Silent Hill 2
1 rating since posting on Tuesday, May 8, 2007
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in Sacramento
(submitted by
Vincent
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Overall Rating based on 1 rating |
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I became a fan of Silent Hill 2 the day when I first bought it. If there is one thing I know is my good taste in video games and I'll tell you why Silent Hill 2 is the best in the series. Introduction: Silent Hill 2 is the second installment in the Silent Hill Survival horror series. The game was released in late 2001 on the Sony PlayStation 2 and was ported to the Microsoft Xbox and PC the following year. While the game is staged in the series's namesake town (Silent Hill), it is not a direct sequel to the events and characters of the first Silent Hill game, and is staged at an undetermined date between it and the third game.This entry takes insight into a new character, James Sunderland, who enters the town after receiving a letter, apparently from his late wife Mary, saying she is waiting for him in their "special place" in the town. The game received favorable reviews and was a commercial success. It has been followed by two sequels, with an additional two installments in the series in development. The Full Story At the beginning of the game the player is introduced to the main character, James Sunderland, who has come to Silent Hill after receiving a letter asking him to come from his wife, Mary, despite the fact that she had apparently died from an unnamed illness three years prior to his return. When James first enters Silent Hill, he immediately realizes it is not the same beautiful town from his and Mary's past. In addition to the strange, omnipresent fog, the whole town seems to be rotting away and abandoned. Bizarre, vaguely humanoid monsters are also encountered both outdoors in the streets and indoors in most of the buildings, waiting to attack James. With his path to his first destination, the lakeside Rosewater Park, cut off, James enters an apartment complex, whose back alleys have the only other available route to reach what he believes could be the "special place" Mary says she is in the letter. Inside the complex James finds the young woman who had warned him of the town's bizarre nature earlier, Angela, lying in one of the apartments with a knife, apparently suicidal. James persuades her to hand him the knife for her own safety, after which point she flees in panic. In another room James meets an obese young man called Eddie vomiting in one of the apartment toilets, who acts very defensively over questions regarding a corpse in a refrigerator in the same apartment. James also has a brief encounter with a young girl he later discovers to be called Laura who is apparently immune to the effects of the town (she does not see any monsters in the town and has an unexplained loathing of James, as well as knowing the identity of Mary. The most disturbing "person" he encounters, however, is the monster commonly referred to as the "Pyramid Head", a humanoid whose head is completely covered in a giant, metal, pyramid-shaped helmet that protects him against anything James will possess in his arsenal in the game, whom James encounters twice inside the complex. When James finally reaches Rosewater Park, he meets a woman who is a dead ringer to Mary, but with a more provocative wardrobe and attitude who calls herself Maria. During the game, she shows inexplicable insight into matters that only he or Mary would know, and acts in a very seductive manner towards James. Maria accompanies James in his attempt to reach his second suspected "special place": the Lakeview Hotel. On their way, however, Maria claims to see Laura, and out of concern for her she has James try to reach the girl. Their pursuit ends in the Brookhaven Hospital, where James finds Laura, but becomes angry at her for claiming to have known Mary for the past year, in clear contradictions with his belief that she has been dead for three years. Laura responds by, under the pretense of asking him to look for another letter from Mary, locking him in a room filled with covered monsters stuffed in hanging cages. After they are defeated, the hospital undergoes a sudden, dramatic change, and James and Maria attempt to flee. "Pyramid Head", however, gives chase, and kills Maria while they make their escape to an elevator. Saddened, James eventually refocuses on his original task of finding Mary, and in finding the key to the hospital's front door he is lead to the Silent Hill Historical Society, which his map states has the only available route to the hotel via boat. The Historical Society, however, ultimately becomes an exploration of two levels not noted on the town map: a disused prison and a labyrinth in which Pyramid Head apparently resides. In this level, James inexplicably finds Maria, alive, unharmed and locked in a prison cell. She greets him with disillusions of Mary and provocations. He is unable to rescue her, however, before she is killed, presumably by Pyramid Head again. This level also provides revelations on why Angela and Eddie are in the town as well. A newspaper clipping implies that Angela killed her father, who abused her physically, mentally and sexually with the complicity of her mother. The player is required to save her from a monstrous representation of her father, but she is still inexplicably hostile towards James and aggressively questions his reasons for being in the town. Eddie is revealed through his own monologues to have snapped after years of verbal abuse by his peers, killed the dog of a football player and then shot the dog's owner in the leg as well. It becomes clear that upon his arrival in Silent Hill he has gone psychotic, seeing everyone as making fun of him, and he has resorted to killing everyone he encounters. He first attempts to explain away the path of bodies he has left, but ultimately he turns on James as well and must be killed as the level's boss. After this point, James seriously questions his perception of the events leading to his arrival in the town. Finally, James takes a boat to the Lakeview Hotel, where he finds Laura once again. She gives him the letter she claimed to be seeking earlier, which states that Mary wanted to adopt the girl while confirming her claims of knowing her for the past year. The final truth is shown to James when he watches a tape he apparently left at the hotel on a previous visit, which shows him that he killed his terminally ill wife himself, smothering her with a pillow to stop both their suffering. Inexplicably, however, the radio James has been carrying to warn him of the approach of monsters sends a message in Mary's voice, asking for him to find her. James explores the rest of the hotel, which has undergone a transformation on the scale of the hospital. During this, the fate of Angela is revealed as James finds her ascending a burning staircase (which, according to the map, does not exist), unable to cope with her guilt any longer and apparently resigned to live in her hell for eternity. The climax of the game approaches as James finds a resurrected Maria being held in a torture rack at the mercy of two Pyramid Head monsters. Maria cries out for help and is promptly killed. James apparently realizes that Maria and Pyramid Head are nothing more than delusions created by the town and his mind in order to punish him. James then is confronted by the two monsters, and resolves to fight them. After taking enough damage, the Pyramid Heads commit suicide by impaling themselves on their spears, and James is lead to an open-air metallic structure where he apparently finds his deceased wife Mary and the final fight of the game begins.. Endings While it has multiple endings determined by the player's actions; like the other games in the series, Silent Hill 2 doesn't have a canonized ending. The fourth installment of the series reveals that James and Mary never returned from their trip to Silent Hill, but the circumstances of their failure to return are not specified. Official statements from Konami have kept the canonicity of the ending ambiguous, with statements essentially saying that any and all of the endings can be considered "real" depending on the player's actions and interpretation of the story. The final version of the game has a total of six possible endings; three which can be achieved on the first playing, and three enabled by acquiring new items on replays. In the "Leave" and "In Water" endings, the woman in the room is Maria once again, dressed as Mary and making a final attempt to get James to take her. James rebuffs her, however, and she turns into a monster similar to the hanging monsters in the hospital, becoming the final boss. Following her defeat, in the "Leave" ending, James is next seen having a final meeting with a dying Mary, to whom he confesses he killed her to reclaim his life from the strain of looking after her. Mary forgives him, handing him a piece of paper which is presumed to be the full content of the letter that he had in the game, and James is last seen leaving the town through the graveyard with Laura follwing him ahead as the letter is read onscreen. The "In Water" ending is identical up to the point that Mary dies during the meeting before forgiving James, and he takes her body into the car he arrived in and drives into Toluca Lake, killing himself. A replay ending entitled "Rebirth" will also have James kill Maria, but afterwards he will then attempt to use new objects collected in the game to revive Mary, with an unknown result. The "Maria" ending, however, is radically different from these three. If the player takes actions that seem to show an attachment to Maria (checking on her frequently, keeping her out of harm's way), the woman in the room will be Mary, who has apparently not forgiven James for killing her. She will then turn into the final boss as the same monster Maria becomes, and after her defeat James dismisses her as being just another hallucination. He then discovers Maria, inexplicably resurrected again, and leaves town with her as she hands him what is presumed to be the full letter. After the letter is read in the final cutscene, however, Maria starts coughing, and James states "Maybe you should check that cough", implying she has the illness Mary suffered from and the events that drove James to the town may repeat themselves. There are also two joke endings available on replays. The first, "DOG", ends with James discovering beyond a normally locked door a Shiba Inu which has apparently been controlling all the events of the game from a large computer console. The second, "UFO", is a continuation of the UFO ending of the first game added in the Xbox port/Director's version in which James is abducted by a group of aliens with the first game's protagonist, Harry Mason. Gameplay James, set to attack, encounters a monster in the foggy streets of Silent Hill.The game is shown from a third person perspective, with various camera angles for different areas of the map in contrast to simply always having the player view the game from behind the back of the playable character. The main screen does not feature a heads-up display, and consequently information on ammunition and health can only be checked by pausing to view the item menu screen. There is also no mini-map, and consequently maps have to be checked through a separate function. Maps must be collected throughout the game like other items, and can only be read if there is sufficient light or when the flashlight James finds is working. James will update relevant maps to reflect locked doors, obstructions and notes on other maps, and during the labyrinth will actually draw a new map himself while the level is being navigated. James will also write down the content of all documents in a notebook for future reference. Much of gameplay consists of navigating the town, with less focus on killing enemies and more on finding keys or other items to bypass doors or other obstructions. Occasionally puzzles will be presented to the player to bypass the obstructions, often with riddles left for the player to interpret the solution. The difficulty levels of the enemies and the puzzles are determined independently, giving players the option of having weak enemies while being faced with extremely cryptic riddles or vice-versa. Like the original game, James keeps a radio with him which alerts him to the presence of creatures by emitting static, allowing him to detect hostiles even through the thick fog. There are a total of six weapons available, three melee weapons and three firearms, with another two being unlocked during replays. While combat is not necessarily the focus of the game there are six boss fights: two encounters with Pyramid Head, the hanging creatures in the hospital, the large "Abstract Daddy", Eddie and the final Mary/Maria monster. All enemies use short ranged attacks with the exception of Eddie, who is armed with a gun, and the Mary monster, which can launch a swarm of black moth-like creatures at James. In my opinon I thought the gameplay was sort of slow and clunky when playing the game on Hard difficulty setting because James is often pinned up in corners. The only time you have an advantage is when you are outdoors. Influences and design The atmosphere of the game is for the most part similar to the first game, including the abandoned and/or decomposing look of the town and the persistent fog obscuring the streets, but it has been given a more psychological twist. One example of this is James' letter from Mary progressively disappears during the game, hinting, as Konami later confirmed, that the letter was not real and merely another part of James' hallucinations.The implication is that, as James slowly began to understand what he did, the illusions of the town begin to disappear. This could also be the explanation for the transformation of the hotel, as when James enters it is mostly intact, but after he sees the videotape he finds it reverts to its true form of a mostly burned-out structure. Other acknowledged attempts to induce a psychological influence on the game include placing Mary's dress in the room where James discovers the flashlight and modelling at least one dead body in the town after James. The monsters in the game, as well as being more humanoid in design than their counterparts in the preceding game, are acknowledged to have been, for the most part, designed as a reflection of James` own subconscious.[31] At least two creatures, the "Mannequin" and "Bubblehead nurse" are acknowledged to have been created with sexual suggestion in mind, a reflection of James` desires and likely sexual deprivation during Mary's illness.Pyramid Head is acknowledged to have been based on the executioners of the town's fictional history and is intended to be a punisher for James. Two exceptions to this theme are the "Abstract Daddy", a reflection of the subconscious and memories of Angela, and the "creepers", which are also seen in the first game. Silent Hill 2 also incorporates some references to real life events. The creators have said that the name "Mary" came from Mary Ann Nichols, Jack the Ripper's first victim.[There are also indications that the layout of Silent Hill has been based on the town of San Bruno, California to a certain extent. So there you have it, the entire review of the game. Silent Hill 2 is still a game I play even till this day. Its no wonder why it sells for a nice price on ebay now. The game is just incredible! The plot is far more better than anything out of a Stephen King movie or novel. The musice to the end of the credits is really great. Which is another reason why I often play through the game from time to time just so I can listen to it. I would say that James Saunderland is allot like me in many ways. We are both willing to go extreme distances to find what we are looking for even if it is not there. Sometimes we let our emotions control the way that we think. James is a character that has an excellent influence over the person that plays the game. He's bold at the same time careful, serious but calm in a dangerous situation, confused and often worry about small problems. Basically I highly reccomend Silent Hill 2 to anyone that is into games with a facinating plot and interesting characters that make Hollywood horror movies whimper in corners. The game has great music, good sound effects, superb voice acting, attractive plot, and characters you can really get into. A straight 5 out of 5. - Vincent , posted 05/08/07 |
Silent Hill 2 was recommended for:
- Tribe: Classic Video Games
- Tribe: Video Game Addicts
- Tribe: Classic Nintendo
