Seeing behind the Dragon God in the Demon's Souls Remake (Patreon)

Towards the end of the first Demon's Souls Compare-Through episode, I showed how there is an oddly-detailed setpiece hidden behind the Dragon God in the tutorial:

I've always been fascinated by how they took the time to create this but it wound up being completely blocked from view. There's no way to see it without cheating (you can either kill the Dragon God with cheats, or disable gravity and venture out of bounds).

I was wondering if they took the time to rebuild this for the remake, but without being able to cheat, what options do we have?

Well, as it turns out, it's possible to enter photo mode in the Demon's Souls remake during the very first split second of a cutscene. And during this brief transition into the cutscene, characters will apparently de-render for a moment. Credit goes to RMuffin64 on twitter for discovering and showing this to me.

So just mash the photo mode button while the cutscene starts, right? Well, it's quite a lot harder than that! The timing is VERY finnicky, and I believe it might even be a frame-accurate input (or at least it's something very close to it).

The area with the Dragon God has an invisible wall that blocks the camera from passing the boundary beyond where the cutscene gets triggered. So if you turn the camera around to look back at the player, it's just as if you're right up against a wall and the camera will be very close to your head.

You'll know you're very near to the boundary when the camera starts clipping into your face, as seen above. You'll be nearer still, when the camera manages to clip through the boundary during photo mode and then allows you some freedom on the other side of the invisible wall:

We did it! We broke free!

The photo mode is still restricted to its usual proximity from the player so it's not like we have total free-cam, and from here any subtle movement forward is going to trigger the cutscene. So we can move the camera around a little bit out here, but it's still not enough to see behind the Dragon God clearly enough:

While stepping forward it then becomes a game of having the toolbelt menu up on the screen, entering photo mode through it, pressing circle to back out to the toolbelt, and then pressing X again as quickly as possible to re-enter photo mode. And then doing this repeatedly to do a sort of "slow mo" step over the boundary until you hopefully get it right.

The tricky part is that it is possible to press X too quickly for the menu to register it, which means you have to do it fast as possible without being TOO fast, which is a delicate balancing act. I found a sweet spot of pressing circle then x in the rhythm of two 8th notes in succession, at a tempo of ~129 BPM. This seems to put you into the right ballpark.

As it turns out, they put a couple big statues back there! While this isn't as exciting as the weird setpiece from the original game, the developers really didn't have to put anything back there at all. There was zero reason to do this so I appreciate how they essentially split the difference here. They saved a lot of time by using assets they already made, but still gave us something to find if we could figure out a way to see behind the Dragon God.

Pretty cool!

I'll be talking about this in the intro section of Part 2 of the Compare-Through, where I'll catch up on a few things from the tutorial before moving on to Boletaria 1-1 and 1-2.