Souls are the dark resource that drives the story of Demon’s Souls. It’s what convinced the King to turn on his people, it’s what the demons are after, and it’s why the hero has traveled to Boletaria. Souls grant power, wealth, and can corrupt even the strongest individuals.
But while souls make the world of Demon’s Souls go round there’s a lot about them that doesn’t make any sense. How they work, what they are, even how there used is often downright confusing and self-contradicting.
10 Inanimate Objects
The life essence of living beings is represented as an inanimate object. Souls when encountered in the world outside of a human body are floating orbs of essence. If anything they look more like mana than souls.
Typically souls are perceived as the spiritual matter of a person. It takes on the shape and appearance of the physical body and is capable of movement, speech, and other actions. But for some reason, souls are little more than inanimate balls of spiritual matter.
9 Some Souls Are Animate
While souls are often portrayed as non-sentient orbs of spiritual essence they’re also moving and animated beings. The Hub houses a number of souls, beings outside of their corporeal bodies who are wandering around, talking, and carrying out various activities.
It’s never made clear why there are seemingly two types of souls in the game. Are the ones found lying around souls and those that are moving around spirits? If that’s the case what’s the difference and how does one person retain mobility and the other becomes an object to be collected?
8 Just Lying Around
The player will walk through Boletaria and encounter a number of souls that are just lying around waiting to be collected. Ignoring the idea that some souls are balls and others are people, why haven’t the souls been collected?
A number of humans have traveled to Boletaria for the express purpose of harvesting souls to gain power for themselves. No one thought to pick any of the ones lying up? There aren’t people hiding in the shadows scooping up the souls left lying around when other people die?
7 Demons Aren’t Interested
As strange as it is for humans to ignore the souls lying around it’s even stranger for demons to ignore them. These demonic creatures are in the land of Boletaria to collect souls to either engorge themselves or feed to the Old One.
But why haven’t any of them collecting those lying around? Or for that matter, none of them think to collect the protagonist’s rich soul? It seems like the hero’s soul that could be worth several thousand souls would be prime pickings, yet the demons don’t seem to care.
6 Demons Don’t Want Demon’s Souls
As strange as it is for demons to ignore the player’s soul it’s stranger to think they’re ignoring other demons. Collecting souls is their prime directive and many of these demons are incredibly clever and intelligent.
Yet not one had the thought that they could let other demons harvest the souls and then hunt those demons. Instead of collecting human souls one at a time, they could wait for a lesser demon to collect a hundred or so, kill that sole demon and claim both the hundred souls and the demon’s soul.
5 How Are Souls Traded
Souls function as a currency in Demon’s Souls. If the player wants a particular item or for a blacksmith to repair something the player needs a set amount of souls to pay for it.
It’s understandable a merchant would want souls, in fact, it’s a lot more efficient to trade something of value for souls than hunting them down themselves. But what isn’t clear is how the exchange happens. Perhaps it’s something like In Time where characters grasp arms and transfer souls, but even that makes little sense.
4 How Can A Human Absorb Them
The entire premise of the game is for players to accumulate both human and demon’s souls to amass power and defeat the more powerful demons. But exactly how the player absorbs those souls isn’t clear.
Sure, the Maiden In Black lends her aid and gives the power to the player, but unless she transformed them into a demon they’re still human. Stranger still is the fact that absorbing that many souls has no effect on the character. King Allant and even demons become larger and more blob-like after consuming so many souls, yet the protagonist stays the same shape and size.
3 Carrying A Soul
When the player encounters a soul they can carry them around in their inventory to either be absorbed later or traded for better gear. What’s never made clear is how those souls are stored on the character’s person.
Is their knapsack a specially enchanted soul reservoir? Were their pockets charmed to house the spiritual essence of fellow human beings? What device or container is being used to house potentially thousands upon thousands of once-living beings?
2 Collecting Souls
In addition to somehow being able to carry all of those souls is the never explained ability to pick them up. The player somehow has the power to come across an incorporeal ball of spiritual essence and can pick them up without any trouble.
It seems like picking up something intangible should be more difficult than grabbing a sword off the ground. Do the souls become more tangible if they’re inanimate? Did the Maiden in Black give the player special demonic tongs to pick them up?
1 Fused With Weapons
The last thing that makes no sense about souls in Demon’s Souls is that they can be infused in weapons. Blacksmiths are capable of taking a powerful demonic soul and transferring it to an axe or sword to imbue it with great power.
While it’s certainly a useful ability it’s never covered how this works exactly. Is it a special type of metal encasing the spirit? Can souls be melted down and cast with the metal? How can an inorganic object house the soul of a once-living being?
