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indigozealBut if my playthrough had poor pacing, then, well, I'm just emulating the game.The pacing really ended up one of the most significant story problems here: You have the opening, which outlines Heather's predicament and the major forces involved in fairly vague terms. Then there's a long stretch - not until halfway through the fourth area, practically half the game - where you get no further development. Then in the middle, you have Harry's death as the instigation to go to Silent Hill, and you get this huge backstory dump. Then you're chasing after this seal for unclear reasons, and then there's more filler before the climax, and it's not until the last area of the game that story is dispensed at a reasonable pace as you gradually get more information on Claudia and why she's doing this.
It doesn't help that the central infodump - the part of the story that gives an uninitiated player their first genuine clue of what's going on here; that outlines an entire ongoing conflict that a new player would be unaware existed; that fills SH1 veterans in on everything that happened to its characters after its ending; that transitions Heather from innocent everygirl bystander to product and font of otherworldly phenomena; that defines the stakes for everything to come, expanding the scope of the story from a small, contained revenge drama instigated by an apparently crazy cultist to a race to prevent the resurrection of a greatly evil entity - is horribly written. It makes Chris Redfield's report from Resident Evil 2 on the Arklay incident ("We later discovered that these dogs were actually zombie dogs," he informs his superiors with a straight face) look like a model of coherence. Granted, the events of Silent Hill are kind of hard to summarize in a way that doesn't make them sound utterly ridiculous. But the writers just try to cram so much crazy stuff in so small a space that what is supposed to be a painful, reluctantly dredged-up personal confession comes off as the insane ramblings of a demented child. (Harry's posthumously-discovered journal, which is supposed to be a difficult but necessary revelation of truth and affirmation of love to his daughter, fares no better.) You never get a feel for Heather's, or Harry's, personal connection to the events; even the "He loved me just like I was his very own daughter...even though he didn't know who or what I was" line, which should be the emotional centerpiece to the scene and the keystone to establishing the Harry-Heather relationship - not even that lands. All you get from the infodump is that Harry considered killing his baby daughter at one point, but could be interesting legitimate character fodder if handled with the proper delicacy but is merely offputting given how the revelations are bungled. Nothing in the scene works.
Part of the problem with the handling of the story is that the designers never figure out how much they think the player knows about Heather's origins or the first game's plot. In the first half, the game makes the bizarre choice of trying to get you to distrust Harry, which is a total nonstarter for anyone who's played the first game. The plot dump in the middle is clearly designed in great part to get those who haven't played SH1 up to speed, but it's not written in a way that's compelling or even discernible for newbies, and for series veterans, the way its sheer nonsensicalness cheapens the events of the first game is off-putting. Those who've played SH1 will know why the Seal of Metatron might be a ticket to countering God's power, but those who haven't are just left in the dark, as the significance of the seal in the series history is never adequately explained. (Conversely, for vets, it's never explained why the seal ultimately has no power against God this time.) And Lord knows what newbies thought of the Otherworld, as its presence and nature (and connection with Alessa) are never explained, either.
But to drill down further: Why is the game's pacing so screwed up, though? What is the main reason the story is so abnormally developed? There's a bit at the end that I had to admire, where Heather brings out the Seal that crazy priest Vincent thinks will undo Claudia's plans - the Seal that Heather spends a big chunk of the game trying to get - and Claudia just looks at it, unimpressed, and goes, "Oh, that's just a piece of junk. ...I'm sorry to see you fell for my father's foolishness." The game has guts, in some twisted way, to be willing to hand you a big MacGuffin and then jeer, "ha ha, did you think that was going to do anything?" It demonstrates, though, a big underlying problem: how little plot there really is to Silent Hill 3. Claudia wants Heather to birth God, Heather uses Princess Sara's lute to stop it, the end. The plot of the first game wasn't much more than that, granted, but there was a lot of figuring out what was going on with the town's reality shifts and seeing how everyone fit into it - Lisa, the everygirl witness who saw stuff she must compel herself to remember; Kaufmann, the compromised man who's nevertheless not gonna let someone get something over on him, dammit, etc. SH3 needs the big, meaningless distraction of the Seal (and the overlong first half that's stagnant plotwise) to make a game-length story out of itself.
It was at the very last line, Heather's "Don'cha think blondes have more fun?" flippant closer, that I got what the creators were trying to do with Silent Hill 3: they were trying to make a movie. We have the trailer-like opening, much more slick and professional than the games' previous attempts; we have several cinematography tricks glommed from big-budget horror movies and many more overtly cinematic shots (the bucket of blood in Brookhaven in the foreground; the shot of the spinning wheel of the wheelchair in the basement; etc.); we have tons more monsters and an increased focus on fighting in a bid to be action-packed; we have, for the first time, rock songs played in the background to underline the plot's emotional high points... (The game making a big deal of calling Claudia a bitch twice right before the climax would also be very much in this vein, 'cause that's what you always do with female villains - there's no bigger comeuppance for them than being called out on being a woman, don'cha know.) I recall hearing how the first Silent Hill was originally supposed to be a "Hollywood-style" Resident Evil clone, but the team (composed of outcasts from other Konami projects) came to stray from that goal, and Konami thus initially lost faith in the first game. I wonder if Team Silent was determined, after making their bones, to redress that one lingering charge against them and show that they could too make that Hollywood-style RE game. As for why they chose this particular story to do so...well, Hollywood has taught us that sequels are a reliably easy starting point, aren't they.
Perhaps I should go over the game's strong points to balance this all out. Again, Heather is a great, engaging protagonist; the creators' use of recognizably teenage (and just plain human) body language to define the character makes her relatable in a way many videogame heroes aren't. She stands as a milestone in videogame characterization and the greatest refutation of the whole "silent protagonists without personalities are more identifiable" idea some JRPGs love so much. The sound design is stunning, just top-notch - listening recently to the game's 100% complete soundtrack compiled by TokyoBrando has only underlined how deftly sound effects are used to create a completely unsettling atmosphere.
As detailed in the last post, I found the cult's myths regarding creation, how the world works, and the role of the divine in it remarkably perceptive and strangely beautiful - nothing I would have expected given the material that came previously. There're also a couple ruminations on the beyond - Heather reflecting on her reincarnation and taking comfort that "death isn't the end"; a subtle suggestion that Heather might have a brief reunion with her father off-camera after the final boss - that added a welcome and much-needed depth to the proceedings in the endgame. And Claudia, oddly, ended up being a high point, despite a rough start; that inexplicable British accent never works, but she reveals an intriguing integrity to her character in the second half. It's interesting, after having antagonists that are purely evil (SH1) and in the protagonist's own mind (SH2), to have a villain motivated by genuine compassion and self-sacrifice - and you can't say she didn't have the courage of her convictions, that's for sure. She actually had some great moments and lines near the end:
"Happy people can be so cruel. Is it so hard to believe that sympathy could be born from pain and suffering?"
"I pity you. You still don't understand. ...You're going to kill me? Is it really so easy for you?" "I've done it before." "Then I truly do pity you."
And "You're pathetic, Vincent. But God loves even you" was the high point of the ending, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, Vincent - here we are back on low points again. From reading the Book of Lost Memories, I get the distinct sense that he's a pet character to the producers, but I found his role in the proceedings implausible in every aspect and his character unconvincing. Every facet of his demeanor communicates "I'm lying to you and trying to fuck up what you're doing behind your back," and he has the composure and self-possession of a village idiot in a giallo, and yet all the other characters collaborate with him unquestioningly. Heather & Douglas go to Silent Hill and spend most of the second half of the game carrying out his instructions on how to stop the cult's plans and avenge Heather's father - instructions from a man who, hours before, identified himself as a member of said cult, impugned said father's integrity, and suggested that Heather really should be falling in line with that whole God-baby thing her biological mom had going for her. I know the writers were trying to find a way for H&D to have an actual plan of action upon hitting town, something more friendly to interim game objectives than "find Claudia somehow and shoot her," but you have a private eye right there. It's not like Douglas couldn't have stumbled upon some inkling of the Seal of Metatron/Leonard business himself and used Heather's residual memories to piece a plan together.
(Side note: This also would've given Douglas some much-needed agency and competence. The guy's remarkably useless as a partner. I mean, Cybil didn't contribute much of anything either, besides, er, handing over a pistol over to a civilian she'd just met, but you got the sense that that was due to the extreme situation and not to any profound ineptness on her part. She always stayed composed and made an effort to help whenever possible. Douglas, on the other hand, just remains this man-child who's perpetually over his head.)
The game claims that it was Vincent's eloquence and persuasiveness that put the cult in the green after Dahlia's departure, but Walter Sullivan had better communication skills and, in some respects, better hygiene. People love to quote and dissect that "They look like monsters to you?" line, but...well, a) it's suggested that some of the townsfolk who got caught up in the imbroglio in the first game were killed or monsterfied in the whole shift to the otherworld (the puppet nurses, etc.), so the idea that some of the monsters were once people isn't anything new, and b) it is extremely obvious in the cutscene that he's saying this just to fuck with Heather. He says in his very next scene that he hates her and wants her dead, for Chrissake. Yes, he's a dead-on simulacrum of an actual type of person, the jerk who picks at and exacerbates every little fault and weakness of those around him to distract from the shit he himself is pulling - I know, and you probably know, Vincents in real life. But what he's not is a character whom I can regard as the wise but irreverent truthspeaker as which the game casts him, and that the characters took his every word as gospel - that the characters took him seriously to any degree - was an insurmountable challenge to my suspension of disbelief.
I've largely evaded talking about gameplay so far. That's partly because I've already posted most of what I have to say about it (goddamn frustrating, too many monsters) and partly due to trauma - most of my memory of the last part of the game consists running around dark corridors with a couple dinky health items trying to avoid 10,000 Insane Cancer fights. Suitable horror fodder, I suppose, but not fun at the time, and no way to experience a game that's partially about exploration; I would rather be creeped by the story than by the spectre of having to run through a difficult section again, I guess. There's a doppleganger boss battle 3/4 of the way through where unless you've got a few extra boxes of shotgun shells to spare (and you most assuredly haven't, at least not your first time through), you're going to have to get good at parrying to win through. While I appreciate the nod toward strategy, I still actively resent that they made me learn the combat system. You're not supposed to be good at combat in a Silent Hill game, dammit.
(Incidentally, that fight was where I burned through a good number of health items right before the endgame. I probably should've redone it, but it's preceded by this bit where you have to beat up some carousel horses to proceed, and my dogs were getting distressed at the screeches and whinnies coming from the screen. When I go through Resident Evil 2, it's going to have to be on my PSP.)
Like/didn't like lightning round:
-Liked: That when you finally reach Leonard in the hospital, you learn that the source of his big disagreement with Claudia isn't that she wants to remake the world, but that she doesn't want to keep Paradise closed to nonbelievers. He's fine with the cleansing with fire and brimstone part, but letting the riff-raff of the world in on eternal bliss? Unacceptable. (I also liked the mundane exasperation with which Heather tried to back out of the conversation once she discovered that Leonard was not only crazy but a monster ("look, we were both just...wrong about each other, OK?!").)
-Didn't like: That Leonard and other monsters such as the Missionary who kills Harry can hold regular conversations and take orders from Claudia and act like reliable physical presences instead of the phantasmic residents of someone's internal psychodrama. It makes them seem more mundane and makes the setting tip even more toward Hellraiser and its ilk than psychological horror.
-Liked: Heather desperately stomping on God a few times like she would any other downed monster, determined to put a definitive end to the fight and the whole damn horrifying experience the only way she knew how. I laughed out loud at that.
-Didn't like: That ending song, with Silent Hill cast as a Robert Rodriguez western, set to the opening theme from the original game. I'm not against vocalists besides Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, but holy hell, was that terrible.
-Liked: The other songs! The lyrics aren't exactly germane to the situation - it's all about romantic love 'n' stuff since the main character is female - but the songs sound great, with "You're Not Here" a particular standout.
-Liked, in a way: The alternate ending where Heather succumbs and the camera perspective zooms up above her body while Claudia, eyes fixed on your perspective, implores, "Oh, God; bring us salvation!". I'm not rooting for Heather to die, but I found this short little scene (which cuts out at just the right place) markedly bold in its fulfillment of the awesome implications of Claudia's endgame - she wanted God to be reborn, and something at the very least resembling her concept of God was. It left me wondering: what happens now?
-Liked: The confessional scene. A cult member, who mistakes an unseen Heather in the other side of the booth for a priest, breaks down as she asks for forgiveness for what appears to be a revenge killing for the murder of her daughter. You're watching nothing but a character listen to a lengthy story and react with her facial expressions, and it's to the great credit of the mocap actress and the graphics department (and the writers and the cultist's voice actress) that it completely works and is deeply moving. It takes its time to unfold and has no direct bearing on the plot, but the creators kept it in, a precious cameo of a scene presented solely to provide a small, rich moment of empathy and human connection.
-Didn't like: Instakills! Instakills! Instakills! Most of the game's setpiece scares (the haunted mansion; the mirror room; the train "ghost") are punctuated or culminated by deaths so sudden that they're in all probability gonna getcha the first time around. As I noted previously, this forces you to replay these sections, thereby robbing them of their power through sheer familiarity. (They're also a really cheap source of difficulty and a truly frustrating way to lose game progress.)
-Didn't like: The game gives you this jumbled story about Douglas's son dying in a bank robbery, which I guess is supposed to make us go, "ah, so that's part of why he's so intent on helping Heather." And then, a moment later, Douglas is pointing his gun at Heather and weighing all macho-like whether to shoot her in the back. SH3 doesn't reconcile its weird tonal shifts for its characters like its predecessor does.
-Majorly didn't like: That the game all but gave up on the indirect style of storytelling that marked the first two games, opting to spoon-feed players information instead. Again, this might come from not having enough of a story to tell.
There were exceptions to this tack, though:
-Liked: How the ending chapel gradually transitioned to a version of Nowhere. SH3 "borrows" a lot of elements from 1, and I was skeptical when I learned that Nowhere reprised its role as the final area for 3, 'cause it's kind of a one-time mental traffic accident in the first game. As realized here, though, it comes across not as a rehash, but as the product of Heather piecing together her resurfaced memories as Alessa. (A big help on this front is the different form Nowhere takes in 3 - not the first game's completely abstract mindscape, but an actual physical (albeit Otherworlded) place sporadically interrupted by another location from Alessa's recollection.)
-Liked: The idea - merely intimated, never (for once) overtly expressed - that Claudia can carry the Otherworld around with her because she views the entire world as a stage for horror, not just Silent Hill (as, say, Alessa did).
-Didn't like, kinda: That Heather's text-based commentary when you looked at things often continued past its seemingly natural stopping point, causing me to click past and miss out on the extra dialogue. (It's not just me, either, since I notice Kyle & Keith doing the same thing in their Let's Play.) This isn't a hardcore complaint so much as it is a reflection on just how many things can go wrong when you're making vidyagames.
-????: Valtiel. The fandom makes a big deal over Valtiel! Valtiel!, and it wasn't until, like 3/4 of the way through that I realized, hey, I hadn't seen this Valtiel at all. I had, actually, but it turns out that he's just a generic crawling monstrosity with dirty bedsheets wrapped over his head, impossible to differentiate from a thousand other such monsters in the series. You'll see him in the periphery of a cutscene or two, but he has no real scenes in the story and no distinctive role to play in the proceedings. (He's supposed to be some sort of guardian for Heather/the god inside her womb, though this amounts only to dragging Heather away in some Game Over screens; you could go through the whole game without noticing him.)
My final recorded time for the game was 7:09 (though my actual playtime counting restarts was oh, so much longer). I got a usual middling 5.6 stars out of 10 for a end score. I got a 10-star rating for item-finding (yay!) but only a two-star rating for runtime (boo!). I got an excellent rating for how quickly I iced God, of all things. Of the 10248393248 unlockables, I got only the beam saber and the HappyBirthDay T-shirt. While I like the vestless look for our heroine, that T-shirt's really no reward; Heather isn't the type of person who'd go around wearing a T-shirt of herself.
I'm surprised I had as much positive to say about Silent Hill 3 as I did. That might be due to being at a remove from its most aggressively frustrating elements, the puzzles and gameplay. I would indeed rank it dead last behind the three other Team Silent games; despite the game's stronger points, I don't think it was worth killing Harry. UFO ending canon forever!
It doesn't help that the central infodump - the part of the story that gives an uninitiated player their first genuine clue of what's going on here; that outlines an entire ongoing conflict that a new player would be unaware existed; that fills SH1 veterans in on everything that happened to its characters after its ending; that transitions Heather from innocent everygirl bystander to product and font of otherworldly phenomena; that defines the stakes for everything to come, expanding the scope of the story from a small, contained revenge drama instigated by an apparently crazy cultist to a race to prevent the resurrection of a greatly evil entity - is horribly written. It makes Chris Redfield's report from Resident Evil 2 on the Arklay incident ("We later discovered that these dogs were actually zombie dogs," he informs his superiors with a straight face) look like a model of coherence. Granted, the events of Silent Hill are kind of hard to summarize in a way that doesn't make them sound utterly ridiculous. But the writers just try to cram so much crazy stuff in so small a space that what is supposed to be a painful, reluctantly dredged-up personal confession comes off as the insane ramblings of a demented child. (Harry's posthumously-discovered journal, which is supposed to be a difficult but necessary revelation of truth and affirmation of love to his daughter, fares no better.) You never get a feel for Heather's, or Harry's, personal connection to the events; even the "He loved me just like I was his very own daughter...even though he didn't know who or what I was" line, which should be the emotional centerpiece to the scene and the keystone to establishing the Harry-Heather relationship - not even that lands. All you get from the infodump is that Harry considered killing his baby daughter at one point, but could be interesting legitimate character fodder if handled with the proper delicacy but is merely offputting given how the revelations are bungled. Nothing in the scene works.
Part of the problem with the handling of the story is that the designers never figure out how much they think the player knows about Heather's origins or the first game's plot. In the first half, the game makes the bizarre choice of trying to get you to distrust Harry, which is a total nonstarter for anyone who's played the first game. The plot dump in the middle is clearly designed in great part to get those who haven't played SH1 up to speed, but it's not written in a way that's compelling or even discernible for newbies, and for series veterans, the way its sheer nonsensicalness cheapens the events of the first game is off-putting. Those who've played SH1 will know why the Seal of Metatron might be a ticket to countering God's power, but those who haven't are just left in the dark, as the significance of the seal in the series history is never adequately explained. (Conversely, for vets, it's never explained why the seal ultimately has no power against God this time.) And Lord knows what newbies thought of the Otherworld, as its presence and nature (and connection with Alessa) are never explained, either.
But to drill down further: Why is the game's pacing so screwed up, though? What is the main reason the story is so abnormally developed? There's a bit at the end that I had to admire, where Heather brings out the Seal that crazy priest Vincent thinks will undo Claudia's plans - the Seal that Heather spends a big chunk of the game trying to get - and Claudia just looks at it, unimpressed, and goes, "Oh, that's just a piece of junk. ...I'm sorry to see you fell for my father's foolishness." The game has guts, in some twisted way, to be willing to hand you a big MacGuffin and then jeer, "ha ha, did you think that was going to do anything?" It demonstrates, though, a big underlying problem: how little plot there really is to Silent Hill 3. Claudia wants Heather to birth God, Heather uses Princess Sara's lute to stop it, the end. The plot of the first game wasn't much more than that, granted, but there was a lot of figuring out what was going on with the town's reality shifts and seeing how everyone fit into it - Lisa, the everygirl witness who saw stuff she must compel herself to remember; Kaufmann, the compromised man who's nevertheless not gonna let someone get something over on him, dammit, etc. SH3 needs the big, meaningless distraction of the Seal (and the overlong first half that's stagnant plotwise) to make a game-length story out of itself.
It was at the very last line, Heather's "Don'cha think blondes have more fun?" flippant closer, that I got what the creators were trying to do with Silent Hill 3: they were trying to make a movie. We have the trailer-like opening, much more slick and professional than the games' previous attempts; we have several cinematography tricks glommed from big-budget horror movies and many more overtly cinematic shots (the bucket of blood in Brookhaven in the foreground; the shot of the spinning wheel of the wheelchair in the basement; etc.); we have tons more monsters and an increased focus on fighting in a bid to be action-packed; we have, for the first time, rock songs played in the background to underline the plot's emotional high points... (The game making a big deal of calling Claudia a bitch twice right before the climax would also be very much in this vein, 'cause that's what you always do with female villains - there's no bigger comeuppance for them than being called out on being a woman, don'cha know.) I recall hearing how the first Silent Hill was originally supposed to be a "Hollywood-style" Resident Evil clone, but the team (composed of outcasts from other Konami projects) came to stray from that goal, and Konami thus initially lost faith in the first game. I wonder if Team Silent was determined, after making their bones, to redress that one lingering charge against them and show that they could too make that Hollywood-style RE game. As for why they chose this particular story to do so...well, Hollywood has taught us that sequels are a reliably easy starting point, aren't they.
Perhaps I should go over the game's strong points to balance this all out. Again, Heather is a great, engaging protagonist; the creators' use of recognizably teenage (and just plain human) body language to define the character makes her relatable in a way many videogame heroes aren't. She stands as a milestone in videogame characterization and the greatest refutation of the whole "silent protagonists without personalities are more identifiable" idea some JRPGs love so much. The sound design is stunning, just top-notch - listening recently to the game's 100% complete soundtrack compiled by TokyoBrando has only underlined how deftly sound effects are used to create a completely unsettling atmosphere.
As detailed in the last post, I found the cult's myths regarding creation, how the world works, and the role of the divine in it remarkably perceptive and strangely beautiful - nothing I would have expected given the material that came previously. There're also a couple ruminations on the beyond - Heather reflecting on her reincarnation and taking comfort that "death isn't the end"; a subtle suggestion that Heather might have a brief reunion with her father off-camera after the final boss - that added a welcome and much-needed depth to the proceedings in the endgame. And Claudia, oddly, ended up being a high point, despite a rough start; that inexplicable British accent never works, but she reveals an intriguing integrity to her character in the second half. It's interesting, after having antagonists that are purely evil (SH1) and in the protagonist's own mind (SH2), to have a villain motivated by genuine compassion and self-sacrifice - and you can't say she didn't have the courage of her convictions, that's for sure. She actually had some great moments and lines near the end:
"Happy people can be so cruel. Is it so hard to believe that sympathy could be born from pain and suffering?"
"I pity you. You still don't understand. ...You're going to kill me? Is it really so easy for you?" "I've done it before." "Then I truly do pity you."
And "You're pathetic, Vincent. But God loves even you" was the high point of the ending, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, Vincent - here we are back on low points again. From reading the Book of Lost Memories, I get the distinct sense that he's a pet character to the producers, but I found his role in the proceedings implausible in every aspect and his character unconvincing. Every facet of his demeanor communicates "I'm lying to you and trying to fuck up what you're doing behind your back," and he has the composure and self-possession of a village idiot in a giallo, and yet all the other characters collaborate with him unquestioningly. Heather & Douglas go to Silent Hill and spend most of the second half of the game carrying out his instructions on how to stop the cult's plans and avenge Heather's father - instructions from a man who, hours before, identified himself as a member of said cult, impugned said father's integrity, and suggested that Heather really should be falling in line with that whole God-baby thing her biological mom had going for her. I know the writers were trying to find a way for H&D to have an actual plan of action upon hitting town, something more friendly to interim game objectives than "find Claudia somehow and shoot her," but you have a private eye right there. It's not like Douglas couldn't have stumbled upon some inkling of the Seal of Metatron/Leonard business himself and used Heather's residual memories to piece a plan together.
(Side note: This also would've given Douglas some much-needed agency and competence. The guy's remarkably useless as a partner. I mean, Cybil didn't contribute much of anything either, besides, er, handing over a pistol over to a civilian she'd just met, but you got the sense that that was due to the extreme situation and not to any profound ineptness on her part. She always stayed composed and made an effort to help whenever possible. Douglas, on the other hand, just remains this man-child who's perpetually over his head.)
The game claims that it was Vincent's eloquence and persuasiveness that put the cult in the green after Dahlia's departure, but Walter Sullivan had better communication skills and, in some respects, better hygiene. People love to quote and dissect that "They look like monsters to you?" line, but...well, a) it's suggested that some of the townsfolk who got caught up in the imbroglio in the first game were killed or monsterfied in the whole shift to the otherworld (the puppet nurses, etc.), so the idea that some of the monsters were once people isn't anything new, and b) it is extremely obvious in the cutscene that he's saying this just to fuck with Heather. He says in his very next scene that he hates her and wants her dead, for Chrissake. Yes, he's a dead-on simulacrum of an actual type of person, the jerk who picks at and exacerbates every little fault and weakness of those around him to distract from the shit he himself is pulling - I know, and you probably know, Vincents in real life. But what he's not is a character whom I can regard as the wise but irreverent truthspeaker as which the game casts him, and that the characters took his every word as gospel - that the characters took him seriously to any degree - was an insurmountable challenge to my suspension of disbelief.
I've largely evaded talking about gameplay so far. That's partly because I've already posted most of what I have to say about it (goddamn frustrating, too many monsters) and partly due to trauma - most of my memory of the last part of the game consists running around dark corridors with a couple dinky health items trying to avoid 10,000 Insane Cancer fights. Suitable horror fodder, I suppose, but not fun at the time, and no way to experience a game that's partially about exploration; I would rather be creeped by the story than by the spectre of having to run through a difficult section again, I guess. There's a doppleganger boss battle 3/4 of the way through where unless you've got a few extra boxes of shotgun shells to spare (and you most assuredly haven't, at least not your first time through), you're going to have to get good at parrying to win through. While I appreciate the nod toward strategy, I still actively resent that they made me learn the combat system. You're not supposed to be good at combat in a Silent Hill game, dammit.
(Incidentally, that fight was where I burned through a good number of health items right before the endgame. I probably should've redone it, but it's preceded by this bit where you have to beat up some carousel horses to proceed, and my dogs were getting distressed at the screeches and whinnies coming from the screen. When I go through Resident Evil 2, it's going to have to be on my PSP.)
Like/didn't like lightning round:
-Liked: That when you finally reach Leonard in the hospital, you learn that the source of his big disagreement with Claudia isn't that she wants to remake the world, but that she doesn't want to keep Paradise closed to nonbelievers. He's fine with the cleansing with fire and brimstone part, but letting the riff-raff of the world in on eternal bliss? Unacceptable. (I also liked the mundane exasperation with which Heather tried to back out of the conversation once she discovered that Leonard was not only crazy but a monster ("look, we were both just...wrong about each other, OK?!").)
-Didn't like: That Leonard and other monsters such as the Missionary who kills Harry can hold regular conversations and take orders from Claudia and act like reliable physical presences instead of the phantasmic residents of someone's internal psychodrama. It makes them seem more mundane and makes the setting tip even more toward Hellraiser and its ilk than psychological horror.
-Liked: Heather desperately stomping on God a few times like she would any other downed monster, determined to put a definitive end to the fight and the whole damn horrifying experience the only way she knew how. I laughed out loud at that.
-Didn't like: That ending song, with Silent Hill cast as a Robert Rodriguez western, set to the opening theme from the original game. I'm not against vocalists besides Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, but holy hell, was that terrible.
-Liked: The other songs! The lyrics aren't exactly germane to the situation - it's all about romantic love 'n' stuff since the main character is female - but the songs sound great, with "You're Not Here" a particular standout.
-Liked, in a way: The alternate ending where Heather succumbs and the camera perspective zooms up above her body while Claudia, eyes fixed on your perspective, implores, "Oh, God; bring us salvation!". I'm not rooting for Heather to die, but I found this short little scene (which cuts out at just the right place) markedly bold in its fulfillment of the awesome implications of Claudia's endgame - she wanted God to be reborn, and something at the very least resembling her concept of God was. It left me wondering: what happens now?
-Liked: The confessional scene. A cult member, who mistakes an unseen Heather in the other side of the booth for a priest, breaks down as she asks for forgiveness for what appears to be a revenge killing for the murder of her daughter. You're watching nothing but a character listen to a lengthy story and react with her facial expressions, and it's to the great credit of the mocap actress and the graphics department (and the writers and the cultist's voice actress) that it completely works and is deeply moving. It takes its time to unfold and has no direct bearing on the plot, but the creators kept it in, a precious cameo of a scene presented solely to provide a small, rich moment of empathy and human connection.
-Didn't like: Instakills! Instakills! Instakills! Most of the game's setpiece scares (the haunted mansion; the mirror room; the train "ghost") are punctuated or culminated by deaths so sudden that they're in all probability gonna getcha the first time around. As I noted previously, this forces you to replay these sections, thereby robbing them of their power through sheer familiarity. (They're also a really cheap source of difficulty and a truly frustrating way to lose game progress.)
-Didn't like: The game gives you this jumbled story about Douglas's son dying in a bank robbery, which I guess is supposed to make us go, "ah, so that's part of why he's so intent on helping Heather." And then, a moment later, Douglas is pointing his gun at Heather and weighing all macho-like whether to shoot her in the back. SH3 doesn't reconcile its weird tonal shifts for its characters like its predecessor does.
-Majorly didn't like: That the game all but gave up on the indirect style of storytelling that marked the first two games, opting to spoon-feed players information instead. Again, this might come from not having enough of a story to tell.
There were exceptions to this tack, though:
-Liked: How the ending chapel gradually transitioned to a version of Nowhere. SH3 "borrows" a lot of elements from 1, and I was skeptical when I learned that Nowhere reprised its role as the final area for 3, 'cause it's kind of a one-time mental traffic accident in the first game. As realized here, though, it comes across not as a rehash, but as the product of Heather piecing together her resurfaced memories as Alessa. (A big help on this front is the different form Nowhere takes in 3 - not the first game's completely abstract mindscape, but an actual physical (albeit Otherworlded) place sporadically interrupted by another location from Alessa's recollection.)
-Liked: The idea - merely intimated, never (for once) overtly expressed - that Claudia can carry the Otherworld around with her because she views the entire world as a stage for horror, not just Silent Hill (as, say, Alessa did).
-Didn't like, kinda: That Heather's text-based commentary when you looked at things often continued past its seemingly natural stopping point, causing me to click past and miss out on the extra dialogue. (It's not just me, either, since I notice Kyle & Keith doing the same thing in their Let's Play.) This isn't a hardcore complaint so much as it is a reflection on just how many things can go wrong when you're making vidyagames.
-????: Valtiel. The fandom makes a big deal over Valtiel! Valtiel!, and it wasn't until, like 3/4 of the way through that I realized, hey, I hadn't seen this Valtiel at all. I had, actually, but it turns out that he's just a generic crawling monstrosity with dirty bedsheets wrapped over his head, impossible to differentiate from a thousand other such monsters in the series. You'll see him in the periphery of a cutscene or two, but he has no real scenes in the story and no distinctive role to play in the proceedings. (He's supposed to be some sort of guardian for Heather/the god inside her womb, though this amounts only to dragging Heather away in some Game Over screens; you could go through the whole game without noticing him.)
My final recorded time for the game was 7:09 (though my actual playtime counting restarts was oh, so much longer). I got a usual middling 5.6 stars out of 10 for a end score. I got a 10-star rating for item-finding (yay!) but only a two-star rating for runtime (boo!). I got an excellent rating for how quickly I iced God, of all things. Of the 10248393248 unlockables, I got only the beam saber and the HappyBirthDay T-shirt. While I like the vestless look for our heroine, that T-shirt's really no reward; Heather isn't the type of person who'd go around wearing a T-shirt of herself.
I'm surprised I had as much positive to say about Silent Hill 3 as I did. That might be due to being at a remove from its most aggressively frustrating elements, the puzzles and gameplay. I would indeed rank it dead last behind the three other Team Silent games; despite the game's stronger points, I don't think it was worth killing Harry. UFO ending canon forever!
