Silent Hill series

Like many things in Silent Hill, what happens to people who die in the Misty/Other Worlds is completely ambiguous. Equally ambiguous is whether people you meet are actual people or not, as any given person could be an actual person who is also trapped in the town, or a psychological manifestation. This makes it hard to determine whether people you meet who turn into monsters - a few bosses throughout the series are like that - are the actual person who became a monster after being lost to Silent Hill, or if the person was never there to begin with and you've been talking to a Silent Hill manifestation this entire time.

You can thank Silent Hill 2 for thoroughly muddying the waters on the question of whether the person you are speaking to is a flesh and blood human being or not.

I thank Silent Hill 2 for quite a lot about the series already. :P

What are you referring to specifically? Maria?

edited 7th Jan '14 11:01:25 AM by Noaqiyeum

Maria is likely Mary's dead corpse.... How James and/or the police were moving it without James realizing it is beyond me....

Also as I have suggested: We should have multiple Otherworlds fighting over each other:

1.Alessa's Rusted Iron and Blood Otherworld(seen in most Silent Hill games) which transitions by having Blood spread everywhere. Also it's central area Nowhere should look like Book of Memories's Blood Dungeon.

2.Water and Steel Otherworld(seen in Downpour) which transitions by having the Fog World or any of the other Otherworlds flake off like in the movies.

3.Steel Factory with Green Fog Otherworld(based off of the Steel Dungeon in Book of Memories) which transitions by having machinery consume the area.

4.Red God, Xuchilbara's Fire Otherworld(based off of the Fire Dungeon in Book of Memories) which transitions by having a wave of Fire convert everything to this Otherworld.

5.Yellow God, Lobsel Vith's Earth Otherworld(based off of the Earth Dungeon in Book of Memories) which transitions by having a wave of dirt convert everything to cave.

6.The God(source of the more recent supernatural phenomena of Silent Hill)'s personal Otherworld(based off of the Light Dungeon in Book of Memories) which transitions instantly the second you enter the area it's supposed to be.

7.Raven God Kwekwasawe(source of Silent Hill's ancient plagues)'s Forest Otherworld(based off of the Wood Dungeon in Book of Memories) which only appears in the forest which transitions by causing everything to go dark.

The Raven God and the God could be one in the same.

So I picked up Downpour. A few months ago, really, but now I'll give my opinion on it: it was okay, I guess. It certainly wasn't as good as two or three (I've never had to fortune of playing the first), but it wasn't a bad game. Murphy wasn't nearly as interesting as characters like James or Heather, but he had more charisma than Henry. His backstory sometimes feels like it was there because they "had to" give the protagonist a dark past "because its a Silent Hill game", rather than telling the story of a very selfish yet sympathetic man, like James.

I'm not sure how I feel about the suggestion that the town is an active force trying to make the characters understand themselves and what happened. In previous games it was always more passive, pretty much parroting the emotions and subconscious of the people drawn in. It punished James because part of him wanted to be punished, not because it "wanted" him to learn a lesson. The same world could manifest outside the town if someone like Alessa/Heather, Claudia, or Walter were present, so that reality seems universal with Silent Hill being almost a nexus of sorts.

edited 16th Jun '14 12:38:06 PM by SilentColossus

I kind of feel like I want the developers of Downpour to make another Silent Hill game, using what they learned from Downpour. Downpour was certainly the best game in a while, and they've shown that they have a better understanding of the franchise than the other non-Japanese developers. Let them have another crack at it now that they are older and wiser, and I think it would lead to a pretty decent game.

Unfortunately, they went bankrupt and disbanded. Which is a shame, as I rather liked Downpour as well. I also think they could have made a fantastic Eternal Darkness sequel given the chance.

I feel the same. I see Silent Hill as basically a psychic whirlpool; all the reality-warping energies from the Alessa/Samael ordeal are still there, but masterless, swirling around the town occasionally drawing in people who wander too near. The psychic vortex can be deliberately manipulated by those who know how, as evidenced by Walter Sullivan, but left to its own devices, it's basically just an unstable reality-shifting event with no guiding consciousness, lashing out randomly at people.

Those people drawn in experience the deepest horrors of their own psyche, and escape is only possible by confronting and overcoming those issues the psychic vacuum is preying upon, because once they cease to haunt you, they can no longer manifest to harm you. It's neither malicious nor benign; it's just THERE, like a psycho-reactive weather pattern, and the fact that personal growth and Character Development is the only way to escape is a matter of the event's logistics, not a guiding purpose behind it.

Its also why Harry and Heather can be an incorrectly born infant god to death; they thought it would work.

edited 16th Jun '14 1:15:06 PM by SilentColossus

Rather old topic I'm bringing up here, but when comparing the original versions of Silent Hill 2 and 3 with the re-release, which has the better voice acting?

Twin Perfect absolutely hates the new voices, and for that matter, consider Troy Baker a completely talentless hack who has no respect for the role or the fans, while Guy Cihi is the best voice actor ever who was sadly robbed of his role in the re-release.

Twin Perfect can go choke on their massive entitlement complexes, as far as I'm concerned.

Btw, here's their reasoning for hating Troy along with every other VA in the re-release, and why they hold Cihi in such high regard.

I can totally see where James' old voice-actor is coming from.

Plus, regardless of Mr. Baker's talent, I've not heard one good thing about the SH 2 HD version.

edited 27th Jul '14 8:24:19 AM by Nikkolas

I prefer the original voices, but I don't understand how anyone could hate Troy Baker. From what little I've heard, the new voice actors are just a case of Its Different So It Sucks for me. I really dislike the new voice actress' performance for Heather compared to the original, and while I like Kirk Thorton in other roles, he's just doing his old man voice for Douglas. I would have preferred something more unique like the original voice actor. I don't know how old Thorton is, but Douglas' original voice actor really sounded like an old man burdened by the weight of age, and I like that. That whole scene around the HD Collection was a bad one. It seemed to be a massive case of They Just Didn't Care all around, so maybe it spread to the voice acting, or it was one of those weird situations where Konami wanted the voice acting a certain way, even if that wasn't an improvement over the originals.

I don't know what to make of Guy Cihi, man. On one hand, he breathed life into one of my favorite characters of all time. OTOH, he seems like kind of an eccentric guy who hasn't done any other game voice acting, which I consider to be kind of a shame. The other voice actors from the game went on to do at least a few more things. We'll never know exactly how much potential he had because he won't do more roles to demonstrate it, which kinda makes me sad. It's a weird situation. I guess I feel more sensitive about it because he's a piece of James, so I care more than I would with other characters and actors.

edited 1st Aug '14 2:17:06 AM by BearyScary

As good as Troy and Kirk are, they're just "the usual suspects" of voice-acting you hear in a lot of Japanese stuff. SH 2 had a lot of "nobodies" but that was part of its charm. These were real people, not people you heard in God knows how many other anime or video games.

Plus as much as I love Mc Glynn - she is a vital part of SH to me with her great vocal tracks - she sounded very snide in the clips in that above video about how James original VA is entitled to nothing.

So, am I the only one who thinks that, aside from the flesh-eating monster problem, Silent Hill seems like a pretty nice town? Aesthetically, I mean; I like foggy, North Woods-type places.

edited 4th Oct '14 3:55:11 PM by HamburgerTime

Well, it actually remains a fairly nice town for most people, in-universe. The Otherworld is mostly experienced by those suffering from very strong emotions, usually a negative one. If said person has psycic powers, they can draw in others as well.

edited 4th Oct '14 4:21:33 PM by SilentColossus

Laura's presence in the Misty World implies that Silent Hill has been at least partially abandoned in the real world. It's implied in Silent Hill 2 that she never encounters a monster or discovers anything dangerous because she's completely innocent; she has no Otherworld or trauma monsters or anything awful to draw out. But she's still there in the Misty World, suggesting that people without psychiatric traumas will still encounter the mists if they come to Silent Hill, they just won't be entrapped.

By the time Homecoming rolls around at the latest, with a tell-all exposee on the cult's activities by Douglas Cartrand blowing the lid open on the awful goings-on in Silent Hill, it's unlikely the town is a resort destination any longer. There's definitely still people in it, though, as evidenced by the fact that the town layout changes subtly with buildings being closed down or renovated.

edited 4th Oct '14 8:08:45 PM by TobiasDrake

Laura really is something of an oddity. She's set up like your typical Creepy Child, but turns out to be, arguably, the least-creepy character in the cast. Word of God says she can neither see nor interact with the monsters (so, for instance, she thought locking James in with the Flesh Lips was a harmless prank), but she can interact with people who can interact with the monsters. So... does she see a lively, full town nobody else can see, or the same abandoned wreck as everyone else?

The way she interacts with the destroyed town seems to suggest that she is present in the Misty World and not the Real World; but she just sees an abandoned town with nothing particularly supernatural about it.

It puts a lot of her interactions with James in a very different light. For instance, locking him in a room in the hospital as it slowly shifted to Otherworld. As far as Laura was aware, there was no real danger in her actions; as long as she let him out eventually, his increasingly panicked cries were just James being a goddamn baby.

And they you've got that theory that there's nothing wrong with the town at all and the main characters are just nuts and attacking innocent people.

A theory I never liked, by the by; seems inconsistent with the fact that there are some confirmed mystical goings-on.

Yeah; that theory's mainly rooted in one line from Vincent in Silent Hill 3 that even Vincent admits he's full of shit on. Seems to just be there for Paranoia Fuel.

Wasn't there a tease in 0rigins, too?

But like I said, I think it'd be a total Contrived Coincidence for the town to have both real supernatural stuff (the Cult and Walter Sullivan certainly exist) and imagined supernatural stuff.

There is some evidence in that police tape is put up in the place you first encounter a monster in SH 2. But beyond that...

I agree. It's just... too improbable, even for this series. I also think that theory eliminates a lot of the series' mystique.

"They look like monsters to you?" was just Vincent being a jerkwad. It's still good for inducing Paranoia Fuel, though, because a lot of things about Silent Hill are not absolute.