Are you guys all under 20 or what? When Demon's Souls initially came out (Early 2009) in Japan, nobody at all had the game on their radar. It was seen as another weird, niche From Software game that'll probably stay in Japan. Early voices from game critics were almost unanimous that the game was a disaster. Even Shu Yoshida had the same reaction:
https://kotaku.com/5884268/this-is-...lopment-said-after-first-playing-demons-souls
It was only when people started importing the game and trying it out themselves that the word of mouth started to spread and people suddenly started saying good things about it. I believe (don't quote me on this, just trying to use my memory), that a western release wasn't even a given at that point and only got done due to the very positive word of mouth and because tons of people started to import it (myself included) due to people spreading the love. By the time the bigger mainstream news sites reviewed the game, it was half a year later and word on the street was - for a long time already - that the game is incredibly interesting. If that wouldn't have happened, I'm almost certain a lot of the bigger news sites would've written it off with a 6/10.