I did it, last night. I finished Demon's Souls.

I really, really liked this game. It did so many things that felt right to me. From the duality of staying in body form and risking black phantom invasion in order to have higher health and better stats versus staying in soul form and being forced to have lower strength and hoping to find cooperative players instead of being able to actively bring them into the game. Then there is the way the levels are all available to you to play in any order, so that your play style and technique can guide you, letting you explore what you want when you want. Finally, there's the community aspects where you can leave messages for other players to guide them around (or into) traps and you can see (on occasion) what other players are doing and (frequently) how other players meet their fates so you can avoid those same mistakes. It's an odd quality, but Demon's Souls is a single player game but if you take away the community, it loses a significant amount of its charm.

I don't usually play through a game more than once but I've already started a new character to play through the game using a different strategy. I may finish the game a second time or I may take a break and come back to it later--actually I plan on coming back to this game again later no matter what, I just worry that the online community will shrink by that point and make the game much more solitary.

Demon's Souls. It is so good.

Whenever I do shelve the game, the next one I'll be playing through is Valkyria Chronicles. We'll see how well I handle the transition from awesome RPG to turn-based squad combat when that comes around.