A large part about SH3’s poor reception people seem to beat around the bush about is the fact that a series with a presumed largely adult male audience was suddenly made to identify with a teenage girl. As Rudie brought up, a lot of the symbolism is centered around the female body. Hell, the climax even had something as overt as Heather rejecting a fetus (egg) using dark congealed blood. It definitely made a lot of men uncomfortable, if not angry. The mass desire to call every change a flaw probably stems from this in my opinion, especially when you look at how SH4 is regarded despite having changed/got wrong way more than 3 in terms of both the game and plot structure. (I love SH4 for the record)
Also RE: SH3’s place in the series, I think it succeeded 2 in the drama and nuance of the character interactions. While 2’s symbolism and complete dedication to pursuing James’s psychoses was great, it was really nice to have the cast interact in a way that wasn’t just goal exposition or backstory dumps. I think the other world set pieces were more effective too, but only if you’re ignoring the narrative symbolism of 2’s.
much of the symbolism in all of what we’ll call the canonical SH games is centered around the female body
personally I think heather is the easiest SH protagonist to identify with because the writing in SH3 is less surreal than the rest of the series. but given that this is SH, that’s not necessarily a positive thing.
It’s certainly above average for its time. The PC version is excellent. It plays well with a modern OS and I’m fairly certain you can customise the controls.
Knowing the way that Gamers are, this would not surprise me. As I say, though, my disappointment was rather the opposite: that it didn’t deal more directly with a young woman’s problems in taking control of her life. Instead it was basically a sarcastic female character plopped into a now-familiar world without much in the way of adapting that world and its symbolism to her character. It just didn’t feel like they thought this thing through on a psychological level to the extent of the earlier games. That the new production team was looking at the project more as a continuation of a successful formula than as an opportunity to explore new ideas.
Of course, my response is a problem in itself in the respect that much of my problem is that the game didn’t match my preconceptions. So, yeah. It’s worth revisiting at some point, I suppose, to see what it looks like with a bit more distance, and with foreknowledge about what the game actually is.
Like. You know how Pyramid Head is intended as a symbol of James’s id – basically his own unconscious haunting him because of what he did to his wife? (Man, SH2 really is all about the unconscious. The way it judges the player’s motivation based on subtle behaviors.) And then for the Silent Hill movie, they just tossed him in as a random threat, because he had become such an icon to players?
That’s sort of what Silent Hill 3 felt like to me. Why is [x element] here? Because it’s Silent Hill! It’s what you want, right? This is a part that people like! So here it is again!
It’s a more considered game than that. Just not as personal as 2/4. Like, 1 and 2 are quite different games. 3 just wants to be the sequel to 1 that 2 never was. Now in doing so it misses out on the singular nature of each of those games, but it’s far from thehaphazard mess that the series eventually became.
Not having spent any time with the non-Konami Silent Hills, is there anything redeemable about the latter-day games? David Hellman lent me a copy of one of them, for the 360. Homecoming, was it? The one that seemed to feature Dean Winchester as a protagonist. To the extent that I played it, which was only a few hours in, it was… mostly competent, but not particularly interesting.
didn’t the her story guy work on the Wii one? That alone would make me want to try it if I liked horror games (I only barely got through the PC version of 2 in 2005 on insert credit’s testimony).
Yeah I understand that feeling with Heather, though I feel like the extensive symbolism is something exclusive to 2, rather than being a part of the series milieu that was extricated the moment it hit number 3. The flayed body at the end of the fake-out sequence of SH1 never had a symbolic purpose, for example. Neither did the pterodactyls. A large part of where I don’t get the criticism is where people say it was less considerate than the earlier games. It definitely wants to be a sequel, but I just think the imagery and plotting is completely thrown at the mercy of being a SH1 sequel. The rabbit hole doesn’t go as deep as James’s, but you can still dig quite a ways and discover something that SH1 & 2 never had.
I guess I’m saying that playing it again is definitely worth your time.
also geist, I think I was trying to say that the approach to Heather’s body as something sympathetic, as opposed to something sexual and dangerous, was worth differentiating from the first two games is all. I came off more confrontational to you than I wanted to.
This exactly. I guess I have a tendency to compare it to SH2 which works as a unified and largely self contained piece of work. Perhaps it’s ties to SH1 work against it for me. I’m certainly going to give it another shot. Booted it up on PC just now and it really does look incredible for it’s age. Actually looking forward to this.
You should absolutely try Shattered Memories. The Her Story guy was involved (and 4-mat did the sound design, for another piece of trivia). It’s the best release on the Wii, in my opinion.
Don’t expect it to be anything like a “traditional” Silent Hill game, though. It’s not even horror in the way you might expect a horror video game to be. You alternate between sessions with a psychologist and more familiar third-person exploration scenes. Your responses in the sessions affect (to a degree) what happens in the “main” part of the game.
Although it’s something of a re-imagining of the first Silent Hill, the characters are different (and can actually have varying personalities based on things that you do). Some of the differences based on your actions are subtle but impressive.
Also, the soundtrack includes a nice cover version of Always on My Mind.
Sounds like a horseshit of a narrative, I am sorry. Maybe I’m isolated from the trendy opinions of 20XX, but Silent Hill 3 was definitely not poorly received. Even appreciation of the fourth game is only found in niche communities such as SB, and whenever people ask which SH games are worth playing, most people draw a line at the third game.
did you guys ever notice that pyramid head is roughly james size and kind of paunchy in sh2, but like every other iteration of him he’s a giant muscled hellbeast
Shattered Memories is great but the wiimote stuff is pretty obnoxious. If you can stomach through that, it’s probably the only game to directly develop on sh2’s techniques in a meaningful way. I appreciate it for not slavishly sticking to silent hill’s tropes and very much having its own style and pacing. I want to replay it sometime. It would be nice (but probably impossible) for there to be a port that ditched the motion controls, or provided an alternative.
Yeah, the controls are way more tolerable/actually playable on PS2 than Wii in my experience. It is supposed to run and look a bit better on Wii but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a way to set up a mapping in Dolphin that would conform to a dual shock/modern dual stick controller to play like the other SHs.
