Silent Hill 2 | Re:Certified Classic [SSFF]

[Music] most say it's the greatest Silent Hill game others the greatest horror game of all time it gave the world one of the all-time greatest monsters Pyramid Head and dared to tell a layered dark story of grief sexual frustration abuse and murder Silent Hill 2 is a classic game whose reverence seems to have only grown and groans his first releasing on the PlayStation 2 in September 2001 but some classics so influenced the climate of video games they themselves become obsolete and there are more horror games in the market now than ever before welcome to recertified classic leave our nostalgia at the door and we ask ourselves Silent Hill 2 is it still good is it still a certified classic but first a quick refresher Silent Hill 2 is one of those incredibly rare times when artistic freedom and commercial needs are married beautifully quick recap Silent Hill 1 was developed as konami x' answered to the blowout success of Capcom's resident evil konami needed a horror game with a similar broad hollywood appeal targeted towards the west but they ended up pretty late to the party Silent Hill 1 didn't make it to market until a year after Resident Evil 2 in six months before resident evil 3 if the existence of only English voice acting doesn't convince you of Konami Western ambitions then note that the North American version came out a full month before the Japanese version pal has always got a little shafted on their release date despite obvious similarity and influence Silent Hill was a hit and was touted as a refreshing alternative with a more atmospheric and psychological experience and less of a action focused one people like resident evil but Silent Hill actually scared them and Silent Hill 2 would only double down on these things that made it distinct from Resident Evil Silent Hill 1 in a lot of ways was a more interesting development than Silent Hill 2 there was a lot more stacked against it and while Konami was trying to make a grab for Capcom's hold on third party horror in a lot of ways Konami as a company wasn't taking it seriously the dev team teams was made up of about twelve or so people within konami who were underperforming or otherwise didn't fit in but after Silent Hill one proved to be a hit for the sequel Konami basically said we don't know what you did or how you did it but here's a ton of money resources and freedom to do it again the budget doubled to an estimated ten to twelve million dollars with the dev team swelling to about 50 people not only that they had access to high-grade mocap tech someone Eve's impressive 3d like s4 sound and Konami even hired a film crew to make a documentary about the development which was a bonus on the original European version hey pal you've got something awesome good for you pal but that should tell you a lot video documentaries on video games are a rare thing even now this combination of freedom and resources is usually arrests before disaster in any commercial industry but instead of going off the rails have produced a real creative triumph it's hard to overstate how rare this type of thing is and many of the developers involved in that a lot of ways the series itself never saw such an opportunity ever again it was a brief bittersweet moment for one crucial member of Team silent in particular CGI and character designer takayoshi Sato Sato was an outsider to games he was trained as an artist mostly as a painter but instead of following the path of his art school peers he made a detour into the commercial industry by accepting a job at Konami and the first game he worked on was as a designer on sexy Herodias but he didn't want to work on 2d which was quickly aging out by 1996 he wanted to work on more serious future leading games like Metal Gear Solid so he hunkered down and taught himself 3d modeling sato became so good at it that Konami had him teaching other more senior people in the company how to do 3d meaning not only was he not working on 3d games he was training other people to do his dream job eventually he went to management and refused to continue training unless they put him on a 3d game either Metal Gear Solid or this cool new project called Silent Hill so they stuck him with the other misfits they didn't know what to do with in silent sato hit the ground running I started a character design and creating the CGI cinematics all by himself but Konami was a traditional Japanese company and shaped at the idea of giving a young upstart all the credit for the visuals when he was about 1/3 of the way through all the cinematics Konami tried to put a senior member above them in a supervisor position essentially just to rob him of his due credits Masato naturally wasn't happy about this and when he pushed back Konami threw down saying he needed to either share the credit or do everything alone which he did and the results were amazing according to Sato in an interview with gamasutra it wasn't like I wanted to make it all from scratch I just had to in order to get credit for my money this means he's solely responsible for one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in videogame history his work was shown at SIGGRAPH and won him some prestigious awards like a Japanese cultural ministry award and even an award from the CEO of Konami silent hill's success afforded Sato much more control and visibility for Silent Hill 2 Sato directed cgi cutscenes character design and had a big input into the story of the game including the backstories and dialogue of all female characters by the way did we mention that all the faces for Silent Hill 2 were also rendered by hand look he even got to do III Konami allowed him to create his own team Sato works and move out to Konami us so that he can have a better idea of what small-town USA was actually like no more Kindergarten Cop references for this team though Mary and Laura's outfits were likely inspired by Conair and Maria is basically just a ripoff of pre xtina Christina Aguilera but that's just good fun you know you'd think that since he had proven himself already he just ride off into the sunset well you don't know Konami while someone hill 2 was a commercial success selling a million copies just a month after its September 2001 release Sato works was in serious trouble the agreement between Sato and Konami was largely informal they had promised Sato works a certain amount of money for finishing Silent Hill 2 but only paid half of what was agreed because there was no official contract Sato works had no legal recourse against Konami since Sato works was now technically unprofitable it closed its doors after working on only one project you'll also note that in the credits of the vanilla ps2 version character designs CG is credited to Sato Works USA and its employees these same credits appear in the instruction book as well however in the instruction book for the Xbox Restless dreams version it just says Sato works with none of its employees and the character designs CG credit being entirely removed is a huge bummer to see someone who so radically shaped the success of silent hill's 1 & 2 being disrespected in this way after all this Sato is still working in the industry he stayed in the u.s. working on titles like Goldeneye rogue agent he now works at Nintendo while a more cartoony style really differs from his previous work Nintendo does amazing things with art and style though with giant companies like EA and Nintendo it's hard to imagine he was ever given the same kind of control or vision ever again though it's worth noting this is by his own account and hasn't been meaningfully verified by Konami or any members of team silent to our knowledge though his story has stayed consistent through multiple interviews Sato refers to the development of Silent Hill 2 as his glory days and seems to see the development of Silent Hill 2 was part of a perfect storm resulting from the success of Silent Hill one and the lower budgets of games at the time well that may have been true for a lot of members of the team it doesn't take away from the game's success it's also worth pointing out that there are many different versions of this game without getting too deep into the weeds there are basically three flavors original extended and unnecessarily botched ports the giant elephant in the room being the Silent Hill HD collection there's a lot to cover with that [ __ ] show us just something we don't have time to discuss here graced its its own damn thing it's so crazy it's its own video oh my god Silent Hill 2 would not only become a best-seller going greatest hits for both ps2 and Xbox it will be celebrated as one of the greatest games the generation eventually as one of the greatest games ever made and its impact can still be felt today here are its greatest claims to fame number one a blueprint for psychological horror in the triple-a space Silent Hill 1 was a direct response to Resident Evil and though it was praised as a more atmospheric in much scarier game the Resident Evil influence was still very present so until 2 went a step further and though still a survival horror game is a much more subtle psychological experience it wasn't the only one at the time but it was the only worldwide hit the Resident Evil remake which was the closest that series had ever gotten to psychological or up to that point famously sold poorly and was the catalyst for pushing that series to emphasize action over horror as a Resident Evil and other horror games even future Silent Hill games tipped the balance towards action and away from scares Silent Hill twos legacy only grew and grew and there's an argument that it has maybe never been topped it wasn't until the likes of amnesia outlast PT a decade later that anything came close at least in terms of sheer popularity number two a blueprint for minimalism in horror at the time Silent Hill two's fog was seen as not pushing the graphics of the ps2 to be fair it was competing with gta3 boney Musha Gran Turismo 3 Metal Gear Solid 2 on a still pretty new system but Silent Hill 2 was never trying for that graphics or otherwise Silent Hill 2 is the story of a fog engulfed town and why four people have been mysteriously drawn to it it's hard to see with this fog there's only the one road you can't miss it there are only three firearms only three monsters that are common throughout the majority of the game dialogue moments had traditional musical accompaniment but the rest of what could be loosely called the score is a melodic ambient noise chased with heavy doses of Silas Silent Hill 2 is small-scale in almost every possible way and only seldom cranks it to 11 and those moments are memorable because they stand in profoundly stark contrast to everything else even the story itself starts small and stays small Resident Evil 7 dead space even Silent Hill 1 start as small personal stories that end up being about a global elliptic fret and while that's not necessarily bad sometimes less is more in Silent Hill - will forever be proof of that number three its story is dark but not exploitive a lot of lip service is given to James's Freudian style sexual frustrations and Silent Hill - certainly deserves credit for that just praising just that sells the game short because depicting the trauma that results from sexual abuse requires more finesse angela is shown as a deeply conflicted and wounded person a complex character whose mood swings show a woman who has suffered severe trauma and has not yet begun processing it did you even realize that she's supposed to be 17 years old yet she was voiced by a woman in her 40s a great subtle choice okay I didn't mean to scare you even Eddie who is essentially a rage-filled ticking time bomb is written as more than just a slowly spiraling psychopath his last few dialogue moments not only show a man who's fully succumbed to his inner demons but also not totally clueless as to the bigger picture his rage dams him but it does not define him Angela could have just been a comatose woman Eddie just a ranting lunatic but the game attempted something much more difficult and succeeded in tackling dark and taboo topics rarely discussed in video games number four established Silent Hill as an anthology horror series or at least to try to three was a sequel to one origins was a prequel to one shattered Memories was partly a remake of one the series didn't really make good on it but it's still to the credit that Silent Hill 2 set precedent for the series Silent Hill is just a foggy place where bad things happen everything else is fertile soil and that's a bold move to make on the second entry of your new hit franchise created directly to compete with Resident Evil a series by the way that was just starting to get a little carried away with spin-offs and sequels it's not really Silent Hill 2 whose fault that it didn't pan out like it should have but it still gets points for trying and that's all fine and dandy and we bury our nostalgia 6 feet deep and we ask ourselves the tough question Silent Hill 2 is it still good is it still a certified classic and the answer yes but only on the strength of its narrative audio and visual achievements I would still have some big caveats recommending this game today to somebody who never played it before Silent Hill 2 is enduring legacy is one of the most perfectly constructed pieces of horror O's it almost all - its story and for very very good reason it's not only an expertly told tale with layered complex characters it's one that holds up to repeat playthroughs once you understand James's backstory and the reason he's in Silent Hill the context of damn near every piece of the game changes every dialogue scene every enemy most item descriptions and puzzles have another meaning beneath the surface and yet there are many things left vague or unexplained like why are all the dead bodies just James's character model was that a technical workaround or a canonical symbolic gesture there is so much Freudian symbolism and then throw in issues of perception like what things do we only see because James does and is James or anyone seeing what they're seeing only because that's just what the town is allowing them to see some story hands are deliberately hidden in plain view while many others are deliberately left vague and open to interpretation I was surprised though walking away from this latest playthrough thinking deeper about the town about the motivations of Silent Hill before I'd always thought of a town that is the version of Silent Hill specifically in Silent Hill 2 as something of a purgatory or personalized hell for people who have sinned a place that punishes people who have committed heinous acts specifically in this case murder you you killed him he made me do it but we're given time to explore James Eddy in Angela's history and they're not bad people they've done bad things but if it were that simple the game wouldn't spend so much time making them sympathetic characters especially in Angela's case a victim of sexual verbal and physical abuse she's not in Silent Hill because she killed her abusive father she's in Silent Hill because she hasn't begun healing the town isn't a judge or a moral arbiter Silent Hill as a predator in James Angela and Eddie are all there because they're vulnerable you can't just kill someone cause of the way they've looked at you Silent Hill isn't out to teach a lesson through just its prey and man that's a really good villain and it made me realize the real villain isn't Maria or even Pyramid Head Pyramid Head steals the spotlight and for obvious reasons his design is absolutely amazing and he's and some choice memorable seeds but he just like Maria is only a puppet the town is pulling the strings and is so much more sinister and cruel James always survives the town because he isn't as emotionally wounded as the town perhaps thought making him a true foil to the town its plan backfires and instead provides James the opportunity to conquer his demons and put the past behind him depending on the ending that is and I'm not totally convinced that Laura is a real person to not also a Confederate like Maria the story and characters will be analyzed and discussed for years to come it may be the video game equivalent to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining but I want to move on and discuss Silent Hill two's other achievements and I can cover all this by discussing one thing the Silent Hill Historical Society as an audio-visual experience Silent Hill 2 is still a master class from frame 1 but if the historical society segment is not one of the scariest and most well produced areas in video game history and then I've never played a horror game the Silent Hill games especially the first floor craft excellent gags the locker room and Silent Hill one and the sink room in Silent Hill three are to that personally destroyed me but the series is just full of them can replacement sound design meticulous environmental detail brilliantly conceived in masterfully tying moments team silent were [ __ ] masters of their craft but the Historical Society is the team operating at the absolute peak of their powers it is one long sustained exhausting assault on your senses in a game already full of thick fog and darkness the bowels of the Historical Society feel even more oppressive lead arc your flashlight doesn't so much illuminate but strain as it tries to push back against the darkness almost every camera angle is distant and obstructed placed as far away from James as possible with objects constantly in your way or incredibly tight on James you can hardly tell which direction you're even facing and to illustrate that all bets are off enemies are placed in specific locations to startle and ambush you any other time oh you know I absolutely would I criticize bad camera and cheap enemy placement but here it's absolutely earned your environment is constantly shifting you're never in one place for very long and you just keep plunging deeper and deeper underground most areas don't have a map in some areas James draws one as he goes with the exception of the prison area you are never given the opportunity to become familiar with your surroundings and as your environment changes so does the music the music that plays throughout is a veritable symphony of violent metallic crashes cold mechanical whirring ear piercing sirens beastly wailings all bit brilliantly punctuated with moments of silence so that each musical piece never lingers long enough to become familiar music and sound designer Akira Yamaoka cos genius is perhaps never more questionable the segment features the game's scariest gags and its darkest story moments yet by the time you near the end and jump down your own grave it's sort of like wow this somehow isn't even the worst thing that's happened down here I was actually having trouble tackling this topic for this video because I had so much I wanted to say when I play through it again for this video I started taking so many notes I realized oh there's no way we're gonna get this video finished before deadline so I don't know I'm gonna have to give this section like its own separate video or something but I just wanted to bring the Historical Society up because everyone loves the story and everyone loves Pyramid Head but god damn it people y'all need to recognize that this is one of the greatest levels in video game history but I guess it's to the credit of the story and places like the historical society that you're able to forget that mechanically held hill to is bad and has only gotten worse over the years and takes a really long time to get going it isn't bad enough to say that you can't go back if you haven't played this game in a really long time I think it's worth going back to but if you've never played Silent Hill 2 before proceed with caution this game controls like crap and doesn't just have a slow start but an almost completely uneventful first third maybe you thought I'd hate the voice acting it's not perfect but they do pretty well with some of the heavier scenes maybe you thought I'd complain about the boat now that part's kind of funny and weird and after the Historical Society I could use a relaxing boat ride here's the problem the game can be separated into four major sections the apartment building the hospital the Historical Society and the hotel all of which are preceded with Little John surround the town including boating but nothing really happens until about midway through the hospital now of course things happen and there are some choice moments and gags in the apartment building but it's all just hours of build up the game establishes a lot of intrigue but the only meaningful progression that James's story before you meet Maria is all subtle stuff you won't notice on a first playthrough and be honest your first time through you had no idea what to do with the cans of juice either that is easily the games worst puzzle and I hate to tell you this people who apply this game yet there are escort missions here and I'm very long thankfully but how you treat Maria affects the ending and holy crap the controls are bad worse than I remember I will sing the praises of both silent hill's 1 & 2 all day but man the movement in combat is just awful oh really the melee combat is awful and it's some time before you get the handgun in the apartment building super unresponsive and clunky fighting the monsters that show up around town after you get the radio and plank of wood is not recommended but why wouldn't you want to start fighting dudes right after the game gives you a weapon and a listen don't give me that tired James is an everyman not a soldier excuse he not only proves to be an excellent marksman having no problem shooting monsters in the dark but according to the dog ending credits dudes a roll of brawny paper towels come on certified hunks like that shouldn't take so goddamn long - ready and swing a 2x4 if you're willing to sit through several hours of setup and wrestle with some bad unresponsive controls and amazing experienced waits for you it is worth the wait but Silent Hill 2 ain't the top dog anymore there are so many games on the market and I would wager a lot of these games have quicker starts however if you haven't played Silent Hill 2 in years I'd say dust off your PlayStation 2 or Xbox and give it another what's this a letter the name on the envelope said Zombies Ate My Neighbors it's ridiculous couldn't possibly be true I keep telling myself a 90s videogame can't write letters I reviewed that damn game eight years ago I know bad jokes are an old bit but maybe it's time for a rebirth this game sure has us drowning in metaphors who is it getting hot in here or is that just Angela pyramid head hates bad jokes I'd say he's got a point what do you call the paper version of Silent Hill 2 restless reins boy the Silent Hill nurses sure are scary I wasn't just scared I was a Freud thanks for watching I hope you had a hell of a time this letter wants you to grab a pillow and smother that subscribe button [Music] how do we end this [ __ ] [Music]

Channel: Stop Skeletons From Fighting

Views: 176,608

Rating: 4.8386831 out of 5

Keywords: silent hill hd collection, silent hill resident evil, the evil within 2, kojima konami, takayoshi sato, greatest ps2 2 games, best xbox horror games, eternal darkness fatal frame, pyramid head, silent hill 2 the movie, best video game movies, silent hill restless dreams, zombies ate my neighbors, happy video game nerd, hvgn, fatal frame 2 crimson butterfly

Id: 195KJ5jUquc

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Don’t really care who’s talking about Silent Hill 2 so long as it gives me a chance to gush about how much of an experience it was.

Not much I can say that someone else perhaps hasn’t said already, but I love how all the subtle level design of the town of Silent Hill all serves a deliberate purpose in portraying James’s character when he is too broken to really lend himself well to expression.

And I know I’m not alone when I say that SH2 would be lessened considerably if not for the critically-acclaimed and timeless soundtrack.