We’re only a few months away from the release of Dark Souls 3, which may or may not be the last Dark Souls game, but everything started with Demon’s Souls. I’ve been reading up on the game lately, and it’s impressive how deep fans have gone.
This video by Sanadsk been kicking around for a while now, but with Demon’s Souls’ seventh anniversary coming up—it hit Japan on February 5, 2009—it seemed appropriate to show much they’ve found.
Here’s a more recent one, where someone got the level loading:
Like most games, there were levels, enemies, and other material cut from Demon’s Souls before it was released. What’s interesting about Demon’s Souls is how it directly references what should have been another area within the fiction.
Demon’s Souls is unique from the other Souls games because it’s level-based. The other games, including spiritual spin-off Bloodborne, allow players to explore a sprawling map that branches off into discrete locations, whereas Demon’s Souls literally has you walking up to portals, called archstones, and warping away.
Image Credit: Demon’s Souls Wiki
The five archstones—Small King, Burrow King, Tower Queen, Shadowmen, Chieftan—leads to five different worlds. But there’s a broken archstone the player cannot use, and a character makes a brief reference to its origins:
“The [archstone was] given to the great giants of the Northern Lands.”
This world was supposedly abandoned—thus, the crushed archstone—to stop the death fog that’s spreading through the lands. Big surprise: it didn’t work.
Some fans have dubbed this area the Land of the Giants. Fans who really want to go down the rabbit hole should read this post and this post from the series’ most well-known data miner, Illusorywall. He’s pieced together lots of details about what From Software’s plan for the Land of the Giants might have been.
There’s a competing theory, though one without any substance, that it’s a portal to the world in Dark Souls. From Software has explicitly said the two games are not connected, though obviously they’re similar, gameplay-wise.
Over the years, people have dug through the code to unearth abandoned material, which pointed in the direction of this abandoned area. It seems like players would have been forced to face some truly grotesque enemies, such as...
Image Credit: Demon’s Souls Wiki
A sasquatch with a mouth for a stomach? God damn, Miyazaki!
But Sanadsk’s video is our most in-depth look at what might have been. It’s not sexy to look at, since the area was never finished, but you get the general idea.
If you’re interested in learning more about other stuff cut from the various Souls, you can’t do much better than Sanadsk’s channel.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.