#i'm actually obsessed this is so funny i hope it catches on i need overly dramatic fanart of these two fucking bit characters

[morninkim]

new toxic yaoi just dropped. from a fucking darts video.

[huntinglove]

What I expected to think about the characters vs what I actually thought of them after watching Hazbin Hotel

A little long because I tried to include as many characters as possible lol (also, I'm not a huge fan of the Hellaverse so a lot of the characters and their designs were brand new to me)

Sir Pentious:

He's kind of funny, I like his dirigible as well! His colors are a bit harsh though...

F/Od him and grew very attached to him, he was very sweet all throughout the show and he really deserves better than what he got

Egg boiz:

Silly little guys! How many of them are there?

They have names?!! I need to know all of them! I wonder if their personalities vary in any way or if they're just clones of each other. Do they have souls as well?

Charlie:

Big dreamer that will probably end up snapping and ruining her own plan

Determined and kind but a bit out of touch when it comes to other people around her, a nice soul that needs to learn how to listen

Angel Dust:

In it for the free stuff and overly impulsive

Dealing with heavy trauma and hypersexuality. Actually cares about people if they give him enough time, kind but stuck in a god awful situation, one of my favorite characters

Vaggie:

Intense but important character, really wants things to work out for Charlie and the hotel

Easy to tell she's an angel when you compare her design to the other characters'. Very supportive of Charlie, even when she 100% thinks that her ideas will go wrong. Interesting choice for a singing voice though

Alastor:

Thought I would F/O him, didn't. Love his aesthetic and mannerisms

His personality changed a bit, but I enjoy how easy it is to make him slip into a more menacing facade. Disliking technology must be awful when hell keeps adapting to it. I wonder who he made a deal with...

Husk:

Rude grump...

Actually cares about the people at the hotel but lives in constant exhaustion over being Alastor's "pet" because of their deal. Badass when he fights using his playing cards. I wonder what the bet between him and Alastor was...

Nifty:

Small critter?

Little chaotic lady, she can be really fun! Also, props for getting rid of that dick head

Cherri Bomb:

Fun! Impulsive and with one of my favorite designs, I like how she treats Angel, especially in Addict

Big kin, her personality is very similar to mine and I really enjoyed her scenes!

Lucifer:

First time seeing him! His design is very nice and balanced between the stylistic choices for angels and demons. I wish his demon was a bit more threatening though

He seems like a nice father to Charlie, I wonder what drove them apart. Lilith seemed like she didn't like allowing Charlie to spend a lot of time around him during the flashbacks...

His rivalry with Alastor is very funny, considering he's leagues above him, power-wise (at least according to the official scale)

Rosie:

Lovely! Such a fun character, plus the whole idea behind cannibal town is very interesting! I wonder if Alastor's affections towards her are genuine or if he just wants to get something out of her as smoothly as possible

Mimzy:

Plus size character, wonderful! Not a huge fan of her personality or the fact that she hides behind Alastor after getting herself in trouble, but she's most likely not the first or last to do something like that to him, especially in hell

Zestial:

One of my favorite designs in the show! I love his voice as well. He seems very polite and influential and I feel like there's a lot of potential for his character. I hope we get to see more of him as the show progresses!

Carmilla:

Very big hands, contrasts nicely with her otherwise sleek, ballerina-like design. Her archetypes and characteristics are very eye-catching and influential to the story. A caring mom and a powerful war lord, definitely one of my favorite characters in the show!

Vox:

Love his design and voice, not much else. For someone so powerful he seems to place his trust far too easily on random sinners and overlords. Seems far more obsessed with Alastor than he is in return.

Velvet:

My favorite of the Vees, her fashionista personality is very fun and I love the designs of the outfits she makes and wears. Doesn't seem very interested in anything that Vox or Valentino get up to, so I wonder why she joined them.

Valentino:

Ew.

Adam:

Ugh. Also, where is Eve?

Lute:

Beautiful design when unmasked. I like her personality, even if I'm not rooting for her side whatsoever

Emily:

My favorite angel! She's kind and very similar to Charlie, I hope she can change Sera's mind about the extreminations, especially now that the first soul to ever be redeemed is inhabitanting heaven!

Sera:

Seems kind enough but feels like she's holding back something very dark. I can't get myself to trust her

Lilith:

Beautiful, but not as good of a mother as I thought she would be. I wonder why she left Lucifer and Charlie by themselves. Did she make a deal with Adam or Lute??

[phantastus]

Hi Kit!! I was thinking about Shattered Memories for the first time in a little while and so I decided to search your blog about your opinion on it and you said it frustrates you, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it if you're interested? :)

Oh man, what a coincidence. I was just talking about this with @dunglizard.

Hmm… to condense my thoughts on it, my basic opinion is that while I did enjoy playing the game, there was a lot ABOUT it that was frustrating. Most of my issues with it have to do with wasted potential and the disrespectful attitude of the people making it, and then also there were gameplay aspects that were frustrating too. Of the two, the gameplay aspects are more forgivable imo, because like, no game is perfect and they really were trying to do something new, which is risky and doesn’t always succeed even with the best of intentions.

But to be clear– I had fun playing it! The story was compelling, the character writing was great, and the entire visual makeup of the game was haunting and beautiful. There was a LOT about it that I find really commendable!

And, really, what made it so frustrating to me was the fact that those aspects of it… deserved better, and were sorely let down by the things that WEREN’T good about the game.

I’ll put my negativity under a readmore because it got really long.

(disclaimer: I’m an angry old Silent Hill fogey and while I think I’m generally more reasonable than a LOT of fans, I’m still exactly the kind of person that Tomm Hulett likes to chortle about never being able to please, so like… keep that in mind.)

So uh, we’ll start with the gameplay I guess!

I love the idea of a no-combat Silent Hill game, and I remember when the game had only just been announced, I spent so much time chatting with friends about how a Silent Hill game featuring a protagonist who had a valid reason not to be able to fight the monsters (such as a small child, or an elderly or disabled person) would be really, REALLY cool. But even with Harry 2.0 as the playable character, I was still looking forward to what I thought was probably going to be a stealth-based Silent Hill game, which was SO exciting for me because the most scared I’ve ever been while playing games as a kid were ones where you had to sneak, with no option for combat (guess who nearly had a fucking heart attack every single time I had to sneak out of the Slytherin Common Room in the Harry Potter + the Chamber of Secrets PC game? spoilers it was teenage me). If you were caught, that was it. And the trailers for the game seemed to indicate that this would be the case, with mechanics for hiding from the monsters so that they wouldn’t find you. You know, like what would make sense for a no-combat horror game. This is a common mechanic for horror games both indie and mainstream NOW, but at the time, the only major one I remember knowing about was Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which blew everybody’s MINDS with how pants-shittingly scary it was, and the thought of an SH game trying the same thing was like:

But then when the game came out, that mechanic wound up being… kind of broken. Maybe the AI for the monsters was just ramped way up or something, but hiding essentially felt useless, since there was basically never a time when the monsters WEREN’T chasing you. No matter how far ahead of them you got, they still seemed to know exactly where you were and would catch up to you within a few seconds. If you DID manage to hide, most of the time they seemed to telepathically know you were there anyway and would drag you out. Not to mention, since you pretty much had to run the entire time without slowing down or stopping, there was no time to check the map and, as the courses got more and more difficult, they basically stopped being scary. 

There was no time to actually breathe and build up that apprehension of “Will it find me? Did I lose them? Is it safe to pull out my map and figure out where to go?”– instead it just became an obstacle course race where all the other participants were not only more in-shape than you but also knew the course by heart and wanted to eat you. What should have been heart-stoppingly terrifying and dread-inducing just turned into “oh FUCK now I have to run around at breakneck speed for twenty minutes and hope that I’m going in the right direction”, and that just got… really aggravating after awhile. It could have been really good, and it just… wasn’t. 

Pictured above: me thinking I’ve taken a new path for the 20th time only to emerge directly into a Raw Shock army who already  knew I was coming.

At best, watching Harry get repeatedly dogpiled by Raw Shocks every time my thumb faltered was pretty funny. But they were going for adrenaline rush and instead wound up with yackety-sax. Not a good move for a game boasting about how damn scary it was. The non-chase portions of the game definitely had a lovely, dread-filled atmosphere, but the fact that you were never in any kind of danger until the scripted events where the Obstacle Course Race From Hell happened kind of dampened their effectiveness, too. 

ANYWAY, onto the other stuff, which I concede is more personal than objective. But I do feel really strongly about it, so here goes.

Originally, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was going to be an entirely new entry in the series, not only featuring a new story and characters but also the first female protagonist since Heather Mason. Between THAT and the unique atmosphere that SHSM had, I really, REALLY think that it would have been an awesome entry to the continuity, and GOD does Silent Hill need more female protagonists!

But somewhere down the line, that idea was scrapped in favor of the “re-imagining” idea, so instead of a new entry to the series, instead we got… a new entry where the characters had the same names as the ones from SH1, despite resembling them only in the most superficial of ways, and also you’re playing as a dude instead of a girl because of course you are. The honest truth is that if those familiar names were filed off and only a few minor tweaks made to the story, it would STILL be a completely original entry, which makes the re-imagining aspect feel jarring and cheap– the game really felt like it was banking on the shock value of Harry Mason Actually™ being an alcoholic womanizer and Dahlia Gillespie Actually™ being a hot sexy twenty-something, etc more than anything else– when the truth is, if they had just trusted in the story they were telling and the genuine emotional impact of the characters’ problems, they would have had an equally (if not MORE, imo) impactful and memorable game.

Instead, the SH1 aspects felt forced and ugly, and when you factor in Kaufmann 2.0’s smug soliloquey at the finale about accepting that your [Cheryl’s AND the player’s] perfect image of Harry Mason was wrong~ and unrealistic~, the entire story felt like a smirking hamfisted dickpunch aimed at people who enjoyed the original Silent Hill story about a diminutive and flawed (yes, even in the original canon, he WAS flawed) but determined man who rescued his child from a nightmarishly abusive home situation. 

Reading Tomm Hulett’s opinion (pictured above: me reading almost anything Tomm Hulett says) on the game only reinforced that impression– I honestly don’t feel like going and looking up the interview because it pissed me off but it mostly consisted of insisting that SHSM was “as canon as any of the other games” and was supposed to be considered a viable in-universe ending to SH1 (despite… literally being an alternate universe BY DEFINITION and not being continuity-compatible with the other games). Given Hulett+Co’s consistent obsession with “fixing” the original games (see the HD collection debacle, during which the original voice actors/actresses were mocked rudely and key dialogue changed to be “more believable” despite the new dialogue being totally deaf to narrative, characterization, and tone), it’s really hard not to take the “We fixed Harry Mason to be more realistic and the entire message of the game is about how silly and fantastical the original character of Harry Mason was, hohoho” attitude as being deliberately condescending and self-masturbatory.

Not to mention, while I have NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with the characters of SHSM entirely on their own (hence why I’d honestly be all for filing the names off and treating them as entirely-unique characters in their own story, which I feel they absolutely deserved), I personally find the whole concept of… ‘fixing’ an everyman hero by ‘revealing’ him to be an unfaithful, child-abusing alcoholic, and a delightfully sinister and brilliant villain to be a Sad Mom ™, AND a troubled and traumatized but ultimately heroic young woman to be a Daddy Issues Stereotype who was also Crazy The Whole Time ™ to be…. just repugnant, in the same way that I find overly-grimdark versions of superheroes repugnant.

Pictured above: me when people take pre-established characters and make them edgier for shock value and not much else.

For me, that was what took an otherwise interesting and poignant story and cheapened it for the sake of beating a dead horse (because they’d rather SHATTER our MEMORIES of those silly OLD games, lol cry moar babies!!! than take the plunge and try doing something that could stand on its own).

The characters of SHSM deserved so much more than to just be a “fuck you” to SH1, and the characters of SH1+3 deserve more credit than to be considered flimsy and unrealistic just because they didn’t fit into someone’s approved level of Grimdark. Given that, after all the smirking and hullabaloo and Problematic Decisions ™, the game’s connection to SH1 was still so, so superficial, it went from being just a questionable storytelling choice to actively making the game worse than what it could have been, for virtually no good reason.

And final footnote: These are my opinions, and obviously there are ample reasons for people to like and enjoy SHSM! I also in no way think that writing characters with the issues presented in SHSM is bad or “edgy” by itself, it’s purely the reasons behind doing it and the fact that it denied me a bona fide in-universe canon Silent Hill game with a new female protagonist that puts it in that territory for me. Nobody has to agree with me if they feel differently. Thank you for reading.