I just went to the Silent Hill reddit and immediately wished I didn't. I knew going in that the discourse would be more divisive than negative as I heard people were mixed about the game but I didn't expect it to be so disingenuous. There's tons of comments about how the people who are complaining about the Silent Hill 2 trailer are just Youtube essayist enjoyers or Tik tok fans, people who haven't played the game.
There's even a thread where people show a Silent Hill 2 OG "combat trailer" and use it to make fun of the complaints ... even though that trailer is way better edited, even though the problem with the remake is how the style of the game didn't mesh with the style of the trailer, even though the art assets and animations looked terrible and out of place. People also didn't usually buy games based off E3 trailers in 2001.
I'll be the first to admit that I have problems with Silent Hill 2's presentation (unpopular opinion but even the VA is not perfect and I've always felt mixed about James performance specifically), and there is definitely an irony there in people complaining about jankiness when Silent Hill 2 is pretty janky. I haven't played 3 and 4 yet (unfortunately) but 2 is definitely not as perfect aesthetically as Silent Hill 1 imo, and the fact that the movement and animations almost look worse than the original has always seemed like a downgrade to me. Whenever I get around to 3 and 4 2 will probably end up being my least favorite aesthetically in the original series.
But it's still weirdly disappointing how quick people are to throw stuff under the bus. Silent Hill 2 had so much intentionality and when I look at that old trailer and compare it to the new one, the aesthetic composition is still just night and day. Everything feels perfect and I don't have nostalgia for the game considering I first played it in 2021.
It also just ignores that if the old game had a bad trailer ... so what? Games have bad trailers all the time, the finished product ended up being great and you can still see how great the final product's aesthetic was in that trailer. It's not a great point against the new game because yes, maybe it's just the trailer being awkward, but an old product turning out great despite a trailer doesn't mean people shouldn't be worried about a new product they have to spend money on now because of a bad trailer. In general if you're making an old thing new again, shouldn't part of the point be to make some things that didn't work the first time great? Silent Hill needs to be janky to work to some extent but that doesn't change that the animations look terrible.
Honestly I think a lot of what made the trailer so bad was the camera angle. I've been thinking about for a while how much REmake 2 camera angles would be weird for a Silent Hill game and this just kind of proved it. Silent Hill is a series where you spend most of your time hitting things with a club or a wooden plank, it spends a lot of time on personal melee combat, so it's fucking weird to give it a shooter camera angle. The negative qualities of the old animations are at least partially hidden by James back while the positive qualities are exuded by how exaggerated James struggle is.
There are a lot of negative posts but they are too memey so while I find them hilarious I definitely can understand the frustration and why the negative side of the community has gotten the bad reputation, because they don't use words.
I probably rambled on too long but I needed to get that off my chest because I hate disingenuous talking points. Overall this has led me to the opinion that I've been starting to get at, which is that this will probably end up like Demon's Souls remake. It will probably not be as well received, but still be considered a great remake, get an 80-84 on metacritic, then divide the fanbase between people who think it's great, people who think it's bad, and people who don't have another way to play the game.
It's an interesting game so far, and I'm enjoying the core gameplay revolving around staying on the move. I love shooters that emphasize player mobility.
