7th March 2015, 10:58 AM
ABF, sorry but until you go through it, you just aren't qualified to say Eternal Darkness is "deeper" in ANY sense than Silent Hill. It doesn't even APPROACH what Silent Hill accomplishes, and I'm not even talking about as a series. DK64 vs Banjo Kazooie? That's opinion, but Silent Hill's deeper meanings vs Eternal Darkness's? Yeah, it's basically objective fact that Silent Hill is deeper.
Let me explain. Eternal Darkness is not deep at all. It pretends to be deep, but it's a VERY shallow storyline. It's Lovecraft as interpreted through Cliffnotes. Now, let me say this. I enjoyed Eternal Darkness. The controls and the magic system? The sanity effects? Nice touches that make the game fun to play through. However, there's no "meat" to it. The characters have basically nothing going on other than their surface, namely because the game doesn't take enough time to actually develop them. The closest it gets is that overweight founding father type fellow, but even then, it's cliffnotes Lovecraft. It spends so much time talking about how overwhelming the elder gods are, it never takes the time to develop the main characters. I really have no idea what's going through the main character's mind, for example. Even the sanity effects are rather blatant and uninspired. Creative from a gameplay perspective, but they've got nothing to add to the narrative except for the whole "elder beings will drive you insane" thing. I'll give you the attention to detail on history. That was impressive, but even there that history doesn't really help develop the individual characters. The best you can say is that the story isn't about any one person so much as the long term manipulations of tiny parts of humanity by an elder being (across three timelines). There's something there, but it is still a shallow story in terms of the human condition or examination of individual trauma.
Silent Hill, on the other hand, DRIPS with meaning from beginning to end. You've barely even started the game, so I can forgive you for not noticing such factors. Heck, I might even suggest you just skip this one and play Silent Hill 2. (The thing about the series is, generally, each game is it's own unique storyline. Feel free to skip around, it won't ruin anything for you.) Avoid 5 and onward, because they end up being "paint by numbers" Silent Hill games, just stick with 1-4. The nature of the games is that they are "secret and personal journeys" (to quote Majora's Mask). There are "elder gods", maybe, but they're barely hinted at and the story doesn't even focus on them. The reasons for what's going on are left intentionally vague, so you can focus instead on the characters. Further, making the background of Silent Hill hidden actually furthers the atmosphere. Look at the best actual Lovecraft stories. The Rats in the Walls is intentionally vague about exactly what the heck is going on, and that's what makes it such an amazing story. By the end, you are left wondering exactly how much of the narrator's story was real and how much was just in his head. Asking for concrete answers is like asking for a definitive answer to whether or not the main character was still asleep at the end of inception. The mystery itself is the POINT.
So we get to Silent Hill. Every single monster, every single location, every single word, person, and puzzle, have a hidden meaning. Those hidden meanings are the real story, because it's deconstructing your main character. In Silent Hill 1, the most moving scene in the game, for me, involved the final scene with the nurse from the hospital you meet at various points. It really shocks you because the whole time you may have thought of yourself as the story's "hero", but that moment steals away any notion the main character, or you, may have had that you were actually any sort of hero. You're just another selfish survivor, that part tells you. No, I couldn't really say what skinless pterodactyls "mean", but that's the first game, they got a lot better at it in the second one.
Heck, the second one does even better at ambiguity. That was the first game in the series I played, and I prefer it that way. There is literally no explanation, at any point, as to what the town is or why it's there (unless you count the joke endings), and that makes the town all the more unsettling. The biggest mysteries you solve in any of these games are about your own character or another character, not anything regarding old gods or whatnot.
Basically, if you're going to say that the combat system or interaction in Eternal Darkness is better than Silent Hill, I won't argue with you. It is (though even Eternal Darkness suffers from old fashioned survival horror controls by today's standards). However, let me tell you this. If you play Silent Hill 2-4, you can change the basic directional controls to the one used by Eternal Darkness, switching from "3D" to "2D" in the options. Silent Hill 1 doesn't have this option, which is another reason to skip onward if the first one isn't doing it for you. You still won't have the "highlighted targeting" of individual sections on enemies, but it's better than tank controls at least. Give it a try.
Let me explain. Eternal Darkness is not deep at all. It pretends to be deep, but it's a VERY shallow storyline. It's Lovecraft as interpreted through Cliffnotes. Now, let me say this. I enjoyed Eternal Darkness. The controls and the magic system? The sanity effects? Nice touches that make the game fun to play through. However, there's no "meat" to it. The characters have basically nothing going on other than their surface, namely because the game doesn't take enough time to actually develop them. The closest it gets is that overweight founding father type fellow, but even then, it's cliffnotes Lovecraft. It spends so much time talking about how overwhelming the elder gods are, it never takes the time to develop the main characters. I really have no idea what's going through the main character's mind, for example. Even the sanity effects are rather blatant and uninspired. Creative from a gameplay perspective, but they've got nothing to add to the narrative except for the whole "elder beings will drive you insane" thing. I'll give you the attention to detail on history. That was impressive, but even there that history doesn't really help develop the individual characters. The best you can say is that the story isn't about any one person so much as the long term manipulations of tiny parts of humanity by an elder being (across three timelines). There's something there, but it is still a shallow story in terms of the human condition or examination of individual trauma.
Silent Hill, on the other hand, DRIPS with meaning from beginning to end. You've barely even started the game, so I can forgive you for not noticing such factors. Heck, I might even suggest you just skip this one and play Silent Hill 2. (The thing about the series is, generally, each game is it's own unique storyline. Feel free to skip around, it won't ruin anything for you.) Avoid 5 and onward, because they end up being "paint by numbers" Silent Hill games, just stick with 1-4. The nature of the games is that they are "secret and personal journeys" (to quote Majora's Mask). There are "elder gods", maybe, but they're barely hinted at and the story doesn't even focus on them. The reasons for what's going on are left intentionally vague, so you can focus instead on the characters. Further, making the background of Silent Hill hidden actually furthers the atmosphere. Look at the best actual Lovecraft stories. The Rats in the Walls is intentionally vague about exactly what the heck is going on, and that's what makes it such an amazing story. By the end, you are left wondering exactly how much of the narrator's story was real and how much was just in his head. Asking for concrete answers is like asking for a definitive answer to whether or not the main character was still asleep at the end of inception. The mystery itself is the POINT.
So we get to Silent Hill. Every single monster, every single location, every single word, person, and puzzle, have a hidden meaning. Those hidden meanings are the real story, because it's deconstructing your main character. In Silent Hill 1, the most moving scene in the game, for me, involved the final scene with the nurse from the hospital you meet at various points. It really shocks you because the whole time you may have thought of yourself as the story's "hero", but that moment steals away any notion the main character, or you, may have had that you were actually any sort of hero. You're just another selfish survivor, that part tells you. No, I couldn't really say what skinless pterodactyls "mean", but that's the first game, they got a lot better at it in the second one.
Heck, the second one does even better at ambiguity. That was the first game in the series I played, and I prefer it that way. There is literally no explanation, at any point, as to what the town is or why it's there (unless you count the joke endings), and that makes the town all the more unsettling. The biggest mysteries you solve in any of these games are about your own character or another character, not anything regarding old gods or whatnot.
Basically, if you're going to say that the combat system or interaction in Eternal Darkness is better than Silent Hill, I won't argue with you. It is (though even Eternal Darkness suffers from old fashioned survival horror controls by today's standards). However, let me tell you this. If you play Silent Hill 2-4, you can change the basic directional controls to the one used by Eternal Darkness, switching from "3D" to "2D" in the options. Silent Hill 1 doesn't have this option, which is another reason to skip onward if the first one isn't doing it for you. You still won't have the "highlighted targeting" of individual sections on enemies, but it's better than tank controls at least. Give it a try.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)