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Purpose of this video series is to explain, in a simple way, the plot of Silent Hill 1-4 mainly
and also give a point of view about the new games of the series
as well as pointing out technical, gameplay details, etc, of these.
This video contains spoilers of Silent Hill.Continue under your own responsibility.
It was a normal night, as always
Pancho was quietly sleeping in his room
However, horrible things were happening in his mind...
Terrible images of misinformation....
...about one of his favorite videogame series....
Silent Hill, series that have declined since it was...
...abandoned by it's real parents years agp...
Then a voice came from the sky: ''Pancho...''
Pancho, alerted, woke up suddenly...
''Pancho, I am God''
''¿Which one?'' - Pancho asked.
''That doesn't matter; I come here with a mission for you''
''You must give hope and knowledge to...
...the fans of this injured saga, Silent Hill''
''¿And how will I do this?''
''You will use the power of the internet...
...You'll have powerful allies and maybe one day you'll even get a partnership''
Then, decided, Pancho got up from his bed--
--and got into this dangerous adventure--
And so, with nothing to stop him--
--Pancho turned his PC on, and started making this video...
Silent Hill, part 1:The real ''Origins''
It was the 80's and, slowly, the genre known as Survival Horror was born.
Which would be inspired by themes featured in books of authors like H.P Lovecraft, and japanesse culture, among others.
On of the first games that gave shape to the genre
even though it's not considered as a part of it
was Haunted House for the Atari 2600
Launched in 1982, the game consisted in investigatins a 3 floor mansion
in search for one or more urns
Inventory was very limited and the idea was to avoid enemies, rather than fighting them.
The concept was taken further in 1989
when Capcom released Sweet Home for Nintendo
This is considered to be the first Survival Horror game
and it would serve as inspiration for one of the most famous titles of the genre, Resident Evil.
However, other games adopted similar gameplay mechanics
like Alone In The Dark, which was the first 3D Survival Horror game
but with pre-rendered backgrounds.
Then, came Resident Evil
which would use, again, pre-rendered backgrounds.
Both titles were a success, and released their respective sequels.
Then, the horror genre in videogames became very popular.
Konami saw this, and just couldn't stand there doing nothing.
Therefore, as response, it formed a team of developers formed by
Keiichiro Toyama, Hiroyuki Owaku, Masahiro Ito, Takayoshi Sato...
Akihiro Imamura, Shingo Yuri, Mashatsi Tsuboyama and Akira Yamaoka.
The team was known as Team Silent
which, alonside Konami, released Silent Hill for the Playstation on January 31, 1999.
Silent Hill has some of the most classic elements of Survival Horror
Tank-like controls and lack of checkpoints
making you restart playing from the last time you saved if you died.
The gameplay system is a lot like that of it's main rival, Resident Evil
Difference is SH is made completely in 3D, doesn't have fixed camera angles and melee combat is more developed.
However, for some reason nobody like this gameplay in Silent Hill
but everybody wants it back on Resident Evil.
Throughout the game you must investigate a Hospital, a School, and the town itself
along some smaller areas.
These places, depending on the situation, turn into a nightmarish version of themselves
full of blood and rust.
The transitions occur almost simultaneously
and in front of our own and Harry Mason's eyes.
All of these sections which the protagonist calls the ''Otherworld''...
...occur in our own dimension.
The town is designed to produce a certain sense of claustrophobia-
The fog is thick, and was originally made to camouflage the graphical limitations of Playstation.
The concept was taken further, made to make you feel vulnerable and lost
and so that you couldn't see more than two or three meters away from you in those gigantic streets.
The camera angle, focused from a little elevated position,
made the sky almost unnoticeable, producing a bigger sense of confinement.
In the nightmare sections of the game, the fog is replaced by darkness.
The streets, as mentioned, were gigantic, and their names made reference to writers like
Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury and Richar Brachman
a pseudonym for Stephen King.
The game has a lot of disturbing material.
from the monsters to the sounds -like Akira Yamaoka's music, the radio noise, and the silence-.
To the puzzles, which have a high difficulty. unlike newer ones.
If you solved them without a guide, you're probably a genious (Real notes taken by me to
solve the piano puzzle)
To scenes which, by the time, were pretty uncommon in terms of audiovisual material for videogames.
The game almost ignores jump scares, and focuses on psychological horror
making the player feel vulnerable at all times.
The story is very well done.
Voice acting is very good as well, but it has some weird pauses between lines
which has led people to judge it as bad voice acting.
Yo!
H-Hi.
How you doin'?
Good, and you?
Ha, if you think this is bad, you haven't played Resident Evil.
(Yes it is)
This is not the kind of game that you beat once and see all the scenes and that's it.
To really understand what's going on, you must pay attention to every dialogue
every observation and every memo you find.
Finally, after finding all this information, you can tell with no problems what the game is about.
A lot of people has come to wrong conclusions about the game
and it's because of this and the incredible amount of theories created by fans.
To analyze the story, we'll focus only on the game.
Please note that no specific dates are given in the game
You can only specify a date from which the events of the game MIGHT have occurred.
In the year 19XX, Alessa Gillespie is born.
A girl with psychic abilities.
Alessa is the daughter of Dahlia Gillespie, an important member of a demonic cult of the town.
The cult uses White Claudia, a drug typical to the area, to bring more people to them.
The purpose of the cult is to bring their demon-god to our world, and make it paradise.
--let's see how that turns out!
To do it, Dahlia attempts to use her own daughter, who is conscious about the plan
and is against it.
The stress caused to Alessa by it, made one of the boilers of the house explode,
setting the house and Alessa on fire.
During the incident, Alessa splits her soul in two to prevent the cult from
successfully making the ritual on her.
Wihtout a full soul, the ritual can't be completed
Alessa is severely burned and the cult uses black magic to keep her alive until she can birth god.
Michael Kauffmann, director of Alchemilla Hospital, asigns Lisa Garlad to take care of Alessa
who is being held in the basement of the hospital.
Alessa, thanks to the cult's spell to bring the other half of her soul to the town,
is kept alive with the demonic fetus inside her, which tortures her with a nightmare for seven years,
until Cheryl, the other half of her soul returns to the town with her adoptive father, Harry Mason
for a vacation.
Harry's car crashes, and when he wakes up, Cheryl is gone.
By the time they arrive at Silent Hill, Alessa's soul is complete again,
and uses her Cheryl aspect to spread the Seal Of Metatron in the town.
In the real world, the Seal of Metatron is based on Metatron's Cube,
a Jewish-Christian sacred glyph, of which use is to protect an object or person from demons
and satanic powers.
By spreading the seal, Alessa unintentionally projects her nightmare onto the town.
Dahlia trick Harry into thinking Alessa is spreading the Mark of Samael, to seal the town to the abyss.
And uses him to reach Alessa's second half.
When Harry gets to Alessa, he uses the Flauros.
In real life demonology, Flauros is a duke from Hell
who must enter a triangle by which he can communicate with his conjurer
and also destroy his enemies or brake their power.
This is just what happens: Harry, thanks to the Flauros, is able to brake Alessa's protection, leaving her vulnerable.
Allowing Dahlia to take Alessa to complete the ritual.
Later, Harry finds Dahlia with Alessa, who has retaken her original form.
Kauffmann arrives to stop the birth of the god
and uses Aglaophotis to do it.
However, the effect produced is not the one expected, and Alessa expels the god,
which kills Dahlia
Harry defeats the god and Alessa shows up to give him a new baby and show him the exit.
Harry and Cybil escape, while Lisa takes Kauffmann to wherever she took him to.
Oh yeah, some weird stuff happens to Lisa by the end of the game.
The end!
The game has five endings: four serious and a joke ending called the UFO ending,
in which Harry is abducted by aliens.
The other ones are BAD, BAD+, GOOD and GOOD+.
After Silent Hill 3 came out, the first two were dismissed
leaving the good endings as the possible ones.
Most SH fans think the canonical ending is GOOD.
But me and other SH fans think that the real ending is GOOD+
This is because the more effort you put into the game, the more info is revealed, and you get better results.
Most people who thing GOOD is the real ending, argue that Cybil is not present in SH3.
But the fact that she's not in SH3 does not necessarily mean that she died in SH.
A reference to Cybil in Silent Hill 3 is, besides, unnecessary.
Her role in this game (SH) is not major.
The only reason she is there is so Harry can make sense of everything that he's discovered so far.
Furthermore, Hiroyuki Owaku, one of the members of Team Silent, referred to the subject, stating:
''Cybil is not involved with Silent Hill 3. What happens to her afterwards is left to players' imaginations.''
According to this, GOOD+ is necessarily the real ending because in GOOD Cybil dies
and, therfore, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about her fate (she's dead, after all).
Well, Silent Hill is a marvelous game.
If you're a horror fan, you can't miss the chance to play this title.
It has a very peculiar non-cliché horror, complemented with audio elements
that, at moments will scare you, and at others, touch you.
But enough Silent Hill for now. After it's release, the director of the project, Keiichiro Toyama
left the team, and Hiroyuki Owaku was put in charge of the series.
By the start of the millenium, Sony had released Playstation 2
and Team Silent was developing a new title for sid console: Silent Hill 2.
The game is nota sequel of the first one, but rather a way of revealing the state of the town after it.
A big casting was made to choose the actors who would play their parts,
plans for the game were huge, and it would become the fan-favourite.
But this is story for another time.