This month has seen a lot of things for me, my birthday was a couple weeks ago. I've been dating someone for almost four months now and he hasn't cheated on or tried to manipulate my feelings into being a piece of emotional furniture or anything like that. This is unusual because most of my courtships seems to fall apart around the four month mark (excuse me while I knock on some wood). As of tomorrow I'll have been at my very interesting and fun job for a year.
But above all, my favorite video game franchise is releasing three new titles this month. Well technically two and one repaint of a couple old titles.
I speak of course, of the Silent Hill franchise.
On March 13, which was my birthday, Silent Hill Downpour was released. I might make a blog post about that once I played the game through a few times. But I'll say as much as I enjoyed Vatra's take on the franchise, but have some slight criticisms which I want to develop a little more thoroughly first.
At the end of the month, a top-down dungeon crawler-esque PSVita game Book Of Memories which a lot of people kind of freaked out about and are calling it an "insult" to the franchise and just a "Cash-in that proves Western Developers are ruining the franchise!". But I just find it a silly throw-away title that's not meant to be taken super-seriously, like the silly throw-away rail shooter that was developed by the "Hard-core" fan's beloved Japanese developers. In defense of both games, they have interesting story ideas, and of course, anything with "Silent Hill" tagged on it Konami will throw tons of money at so the production values are high for both.
I love the Silent Hill series. All of it. Yeah, I love some titles more than others but I still love all of them at the end of the day. These are the games that sparked my interest in composing music for games. These are games that showed me that games could provide a narrative experience with emotional depth and complexity that no other form of media can.
These games introduced me to real art.
So I view all the games as one would paintings by different artists that share a same theme. I see influences from everything. And I love it.
Regardless of what title you pick, the Silent Hill series always has a story and an emotional drive in it's characters that's always above most modern games.
(Some of the following video links contain spoilers, but are awesome stuff out of context, so if you don't care then go ahead and watch because it helps to understand where I'm going to be coming from later.)
The first game pokes the rotten corpse of the idealistic tourist town with a stick and shows the kind of hell it spawns through the striking imagery of an abused and drugged up child, raised from birth to be nothing but a tool used by other people.
The second game puts us in the shoes of a seemingly sympathetic, albeit purposely under-developed protagonist, James. We're supposed to be him, the game sucks us in his shoes, his confusion is our confusion, his fear is our fear, his reluctance is our reluctance. But the game isn't really about James it's about the woman behind those bars, Maria and what the "Thing That James Did" that everyone probably knows by now, which is the whole reason to play the game. A major theme of the game is guilt which is embodied by the very disturbing Pyramid Head. This game is still the most popular of the franchise, which kind of ruins my own enjoyment of the game. But it's still an excellent game with a wonderful supporting cast that pretty much makes up for James being merely "you" until the plot demands it. When that happens though you realize how dangerously three-dimensional James actually is because of that "thing he did".
The third game, has the most personality in my opinion. It's a direct sequel to the first game, but you never really find out how until halfway through. It stars Heather, the only female protagonist in the series to date, and revolutionized real-time environment textures. Heather is snarky, rough around the edges and doesn't really put up with anyone's shit. But even though she reacts as such to some of the horrible things that happen to her, it really showcases her vulnerability when there are visible cracks through her outer persona. This tells us volumes of the kinds of emotional wall-building she's had growing up, and it's made abundantly clear as to why she's acts the way she does once you make it to that halfway point. We also actually learn about Heather. She'll make some very opinionated commentary when examining certain objects or situations and it'll build her as a character. This is something I found James lacking was made less compelling for it. While Heather lacks the great supporting cast from the second game, she and her cohort Douglas are really the only compelling characters in the game. Vincent certainly raises some interesting question. Claudia serves pretty well as an antagonist but isn't much more than that. This was my first Silent Hill game and remains one of my favorites.
The fourth game ended having the best story, but lacked a lot of character in everyone except the villian.
The prequel to the first game was... okay. I liked the main character and he was well developed, but the use of old characters was a little shallow. The games still has my favorite soundtracks of all the games and of all time to boot, if nothing for the seemingly out-of-left-field influences, but fit insanely well in some of the kinds of subtle imagery the game itself presents.
The fifth game was... this. That trailer makes it seem kind of laughable but was actually just... meh? Story-wise it's not awful, but clearly Konami was in a transient place when they green-lit this. It was a decent flirtation with next generation technology at least?
And Shattered Memories did pretty much that by being a re-imagining of the first game. This game is certainly my whole justification for owning a Wii and one of my top three SH titles. I could and probably will write an entire post about this game.
This post was supposed to be about something else. But whatevs, I'll just make another post about it. This post is really just an introduction to my attitudes and opinions about the series and will give context when I talk about the game I got today.
The Silent Hill HD Collection
