I may be totally off base here, but hear me out.

After putting in more than 100 hours into Demon's Souls (multiple NG+ with 3 builds) and more than 30 in Dark Souls (I know, I'm a dark souls noob I've been really busy with work), I have come to the conclusion that I believe the FROM developers envisioned us to play as melee characters to get the true essence of what these games have to offer... at least in terms of the single player game.

Does that sound totally off base? I mean think about Demon's Souls starting off as a knight. You are forced to go hand-in-hand with every single enemy the boletarian palace can throw at you before you can even think about learning spells. Now think about starting off as a Royalty class, you can spam soul arrow for the first 10 hours of the game without hesitation. It just seems like the right way to go toe-to-toe with bosses like the Tower Knight, Flamelurker, and Quelaag. I hopefully don't sound too biased here, I love battle mage builds in RPGs, but something about these two games makes me appreciate the hard work that was put in to the combat mechanics and boss design for melee.

Let me know what you think.

I think you're absolutely doing yourself a disservice if you don't do a run through of either/both games as a pure melee class. To me you're right on, the combat system is definitely designed around the melee aspect.

In my opinion the melee combat is one of the main things that set this game (haven't played Demon's) apart from the rest. My first instinct was to play it like any other hack-n-slash game. It didn't take long for that idea to fall flat.

i think they made it so you can do whatever you want, if you're a mage you can buy souls arrow and heavy souls arrow as soon as you get to lordran or you can pick up the zweihander too and go melee or you can do both, the first time i played demons i started an all around build so that i get to use everything and decide what im gonna do with my second character, i did the same in dark.

my first dark souls char was a pyro, loved the idea of having magic as a back up while not having to use points in int/faith. and most pyro spells are close range, and slow casts.

I agree that they made it harder to start as a pure mage, but once you start collecting some of the spells, some bosses are a joke (while others are still hard). Then again, I think that follows with many other 'RPGs' (if you can call DS an RPG). Wizards are always weaker and take more skill to keep alive at low levels, then they come into their own once they acquire the right spells.All in all, I think the designers were pretty close to genius (although I will say non-stat scaled weapons should either be nerfed or stat-scaled really up their damage)

Even the casting classes do a lot of melee, so the emphasis is definitely there. Even as a mage, I go through much of a level using sword and shield, and save a lot of the magic for bosses, where I wouldn't have a chance up close. If I'm going to play as a pure melee class, I'm going to want to have a lot of healing and great defenses.

This game definitely focuses on the melee, but it does a great job with magic too. Honestly, I think this game treats spell casters better then some other games.

Also, a lot of games focus on melee more then ranged attacks.

I don't really know because I have no spell experiences. (my toon just scratch his head when he try to to use catalysts or talismans; while I scratch my head). I'm currently on my first run and I agree that melee is beautiful.

Shielding hard attacks with greatshields is so gratifying it makes me feel like a Spartan. Large strength weapons hits feels amazing; it's like you really flatten the enemies. Certain movesets for large strength weapons feel great, like BKUGS two-handed heavy attack, or Dragon Tooth continuous chain-stun whirlwind. And once you buffed strength and upgrade those weapons, every time you "drop the hammer" it hits like a freight train.

I'm unable to play PVP for now. I think a lot of people get too worked up about "What's a good weapon for PVP?", "what's a good build for PVP?", "Oh large weapons are so slow they're useless in PVP...", "Spells are safer for PVP"

People seem to overlook about the fun of playing the game with large weapons. Maybe I just think so because I'm still unexposed to the ruthless carnage of PVP? I don't know... But for now it's a lot of fun going toe to toe with enemies with heavy hitting weapons that makes me feel like a unstoppable train; rather than watching videos of people casting spells from afar, that's for sure.

I gotta agree, the weapon system is so well done that using magic just sort of dulls it for me. So many crazy weapons and setups are available to STR/DEX builds it's criminal to ignore them all.

Friend of mine played as a mage, and many bosses just weren't a problem for him (barring Nito, curiously). You can just blitz them. Same with Pyromancy too.