Konami is Rebranding Silent Hill...
First off this blog isn't about anything pornographic but since I'm a Silent Hill fanatic I felt it was still important that I slam the false information over on Gamescom about the franchise and how it's going to "return back to it's J-Horror roots." Secondly I wasn't even aware that there was a new Silent Hill game coming out next month...After seeing a trailer and a few scenes from it...I wasn't thrilled at all with the new direction. And yes it could have turned out much worse than this. Still, I have zero interest in Silent Hill getting rebranded as a J-Horror franchise for a few reasons. But it was probably either that or woke Silent Hill, sorry don't know any other word to describe the dumb pandering nonsense studios were doing. But before I even get into the whole J-Horror argument situation and Silent Hill getting rebranded as something it never was, there's a few other things I'd like to talk about first.
My question however... Is Konami trying to purposely get it's ass handed to it by Capcom's Resident Evil 9? I believe they are, and they didn't even have to go the pandering Western influenced route in order for that to happen either. It's Capcom who likes to shoehorn certain people into their products these days. Dragons Dogma 2 was proof of this, but it's not the first time Capcom ever did that. But the fact that Konami stripped Silent Hill of it's original identity and gave us this generic school girl character who must compete against a Western character in a bigger and much more relevant Horror franchise, well she's going to easily end up far more popular than the irrelevant and generic Japanese school girl character. Capcom could have made Yoko from Resident Evil Outbreak the main protagonist of RE9, then it would be two Japanese characters from two different horror games going head to head.
I'm already calling this one right now, Resident Evil wins, Silent Hill goes back into obscurity for another 9+ years. So it's going to be a Western character that will also obviously have a much deeper personality than the tiresome generic Japanese school girl in Silent Hill F. One thing Konami was never good at, is writing memorable characters and each Silent Hill game the characters ALWAYS fail to become popular or as big as the ones from Resident Evil. Including James and Heather the only two characters in Silent Hill that made somewhat of a name for themselves. Although I strongly hated Heather and hope she dies if they do ever remake the damn third one.
Although Konami could have gone the self destructive route and got it's ass kicked even harder than just merely stripping the identity of Silent Hill and pretending that it was always a J-Horror franchise. The battle between a relevant Horror franchise vs a dead horror franchise that's been stagnant for years until Silent Hill 2 got a remake that didn't do too badly in sales even though I thought it was still crap compared to the original. Either way a battle between two horror franchises is unfolding. So it's easy to determine that Resident Evil 9 is going to out-sale the hell out of Silent Hill F, and that's a prediction I stand by despite being a massive fan of Silent Hill. Don't even get me started on the worse era to set the game in, the 1960s. They didn't even go for at least the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s Japan.
Which horror game will people be more interested in, a Japanese version of Silent Hill that makes no sense? Or Resident Evil 9 a game that will surely outsale Silent Hill F? SH2 Remake came out and what did they do to it? Steal a few ideas from Resident Evil 4 proving themselves to be inferior and too impotent to do their own thing. So once these two Horror titles go head to head, believe me Silent Hill F stands little chance of gaining enough attention when a lot of people are already talking about RE9 and I'm starting to see art of it on Deviant Art but zero artwork of Silent Hill F...People are going to be wondering, "what the hell is this fake Fatal Frame nonsense? This isn't Silent Hill! When did Silent Hill ever take place in Japan?"My guess is if Silent Hill F took place in America or a Western town involving a Japanese girl it would make even lesser sense not like how it was when Yoko appeared in Raccoon City... I mean why would a Japanese girl be in an American town like Silent Hill anyway? Is she a tourist? Yoko in RE Outbreak I believe she was a student, but Silent Hill is so small there are no colleges or universities just one Elementary school. And if a Japanese student had a choice to attend school in America, would she really pick the one in the middle of nowhere in some Midwestern looking town? Although Raccoon City sort of looked like the Midwest too.
So instead they set this new game in Japan, and chose the weakest, generic protagonist they could come up with. Is Silent Hill F an origin story? Is it connected to any of the Silent Hill games that take place in the American ghost town? Why is the game set in Japan all of a sudden? Or is it a complete overhaul of the franchise? I can say that the monsters might actually end up better in Silent Hill F if they're going to base them all on J-Horror Mythology monsters and ghost.
But I suppose this new Silent Hill going true J-Horror is much better than ending up playing a modern shitty pandering Western version of Silent Hill. However, if I were a betting man, and I am a betting man I would have bet money years ago when Silent Hill was first released, the game was not a J-Horror franchise. How can you claim a game about Westerners in an American town a J-Horror game? There was nothing "J-Horror" what so ever about Silent Hill. The town was American, the people in it were Americans or Europeans.
If Silent Hill was originally a J-Horror game, why didn't Team Silent make the first four games about Japanese people in a Japanese town tainted with evil and monsters in the first place? Why did it start out as a Western influenced world of evil? Even the first two films were based on Westerners. It's not like the movie came out with a Japanese J-Horror version that got a Western film adaption like how it usually is with some of their actual J-Horror films. Silent Hill the first two films were written and directed by Non-Japanese people.
J-Horror isn't a bad idea for a Silent Hill inspired game but they could have just said "we're rebranding the image and world of Silent Hill, it's no longer an American town anymore. We're starting over, Silent Hill now takes place in Japan not the United States. And the characters will be Japanese." Japan has had all the time in the world to create horror games centered around the people of Japan and their own culture but chose not to do this. Because they either have no faith in their own or they believe no one would be interested in their games if they were about them.
Fatal Frame is what Silent Hill could have been IF Silent Hill started out that way in the beginning but it didn't. So when I saw the false claim of the game returning back to it's roots. I couldn't believe they would make a false claim like that about a game that was never J-Horror. The original creators were Japanese, the studio that publishes the game was also Japanese but that still wouldn't make the game itself Japanese when the characters aren't Japanese, and the setting isn't set in Japan or includes any relatable monsters of Japanese mythology of any kind... There's nothing about Silent Hill that ever made me question whether or not it was a J-Horror series because I knew from the very start that it wasn't.
Instead they completely made the game about Americans in an American ghost town. Because when I first bought Silent Hill 2 in 2001 or 2002 and then Silent Hill 3 in 2003. I don't recall either game ever giving me any sense that it was J-Horror in any sort of way. Nothing in these games felt like or resembled anything from a J-Horror genre. There was one moment in Silent Hill 4 where you encounter a ghost that looks like it was inspired by Sadako, but so what? Evil Within had a similar monster, that still doesn't make it "J-Horror." There were no Japanese characters, the game took place in an American ghost town based on a real life ghost town, Centralia Pennsylvania, is Pennsylvania in Japan? The monsters in SH all have generic names that have zero connection with Japanese culture, literature, or anything.
Because at this point they are full of crap and I lost interest in Japanese culture the moment they started promoting a lot of Westernize trash in their media in order to be more like the West, and yes that includes the current state of their shitty pornography. They do a lot of stuff over there they weren't doing before in the past because they've allowed the West to throw feces in their faces for so long that never once felt inspired to be more like China in terms of self determination. And I just don't see this with Japan or any of the content they currently make.
It amazes me because it's as if they don't know the difference between their own roots and Western Roots if they believe Silent Hill was a J-Horror series from the very beginning and lost that appeal once Westerners got a hold of it. It's like they are trying to claim the game was a J-Horror series when Team Silent still had rights over the franchise. But once it got into the hands of Western developers, the games forgot their identity and became Western when the series was always Western even under the development of a Full Japanese team.
Japan and the creators of Japan who produce and create content need to also stop walking into obscurity if they want to be relevant and taken seriously like they were in the 80s, 90s and half of the early 2000s. Claiming that Silent Hill had J-Horror roots, rubbed me the wrong way because that simply isn't true about this franchise. At least to me it isn't, and I don't have to be Japanese to understand this. For Silent Hill to have Japanese J-Horror roots or elements at all, the whole franchise would have had to start out as a Japanese horror game that departed from that and went in a Non-Jhorror direction and then returning back to what it use to be before it was bastardized/Westernized.Silent Hill F is the ONLY Silent Hill that takes place in Japan about a Japanese protagonist. Without a history to establish what Silent Hill was before this new direction and change, well Silent Hill never had these J-Horror roots that the article falsified. It was always about a Western ghost town and Western people being connected to it in some way.
But as I said before, Silent Hill F is better than what it could have ended up as if the Japanese were still following in the West moronic footsteps or if the West still had rights over the product to infest it with their obnoxious political agendas. And hey, at least they won't have the main character swearing and using random profanity to prove how tough she is either. I am willing to bet everything I own that Capcom does this stupid crap with Resident Evil 9 just to show you how edgy their new main character is.
Japan is not an independent country and they don't strike me as a nation of people who are trying to break free of Western influences either. When it comes down to media they don't think like independent thinkers, only what they believe the West will approve of from them. And even though they never did the Woke thing with their Manga's (which is why they are currently defeating Western comics). They still think the way Westerners think and believe what they believe will be appealing to Westerners based entirely upon what Western policies dictate.
This is why the Japanese content creators have been creating nothing but low quality trash as of lately, even Dragon's Dogma 2 had some pandering in it as well as characters looking out of place in a world they didn't fit into, but they were there because that's the mentality of modern Capcom. So they'll do all this stupid stuff to their modern characters like having them flinging random profanity just to make their main protagonist in RE9 seem "tougher" than what she really is. I had this same problem with Devil May Cry 5, everyone using forced profanity and being way too cocky to the point where I got annoyed and just couldn't finish the game because of the personalities pissed me off. It just shows the desperation Capcom have for appealing to the downgraded West by creating these borish try hard edgy characters that talk, and act as if they came up in the Ghetto. Not once do they stop and ask, "would this character really say this or talk that way?"
At least in Silent Hill 2 Remake, Konami or whomever remade the game left everyone the same as they were in the original game except Jame's ended up boring, dull, and unconvincing because his voice actor replacement sucked. It was even worse with Angela, but they all sucked with the exception of Laura although the original actress was still better. And that's probably because she was a real 11 year old and not some adult woman who is pretending to be a little girl masking her voice. So Laura had realism added to her in the original game vs the remake where the voice actress is most likely an adult. I didn't look into it, but I remember watching the making of Silent Hill 2 and they showed the voice actress including the mocap she did for Laura.
In the remake they hired a bunch of lame lazy actors that had no interest in the game what so ever rather than bringing back the originals.... Personally I would have liked it better if the next Silent Hill game involved Cybil Bennit as the protagonist from the first game, but the only way I would be interested at all is if they got rid of that goddamn annoying over the shoulder camera and go back to full character view or the fixed dynamic cam from the original games....
In Silent Hill F case, the protagonist will be armed with a pipe and will probably fight like total trash with it to make her more believable since you're going to be playing as a lame generic teenage Japanese school girl in the 1960s anyway. What will she know about fighting monsters? She's going to end up as a character that no one is going to care about once this game fizzles out and gets dethroned by Resident Evil like always. So I expect the Melee fighting won't even be remotely fun or enjoyable like how it was in SH2 Remake. And what about firearms? Well it's 1960s Japan, I doubt they will even bother to put any guns in the game, and if they do it will be the inferior crappy old ones no one in reality uses anymore since SH was never big on having the kind of cool firearm weapons you can get in Resident Evil games.
But the one thing they did get right in the remake, was the melee fighting and leaving the plot in tact. Either way I have no faith or hope in Silent Hill F even more so if it had of turned out like most modern games.
Therefore if Japanese gaming studios are going in a new direction that could only mean that certain gaming studios in Japan have lost interest in Western characters and Western themed ideas/concepts. So they decided to change Silent Hill completely. If they continue onward with the franchise after this, will the next game take place in Japan again or return back to the American setting once the game get it's ass handed to it by Resident Evil for stripping SH of it's identity and claiming it as J-Horror, an identity that was never part of Silent Hill in the beginning? Or will Silent Hill F succeed as a new direction for the franchise without it's old identity?
People are going to look at this game and assume that it should have been named something else entirely, like a new IP. But again Konami could have just came out and said "we are rebranding and restarting the series over, it will now be about Japanese people in Japan dealing with the unknown forces in Silent Hill." Here is the thing, when Silent Hill PT was announced, over 10,000,000 Downloads of the demo broke a record. How many people have that much interest in Silent Hill F? I'd say the odds are incredibly lower than the high expectations people had for P.T. and quite frankly if Silent Hill P.T. had of been in third person and not the lazy first person perspective, it could have given Resident Evil 9 a real challenge in Horror supremacy...Silent Hill F looks like a half assed Fatal Frame meets Clocktower and is just Konami's way of trying to make Silent Hill fail so it can go back into being that pathetic Horror franchise that lost to Resident Evil AGAIN.
Japan is producing more and more games that take place in Japan centered around Japanese characters and quite frankly they should have been doing this YEARS ago rather than kissing the Wests ass 24/7. Though I don't see this becoming a trend among studios like Capcom...At least not yet anyways. Resident Evil could easily expand into other places like what we saw in Resident Evil 4 (Europe/Spain) and Resident Evil 5 taking place in Africa. Raccoon city unlike Silent Hill is not the official town of every Resident Evil. Unless there's also a fictional town in Japan called Silent Hill, I don't see any connection between Silent Hill and Japan or why the game even takes place there. But judging from the footage and gameplay I've seen so far, this is a Silent Hill game I'll most likely skip out on since it doesn't even look as interesting as Silent Hill P.T. excluding the stupid first person demo. If the game had of gone in that first person direction I would have strongly hated it even more than the over shoulder camera perspective. And also, what does the damn F stand for anyway? Silent Hill Fucked? Because it will be once more people go out and grab RE9 instead.
