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phantastus · 7 years

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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.

#Silent Hill #SHSM #kit rambles about silent hill #this is a largely negative post #so folks in the tag for regular SHSM content might want to scroll!#asks 4 me #Anonymous

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swipestream · 6 years

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Tales of the Once And Future King

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Uther Pendragon sires a secret son and with his last breath sticks his sword into a rock and proclaims it a test to determine who shall inherit his crown. Arthur yoinks the sword, founds Camelot with its Knights of the Round Table, saves Britain from multiple threats, and finally dies at the hand of the bastard son sired by Arthur and his half-sister. Along the way King Arthur’s knights engage in antics of both heroic and debauched, and generally fail to heed the warnings of Arthur’s chief advisor the (wizard?) Merlin. In the end, we are told that King Arthur will one day return to Britain in her hour of greatest need.

Better yet, don’t stop me, because you’ve never heard this one quite like this before.

Fans of the King Arthur myth understand that it is not just A story. It is THE story. The rise and fall of Arthur encapsulates the history and myths of Western Civilization, and includes all of the best and worst that post-Roman European culture has to offer the world. From Arthur’s rags to riches rise to the arrogance that leads to his fall, to the redemptive arc that runs through the final stages the story, it even manages to embrace both western pessimism for the state of the world today and its optimism for the future. It is at once the story of one man’s heroic journey, but a story that includes space for the tales of his coterie of knights as they struggle to defeat their own challenges both internal and external. As such, the legend of King Arthur goes beyond just THE story and becomes ALL of the stories. It’s not just a legend, and its not just a genre. Taking all of this into consideration, the King Arthur myth becomes a narrative device – a means of storytelling narrow enough to provide context all out of proportion to length, and wide enough to create space for adventure quests and morality plays and even execrable feminist doggerel. The legend’s scale and scope occupy a large enough chunk of literary real estate to have earned its own moniker – Arthurian.

The rich vein of the Arthurian legend has been tapped countless times by authors and film-makers, each with their own spin and take on the subject matter, and most of them using the deep cultural cachet of the story lend weight to thin plots, weak characters, and stomach churning political messages. By now the Arthurian “brand”, such as it is, has been so watered down that fantasy enthusiasts can be forgiven for rolling their eyes at each new entry into the field. They would do well to set aside their reservations upon seeing the cover to the recent Arthurian collection, Tales of the Once and Future King. This collection, edited by Anthony Marchetta and published by Superversives Press, represents a triumph of the genre on both the technical and the entertainment level.

Already a collection of stories united by their Arthurian inspiration, this collection is further united by a narrative that presents four weary travelers crossing Britain during a vaguely modern time of troubles. Lost in a dark wood, they find themselves captured by…bandits(?)…one of whom claims to be the Bard of Britain, Speaker for the King, and heir of the legendary bard, Taleisin. The interplay of these four wanderers and their captors provides a framework for each of the individual stories to both inform and influence the action. The result turns Tales of the Once and Future King into a strange hybrid at once a novel featuring Inception-style levels of tales within tales within tales, and a complete narrative in its own right.

It’s not the first book to use this technique, but it is one of the most effective. In most cases, a narrative framework for stories from a collection of authors feels bolted-on – an awkward and hamfisted excuse to pad the length of a book, and often one that come across as being as cheap and as lazy as a sitcom clip episode. Marchetta’s use of the narrative framework is seamless. The placement of the tales is deliberate, the characters within the larger framework react to the stories in the collection naturally, and the action in the interludes lays the groundwork for the story to follow. In most collections of this type, the reader can safely read the stories in any random order and the narrative within the framework won’t lose any of its punch. In this case doing so would lead to a nonsensical series of non-sequiturs. The deftness with which these stories are tied together elevates the quality of entire collection to create a title even greater than the sum of its parts – and its parts are excellent.

Though a little heavy on the YA side of storytelling, the individual tales evoke the sense of wonder and majesty that the theme of the book demands. Taliesin’s Riddle, by Peter Nealen, starts things off with an Arthurian contemporary tale of a knight facing his first significant test.

Then things get a little crazy. The title of the next entry itself spirals out of control – an excellent precursor to the tale that follows – as Matthew P. Schmidt presents (I’m not making this up) Tristan and Isolde, A Chivalric Tragedy with Giant Steampunk Battle Robots (also, vampires). In this day of “LOL so random” humor, one can be forgiven a quick sigh on reading that. Have a little faith in your editor. What follows is indeed a chivalric tragedy with giant steampunk battle robots (and vampires), but a chivalric tragedy with giant steampunk battle robots (and vampires) that takes the concept of a chivalric tragedy with giant steampunk battle robots (and vampires) seriously. The characters in Schmidt’s story are deadly earnest – they face a mortal threat armed with battered equipment and never once break character to crack wise or throw knowing winks at the audience. They are genuine people living in a fully realized world and that simple authorial decision lends this story a weight as heavy as the machines they pilot. The action is stirring, the stakes meaningful, and the result a page turning read with far more gravity than the title suggests. Tristan and Isolde, A Chivalric Tragedy with Giant Steampunk Battle Robots (also, vampires) manages to rank as my favorite story in the collection, which clears a high bar because I don’t even like steampunk.

From these first two short reviews, you can already see how much variety this collection contains. Not content to limit itself to prose, the collection gives us Ben Zwycky’s epic poem, The Beast. The modern day ghost story of Jonathan Shipley’s Lady in Waiting eschews the iron-clad route to delve into the depths of the Lady in the Lake. L. Jagi Lamplighter brings her own dreamlike take on the mythic cycle, in Understudies of Camelot, one that touches deeply upon the central Christian core of the mythic cycle. We even get a World War Two adventure story in R. C. Mulhare’s Sacred Cargo.

All in all, Tales of the Once and Future King presents a very satisfying collection of short stories. Like the best of symphonic music, the variations on a theme are used to the best extent possible to give the reader that ever elusive “same, but different” quality that trips up so many creatives in the written and visual arts. Although the settings vary wildly, the central core of the Arthurian mix acts as a perfect framework within which to present a wide variety of tales. In it, Marchetta proves that the rich mine of the story of King Arthur and friends is anything but played out.

Tales of the Once And Future King published first on http://ift.tt/2zdiasi

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