YMMV / Silent Hill: Origins

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Lisa in this game. A lot of fans did not like the portrayal of Lisa here, who was less kind than her portrayal in Silent Hill, and was a significant Mood-Swinger. Given that the Lisa in the original Silent Hill was a re-creation of the original from the memories of Alessa, it makes a certain amount of sense that that Lisa was practically angelic. This game also seems to show the effects of the drugs she took that Dr. Kaufmann supplied for her; this was alluded to in the original game but never actually seen.
  • Travis himself. He's either an interesting character with a sympathetic motivation and backstory, or a bland Composite Character that's basically a watered-down copycat of both Harry Mason and James Sunderland.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Contested Prequel: Being the first Silent Hill game developed by a western studio after Team Silent disbanded, opinions tend to vary. Some fans see it as a solid horror game on its own and a worthy entry to the series that sticks true to the formula, whereas others disliked it for sticking too much to the formula and didn’t develop its own identity, and felt some of the gameplay mechanics (such as breakable weapons) were not needed and made the game less fun to play. It being a prequel to the first game hasn’t helped either, with some loving the expansion on the original story, while others feel it was unnecessary and didn’t need to be explained (the fact that Origins's story also includes a couple of somewhat controversial Retcons and Continuity Snarls probably doesn't help matters). That said, it at least seems to be the least negatively received of the three western-developed Silent Hill games, with Homecoming and Downpour having received a significantly more negative reception.
• Fan Nickname: The Final Boss has been called Flauros (which is the name of the artifact he inhabits), Alessa's Dream (as an attempt to interpret his nature), Samael (since he's almost definitely a proto-incarnation of the The Order's god), The Demon, etc.
• Memetic Mutation: Travis' ability to store ridiculous numbers of Portable TVs in his jacket. Oddly enough, portable TVs only make up about 5% of the large, bulky items Travis can pick up.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The Game Over screen is accompanied by a truck horn. Yeah, we know Travis is a trucker and all, but it's still very silly. It's not even particularly demonic; you could easily mistake it for the game's sound data glitching out.
  • As was pointed out by Yahtzee, making your visits to the Otherworld voluntary robs a lot of series' oppressive atmosphere from the game, by putting the player in control of something that until then had been seemingly at the whims of the titular Eldritch Location itself. Having to immediately switch back from one to the other because you forgot something makes it outright farcical.
• Once Original, Now Common: By today's standards, the game looks like any other PSP game on the market, some dynamic shadows aside. For its time, Origins looked nearly as good as its console predecessors, to the point that despite the Playstation 2 version being a Polished Port, it arguably looks worse at a higher resolution by being PSP graphics with better textures on top.
• The Scrappy: The Butcher is one of the most mocked monsters in the entirety of the franchise for being a blatant copy of the Breakout Villain Pyramid Head. Everything about his design, choice of weapon and color scheme is far too similar to Pyramid Head to be a coincidence.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The 3D-only movement (no Tank Controls) is fine and dandy whenever the camera is freely following you around, but it becomes a huge liability and pain in the ass whenever you're in an area full of dynamic camera angles because Travis has a bad tendency to switch his orientation on a dime with the sudden perspective shift and start running in a direction you didn't want him to, which is usually smack into a pissed-off enemy.
  • The ability to travel between the normal world and Otherwold at will with the mirrors has been criticized by some fans for removing the terror of the sudden shifts between worlds that has been one of the franchise's hallmarks.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Breakable weapons, in contrast to the series' general treatment of weapons up to that point, though that's made up for by the sheer amount of weapons you can find. It's not uncommon to finish the game with several dozen melee weapons unused, so in practice, it just means the player has an extra, unnecessary menu they have to repeatedly cycle through while bashing enemies.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some reviews hold the point that this game would have been a lot more interesting had it have put a lot more focus on Travis and his past and how Silent Hill twists itself around it rather than largely just recapping a lot of plot points the player would have already of known from playing Silent Hill.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Richard Grady. What he went through with his wife wouldn't be wished on anyone, but succumbing to despair and committing suicide in the face of such tragedy comes off as a rather selfish choice for a father to make, with his final written message pretty much dismissing the fact that it would leave his young son both orphaned and heavily traumatized (a fact we've spent the entire game thus far learning was very much the case).

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