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Description

I recently completed a second Demon's Souls (2009) playthrough via emulation; the save took less than 30 hours for me to reach the ending, I reached the same ending as last time due to my player tendency not being especially good or poor, and I was able to maintain extremely high World Tendency in every single area by refusing to go anywhere whilst embodied.

While I was playing the game, I found myself struck by Latria very heavily; one of my favorite sorts of locations in a Souls game is one where the space itself feels as if it is in pain, and Latria happened to be the first instance of that in the series. The light pollution-green of the sky, the ubiquitous violence and cruelty, decaying quality of the stonework and ironwork, the strange intrusions of the great heart's tendrils and veins, and of course the heavy rust covering everything there, as if blood has covered every single surface in Latria at least once.
The Souls games are tremendous at giving personalities to spaces; Anor Londo feels as if it desperately wants to tell you about itself, but is deeply scared of what you would think of it. The complexes of the Healing Church feel uniquely pompous and self-obsessed, as if they are completely sure of being the only conduit to the Great Ones. Mohgwyn and Leyndell are both continually exhausting themselves in different ways, Raya Lucaria has the anger of it's internal civil war underlying every single dysfunction or inconvenience, and Latria feels simply horrified by it's existence.

I will admit that, unlike my depiction of the Nightmare Frontier, this wasn't fully conducted from an impression of the space. I took screenshots heavily throughout my DeS playthrough, and one of them happened to be this view of Latria, which was not the tremendous views from the balcony facing the Heart in the Prison of Hope, or even the view from the bridge in front of the tower where the Old Monk luxuriates, but which was rather a fairly unremarkable glimpse into an unattainable distance, from the top of a stairwell which leads down to the chamber where the Great Heart falls.

Latria reminds me of many of my favorite spaces from subsequent Souls games; the light pollution-green sky and omnipresent death evoke Ariamis, the oppressive darkness and cage elevators evoke the Nightmare of Mensis, the overtaxed Romanesque hallways evoke the Profaned Capital, the story evokes the same atmosphere of nauseating hatred and bloodlust as Cainhurst or Mohgwyn, and the structures around seem to be decaying in the exact same manners as the version of the Kiln of the First Flame which we see in DSI, not to mention how both Latria and the Kiln bear explicit resemblance to Bruegel's depiction of the Tower of Babel.

Description

I recently completed a second Demon's Souls (2009) playthrough via emulation; the save took less than 30 hours for me to reach the ending, I reached the same ending as last time due to my player tendency not being especially good or poor, and I was able to maintain extremely high World Tendency in every single area by refusing to go anywhere whilst embodied.

While I was playing the game, I found myself struck by Latria very heavily; one of my favorite sorts of locations in a Souls game is one where the space itself feels as if it is in pain, and Latria happened to be the first instance of that in the series. The light pollution-green of the sky, the ubiquitous violence and cruelty, decaying quality of the stonework and ironwork, the strange intrusions of the great heart's tendrils and veins, and of course the heavy rust covering everything there, as if blood has covered every single surface in Latria at least once.
The Souls games are tremendous at giving personalities to spaces; Anor Londo feels as if it desperately wants to tell you about itself, but is deeply scared of what you would think of it. The complexes of the Healing Church feel uniquely pompous and self-obsessed, as if they are completely sure of being the only conduit to the Great Ones. Mohgwyn and Leyndell are both continually exhausting themselves in different ways, Raya Lucaria has the anger of it's internal civil war underlying every single dysfunction or inconvenience, and Latria feels simply horrified by it's existence.

I will admit that, unlike my depiction of the Nightmare Frontier, this wasn't fully conducted from an impression of the space. I took screenshots heavily throughout my DeS playthrough, and one of them happened to be this view of Latria, which was not the tremendous views from the balcony facing the Heart in the Prison of Hope, or even the view from the bridge in front of the tower where the Old Monk luxuriates, but which was rather a fairly unremarkable glimpse into an unattainable distance, from the top of a stairwell which leads down to the chamber where the Great Heart falls.

Latria reminds me of many of my favorite spaces from subsequent Souls games; the light pollution-green sky and omnipresent death evoke Ariamis, the oppressive darkness and cage elevators evoke the Nightmare of Mensis, the overtaxed Romanesque hallways evoke the Profaned Capital, the story evokes the same atmosphere of nauseating hatred and bloodlust as Cainhurst or Mohgwyn, and the structures around seem to be decaying in the exact same manners as the version of the Kiln of the First Flame which we see in DSI, not to mention how both Latria and the Kiln bear explicit resemblance to Bruegel's depiction of the Tower of Babel.