They are merely games of patience. As long as you're patient, you are likely to rarely ever die in the game. It's a meticulously crafted gameplay gauntlet wherein carefully integrated skill acquisition and the application of said skills is paramount rather than some sort of unfairly difficult and arbitrary barrier.
In fact, rarely has a game been more fair than Dark Souls and Demon Soul's. It's almost the polar opposite of the phrase "cheap", which is why my ears perked up reading your posts. Cheap is a game wherein most deaths can be attributed to some element of the game that has been designed in a way that is intentionally counter-intuitive or non-advantageous to the gamer, thereby it being "the game's fault" when you fail to proceed past a particular challenge. Cheap is not Demon or Dark Soul's. Almost every death in these games (with a few exceptions in a handful of bosses) can be directly linked to a gamer's failure to properly apply a set of fairly simple skills, or a gamer's obvious impatience.
If you're the type who needs to run through games, you'll frequently find yourself having problems. If you're the type who doesn't take the time to practice your newfound skills and abilities on lower enemies before taking it to the bigger ones, you'll find perhaps you didn't hone your skills enough to proceed.
But if you are patient and you do carefully integrate your skill sets into your play, you'll rarely ever die, and the game goes from its reported "legendary difficulty" to merely a super engaging game that happens to test your mettle from time to time.
