the ass. It's an old-school game design philosophy that manages to be rewarding with every hernia-inducing victory, and it helped the game go from an obscure, awkwardly translated import to one of the PS3's most iconic sleeper hits. Even despite its age and the multiple gameplay improvements implemented by its successors, Demon's Souls still remains a fresh and interesting dive into the futility of life.

The story is such:
The Kingdom of Boletaria has been engulfed by the Deep Fog. King Allant XII's greedy use of an ancient, dark ritual to channel the power of souls has awoken the Old One, a giant tree slug living underneath the mountain temple The Nexus. With the Old One comes demons, death, and a whole lot of Allant's allies getting corrupted.
Wei Shen and King rise from the ashes of Travis's Sleeping Dogs LP to brave the Deep Fog and save Boletaria... and promptly get killed in the process. Now they are bound to the Nexus and must kill the many demons across five worlds, make their souls their own, and beckon the Old One either back to sleep or to their will...

--About the Co-op LP--
BigTUnit1 is my co-op partner for Parts 1-11, and he had to step down afterward. YamiNoSenshi takes over on Part 12.

Yami and I are reasonably experienced at the game and have beaten it a few times. Travis played it when it came out for about ten minutes and then never touched it again. Thus I serve as the informative one against Travis as the new guy experiencing everything for the first time. With Yami, he and I are both the knowledgeable types who still die to every little stupid reason.
I play Wei Shen as a dex build Thief with secondary magic, while Travis and Yami play King as a strength build with secondary faith. That way we can show off the majority of weapons and spells in the game. We'll be showing off as much of the game as we can, save for maybe world tendency.
Both Travis/Yami and I will be recording our gameplay. Most often one of us will be summoned into the other's world, but there will also be cases where we simply play the same level at the same time, and one's footage will either be periodically overlayed onto the other's, or the POV will swap between us if one gets ahead of the other or has something more interesting going on.

We didn't get invaded nearly as much as we wanted to, but there's a bit of fun with that in the Tower of Latria.

It's been done
Yes, TheWanderingNewbie also did a co-op LP of this game with Taoto, but that was at NG+4, while this is at the base NG, and Taoto didn't also record footage. Plus this is only the first installment in a possible Co-op LP series of the Soulsborne games.

THREAD RULES

Keep story or item spoilers tagged. This isn't Dark Souls's level of vague storytelling, nor is it an especially complex story, but at least tag until we've addressed in the LP itself what it is you want to discuss.
If we're leveling our characters and weapons in a way that might be a hindrance in showing something off, that's one thing, but we don't care if you think we're generally "doing it wrong". If you're one of these cunts nobody likes, leave it.

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