Not too long ago I beat SH2 for the second time. Looking back on it, and scary games in general, one thing I really like in this kind of game are moments of safety contrasted with areas that are threatening. Pretty basic. Like Resident Evil has the safe rooms that contrast with the dangerous corridors of the mansion.
In this way, in these moments, RE is genuinely relaxing, this is a great effect juxtaposed with the rest of the game. I get a lot out of this, the basic ambiance you can create from horror in different ways, rather than just always directly trying to scare people I guess.
I like that in sh2, in similar moments the calming music becomes such that itâs exaggerated, overwhelming almost to the point of uncomfortable or sickly excess.
And slight spoilers for the side quest Lost in a Dream:I though it was a nice addition to the game, emphasizing the fact that Maria is not her own person but always existing around someone else, in this case a person hidden behind a door who you canât even see.
What I like about the endings is that generally theyâre not something that you would game in an obvious way. Theyâre mostly based on little ticks that you probably donât even realize youâre doing throughout the game. Itâs not perfect, but I love the attempt here at analyzing the playerâs behavior and using that to build a motivation for the character.
I like that James wanders around town, picking up and drinking from brown bottles that he finds propped in corners. It certainly fits that he would be a raging alcoholicâŚ
Also, all of the core Silent Hill music is good. SH1 is just something else, though. Listened to on its own, itâs the most amazing industrial album thatâs been written.
Well, what it really is, is that Konami was amazed at the success of Silent Hill 2, so they took the series away from Sato, because clearly they couldnât trust such a now-important series with a nobody like him. So, with the series now back in steady hands, for the next game they decided to play to the crowd and make their version of Resident Evil, except labored with previously nebulous continuity from the first game.
And⌠I mean. Itâs a decent game, but anything that made the first two games special is kind of not here. Itâs not subtle or particularly psychological at all.
Then The Room is just delightfully weird. This game goes off the grid, and goes at the series from a totally different angle. I like that it continues the notion of Silent Hill as a horror anthology series, like The Twilight Zone, rather than a discrete linear narrative, as SH3 tries to enforce.
I respect SH3 now having played it again recently. The back half is a journey of personal grief and loss. That could be me projecting from personal experiences but for how narratively it retreads I think tonally it is just as strong as the first two.
Heather losses the parent she has known and somewhat lost goes after the history she doesnt know. Shes lost at a critical point in her life and suddenly has all these questions she didnt know she had until she couldnt ask them. So shes asking everyone around her and having to take their half answers. You dont want to get answers from a persona like Claudia but you have to make due with who you can ask.
As a man I cant really delve into it outside of say there is also a strong menstruation metaphor there.
A teenage girl being confronted with a giant penis and then not really talking to anyone about it.
The game has a lot more symbolic depth that has very little to do with SILENT HILL which this forum was also guilty of missing.
Thinking about it more. In an essay I didnât write I also pointed out that retreading is also narratively consistent for Heatherâs journey walking the same path her Father (and James) did. Also exploring the sins of the father must be passed on to their children. She latches on to the detective as a father figure is pretty consistent with my own grieving process.
SH3 also added the atrocious âpress R3 to place meatâ feature.
I think it plays a lot more favorably towards the end as @Rudie pointed out. The fact that 1&2 both use loss as the driving force behind their exposition from the beginning really hurts the first half of 3 which felt to me more like a teen angst melodrama.
Wow, I actually think the first half of SH3 is one of the series highs largely because itâs a believable teenagerâs anxiety dream. Applying the by-then-established exploration loop (lock broken, lock broken, click, whatâs in here?) to the nightmare of being abandoned in a mall after hours works so well. Public spaces by their nature undergo a transformation when nobody else is in them so the whole experience is uncannily familiar. The subway level is probably an even better example of this even if it was cribbed directly from Jacobâs Ladder.
The halfway point is, to me, where the plot starts to butt in and it gets a little bit lame. Heather has two motivations in the game. In the first half she wants to get home. In the second she wants revenge. Anxiety about being out too late and not being able to get home is a completely understandable motivation for a young girl. Revenge is not so much. I mean it is, but the normal human response to trauma is fear and avoidance not incitement to murder. From that point on Heatherâs motivation is too action-movie-tropey; I donât buy it. Compare the motivations of Harry and James from the previous two games: Harry wants to find his daughter and James wants to see his dead wife again. These are real-world anxieties and they remain consistent throughout. These games are very focused. SH3 goes off the rails halfway through. Then sheâs like two people or three people or something and whatever.
I vaguely remember the meat feature, but I donât think I ever used it.
I agree with a lot of this, but iâll try to clarify my point.
It was always my impression that Heatherâs loss was her motivation in the later half of the game, just as Harry and James are searching for living persons, Heather is looking for answers (as Rudie pointed out). I think this is, as you suggest, a much more compelling motive for her actions. More than this though, I find it incredibly difficult to reconcile the nightmarish creations that haunt Heather with her mundane anxiety about getting home on time. Prior to the trauma of her father passing, there is really nothing provocative enough for me to invest in these nightmarish moments so they sort of fell flat with me.
In terms of the games environments though, the early stages are much more refined precisely because of the transformation of public space you identiy. I was gushing about Shin Megami Tensei, which mostly takes place in malls, in another thread for precisely this reason.
SH3 only seems weak in comparison to the heights of SH2. judged on its own merits, given the standards of the time, itâs still exceptionally well done in terms of storytelling and atmosphere. just not as ambitious or heady as sh2 is. it could have been way, way wayyyyy worse for a âstab at mainstream successâ attempt.
what is truly lacking in silent hill 3 is that there isnât much analysis or lore to go over. in different ways, 1 and 2 had a lot of deep, rich elements to their story that only came out after repeated playthroughs and carefully studying the dialogue, item descriptions, etc. sort of like a souls game. with 3, what you see is pretty much what you get. thatâs what I found most disappointing about that. itâs missing this higher brow styled âliteraryâ aspect.
This is the trailer that I saw at my first E3, and it floored me. I got a very different impression of the game from this than I got when I played it.
Somehow I missed all of the first half (that Iâve skipped over here for that reason), and picked up with Heather, head-down on the table, every time I saw it. So I didnât pick up on the connections to Silent Hill 1. I saw it as a novel third approach to the personal purgatory that is our favorite little American town. Harry lost his daughter. James was stuck in a fugue of misery and self-hatred after what happened to his wife. And Heather⌠the trailer made it seem like she just had a bad breakup or something, and in the immediate aftermath found herself in Metaphor Land, learning to fend for herself. Sounded great!
Then I got a convoluted continuity fest that was way more action-oriented and Resident Evily than the earlier games, retreaded lots of old ground to lesser effect, and â this is minor, but was important to me at the time â was mapped to the controller in an annoying way that it wouldnât let me change. It was like a summer blockbuster based on Silent Hill.
Which is still better than lots of games. But, you know, I was in this for something else.
Right. I mean, the points raised in this thread are helping to make me think I might have been overly harsh on the game at the time. Itâs been over a decade â might as well revisit it at some point!
SH3 HD is supposed to be based on the PC version and probably a lot more playable than 2, but somehow the ambient loops donât play properly or were sometimes replaced with other tracks. Also YMMV but the original voices are goneâŚI did like the originals overall but Douglasâ were probably the weakest.
ew. I thought they didnât redo the voices on that one.
tbh, what Iâve played of the sh2 remake, the new voices arenât bad. itâs the stuff thatâs overdubbed during gameplay that is ugly and distracting. I should give it another shot, I guess. might be worth it just for the visual experience?
On the PS3 version Silent HIll 2 HD is fucking awful. the fog doesnât work, lighting is broken, the final boss and the hotel are no where near finished.
Silent Hill 3 does have the new dub which isâŚalright. Iâm not sure if I would have noticed had I not played the original as much as I do. The game looks fantastic. The Silent Hill 2 parts even look right! It really makes the SH2 port look that much worse. âOh I wasnât just having clouds of nostalgia, the port is actually shit.â I remember I didnât like Aderackâs characterâs new VAâs delivery of the most important line. Heather is a little more animated in her delivery where I think her original VA was really good at being aloof.
In other words the dub is fine, itâs just feels a little off and donât know if that is because it is a little off or nostalgia or comparison.