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aka: Siren

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North American cover

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Japanese and Asian cover

Siren is a PlayStation 2 game released worldwide, first in 2003 in Japan and Asia and in 2004 for regions outside Asia. It's the first game developed by Project Siren under Japan Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment.

A mysterious earthquake takes place in Hanuda in 2003. With the sounds of what seemed to be a siren, the village is cut off from contact with the rest of the outside world. Ten persons are in Hanuda at the time when the village was rendered isolated by seemingly paranormal forces. All of them seek to find out how the earthquake and siren sounds is linked to three days after the disaster took place.

The game has two manga adaptations. They consist of Siren: Akai Umi no Yobigoe (Siren: The Call of the Red Sea) and Siren: ReBIRTH.


Siren provides examples of:

  • Abandoned Hospital: The Miyata Clinic in Hanuda.
  • Age Without Youth: Although members of the Kajiro family (or those with their blood inside) are spared the effects of the red water and live long lives, they cannot die of natural causes and so their bodies eventually age out of human form.
  • A Storm Is Coming: Hanuda is engulfed in the middle of a storm late in the first game.
  • Alternate Universe: The first game takes place in one, where the Shibito live in harmony with Datatsushi. Those who ingest the red water come here, and it’s unknown if you can escape from it.
  • Ancestral Weapon: The Uryen (宇理炎) figurines (also Artifacts of Power) and the Kajiro family katana Homuranagi.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: While the game is notoriously difficult with no hand-holding, it does offer a few features to grant the player some relief:
    • When escorting Harumi Yomoda in the school, she can be ordered to hide in closets while the player goes ahead to clear the area before returning to collect her. She is also immune to firearms, as the bullets will not register a hit on Harumi.
    • Not all Secondary Objective Keys are required to complete the game. There are some missions that can still be completed even if you missed an important key item in past levels.
    • No matter how much noise your companion makes, with their voice or footsteps, nearby enemies will remain undisturbed.
  • Anvil on Head: It's more specifically an ECG monitor on the head of a Shibito. Of course, with him being a Shibito, it's best to proceed with the mission before he gets better.
  • Autobots, Rock Out!: In the first ending, Kyoya Suda rocks out to a heavy metal song called "The Buster" while running about exterminating Shibito with all the weapons he's got.
  • Backtracking: Justified in that Hanuda is a small village and is isolated in a Dark World. Thus, most of the main cast will go through the exact same areas previously visited — albeit with different objectives in mind and often from another approach. Once missions are completed, alternate objectives of varying difficulty are unlocked for them, which, when completed, add connecting details to the cast's story and unlock paths that move the game closer to its true ending
  • Blood Bath:
    • The red water being analogous to blood, Naoko Mihama mistakenly gets the idea that bathing in it would make one young and beautiful a la Elizabeth Bathory. The red water actually turns anyone who interacts with it into a Shibito, but the liquid does technically grant special healing properties.
    • The Shibito are compelled to periodically enter and re-enter the sea of red water around Hanuda on a regular basis, so they can further mutate.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Datatsushi is dead, Hanuda is destroyed (along with the Shibito) and the threat of Datatsushi's revival is ended. Unfortunately, most of the cast is dead, or pretty poor off. Suda is trapped in the dimension the Shibito come from, but he's well armed, nigh-impossible to kill, and dead-set on protecting the world. The only other survivor is Harumi, who manages to make it out traumatized, but alive.
  • Bolivian Army Ending: Harumi is the only true survivor of the catastrophe. Everyone else is either a Shibito, a Shibito permanently tac-nuked by one of the Uryens or the Homuranagi, or trapped in the same temporal dimension as the Shibito with no way back home.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Inverted. Officer Ishida's drunkness is suggested to have made him way more susceptible to the effects of the red water, to the point that he turned into a half-Shibito while the stuff was still forming in the middle of the night, shot his superior and started wandering around before any other Hanuda citizens.
  • Brick Joke: You have the option of removing a specific Shibito from Tamon's first stage early on Day One by knocking him into a well. One of Kei's secondary objectives way later on Day Three takes him down that same well, and if you knocked the Shibito down it, he'll still be down there to greet you.
  • Closed Circle: Once Hanuda is drawn into the Other World, it's surrounded by a vast, seemingly endless sea of red water, not to mention being trapped in a different plane of existence. Not much chance of escaping under those circumstances. And, indeed, even though multiple characters survive, only Harumi manages to actually get out.
  • Conspicuously Light Patch: Averted most of the time in Siren 1, which leads to many cases of Guide Dang It!. Sometimes, the camera angle will change and attempt to help you. Keyword: attempt...
  • Creepy Crosses: The Mana Cross, a variant which looks similar to the Eastern Orthodox depiction of the cross, is unique to Hanuda and can be found in a number of places throughout the village. It's actually patterned on the wooden planks the villagers placed Datatsushi on, when the alien crash-landed on Earth in 684 AD and the starving villagers began to butcher and eat him. When Christianity later arrived in Japan, that made for convenient camouflage. In addition to being the symbol of the cult, the crosses are a source of spiritual/magical power, as Mrs. Takato accidentally discovers when she lights the candles under the stone crosses in her second mission in Karuwari — after several other characters have pushed and activated the crosses in their own missions — releasing the glowing Kiruden which then empower the Kajiros' Ancestral Weapon the Homurangi, turning it against the cult and allowing it to permanently kill shibito.
  • Epic Hail: Harumi over the school PA system: "Mrs. Takato! Help! Mrs. Takato!" Loud enough that Prof. Takeuchi hears from the water tower across town.
  • Gone Horribly Right: Archive Item 001 explains that Datatsushi only crashed in Hanuda after rituals were performed in the hopes of ending the drought. Whether the two events were actually linked is ambiguous, but either way, from the villagers' perspective, they got the nourishment they prayed for... along with a centuries-long curse.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • In Siren 1, players are often required to pick up items or fulfill sub-objectives (which the game doesn't tell you) in earlier stages for use in later ones. Sometimes, the game will give you a hint, but these are vague at best.
    • In one of the first missions of the game, you're required to pick up a radio, visit the well, pull up the bucket, put the radio in the bucket, hide, wait for a Shibito to inspect the radio, and shoot the Shibito down the well just so that the Shibito isn't there to kill someone else in a later stage. Also, you only get this hint (which consists of an extremely vague clue: "Search the Yoshimura house and well") if you decide to revisit this stage for some reason, not on the stage where you actually need it.
    • In one of the other first missions, you need to look for a number on the wall of a house, go to a tape recorder, rewind the tape until it reaches that number, listen to the numbers that are said on the tape, use those numbers to unlock a shed door, get a face towel, and put the face towel in the freezer. In a later mission, you need to take the same face towel, place it under a piggy bank, wait for the towel to melt so that the piggy bank falls and causes a distraction, kill the Shibito it attracts, and then get an I.D. badge. Yeah...
  • Haunted Castle: The entire village of Hanuda as a whole in the first game, but especially relevant to the abandoned house at Tabori where a few characters have their own missions taking place there.
  • Hide Your Children: The American release of the first game raises Kyoya Suda's age from sixteen to eighteen, and Miyako Kajiro and Tomoko Maeda's ages from fourteen to seventeen.
  • Hollywood Cuisine: The recipe for Hanuda Noodles (Archive 022) in the first game. Of course, watching Shibitocop aka Officer Ishida gorging on a bowlful borders on Nausea Fuel.
  • Infernal Paradise: The Manaist version of Paradise shows a blood-red sea with thousands of people bathing in it, winged shibito flying around everywhere, dog shibito roaming the grounds, red flowers all over the ground and the Mana Stone square in the center. It's an image of the Underworld from which Datatsushi and his like arrived.
  • Interfaith Smoothie: An in-universe example: various archive items reveal that the religion of Hanuda combines elements of Christianity (e.g. depictions of angels, the story of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden) with Japanese and pre-existing Hanuda folklore, as well as worship of an "alien god." And then, of course, there's the Mana Cross, which, along with the whole "flesh of God" thing, might well be the reason the faiths were so easily combined in the first place.
  • Jabba Table Manners: One of the focal Shibito of a mission in the first game can be seen gorging on a bowl of noodles with his bare hands. The food is also plastered all over the desk and even the walls.
  • Path of Inspiration: The Mana Cult of Hanuda. Of course, only Hisako Yao seems to know it's really about the whole Stars Are Right deal with resurrecting Datatsushi.
  • Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Siren Maniacs mentions that numerous people in Hanuda were troubled by visions and hallucinations, implicitly including sight-jacking. Harumi and Miyako explicitly had visions relating to events in the game.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Yoriko Anno's manga-esque sketch of Tamon Takeuchi in her class notes (Archive 033) suggests she's possibly a reference to and an Expy of manga artist Moyoco Anno.
    • The air raid siren's usage can be considered a reference to Silent Hill, or alternatively just a part of creator Keiichirō Toyama's Signature Style; he's also the man behind the first Silent Hill, and reportedly the use of sirens in both games was inspired by recurring nightmares he had about the sound.
    • The first game shares much of its setup with The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
    • The scene wherein Naoko Mihama lowers herself into the red water in a misguided attempt to gain eternal youth, but becomes a monster instead is lifted from one character's arc in Ankoku Shinwa by Daijirou Morohoshi, as acknowledged by the creators.
  • Sibling Yin-Yang: Kei Makino and Shiro Miyata are basically opposites. Kei is a kind-hearted, but completely ineffectual guy, and Shiro's cold, but gets things done. Shiro envies Kei, due to his place within the community, and we all know what can happen when brothers envy each other...
  • Sinister Geometry: Hanuda is slowly being converted into a hideous nest for the Datatsushi and its Shibito servants.
  • Sins of Our Fathers: The events of the first Siren are rooted well in the ancient past. On the brink of death by starvation, the inhabitants of Hanuda resort to making a meal out of a still living Datatsushi. Needless to say, the big fella didn't care much for this, and his outraged and pained shriek mutates into the familiar siren wail while pronouncing a Fate Worse than Death on the entire village in a Lovecraftian twist on The Last Supper.
  • Stable Time Loop:
    • In the first game, Kyoya Suda ends up single-handedly committing the historical and legendary slaughter of (Shibito-infested) Hanuda. It was this very story that inspired him to journey to the village and investigate it in the first place.
    • The cycle of Ouroborus. Yao both sets into motion and dooms herself, though it's not really a loop since she and Datatsushi's skull show up in multiple spots along time.
    • The supplemental stories include a case where a girl dies being chased by a Shibito, revives as one, and spots her past, living self. She tries to warn her not to go that way...
  • Super Soldiers: Miyata Clinic received a massive expansion and overhaul during World War Two when the government became aware of Hanuda's Shibito and thought they could make some to be used as troops. This was abandoned during the chaos near the end of the war.
  • Sword of Plot Advancement: The Homuranagi sort of qualifies. Kyoya automatically obtains it after taking down the Shibitofied Jun Kajiro in the Netherworld with the Uryen, but using it to go Highlander on Datatsushi is necessary to achieve the True (or rather, Full) Ending.
  • Tactical Door Use: An attempted mechanic, as you can lock doors to slow down Shibito. However, most of these doors are in tiny 1-door shacks or areas with only one exit, meaning they only delay your death as Shibito can break the lock by slamming on the door. This mechanic barely exists in 2 and Blood Curse revamped it entirely.
  • They Would Cut You Up:
    • What Shiro ends up doing to the Ondas. Turns out that not much will kill them, no matter how much he cuts.
    • Also happens to the previous Miyako from the last failed ceremony, after her escape attempt failed.
  • Thunderbolt Iron: Homuranagi was forged from siderite obtained out of the Mana Stone.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: After the ritual to restore Datatsushi proves successful, no more generations of Kajiros are needed, and so Ayako Kajiro gets roasted.

The manga adaptions provide examples of:

  • Call-Forward: In the ReBIRTH manga, the fake Wikipedia article for the disaster where Reiko Takato's baby died implies that it was caused by Mother from Siren 2.
  • Setting Update: The Siren ReBIRTH manga has the modern setting taking place in 2019. This necessitates an explanation for why they can't use cellphones (no signal or their phones get destroyed), but also permits things like fake Wikipedia articles to be used to provide information on the setting.

Alternative Title(s): Forbidden Siren, Siren

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