Demon's Souls SL1 NG+5 PBWT 'Easy Mode' - Part 3 - 4-1 - Adjudicator

Welcome to Demon's Souls, Max Difficulty for Noobs edition.

No skills were used in the making of this series. =)

People often ask why so many veterans recommend 4-1 as the first level in Demon's Souls, when it's arguably among the hardest in the game. There are several reasons for this. One is the over-the-wall shortcut, one of the biggest and easiest stage skips in the entire game. This allows you to go almost directly to the 4-1 boss, who is himself one of the easiest bosses in the entire Soulsborne series. Adjudicator, however, is not "ranked" as if he's one of the easiest bosses in the game, so he gives a fairly massive amount of souls as a reward. But those aren't the only rewards you receive here. You also unlock two of the most important vendors in the game by beating 4-1: Blige and Patches (more on them in the next video), and the first Reaper of 4-2, one of the best and easiest soul farming locations in the entire game.

For the purposes of this run I'm not interested in farming souls, obviously, however I do need Blige so I can renew my arrows and Soul Remains. That makes 4-1 my first priority after 1-1.

Getting up the initial hill of 4-1 is one of the hardest things to do consistently in this entire challenge. To do it, it's important to understand the exact nature of Soul Remains. When you throw a Soul Remains on the ground, an enemy will go to it and try to attack it a couple of times. It then realizes that it's "not real", and it will change targets and re-prioritize you, instead. However, if you throw a Soul Remains somewhere up high, like on a wall, where the enemy cannot actively hit the visual effect, it will cause the enemy to get "stuck" hunting the Soul Remains for its full duration. Doing this makes them far more valuable, and is essential with these silver skeletons, who are incredibly aggressive.

0:52 I begin 4-1. First I need to stop Satsuki from killing me. I toss a Soul Remains high and away. This isn't really a precise throw, and as long as you're generally in the corner of the area here, it'll buy you enough time to get to the second area, where they'll forget about you as long as you have the Thief Ring on.

1:05 You want to stand just behind this rock here, and aim your bow where the two bends of the tree branches intersect. To do this, aim with the bow, then press triangle to drop the bow, and square to throw the Soul Remains without moving. This won't always lure the two skeletons off, so I like to make sure to not move in the hopes that I can throw 2-3 Soul Remains and hopefully one of them will work.

1:37 This is actually a bad throw. I should have aimed a bit higher to make sure the Soul Remains were out of the skeleton's reach.

1:57 This whole sequence is easier/safer once this fog gate isn't here to slow you down, so it may be wise to just resign yourself to two separate runs. One to open the fog gate, one to make the actual run. I get lucky here and pull off both, but often the fog gate will slow me down just enough for a silver skeleton to pursue me all the way down the trapped hallway here. As you can see, one tries, but gets stuck on the edge of the doorway.

2:10 Now I have to wait for Hyper Mode. This ends at 3:40.

4:00 I kill Vanguard as a preparation step for saving Graverobber Blige in Part 4. I then similarly grab the Copper Key that opens his cell. I mess up here and waste Holy Arrows instead of Fire.

6:35 You can usually just run safely past this guy and he won't hit you, but I wasn't taking any chances with him, so I used a Soul Remains.

6:45 I make quick work of Adjudicator, then close things out with a body form suicide. I was going to do two here but I forgot to use my Stone of Ephemeral Eyes, so the second suicide doesn't actually accomplish anything. I'll throw another one at the beginning of Part 4, which is going to be a short segment anyway.