Demon's Souls

General

• Learn by dying. When you die, think about what you did wrong, and don't do it again.

• Don't grind unless you're really close to affording something. It will make the game tedious and less fun, and you'll get souls much faster by exploring new areas.

• You're going to lose lots of souls. Don't stress out over it, you'll get more in no time. You can avoid losing large numbers of souls by spending as many as you can before going somewhere dangerous, and by only using the soldier's and hero's soul items when you're close to affording something.

• You can do the levels in any order (after you beat the first boss). If one level is giving you too much trouble, another one might be more susceptible to your strengths, or you might find something that will help you in the level that was stonewalling you.

• The Demon's Soul items dropped by bosses can be traded for unique weapons and magic. Don't use them unless you're sure they're no good to you.

Build advice

• As far as builds go it's generally best to specialize, like go all in on one stat from strength, dexterity, magic, or faith, and then also the first three as needed, like if you're not doing a casting build you can go light on intelligence since that increases your mana. There are builds that choose two of those, like str+dex is known as a quality build.

• Then you find a weapon that scales well with your chosen stats, this would be something to look up, especially the upgrade paths as they are convoluted in demon's souls. The scaling will be on one of the weapon description tabs, when viewing the inventory press square to cycle them, there'll be icons going left to right for str, dex, magic, and faith with letters from E up to S for scaling.

• Weapons have upgrade paths that augment the scaling, like crushing weapons scale more with strength. Other upgrade paths add status effects.

• Alternatively pump magic and int and buy spells and get equipment that regens mp to break the game over your knee.