Anticlimax is the New Climax
Jeffrey Matulef of TheGameReviews writes in his Challenging Conventions column: "When I finished my playthrough, my initial reaction was one of disappointment. After taking down a dragon hundreds of times my size, this puny mercy kill seemed highly anticlimactic. But then I found that I liked it. I admired the game for flipping itself on its head. Up until then it [Demon’s Souls] was a fairly traditional good versus evil story, a series of David versus Goliath encounters with a clear hero and villain. The game’s few sympathetic enemies still provided a hefty challenge, so any feelings of remorse were outweighed by frustration as I attempted to defeat them for the umpteenth time. The final encounter, however, was extremely easy, so I took pity on the poor sap. It added depth and intrigue to a story that previously seemed rather simple."
