Silent Hill Origins...

[Bobtheduck]

I'm a BIG Silent HIll fan... Mostly the second game, but I liked all of them, really... Least enthusiastic about the first game. In any case, I was pretty excited when I heard about the PSP Silent Hill game... As time goes on, though, I'm getting less and less excited about it...

First off, it's being made by an American team... Not that an American team is a bad thing by default, but a quick glance at it reveals some of what is bothering me...

Character designs, firstly. They're ugly... Silent Hill 3 and 4 have the best looking REALISTIC character designs in any game... Just, ever...

Then, the camera... Konami has been gung ho about getting rid of cinematic cameras... Now, don't get me wrong, the cameras in previous games tended to make meneuvaring more difficult, but it was part of the atmosphere of the game... There was that thing you could never look at, you couldn't see everywhere that James or Heather or Henry could see, you didn't know what was there just beyond those bars... The "new" style cameras like they introduced in Subsistance (though they're not really new) really detracts from the whole Silent Hill experience, as it does from the Metal Gear experience...

Then the interview... They talk about this new game, saying it will be more personal and less "emo." That's right... The producer actually used that word... Emo bashing is getting old, because it doesn't just happen to actual Emos (people in the Emo scene) but now anything with a sad story is instantly labeled Emo... Silent Hill 2, I think, ties with Metal Gear Solid 3 as best game story ever made, and one of the things that made it so great was, yeah, it is incredibly sad. The theory of Silent Hill as Purgatory requires sad content... It's a given. It's just lame that the original team is no longer together...

This game is ugly, the producer is arrogant, and the gameplay looks too similar to RE4... I don't know, I just hope things get better with Silent Hill 5... Silent Hill 3 and 4 were hallmarks in Character design. I'm expecting no less with SH5... I hope that's why it's taking so long... Origins may be the "Snake's Revenge" of this generation.

[Rocketshipper]

First off, it's being made by an American team... Not that an American team is a bad thing by default, but a quick glance at it reveals some of what is bothering me...

-_-. Hearing that just brings back memories of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. And if it's made by an American Team is it even canon to the series?

[Azier the Swordsman]

-_-. Hearing that just brings back memories of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. And if it's made by an American Team is it even canon to the series?

Only if the story doesn't contradict any of the other games and/or the style/story doesn't seem too outlandish for the universe it's set in. If they start suddenly blaring Marilyn Manson like the American made Resident Evil movie or give someone the ability to run down the side of an 80 foot skyscraper, I'm out of there.

[Bobtheduck]

Only if the story doesn't contradict any of the other games and/or the style/story doesn't seem too outlandish for the universe it's set in. If they start suddenly blaring Marilyn Manson like the American made Resident Evil movie or give someone the ability to run down the side of an 80 foot skyscraper, I'm out of there.

Well, worse than something like that (though that woule be bad), is the idea of it being more "personal." There are two schools of thought for storytelling in this regard. There is the Lifetime movie Super Mario brothers school of thought, and there is the Eternal Sunshine...

Basically, Lifetime movies are generally made with one dimensional characters so the women can project themselves onto the characters. The idea is, the fewer details there are to get in the way, the easier it will be for you to identify, because there will be less to alienate you...

The other school of thought, the Eternal Sunshine's philosophy, says that you get in detail about the people's lives so the people appear more real and easier to connect with. Well, I haven't seen a game that took the eternal sunshine route completely. Some of the Final Fantasy games came close.

Now, none of the Silent Hill games have had the Eternal Sunshine type completely (2 and 3 did most, wheras 1 had very 1 dimensional characters, and 4 had a very one dimensional main character, but a rather complex villain) Even so, there was a story to Harry... He may have been monotone, and showed no real emotion, but he had a story. He had a daughter he loved and he wanted her back. 4, I believe, failed most because there was no real story to Henry... He was that sort of blank character you were supposed to project yourself on.

So, which line of thinking does the American team have on this? Is more personal something which gives us copious details on the characters, or something that creates a blank slate for our projections? That is my biggest worry.

[Rocketshipper]

If I had to chose I'd probably like the new game to have a main character (and other characters) with more detailed character development, rather than a blank slate. Even though I like all the games, I always thought one flaw with them was weak characters. Characters like Cybil, Lisa, and that guy from SH 3 (forgot his name, the guy with glasses who was part of the cult) seemed a little superflous (did glasses guy really serve any purpose??), and even though I LOVE SH 2 I still wish their had been more information given about Angela, Eddie, and Laura (lack of info is one reason I wrote my own Eddie fanfic).

[Htom Sirveaux]

Silent Hill, for me, has always been as much character-driven as it is story-driven.
It has a certain way of presenting secondary characters who may not all have been very complex right away, but they each had their own issues and if you did some digging and hypothesizing, you could uncover their story.
As for the main characters, if everything that made the previous ones seem so human and so vulnerable was taken away and you were just left with a hollow, generic character with no real reason for being there, it certainly wouldn't be as riveting as the series has thus far managed to be. I would exclude SH4 from this, except the depth of the main villain, Walter Sullivan, made up for Henry Townshend's near-total lack of depth - all the stages and enemies were centered around Walter rather than Henry which was different, but it worked.

Apart from that, one of my personal biggest concerns is simply this: will it have one of its trademark "bathroom gags"? I just couldn't bear to see that tradition die.

Oh and Rocket, the glasses guy is Father Vincent. He was a priest for the cult, but he wasn't as completely sold on it as was Claudia Wolf.

[Rocketshipper]

Bob is using him as an icon now ^^. I totally forgot his name, maybe because I nver liked him too much.