Yeah even with the enemy designs being very cool, they get repeated so often and they respawn so much they lose their luster pretty quickly.I agree with your criticisms. The combat often spoils the mood and the fact there are any "respawns" at all is idiotic.
What's funny to me is that the issue was already solved in the 90s. Not every single game needed combat. The original clock tower has a stalker enemy and learning how to evade it was a time-sensitive puzzle, as opposed to modern horror games where you sit in a corner for 20 minutes waiting for the scary thing to pass you by. Twilight Syndrome had no enemies at all, it was an adventure game with fail states.
Keichiro Toyama (The director of SH1 and the forbidden siren series) actually cited the Syndrome games as an inspiration, which is probably why the Siren games have a more unconventional approach to enemy encounters and I tend to like them a lot more overall. (One of the main characters of the original Siren was called Suda as a homage to Suda51.) Hell everything about the Siren games is unconventional, for some reason they manage to feel less "gamey" to me despite being separated in actual levels you pick from a menu, with side objectives and shit. (Not that being "gamey" is a bad thing in and of itself, but that's clearly not what Silent Hill was going for.)
I don't mind it in levels that are actually well designed, like the Hotel in 2 (I'm just using that as an example since that's the one you played). However, each of these games has some area which is just a gray corridor that you walk through over and over again fighting enemies for an hour or so which completely stops the pacing. Even 2 had that, I think right after the historical society where you just walk through some samey underground corridors for ages.I will say though that for me the vastness of the maps as a consequence combat design is a silver-lining. There's something about them I find pleasing. I suppose that's personal taste. I may have enjoyed tighter areas and camera more, but we will never know.
IMO the game would be better served by being tighter and cutting out a lot of fat, but I blame that on gamers being braindead ape-like mongoloids who value their money in terms of playtime lol. (Hence why gaming finally transitioned into endless dopamine dealing machines with no beginning and no end, so I can stop caring about it altogether.)
I did find the premise of 4 to be very interesting and I really liked the apartment, it was just the cut off point for me in terms of how shitty gameplay was that I couldn't really bring myself to play it. I'll probably look up a playthrough at some point but I was busy doing other stuff (mostly actually working on the website).The amount of monsters in Four is almost like an MMORPG. It's a shame because I find that game to be overall the most interesting in the series. I'd probably still rate it higher than Three.
It sure would be nice if some cuck faggot cracker honky who blinds me with his absolutely radiant whiteness would produce me that "don't lose your head" susie image so I could make the site map but that's asking too much I guess
I did not play any of the western ones except for Shattered Memories, which had an interesting premise at least. It wasn't that great overall though. I don't have much to say about it because I don't think there is much to say about it.
I don't mind the magical girl stuff since that's only in NG+. So it's meant to be some funny shit you use during replays to add some variety. I don't see a point in it though because that would require the games to be fun to play, which they aren't.Presentation is good in the first act of Three but even then the writing doesn't really match. Characters are too loud and stupid. Whole thing can be played with magical girl outfit and there's no change in mood. Promo materials were misleading.
I guess my point is that the silent hill games are designed to be experiential/arthouse type games like Clock Tower or the D trilogy, but they have a bunch of shit in them that was incorporated thoughtlessly from the resident evil games which really kills my interest. Enemy encounters, unlockable weapons, unlockable costumes, all that shit is in RE because those were very gamey games that encouraged replayability to get better scores. Which would come from memorizing item locations, minimizing travel time, optimizing puzzle solutions & picking which enemies to fight, with which weapons and when in order to have enough ammo for boss fights. In that regard they are similar to the Metroid games, even though the gameplay style is completely different.
Silent Hill has all the elements of an RE game, picking up ammo, smashing a crowbar over an enemy, but makes every action overtly tedious and lacks the overall structure that makes those encounters worthwhile. Playing on hard combat mode I wasn't exactly speedrunning and yet I never ran out of ammo (except for the final boss of 1, so I actually ended up with the boss killing itself lol) and I had plenty of healing items till the final encounters. There's nothing to optimize really, so why even have it at all. The exploration and puzzles are good though. Deadly Premonition has the same issue with the retarded combat segment that were forced in by a producer, but to be fair they amount to far less of the overall playtime in that game than they do in Silent Hill, and D4 had done away with them entirely.
What I dislike is how Silent Hill fans tend to describe SH as if they were reading an encyclopedia, or some real world scientific literature.Never underestimate gamers.
They always go on about the "mechanics" behind a spooky town being haunted which is completely retarded, because it's not happening in the real world. There are no fucking mechanics behind a town being haunted. That's where I feel the writing is at odds with the design, because a lot of the visuals and soundscapes are meant to be evocative in and of themselves, but noone who professes to love the series seems to pay attention to that because a bunch of talking heads just sit down and explain the plot to you. Even 2 which is the one that's unconnected to the whole cult conspiracy, all the psychological stuff is pretty much explained outright, while I think it would actually benefit from being more abstract and obtuse. Like after I see james suffocating his wife I don't also need a monologue of him explaining everything that happened in detail.
It's definitely more pronounced in 3 than it is in 1 and 2. The first two games have more segments where you walk through the city streets which help ground each labyrinth as an actual place within the town, while in 3 most transitions happen in cutscenes. For that reason I don't even feel like Heather's town is a believable place, I don't even remember what it was called lol. The mall level in particular bored me to tears.My main complaint about Three could also be applied to the others. Areas feel seperated into "levels" like it's Super Mario. This is a trapping like you said and I don't want to get too abstract in my criticism. Four is better in this regard. The retracing of steps, the routines and the constant returns to the room has a grounding effect and works harmoniously with the purgatory theme and overall mood. It's the same thing that makes F.S.R. work but then they ruin it by throwing Dodongos at you.
It makes me think of how few games actually use a believable, lived in place as a setting. (Believable doesn't necessarily mean realistic.) The Yakuza and Shenmue games obviously are examples of it done on a high budget, but even your example of FSR is correct. The GHM Blood+ game also has a town setting which, while underutilized overall (mostly because they had to finish the game in 7 months, so they drop the investigative angle of the game pretty quickly and put you against a bunch of dodongos instead LOL! They even look like dodongos.) is very nice and moody and provides a good setting for the game. Just having it there and seeing it does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of establishing the setting of the story, which is then expanded upon in dialogue.
Santa Destroy from the original NMH would be a better realized version of that, since you can actually enter stores where you make small talk with people and what not, but I feel that having big glowing videogame hotspots almost ruins it. (Yes I understand they are there because Travis is a delusional retard who sees his life as a videogame.) It almost makes me wish that No More Heroes 3 was good because there's a lot of storytelling and atmosphere you can put in designing a location, but in 3 it really does feel like a unity asset flip where you get magically teleported to beta-testing arenas to fight gay aliens. You can almost see the design intentions that informed FSR, ONK and NMH1 if you squint your eyes and smoke crack, but none of the buildings do anything but provide a location for teleporters and random tchotchkes. You can't even buy shirts at the shirt store, you have to trade achievements with random aliens in random spots which are mostly gained by grinding said gay aliens.
Kurayami was probably going to be the next step in that kind of GHM design but I guess it was not meant to be.
I think the setting of Silent Hill overall is pretty well realized and probably my favourite part of all four games (though I agree with you that 3 is the least interesting one, because its locations could really be anywhere). I liked the games okay overall, I just think it's a shame they are bogged down by trashy gameplay and cheesy writing because I really liked everything else. I can see why people hold Yamaoka in such high regard for example, it's clear he either did not give a fuck while working at GHM or he was given no direction whatsoever because his soundtracks really fit every segment of every SH game he worked on, while they don't fit any of his GHM games at all. Shadows of the Damned is almost scored like a horror game lol.