Silent Hill

[torpid forge]

(and that is the highest spoiler tag I'm clicking tonight)

[spark kraken]

Playing this on NG+ is not only looking to really make everything so much more clear but also seems like it's different enough to actually warrant wanting to do a NG+ rather than it having one or two bonuses

to be fair all the background cult/early Silent Hill settlers stuff was always in the way of notes and such and mostly left for you to decipher all those details

[torpid forge]

yeah, one of my big criticisms of SH3 is that the cult is extremely generic and boring unless you find a lot more of the lore than I managed to in my playthrough (and I'm usually above average at that)

[spark kraken]

I never thought the cult was necessarily generic, especially because it's like... yeah it was made during the time where it was the cool thing to do stories about evil cults, what I mean is that it was mostly out of the way stuff not super relevant to the main story progression and you only really found out about this stuff through notes about the history of the town and the sightings of the cult and it's all left for you to piece together so yeah most people probably aren't super on top of all that info after playing the games

and honestly the connection here is gonna be even harder for most people to figure out but it's super cool that it's there

[torpid forge]

mm-hmm, I appreciate the acknowledgement of past lore even when the whole premise of the installment is to have a totally new and different setting from all the previous ones

what I mean is that it was mostly out of the way stuff not super relevant to the main story progression
to be clear, I consider it a major issue with the game because the cult being your antagonist and the driver of the entire main plot is extremely in your face :P

it was definitely a clear issue I can point to to at least partially explain me not enjoying it nearly as much as 2

[spark kraken]

I never saw it that way, I guess mostly because I guess it's not technically necessary to know all the information about the entire history of how the cult came to be, you just have to know that there is one
But hopefully that can be one aspect they can expand upon with the SH1 remake

[torpid forge]

maybe, SH1 I honestly don't even remember well enough to criticize

at this point I know it better through video essays than the actual playthrough I did forever ago

[spark kraken]

It's very subtle, especially since it's a NG+ thing, it's literally just a note you can find, but it's a really cool detail that reminds you ''yeah this is the same universe'', because everything is so different that I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking this is some type of non-canon alternate universe thing
It also recontextualizes SH: The Short Message where || they talk about the ''Silent Hill syndrome'', basically retroactively implying that the syndrome is people tripping balls with White Claudia drugs, or the drugs are magical and allow for the summoning and communion with dark creatures and entities, or BOTH ||

[torpid forge]

which probably means 1 was "just too old and janky" to properly immerse me, so I guess I'm the target audience of the remake

[spark kraken]

I'm planning to play through it again for October, I gotta remember to set it up

[torpid forge]

the way this year is going I'm unlikely to even get to an NG+ of this game

[spark kraken]

So long as you don't care, the NG+ lets you change the difficulty which is nice if you just wanna blast through it and see all the different stuff rather than do a full new playthrough

which is another cool detail about the game asides from the other conditions it tells you for NG+

[torpid forge]

that's a good idea actually

though from what I read of the difficulty differences I'm a bit skeptical story mode would speed things up much in practice, e.g. it doesn't sound like it affects damage sponginess

unrelated serious question

what's up with the journal puzzle pages sometimes having a three-leaf pin and sometimes a five-petal flower pin and sometimes no pin? those have to mean something but I have no idea what

huh, that symbol is supposed to be a kudzu leaf

[spark kraken]

I actually don't know but I know about those symbols, || pretty sure the three-leaf one is the same symbol she has on her clothes || and || the five petal flower pin is the one the fox man gives her at the end that carries through to NG+ which she gives her at the end of the rituals I assume it's some marriage pin thing ||

Ooooh my god

[torpid forge]

yeah we've seen that symbol everywhere

this tutorial message is just the first time it's been described so I finally know what plant it is

[spark kraken]

At the beginning of the game || when Hinako has a headache at the temple and the room goes red and she starts banging on the door and the fox man says ''good morning, that must have been some nightmare'', that's Hinako after moving in with her new husband having a mental breakdown nightmare, and the entire other world is a maze and looks like that because it's her rich husband's mansion, which to her would be a completely new, confusing , maze-like enviroment. In the real world she was banging on the doors of her real life room after having a nightmare and waking up ||

bravo ryukishi

bravo

[torpid forge]

anyway I need to focus on ||devil trigger|| tutorial, I don't think the game expects me to be death looping here

[spark kraken]

|| the note you find at the introduction to the otherworld when the fox man is showing you around, that's her describing how nice the mansion is and that's the fox guy IRL just showing her around the mansion and introducing her to the new house || ooooohhhh myyy goooodddd
and || the reason she goes so insane is because the entire game she's talking about how she HATES having her autonomy taken away from her and hates when others tell her what to do, so even though she's marrying a nice rich guy, she still hates that she doesn't have a choice on the matter and has to leave her life behind ||

[torpid forge]

this is a fascinating mural considering what's going on here... (cw: gore)

[spark kraken]

To be fair if you're on Hard it really is pretty hard

it's actually a tough game which is unusual for Silent Hill

[spark kraken]

Oh interesting that's gonna be a thing later

you'll know when

you'll definitely know when

[torpid forge]

honestly I was expecting ||the 2nd ceremony|| to be that

[spark kraken]

You would, but you'll know what that is probably referring to when you see it

[torpid forge]

to give you some idea of the pace I'm going at, I just got to the ||3rd ceremony|| cutscene

[spark kraken]

Interesting..... || the boy that got bit by the fox in some notes here is said to have no abnormalities whatsoever, but the mom says the kid seems like a completely different kid and has been applying himself into studies harder, and there's a note directly after that mentions how some people getting possessed by the fox is sometimes favorable, so the fox man may not be evil persé, he's just possessed by the fox spirit ||

[spark kraken]

the one where || they cut off your face? ||

wait that's stupid to say if you didn't actually get there, I mean the one where || you get the fox mask ||

that's probably better wording

[torpid forge]

lol yes

||plus it's only half of my face||

hm, interesting journal update: ||"in exchange, I'll offer/sacrifice all that I have. My body. My mind/soul. Even my resolve to always make my own decisions, which I've treasured since childhood."|| Is that what the ||doll|| represents?

[spark kraken]

Interesting that you picked up on that because people in the chat I'm in are still wondering what the doll represents

But it's highly implied from what I've gathered || that the doll is herself from her childhood, since that is the doll she's seen playing with at the beginning ||

[torpid forge]

not clicking

ah crap they're starting to use JP so old-fashioned I can't parse it

[spark kraken]

the rituals also seem to || be less literally evil demonic rituals, and more like what that journal entry says. It's Hinako giving up parts of herself completely after she got sold off to marry a guy she didn't want to marry, and then at the end, fully giving herself in, and giving up her own autonomy which is the thing she keeps saying throughout the game is the thing she thinks is most important, even if it means going against people that are trying to help her she still will not accept others making decisions for her ||

[spark kraken]

yeah click on them later maybe

but you're over the halfway point now I think

Not at the end though, it seems like this would be the end, but it isn't

[torpid forge]

tbf I'm absolutely still wondering, but I did pick up on the fact that literally the first scene of the game shows you the doll in a pretty specific context, so we've got something to go on there

hold up, one of those extras had a non-fox mask

wow

that was a lot of subtext to break down later

but first, this fight is gonna be so cool and also kick my ass probably

[torpid forge]

there we go, ||do I get to join FOXHOUND now ||

that's interesting, the powers didn't transfer but the injuries and clothing damage did...

[torpid forge]

||that was Junko!?||

ok I didn't get this at all when she first mentioned ||"Shimizu Hinako" and "Hinako" being two different versions of herself||, but after that whole sequence I'm 90% convinced that ||just "Hinako" is the version of herself that obeys cultural norms, gets married, and lets the husband make all the decisions; that's why the given name is the same but the family name is dropped||

and that's why Mr Mask doesn't have a name (yet?), ||he's just a placeholder for what a good husband is supposed to look and act like||

oh hey, it's the Soulslike philosophy

[spark kraken]

You'll know who he is later, but at the same time that's a valid read on it because || even though you find out who he ends up being, it never really ends up mattering that much as much as it matters what he represents and what his existence means for Hinako and her relationship with her friends and family ||

[torpid forge]

yeah, I only expect to get partial credit at this point

[spark kraken]

Hinako's life motto really is just soulslike philosophy

[torpid forge]

3RD CHARM NOTCH

oh wait I need 130 more geo first

but ALMOST 3RD CHARM NOTCH

[torpid forge]

the park: ||hold up, did he say "Koutei"? not "Shuu"? ...so many questions||

[torpid forge]

is the save screen telling me that ||my home|| is located in "Kudzu Heights 2nd District"?

well that was the most suicidal detour the game's let me do in a while, but it put a Nengan Ema at the end of it so I had to

now to actually go to ||my house||

I have officially run out of excuses to put this off

[spark kraken]

also important
https://bsky.app/profile/nitrorad.bsky.social/post/3lzp4dnl3vs2e

James (@nitrorad.bsky.social)

SILENT HILL FUCKIN RULES AGAIN

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Bluesky · Sep 25, 2025, 11:31 PM

this is why I oppose AI-generated background textures, we'd never get greatness like this

on the same level as Minmo

[torpid forge]

"女は…家畜とは変わらないんだ…" yikes ||I get where protag's coming from but that's your mom jesus||

[spark kraken]

|| mom's kind of awful.... but in a ''perpetuating a system of abuse she was also a victim of because she had no other choice'' kind of way ||

[bold torrent]

a completely unrelated quote from the lead writers prior work

[torpid forge]

Ornstein and Smough defeated

I have no idea what is going on anymore, I think in a good way

[spark kraken]

Yep

That's how we all felt too

You're at the point in the game where the entire thing just completely went off the rails and you don't even know not only what's even going on anymore but also you have no idea how actually far in the game you are

[torpid forge]

had to take a break

so, more concrete thoughts on events in The House™

||The Hinakos conversation, taken in isolation, seems to be telling us that just-Hinako is the mass murder-y one, and Shimizu is the one not confronting her feels. This initially felt like it doesn't fit with the fox wedding where just-Hinako is a willing bride and Shimizu is the one who resists.||

||But then I realized just-Hinako is probably the Mist Monster, because:||

• ||they both have the fox arm (there's a timeline question here but hold onto that)||
• ||at the Shimizu House, just-Hinako claimed to have let Shimizu live when she could've killed her; the Mist Monster did indeed do that back at Shuu's house||
• ||just-Hinako also said she's going to kill all our friends and family, and that last irl shot is implying the parents were killed by a large creature in an old-school JP bridal dress with a mutilated face. We haven't clearly seen that part of the Mist Monster yet, but the lower half of MM we saw at Shuu's house does fit that dress.||

||The big question for me now remains how the two worlds relate. The clothing damage transfer heavily implies these sequences take place in the order we see them, and Junko just now appeared to be referencing the parents' deaths, but MM had the fox arm at Shuu's house before the sequence with the three ceremonies... I can't think of any answer here that fits all the evidence yet.||

Nire: you may now laugh

[torpid forge]

aaaaaah I think I just got the answer to that exact question

||the missing person poster was for us... though the name here used to be "Suzutani Mayumi", dunno if that's a separate poster or something protag just made up or what||

so with that in mind it seems like the timeline might be ||Shimizu family has a fight, Hinako runs away, gets sucked into this Inari cult that causes most of the spirit realm(???) sequences we've played through, then after just-Hinako's Mist Monster powers are fully awakened she goes home, Shimizu family has another fight over Hinako's disappearance which is the one we actually see at the start of the game...||

I think this cutscene just confirmed ~90% of what I was rambling about

niiiiice, I did get that right

so now I'm thinking at least one of the other endings is ||Shimizu remembers/confronts these memories sooner, and Hinako doesn't kill everyone at the end||

[torpid forge]

[torpid forge]

credits

oooh, a sub-5%

whoa, there are huge differences in the opening cutscenes on NG+

every time I think I've got the gist of it another wrench gets thrown in

ok pulled up an LP to rewatch the OG scenes, so ||the flashback talk with her doll was about other kids excluding her, on NG+ it's about being married off. Present-day Hinako has the fox pin now. The argument with her parents was about disrespect and "why can't you be like Junko", on NG+ it's about failing to consult them but they still talk as if she's going through with a marriage to clear the family debt|| which is one of the spoilers you/Nire said earlier so I'm guessing you've also watched this

[torpid forge]

I'm now finally realizing this is "new game+" in the Nier sense: you kinda have to play more than once or you haven't actually finished the story, there's just too much that isn't available the first time

[spark kraken]

Yep, NG+ is straight up necessary to understand the entire story, which is pretty crazy for a Silent Hill game but I kinda like it a lot

[spark kraken]

I haven't seen all of NG+ yet, just the beginning portion so far
|| her being sold off to a man to pay the family debt is just what we concluded from the first playthrough which ended up being correct ||

[spark kraken]

Oh, you think || all the cult stuff was real? ||

I interpret it as || not being real at all, just a complete hallucination/netaphor, the cult rituals is just Hinako giving up more and more pieces of herself until she becomes the bride and there's nothing left of herself anymore, that's why she ends up killing her younger version which is the one without the fox arm you play as, it's all completely in her head just like the beginning part of the game. She isn't a 16-17 year old teen hanging out with her school friends, did you notice that some of them are confused about why she's even here? They bow down to her and call her ma'm too, they're all like 20 now and she's imagining them all in their highschool clothes because she just came back to town after being sold off, that's why Rinko is so mad at her for coming back just to try and steal Shu from her ||

|| the timeline I'm still unsure about but the timeline I interpreted was: Hinako saves fox boy as a kid, Hinako falls in love with Shu, Junko is sold off to get married, Hinako ends up getting sold off after too to pay dad's debt, sometime between she comes back to town, at the day of the wedding Hinako goes crazy from the stress of it all plus the drugs she had been taking and she starts killing everyone ||

[torpid forge]

well, keep in mind I was writing all of that before ||the mid-credits scene||. I also prefer to avoid playing the ||"it was all a dream" card until as late as possible, since it's a really easy/lazy answer that doesn't actually answer anything Until I can say why it's this particular dream/delusion/etc, it's a non-statement to me.||

[torpid forge]

||"saves fox boy"|| oh, I didn't even consider that, I've been waiting for that guy's name to come up anywhere else

[torpid forge]

||well the bowing and ma'aming was presented as part of a joke, so it wasn't suspicious at all the first time around, though I agree all of what you said is probably on the right track||

what I'm particularly suspicious of right now is ||are the 1st and 2nd playthroughs actually depicting the same events, or roughly parallel events at different times? Given all the differences in the opening scenes, I currently suspect that the 1st playthrough opening actually was high school Hinako actually hanging out with high school friends, and the 2nd playthrough opening is (like you said) Hinako visiting home after agreeing to marry fox guy.||

but I'm only ~5 minutes into NG+ so that could still change very quickly

[torpid forge]

I guess neither of us have explicitly stated this yet but it's probably worth adding to the conversation that I'm 99% sure most of the monster designs reflect ||various things Hinako hates about women and men in these traditional gender roles. I imagine most of us figured sexism was relevant to the designs as soon as we saw the first regular enemy, but after completing a full playthrough I think it's clear that in-universe these designs are coming from Hinako's psyche, not anyone else or any malevolent supernatural force.||

[spark kraken]

Oh yeah it's extremely clear especially with her descriptions on her journals

[torpid forge]

yuuuup

||especially that bit about the glowing monster only attacking women||

[spark kraken]

|| and the multiple boobs/pregnant bellies monster ||

what could that possibly mean

[torpid forge]

classic example of the subtext/metaphor managing to be more horrifying than the real thing it's alluding to

the SH2 boss encounter in Angela's subplot still haunts me (and it's so much worse/better/aaaaaaaaa in the remake)

[torpid forge]

ok, let's get back into it

machi ga kirei

hm, more changed dialogue: when you squeeze between two buildings to bypass the truck, the whispering women in the background are ||originally talking about someone dying from a curse, but on NG+ they say they're envious of how well someone did (I assume they mean our husband)||

I wonder if that's related to the "Suzutani Mayumi" missing person's poster ||that gets replaced by a poster about us later||

that poster and the early cutscenes with our friends seem identical on NG+

[spark kraken]

when you encounter the first enemy make sure to look around

there should be something new in that area with the small river and the small crossing bridges

[torpid forge]

I've actually pulled up the IGN walkthrough so I can check for stuff I missed and stuff added by the second playthrough

and an LP to check 1st playthrough cutscenes

early weapon is a welcome change

[torpid forge]

tbc, you mean ||the inari boxes||, right? I remember those being inaccessible the first time, but the first of those comes waaaaay after "the first enemy"

[spark kraken]

No I mean || there's a tunnel that wasn't accessible in the first playthrough I'm pretty sure that has a radio with a UFO broadcast ||

[torpid forge]

oh no that was there the first time

what the radio says changed, but the room was there

[spark kraken]

Okay then maybe we just missed it the first time around then

[torpid forge]

looks like this LP missed it too so I can't easily prove it lol

[torpid forge]

when the first otherworld transition happens, ||originally mist shrouds all the buildings and the whole world sort of evaporates away around us, but in NG+ the environment seems unaffected and Shuu calls to Hinako and runs over to her||

all right, time for my first Lost In Fog puzzle in my non-native language

oh, that wasn't so bad

[torpid forge]

haven't noticed any cutscene/dialogue differences here yet

unfortunately the IGN NG+ walkthrough only covers the first two sequences in each world... but also I found a document here that's not in the walkthrough

early adopter problems

regardless, this is definitely new

[torpid forge]

I knew I'd seen "Mayumi" somewhere else before, finally found it

[spark kraken]

The UFO ending is so good lol

[torpid forge]

finally getting back to it, and indeed this pattern continues: ||when Hinako gets KO'd at the end of the first Dark Shrine sequence, originally we just see her lying there as the world is eaten away by mist, but in NG+ the environment is unchanged and we get a new camera angle showing the doll standing behind one side of the door||

[spark kraken]

That's because || she doesn't take the pills this time ||

[torpid forge]

yeeeeees, finally more lore on this guy

I'm glad they make it so easy to toggle languages so I can take screenshots whichever way I feel like

||oh hey I found the Evangelion ending ||

[torpid forge]

the tradition is alive and well

[torpid forge]

I finally have a theory on this: all the pins represent "this section of the journal is complete", but ||the 5 petal flower pin is for irl / Ebisugaoka topics, and the 3 kudzu leaf pin is for otherworld / Dark Shrine topics.|| There's also a sparrow pin I currently have on Hinako's character entry ||(the only character entry with a pin )|| and the Search mechanics entry. The Combat entry has a unique-so-far fourth kind of pin ||of snakes???||. No idea what these mean beyond the obvious Hinako = bird thing.

speaking of which, do you know what "hina" means?

the doll is now visible in the cutscene in ||Rinko's house|| before the attack

I haven't noticed any dialogue changes since the opening

oh that same cutscene also ||has red goop on the stairs after you fall down them||

[spark kraken]

chick? like small bird

[torpid forge]

yeah

[spark kraken]

someone pointed it out in the chat I was in and I only noticed after but they said something about how most of the names end with 'ko' which is apparently a super common naming convention thing that's supposed to make them all feel more like regular people or something along those lines

it's one of those cultural things that you really gotta know about to pick up on

[torpid forge]

it's certainly very common for girl names, and all three of these girls have the -ko ending

I guess the mom doesn't

of course Sakuko is "saku" because ||that means "bloom" and the flowers get her first ||

I am unstoppable

hm, yeah, I see why this room is not available until NG+

[spark kraken]

|| the tools are already bloody.... ||

also, in that same area/room || there's multiple other boxes of the same size as your arm already fully stacked ||

[torpid forge]

||I did open one and saw a hand, but wasn't sure what to make of it until you said that||

let's see if I'm less incompetent at the boss now

FIRST TRY NO HEALS

granted this is on story mode combat and with the upgrades from last time

...I might have to drop a bunch of healing items on the ground just to make space for money lol

[spark kraken]

So, on a second playthrough and with the idea in mind that || the fox guy, the mansion, and all of this story is taking place after Hinako is sent to live with his new husband, it completely re-contextualizes why and how the fox guy can ''vanish'' the evil monsters.... it's because this is his house, this is his mansion, and Sakuko just broke in and went crazy ||

|| which is why the monsters in this area are the dolls and the man monsters that are chained up, those are his servants in the real world, or a representation of them ||

[torpid forge]

I don't think it's that simple, ||because he didn't do the same to Rinko, and there's no other indication that Sakuko did anything that extreme irl||

though I agree a lot of the "monsters" in these levels are probably just ||his servants/family/etc||

wait a

[spark kraken]

this is actually one thing I ''don't like'' about this game's story, which I actually do like, but I don't like it when it comes to trying to piece it all together is that || you never really are able to tell what literally happened, what was a hallucination or a jumbled memory, and what is completely and utterly metaphorical and entirely psychological ||

[torpid forge]

huh, that cutscene now ends with a ||flash-forward montage of the three ceremonies||

[spark kraken]

it's cool because.. that's really cool when a story does that and it's what makes it interesting and adds to it, but it's not cool because you end up never knowing || what was factually 'real' and what wasn't ||

[torpid forge]

we're also still missing an explanation for ||the missing person posters|| that gave me a totally different interpretation of these scenes the first time around

[torpid forge]

personally, I do think a story like this should eventually allow an attentive viewer to pin down broadly what was or wasn't real (like SH2 did), but considering I haven't even seen a second ending yet we've still got plenty of time

[spark kraken]

All the other Silent Hill games still had some of this some stuff is real some stuff isn't things, but it was always very clear when it started and when it ended, and it was especially clear sometimes that people would sometimes see the same things or not, but here? who knows man, the only semblance of any of this we get is || during the very final scene when we are shown the very real objective factual world and how Hinako is being chased by police after going on a murder spree with a knife and possibly the pipe at the wedding || but other than that who knows, || the entire fog world and otherworld sequences jumping back and forth and connecting at the end where Hinako 'kills' her younger independent self to give in to her role as a wife complicates things even more and makes the chances of any of those things actually happening much lower ||

I was expecting initially that || all the 'fog world' sequences would be real, but I don't think a large majority of any of those interactions are actually real at all, especially considering that the entire time none of them are actually teenagers and instead they must be adults, since everyone is so confused at why Hinako is even here because they all know she's supposed to be living with her new husband now ||

maybe the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th playthroughs will make it more clear but for now I only know about the first playthrough, half of the second, and the UFO ending

[torpid forge]

tbh I still haven't seen ||"everyone is so confused at why Hinako is even here"||, unless you're referring to stuff I still haven't gotten to

[spark kraken]

It's from right at the beginning of the game

|| Sakuko asks her first what she's doing around here, and then Rinko shows up specifically only mentioning Shu and being surprised and weirded out that Hinako is even here ||

[torpid forge]

ok that is all you meant

then I'm just gonna have to disagree

there is surprise, but I don't think any of it rises to "confusion", much less ||none of this is real|| levels of confusion

[spark kraken]

Oh that's not what I mean by confusion

I mean surprise, if that's a better word to use

Not confusion in the sense that ''this isn't real'', confusion in the sense of || '' why are you here in town again? why aren't you at your husband's house in your new home?'' type of confusion ||

[torpid forge]

fair

[spark kraken]

because timeline wise, || Hinako is here after she already moved in, but I assume not after the wedding, so it must be in the time between the wedding and her moving in to her new house, she just came back to town ||

which is why I assume || Shu isn't surprised at all by Hinako being here.... because they probably already planned to meet up, especially since he's the one supplying her the pills ||

[torpid forge]

tbf ^this is still my current theory. Everything before the monsters showed up fits with it IMO, and everything after that is probably less real and thus the lack of significant dialogue changes since then hasn't affected its plausibility.

yeah, any way you slice that scene, it's clear that Shu expected her to be there, Rinko did not, and probably Sakuko did not though her reaction didn't really pin that down for us

what was unclear the first time around that seems obvious now is that ||lines like "don't you have anything to say" and "it's not like you to just accept this" are almost certainly talking about Hinako being married off, which does put at least a strong lower bound on when this might actually be happening||

[spark kraken]

Yeah, that's the kind of dialogues that || make me think this is definitely not them as teenagers and is happening in the ''''present'''', but I also don't think any of the fog stuff or monsters actually happened either at all.... so it's unclear to me whether Hinako going around town with Shu and Rinko running from monsters actually happened at all ||

[torpid forge]

the ||missing posters|| still bug me the most since they seem like an extremely strong hint about ||what the Dark Shrine sequences represent, especially after seeing Mayumi's message there||, but that clearly doesn't match with the idea that ||those are all symbolic of her moving into her fiance's house||

[spark kraken]

I also am not even sure that || Hinako didn't straight up murder Sakuko herself, especially when the last words she said was ''you traitor'' except she didn't even get to finish saying it, which could imply to me that Hinako just snapped at that moment ||

but if she did do that, || I don't see why Shu and Rinko would hang around with her after that, but then I don't know what could have killed Sakuko in the ''real'' world, but I'm still not fully convinced that all the monster stuff isn't happening exclusively to Hinako especially after they make a point to mention her being overdosed on drugs (very VERY possibly the white claudia, which is a hallucinogenic) ||

[torpid forge]

||at this point I have no idea if Sakuko is even dead||

[spark kraken]

again: who knows

|| all the ritual stuff I know for a fact isn't real, it's all purely metaphorical, it would be cool if it really was all some sort of dark ritual from an evil cult like SH1 and maybe in some alternate timeline or future playthrough with a different ending, it really is real, but I know for a fact it's all just a metaphor for Hinako just slowly giving up pieces of herself to ''fulfill her role'' in society as a wife ||

some notes imply that it could be real, || with some notes that I don't know if they are NG+ exclusive talking about the union between gods and supernatural entities and regular people, as well as a note talking about how encountering and being possessed by the fox spirit can sometimes be benefitial, but they're very minor and I haven't seen anything to support a strong connection there yet ||

[torpid forge]

I'm pretty sure one "union" note was in the 1st playthrough, but a second one is NG+, and the ||fox possession can be good note|| is also NG+, and the ||Kotoyuki medical record|| is definitely NG+, which together heavily imply ||he was fox-possessed, or at least would have been perceived as such by the superstitious locals||

[torpid forge]

do you have a citation for those "fact"s? (besides the mid-credits scene ofc)

I mean I doubt any of those scenes were 100% literal, but I'm not ready to declare them 100% metaphor either, ||it's not like anyone is theorizing she didn't actually agree to marry a guy||

[spark kraken]

Me that's just how I interpret it all to have happened, because I don't believe for a second || she actually cut off her arm, her face, and turned into a giant evil wolf armed no face bride monster. I just interpret that all those scenes must have all been some sort of religious or shinto rituals for marriage or something in the real world, maybe all the other ladies with fox masks were servants helping Hinako out in some sort of pre-marriage bride ritual stuff or something, but in Hinako's mind they're all warped and twisted, because to her it represents giving herself up and becoming something she isn't and doesn't want to be ||

[torpid forge]

then yeah we're on roughly the same page

[spark kraken]

now, the thing that is still confusing me is || why the doll continues to say ''don't trust the fox mask'', because it feels like it's setting him up to be this dark entity or a cult leader or something, but that never really happens at all ||

[torpid forge]

I just want to be very careful about over-interpreting when we have so little solid footing for any of this

[spark kraken]

So I'm wondering if a different playthrough || will actually go through with the ''it's all real and the cult and dark evil entities are real'' angle ||

[torpid forge]

oh I didn't see any confusion there at all

||the doll represents her childhood resolve to always make her own decisions, the part of her that she decided to suppress when she chose to marry this guy, and these rituals where she gives up a part of herself probably metaphorically are precisely what the doll wants to prevent despite Fox Mask and Hinako being on the same page about going through with them... at the time||

[spark kraken]

That's what I thought at first too, but || the framing of it all makes it seem like the fox guy is trying to be nice but is actually evil, playing into the whole ''foxes are mischievous creatures'' thing, but he doesn't really seem to have any evil ulterior motives or intentions other than just... wanting to marry Hinako. and Hinako going into this situation would already not like him anyways because she doesn't wanna marry this guy anyways, so why is the doll going ''don't trust fox mask'' when Hinako probably already doesn't trust him anyways? it feels like a red herring of sorts ||

[torpid forge]

I think that "contradiction" is just part of the subtext on how these gender roles work, ||he's being the good and caring husband and yet the whole premise that these are things Hinako should do and he should support her doing is fucked up from the get-go||

[torpid forge]

||Yeah, assuming this is mostly metaphorical, he's just the husband in this particular wedding, and isn't the "leader" of anything; exactly the same procedures happen in any other marriage. Just look at Junko's body in these scenes.||

[torpid forge]

It's possible, but I really hope not. IMO that mid-credits scene already was a pretty hard commitment about certain things being actually real and other things being mostly metaphorical. And one of the few commitments we have at this point. Reshuffling that in another (non-joke) ending would just feel like cheating.

what I think is far more plausible is that many of these scenes have different meanings in the 1st and 2nd playthrough; I stated my specific theory already, but even if I'm wrong about that, there's just too many differences (not additions, differences) that are way too intentional not to mean something

||heck, maybe there is an Inari-worshipping cult and Mayumi and Hinako did get kidnapped as teenagers, and being married off to this other guy years later is bringing back those memories...||

while we're here, one of the few things I'm still baffled by is how after the middle school sequence ||Rinko keeps telling Shuu that Hinako is long dead||; I guess it could be a bizarre way of saying ||she's taken and he needs to move on|| but that feels like a stretch

[spark kraken]

That's what we came to the conclusion that meant too, || we assumed it's Rinko fully taking it out on Hinako for coming back and ''ruining'' her chance with Shu, but also it's implied again due to her drug usage that maybe Hinako was already delirious, violent and had mood swings in the real world, and Junko already confirms that Hinako just kept and kept overdosing herself with the pills so she may have gotten more and more erratic, which is why Rinko says that the Hinako they knew is dead by this point ||

I don't actually remember right now if || Shu ever shows remorse or takes responsability for giving her the pills at all, but if he did it would make sense ||

it's also genius that they make Rinko say all that stuff || after she puses Hinako off the stairs and starts acting all weird... it's a perfect subversion of the idea that she's starting to get possessed by the evils of the town, especially at that point in the story where you could have NEVER imagined where the story would eventually lead to and it would be perfectly reasonable to assume she's getting possessed by some entity instead ||

[torpid forge]

ironically I never even considered her being possessed, because her actions seemed very human to me, and the surface-level supernatural badness didn't seem to have any interest in or need for possessing people

[torpid forge]

don't think so, but also he's not around for any of the scenes that imply there's anything wrong with them

for now there's just too many unknowns for me to pick a theory for these parts: ||we know the pills have negative side effects, but we don't know that Hinako was ever behaving problematically before the wedding, or if any of the events after the monsters attack represented something real, or if any of Hinako's 3 friends were even really there||

...then again

||what if the monster attack was a game Hinako and Shuu were playing, Sakuko left right at the start of it, while Rinko's getting fed up with it and trying to talk Shuu out of playing childish make-believe games and that's why he eventually goes along with "abandoning" Hinako||

[spark kraken]

Okay I just || scrolled my mouse all the way to the end of this NG+ walkthrough on youtube to see if the ending cutscene is any different, and it's totally a completely different cutscene, luckily I only saw colors because the thumbnail is too low quality, but at least I know that the ending of NG+ should definitely at least give more context or is significantly different from the first so I guess some things will become clearer ||

[spark kraken]

|| it could be but I find it too hard to believe that a bunch of 20 year olds are running around 'playing' like that but I guess it could be one way of explaining it if we assume all these fog world interactions are literal and real minus the monsters, and it could fit in with Rinko going ''why do you keep calling her partner/you never treat her like a woman/''did you know that sometimes you talk like a man?'' stuff ||

[torpid forge]

for now it's just a random thought

honestly there's a lot of things you could easily say are "unnatural" if they're kids or if they're adults but I feel like there's plenty of room for interpretation there, and the fact that a behavior is weird doesn't necessarily mean they aren't actually being weird lol

[spark kraken]

apparently the requirement for one of the five endings is to have at least two of the other endings, so the first required one, and then an extra one, to be able to unlock it, so this game needs at least three playthroughs

I'm just wondering if || just the endings are different or if any of the other NG+ runs have any other different characteristics, or if all the NG+ runs have the same story and lines ||

[torpid forge]

I'm not gonna look up detailed requirements until I at least get a second ending, or get stuck on that somehow

but so far it seems like I should be able to solve the ||spirit blade|| puzzles on my own

first, need to double-check if I really am out of walkthrough at this point

[spark kraken]

hmmmmmm, || there's ''mayumi'' again, whoever that is. and more implications of the whole ''gods are real'' idea ||

this is from the worship hall area in NG+ if you haven't gotten there yet

[torpid forge]

gtk, I have not yet

[spark kraken]

the guy I was watching play isn't gonna be playing this game for a while so I might as well just kinda go through this walkthrough on my own and see what's new now or else I'd be out of the loop entirely

[torpid forge]

looks like there aren't any walkthroughs covering the NG+ differences in as much convenient detail in a spoiler-proof format as the unfinished IGN one, so I guess I'll continue using their first playthrough walkthrough to check for stuff I missed the first time, but just rely on raw gamer skill for the NG+ material

[spark kraken]

Not yet anyways

[spark kraken]

Mmmmmmmmm

|| the little shed near Shu's house with the note about the pills in the first playthrough in NG+ instead has an entire new cutscene and a letter of Shu basically saying goodbye to Hinako, and the interesting part is she leaves the pills there after saying goodbye herself ||

[torpid forge]

I see, we're back to "not clicking" territory for me

meanwhile I'm trying to get the achievement for killing this optional big enemy

[spark kraken]

Oooooooooh, and the cutscene you get directly after that || the fox mask guy is NOT guiding Hinako down the stairs anymore... it's just her, walking down the stairs alone, with the fox arm and mask already, and she's still acting like she's holding someone's hand and talking to nobody ||

iiiiinteresting

Oh wow this playthrough skips so much

[torpid forge]

back to where I'm at, oddly enough the big enemy here ||doesn't stay dead, even though all the smaller enemies do, and this is clearly "the real world"||

[spark kraken]

Like, not this walkthrough, the NG+ skips so much

[torpid forge]

...huh

[spark kraken]

so I guess that's good for replays

[torpid forge]

nothing's been skipped for me yet

[spark kraken]

If you want to know || so far I haven't seen any of the rituals take place, Hinako already has the fox arm and mask since entering the Worship Hall, after going to Shu's house and going to the Otherworld, you just go straight to the part where you 'walk down the aisle' with fox mask instead of going through the 2nd and 3rd rituals ||

so I guess that's why || you see the images of the rituals flash by during that one moment ||

[torpid forge]

not yet

[spark kraken]

the dialogue with || Junko and Hinako after the Rinko boss fight is, of course, completely and entirely different ||

this time || Junko is talking about how she ''also'' had to ''kill'' her father, mother, even HInako herself, and all of her friends too, and that Hinako has to decide for herself but that the choice will come at a great price and that she only wants Hinako to be happy ||

[torpid forge]

heh

[spark kraken]

Interesting || there's some more new notes about the lightning splitting down the tree as well as a new interactable with an ''indecipherable character'' that makes Hinako have a headache and think about certain areas, the last of them a tree with a knife on it ||

ahhhh, that's what it is... || it's where to find Dad's Old Kitchen knife ||

Aaahhh that's part of the sword quest

I see I see

Mom!!! What the hell

|| ''I can't believe my dear husband would throw a knife at my beloved daughter..... I mean, what if he disfigured her and made her UGLY and UN-MARRIABLE anymore?! '' ||

also, there it is again with the -ko names

|| animation cancel parries?????? jesus christ this game ||

hhhmmmmmmmm........

|| that's the same thing Hinako says herself too....||

Of course the scene with || the mom and dad in the table at her house are different too... this time Hinako tells her mom that she hates her and dad is asking Hinako if she's hiding anything ||

maybe... don't do that....

wwwwwwoooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

the cutscene with || the other Hinako at her house is completely different too and THAT is where the image of the girl with the peeled off face comes from jesus christ that caught me super off guard ||

[torpid forge]

unfortunately I'll be taking a break seemingly right before it gets good :P

just did ||spirit sword|| part 3 and will pause at the school

[spark kraken]

Yeah this is where differences seem to get more apparent but the good part is that it seems like it's gonna go by faster than the first time

the talk with || Junko now has her talking about how ''it'' is still alive and she urges Hinako to ''kill it'' ||

[torpid forge]

the Nier comparison was more apt than I thought

[spark kraken]

If you already got the sword then I think any of my previous messages are good to go now

[torpid forge]

nah I have no idea how to actually get it beyond the pattern established by these three ||jizou|| puzzles so far

[spark kraken]

Oh you're at the third jizo thing okay yeah then no

you haven't even gotten to the part where || Hinako has her arm and mask without even going through the rituals ||

so at around the point after the school is where things start picking up

As in, differences are a bit more apparent now

ooooooohhhhh...... you

|| so in this cutscene obviously Hinako isn't all drugged up and there's no conversation about pills but instead Junko is berating Hinako for not accepting her fate, telling her Shimizu Hinako doesn't exist anymore and that she's not welcome here and she's going to take care of it, and then.... doll ||

|| FACE... YOURSELF ||

OOOH

OH

Okay so, first of all: || heh, nice fireworks||

But also: || JESUS SHU ||

|| you're still alive?! ||

THERE IT IS

|| YOU KNEW???? ||

|| shu boss fight??? ||

|| holy shit ||

Huh....... okay.....

wwwwoooaaaaahhhh

holy shit there's gonna be a lot to dissect with that one

but weirdly enough || still didn't clear anything up ||

|| pffff holy shit man ||

so this is || the third ending route, which is super nuts so far, and I totally knew one of the endings was gonna go for the whole ''he's actually a supernatural entity'' route ||

yeah holy shit wow this game requires || 4 playthroughs to fully understand EVERY single aspect of the story and get the true ending ||

|| interesting, even in this ending Shu and fox man are still ''friends'' ||

OH, || fox man was a FRIEND of Shu when they were kids? ||

[torpid forge]

should I just assume I won’t need to post anything for the rest of my run

[spark kraken]

|| so this fully confirms that they're totally not teenagers and their uniforms are all in Hinako's head, this is Shu somehow getting into fox man's mansion for the wedding and attacking him and helping Hinako leave and she's still in her bridal gown and they both run off ||

[spark kraken]

I still wanna see what you think and discuss it this is my first reaction to this stuff so far

aaaaahhhhhh look at that.... || the third ending implies the 'fog' is steam from geysers who have shown up around ebisugaoka full of hydrogen sulfide gas and everyone has been evacuated.... so it could all be a complete hallucination still anyways ||

Aaaaahhhh hah.... || the TRUE ending then, the fourth ending, neither staying with fox man or staying with Shu.... ||

this is the only || ending where Junko doesn't get frozen by an outside force.... because this is the truth of what happened, Junko realized what Hinako was talking about and allowed her to choose for herself ||

OH MY GOD || Hinako in this fourth ending comes into the final boss cutscene saying ''why must we fight to the death just for one of us to survive this nightmare?'' which implies that they REMEMBER all the other playthroughs happening oh my god ||

I can't believe this game actually needs you to || complete it FOUR times to get the actual full story of what is happening ||

I actually feel like that's just asking too much of people honestly, wow

That's insane though, it's not just that the different || endings are all different, they're CONNECTED, they're directly connected to each other, sequentially, they wouldn't make sense without the other previous to it, that's absolutely insane ||

This isn't just Nier, this is next level

wait.... so the whole || supernatural thing is real after all then???? I'm so confused.... ||

I absolutely cannot believe that this game really || took me for a spin like this, I theorized earlier that the supernatural stuff may be real, then the game showed me it's not, then I theorized again... then not, and NOW it comes back to yes actually there IS a real fox demon entity ||

ooOOOOHHHHHHH || DUAL BOSS FIGHT WITH BOTH OF THEM WAOW ||

this game is nuts, this game is nuts

too nuts, if I dare say

|| and this time it's the doll instead of Shu huh....||

yeah this is Nier, this is just Nier Automata

that's it, this is Nier: Silent Hill

oh my god ITS DOING IT AGAIN
|| now the fox demon is just his dad who's super drunk and upset that he's not managing to actually marry the girl he chose to marry ||

oooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh || this is why Junko talks about her running out of time and having to decide now, this is what Shu meant when he said in the very first playthrough that whatever Hinako decides he's gonna be fine with ||

oooh myyy gooood myy heaaaaadd aaahhhhh this game, this game

|| hug ||

this is..... surprisingly positive.....

This is getting out of hand.... || now there are two of them! ||

that is..... so nice.....

wow, wow holy shit

so I got it easy, I got to just skip through the gameplay sections (still keeping track of any new notes and dialogues though) and I got to just blaze through those different playthroughs, I really don't know how different it is to actually go through all of them oneself, maybe there's some certain things to do in specific sections of the game that can make multiple playthroughs easier, because I really don't know if NG++ or NG+++ have any more differences than NG+, if so, that would be insane, but that was really worth it, it really isn't a complete experience with just one or two playthroughs, which is insane to say because the game is already long as it is

counting all those endings? this is the longest silent hill game by far, it's actually pretty ridiculous

you're gonna know better than me because I just can't play the game without my computer turning into a particle accelerator but I really hope that any subsequent NG+ is gonna be easier to go through and that the different endings will be easy to get

that was super worth it though I'm gonna need to really process all that because I just blasted through all that but that's really just up there with 1-2-3, it already was the first time around, but every other playthrough just really solidifies that more and more

the || endings being all part of the story and requiring the previous one to work narratively || is just..... it's so insane, but it's so fitting for this franchise in a weird way... in a sense, the || endings are first ''bad'', then ''neutral'' then ''good'' and then ''true'' ||

anyway, wow, nuts, just nuts, truly

I guess let's just say there's gonna be a lot to talk about

....i hope I don't get nightmares after going through this game 4 times tonight....

I guess we'll find out

[torpid forge]

you're probably not that far from my specs, I have to lower graphics to potato in order to get a good enough framerate for the combat

so I guess I'll just assume that whole flurry of spoiler posting is unsafe for me until I'm way closer to the end of all this

🛸

ok, this looks interesting, I dunno if I missed it the first time or it's new, but

||does the tori'i symbol mean kids who got spirited away? we have seen two missing person posters||

confirmed rabbit names are Urara-chan and Yukimaru (= Snowball), there's a 3rd starting with Sa but it's torn

you guys definitely weren't here last time

[torpid forge]

ah I found the new classroom with the ||Fox Sacrifice|| info, so this drawing is now clearly related to that

the list of names on the whiteboard is ||Hinako, Kimie, Kanta, Sachie, Sakuko, Rinko, Shuu, Kotoyuki||, and I do not remember any details about ||"Sachie"|| though I'm confident I've seen the name before

recording this for later analysis

||I feel like you told me who Kotoyuki was long before I could've possibly figured it out myself, but if I hadn't known this might have been the thing that gave me the idea||

The names on the lockers we can interact with are Asakura Ayumi, Suga Yoshie, Tsuchiya Taiko, and Aoi Takeshi. I think these are all one-offs for the puzzle with no deeper significance, but not taking any chances.

[torpid forge]

hm, I don't think Junko said anything about ||killing|| last time

🥚

checked the walkthroughs I have, seems like I probably got everything there is to get here, NG+ included

what the

ok so first off

I've been wanting to re-watch the bit where Fox Mask has his mask off, I always felt I was missing something there

||I can't see a scar or anything, but he does say something like "you saved my life, then my soul was taken" which fits the NG+ notes about Kotoyuki getting fox-possessed||

but right after that WE ALREADY HAVE ||THE FOX ARM/MASK/ETC|| APPARENTLY???

Rinko saying "you're even prettier than usual today" hits super weird this time around

||I still can't get over the fact that our metaphor for "the patriarchy is everywhere" amounts to "furry TF kinks have been hypernormalized" ||

huh

Nire: you're familiar with Hina Dolls, right?

the NG+ room's letter says "same village" , my first thought is ||Mayumi??? does this guy have a legit harem, or was she only hired as a servant?||

ah, literally the other document in this room is signed ||Mayumi||

this has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but

the Chizuru-ya shop sells these little foam plane toys

when I was a kid, every time I went to the dentist I got one of these in addition to a lollipop

ah, the NG+ origami note in here explains a few things about how Nire was phrasing things above

[torpid forge]

I'm gonna assume Nire posted this ||sword dream|| note earlier because this is so clearly an ending hint

[spark kraken]

I mean I know vaguely what they look like and that they're dolls but that's about it

[spark kraken]

If you're referring to the flashing images after touching a certain item then no that's actually a hint for immediately in that area

[torpid forge]

nope, I'm talking about this:

[spark kraken]

Oh yeah those are direct hints, like very direct and literal hints for what to do

But I think you'll know when you can get the sword when you get there

As long as you're going through the map as best as you can

Because I'm pretty sure the item you interact with to get the final clues wasn't there in the first playthrough....

I think

To give you a very general non-spoilery clue just to let you know which area is the one where you need to look out for any stuff you may have missed, if you're just going through a particular future area and Hinako starts saying weird stuff about a tree, that's the area where you'll definitely get it so look out for anything in that area as you go through it

[torpid forge]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinamatsuri

The primary aspect of Hinamatsuri is the display of seated female and male dolls ..., which represent a Heian period wedding, but are usually described as the Empress and Emperor of Japan.
...
Families normally ensure that girls have a set of the two main dolls before their first Hinamatsuri. The dolls are usually fairly expensive ($1,500 to $2,500 for a five-tier set, depending on quality) and may be handed down from older generations as heirlooms.
...
Traditionally, the dolls were supposed to be put away by the day after Hinamatsuri, the superstition being that leaving the dolls any longer will result in a late marriage for the daughter
...
Historically, the dolls were used as toys, but in modern times they are intended for display only

I doubt all of ^these details are directly relevant to the game, but you can see how they're extremely thematically relevant

also worth noting that in the Dress-Up Darling series, the male lead is a hina doll maker; I don't remember if you're familiar with that one

[torpid forge]

I was already planning to revisit The Tree ™ so this should be fine

[spark kraken]

I watched the first season so I'm familiar but I haven't kept up with it

[spark kraken]

Yeah well I mean the obvious stuff of course is totally relevant with the themes of the story for sure

[torpid forge]

I'm trying not to assume "hina dolls represent a traditional wedding" falls under "obvious"

since there wasn't a note spelling that out in-game

lol, they have to word to specify a good/benevolent kitsune

speaking of deep lore questions

what kind of bird is this

clearly a borb, but more specifically

[spark kraken]

I guess obvious to us since we already went through the game once and we kinda have a grasp on the themes of the story and what something like that doll could represent

[spark kraken]

no idea actually

[torpid forge]

incidentally, I think the game doesn't actually say this in the difficulty descriptions, but I'm convinced story vs hard combat has a huge impact on how much damage you take, and on how much durability your weapons lose, but not so much on enemy health

[torpid forge]

I asked ChatGPT and it said "bullfinch" (and recognized this is an ema), and further googling implies it was not hallucinating that one

apparently the JP name of that bird is "uso", which is such an unfortunate homonym

[torpid forge]

jizou 4 done, and I noticed The Tree has a ? on the map this time, though I think I can't act on that yet

uh... why is the guy missing from this scene

normally he's only here for half of it anyway but now he's not even a little bit here

also why is the doll warning us when apparently we've already done the thing this time

the non-change is even more bizarre than the change!

not to mention what is this entire segment going to be if we've already done the thing

huh, I really can just walk straight to the end of the level this time

reloads

in retrospect I really should've taken ten seconds to look at this mural the first time around

classic "when does foreshadowing become spoilers" moment

[spark kraken]

You have no idea yet

[torpid forge]

yes, I look forward to when the fox-like aliens make first contact with humanity and finally confirm all the endings are simultaneously canon

[spark kraken]

|| YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TRUE THAT STATEMENT YOU JUST MADE IS THOUGH ||

[torpid forge]

not clicking that

[spark kraken]

you shouldn't

[versed raft]

I wanna play SHF, but it's quite a bit of money

[torpid forge]

I'm still not sure how to feel about the little hearts in this doodle on the map

yeah it's completely reasonable to wait for a sale on this, especially if your machine is unlikely to run it above potato settings

[versed raft]

My pc could most likely run it tbh

[spark kraken]

I have a good CPU luckily (i5-11400F) which I haven't needed to change since I bought it years ago, I swapped my GPU a couple times since then but the one I have currently still is underpowered for modern games (RTX 3050 6GB model) unfortunately

and considering UE5 games have stutter issues even on high end rigs....

[versed raft]

The only issue is, currently my pc just won't launch any game that's not 2d it seems. They all just launch to a black screen and crash

[torpid forge]

Foxes in Love, Heian-style

[versed raft]

Omg peak

[torpid forge]

oooh, there is a NG+ area here

[torpid forge]

all right, I'm as confident as it's currently possible to be that I found all the NG+ content here, and in particular have now 100%'d the ||Inari-sama boxes and doors|| since this area's was the last one

[torpid forge]

I'm pretty sure Junko's dialogue here is different, I don't remember her saying ||"Yes, I've also killed my parents, my friends, and you" and "Just let yourself be killed." and so on|| the first time around. I think that's the clearest evidence we've gotten yet that most if not all of the ||deaths|| in this story are metaphorical.

[spark kraken]

You'd be correct

On the first part I mean

which would also mean || Junko is probably not even actually dead at all ||

Hinako believes her || to be dead, because she gave up her true self and cut them all off after getting married ||

[torpid forge]

||which is presumably why Junko has always looked like a Frankenstein's monster after the opening cutscene||

[torpid forge]

I got the thing

[torpid forge]

oh no, the list of NG+ ||Inari boxes|| I googled earlier was wrong , I just found another one in the northwest of town

by the way, when I say I'm playing on potato graphics, this is the kind of thing I'm referring to:

(better textures popped in a few seconds later)

[spark kraken]

Oh hell yeah, now it really looks like a PS2 horror game

[torpid forge]

I think I'm just about at the final save point before I have to commit to an ending

||I've left the sword unpurified for now||

[spark kraken]

|| oh you might get the endings in a weird order if you do that ||

[torpid forge]

bad weird?

I figured I'd do a "bad" ending first

[spark kraken]

you know the funny thing about seeing the low quality model is noticing how much of the ''realism'' comes from the high poly count and how much is texture work

don't worry about it

I just saw the endings in a different order, but it's fine

the important part is: || doing the purified sword ending after this one because they kinda require and compliment each other ||

and then || doing the 4th playthrough ||

[torpid forge]

ok, double-checked the opening areas, cashed in all my offerings

I now have maximum health, stamina and mamori/charm notches (only mental fortitude(???) is left to upgrade)

pretty sure it's time to redo the final dungeon and commit to this ending

I wonder if the game will let me never answer that phone

[torpid forge]

and another one

the phone stopped ringing at some point

the childhood flashbacks in the park and the house are noticeably longer than before

[torpid forge]

the later flashback to ||an argument with her parents|| got replaced by ||a conversation with Shuu that sounds like her telling him about the marriage proposal, though they still aren't explicitly confirming that||

[spark kraken]

There's multiple new convos in that part

[versed raft]

Have you guys already finished the game?

[torpid forge]

I'm currently late into my second playthrough; it takes multiple playthroughs to finish the game properly / get all the endings

[versed raft]

I see

I wish the game wasn't $94

[torpid forge]

weird, this puzzle on Lost in the Fog difficulty doesn't make sense... but in English the text has a whole extra clause that almost completely fixes it

wait no this answer doesn't work either

now I'm seriously worried my copy is broken, that's multiple videos of a solution to this puzzle working that do not work on my end

ok, IGN was correct, every youtube video was wrong somehow

ah here's another of those new convos

there we go, the ||two Hinakos|| cutscene was completely different

and I understood none of it!

interesting, we're this late into 2nd playthrough and only now is ||a 2nd character entry, Shuu's,|| getting marked complete in the journal

[torpid forge]

ok on second thought that's a lie, just like Hinako my first instinct was to pretend not to understand it

||mass murder-y Hinako was "just" describing her feelings toward her fiance, and admitting those being her feelings is a strong sign the marriage is wrong||

interesting, this "final"(???) boss fight ends immediately if you ||only kill dad... which makes perfect sense given how she sees her parents ||

[torpid forge]

final borb

ah, finally found a document that explicitly says ||the boy Hinako saved from the fox wants to marry Hinako||, we no longer have to worry about whether that's somehow all a big misdirect

[torpid forge]

I wonder what the significance is of them mixing up the rings on the first try

[spark kraken]

You're gonna find || a lot more that explicitly states than than just a document ||

I think it's just to show that she's completely inexperienced I think it's one of the more literal acts in the game actually

[torpid forge]

||but he's the one who gives her the wrong ring lol||

[spark kraken]

You can see he actually looks at her expectantly while she just tries to immediately jam in the ring

It's not the 'wrong' ring you just exchange rings before

[torpid forge]

oh

[spark kraken]

They do that even in western wedding ceremonies I believe

You have to exchange the rings before you put them in your finger, or your spouse's finger

[torpid forge]

weird, I do not recall ever seeing that step

[spark kraken]

In this case before you jam it into the Resident Evil puzzle item, which is japanese tradition as we know of course

[torpid forge]

ok final stretch

[torpid forge]

huh, this time ||the doll's talking as if she's already won and it's weird that we're even fighting, even though there've only been subtle changes so far and Hinako still effortlessly "killed" Shimizu after Junko prodded her||

[torpid forge]

hype hype hype

oh hi

I care not for your meme brackets, I have ||magical foxes|| to slay

I know it's a spoiler, but this feels like the kind of screenshot that would instantly sell me on the game if I somehow wasn't already

[spark kraken]

Devs, I know you guys hate the Souls comparison... but come on

like, come on!

Put the UI over at the top on the left, basically indistinguishable

also did you notice that || the red goes away the more you drain his health ||

[torpid forge]

I was hoping that was a phase indicator

FIRST TRY LET'S GO

(yes it's story mode with max upgrades, still counts)

you know, I was expecting a little more ||corruption|| in my ||corrupted sword|| ending

cue mid-credits scene

interesting

okay, so, Ending 3 interpretation:
||I've been thinking throughout this 2nd playthrough that there's more and more evidence something genuinely supernatural is going on, beyond all the emotional metaphor stuff. I believe this ending basically confirmed:||

• ||Mr Fox Mask is Kotoyuki, and he is kitsune-possessed. He fell in love with Hinako when a young Hinako saved him (then an actual fox) from the other humans after biting Kotoyuki.||
• ||Hinako's final line that the "necktie doesn't look good on you" seems like explicit confirmation these characters are not wearing the school uniforms we see on-screen. So at least some of these events are set when they're adults.||
• ||The report about toxic gas leaks basically confirms all the mythological backstory of the town was literally true: The kitsune(s?) were keeping the water dragon calm, and once Hinako drove away Kitsune!Kotoyuki, they left and the water dragon came back in full force.||

[spark kraken]

and now..... || gotta go back and purify that sword ||

[torpid forge]

yup

there's no need to get all five endings on the same save file, right? this can be a throwaway load-and-speedrun?

[spark kraken]

Uuuuuh you're definitely gonna want to have them on the same file I think

You cannot get one of the endings without having done at least two endings I think

[torpid forge]

I remember that part, but it's just two, not all five right?

[spark kraken]

They don't have to be all in one just two

[torpid forge]

because that implies five whole playthroughs are needed even if the only difference is near the end

ok then yes I've already done that

[spark kraken]

as long as you have two endings it should be good

[torpid forge]

I suppose it's kinda hard not to since the other endings are NG+-only to begin with

[spark kraken]

I haven't seen it because I'm unable to actually see if there's any differences myself as I've only seen the NG+ playthrough but I do believe that there aren't any significant differences in any subsequent NG++ runs because otherwise that would be literally insane

So it's not too much like Nier in that regard

which speaking of I never actually finished I only did the A ending for that game

[torpid forge]

so in both Nier games, it wasn't literally 5 playthroughs, it was more like get to credits once, start a 2nd playthrough, replay the same stuff with minor differences for a while, then at some point the whole game diverges into brand new content, and some of the endings are an actual choice right at the end but there are multiple "the ends" because of the above

the SHf equivalent would be more like ||after finishing the middle school, Shuu actually stays with you, and you actually escape the town as originally planned, and then a bunch of other stuff happens||

[spark kraken]

I might actually revisit Automata if that's the case

[torpid forge]

iirc in Automata it's even more obviously different on the second playthrough because ||your point of view character changes; even if the plot is the same at first you immediately get unique gameplay segments when they're split up||

[torpid forge]

oh I forgot to make explicit:

• ||The Shuu during the ending is clearly the real Shuu actually in Kotoyuki's mansion with Hinako and Kotoyuki. Not just Hinako doing a "he's with me in spirit" thing. So that significantly increases the chances that Shuu and the others are real in other parts of the story.||

[spark kraken]

So remember when you said that || Sakuko attacking Hinako wasn't actually literally what happened? ||

well.....

it makes more sense now if we imagine that || she was there for the wedding, maybe as a guest possibly, and she just had a freakout ||

[torpid forge]

true, it does raise the odds of that interpretation, but that still feels much weirder for ||Rinko's boss fight||

[spark kraken]

|| sakuko makes sense in a way because she manages a shrine herself, though I don't believe that she's there for that reason, I do believe they are there just as guests especially since fox-boy mentions how he had Hinako say goodbye to all of them and how hard that must have been while they do the ritual stuff. but Rinko I wonder why she's portrayed as the enemy she's portrayed as which seems like the head of a ceremony ||

|| I believe Rinko was also just there as a guest and had an argument with Hinako, and maybe the boss fight was just purely metaphorical, Rinko is one of those gossipy girls so it makes sense during her fight she summons and controls other enemies in a way ||

[torpid forge]

hm, ||Shimizu 2nd floor Hinako room has a flashback with stomping on a dress||, I don't remember getting that on my Ending 3 run

[spark kraken]

I remember || a cutscene of Hinako telling her mom she didn't like a dress she brought her, but I don't remember one where she actively stomps on a dress before ||

[torpid forge]

I'm still not sure what this means but it looks cool

I also don't remember ||a flashback with Hinako and Kimie one-on-one, where Hinako flat-out says she hates her mom and doesn't want to end up like her||

so I'm convinced this area changes significantly depending on the specific ending you're locked in to, not just NG+

[spark kraken]

That sounds about right

[torpid forge]

the four seal puzzle also changed

the scenes in ||Hinako's room|| seem identical to 1st playthrough / Ending 1 though

neeeeever mind

ah so this is gonna be the ||actually I am a furry after all, we can make this work|| ending

hey, she said the name!

[torpid forge]

as before, after the ||Hinako's Room|| scene everything seems identical to 1st playthrough up until ||the doll gets in our way||

[torpid forge]

huh... ||that strongly implied we physically assaulted Junko, unlike the other two endings,|| which seems worse

ouch

oh god, he knew how dangerous ||the pills|| were

welp I guess we're doing this now

the last boss was cooler

and that's that done

yeesh, was not prepared for that mid-credits scene

||I think that's the only one of the three mid-credits scenes we can't take literally? though in this case the meaning's pretty obvious anyway||

there we go

I tried to skip a cutscene I thought I'd seen before, and this time I got an extra confirmation popup saying "This scene has content you haven't seen before. Are you sure?"

never seen that before, kinda hope this becomes a more common feature

ah I see, this is the NG+ variant of the scene but on this save file I "haven't seen it" before

[torpid forge]

UFO ending taken care of ||I appreciate that they incorporated the dog too||

[torpid forge]

so, Ending 2 interpretation

||The first detail that jumped out to me was Fox Mask exorcising Shimizu from Hinako. Unlike the Sakuko post-boss scene, these two are the same physical person, so we can't explain this one as a colorful metaphor for him simply getting security to throw out a deranged houseguest. Since Ending 3 conveniently already made it clear kitsune magic is real, I think we just have to take this bit as a genuine supernatural exorcism. Which makes it even less clear what might be going on with boss!Sakuko, especially as we still don't have a good explanation of boss!Rinko.||

||Interestingly they never named the boss that Shuu turns into / gets possessed by, but all external sources refer to it as Tsukumogami, which we know from the NG+ Revenge Diaries was one of the other players in Ebisugaoka's religious history. But I'm failing to hit on a clear reason why this was Shuu's boss. I feel like I'm missing something obvious about Iwai family history there.||

Maybe the biggest clear confirmation we got here was ||Shimizu and Hinako really are two distinct personalities, and this girl does have a drug-induced mental condition. Those two aren't just metaphors for internal conflict. That also makes all the talk of "killing" one or the other, and of Hinako "being dead already" make waaaaaay more sense, if her DID(???) was just common knowledge among her family and friends already.||

At this point what I think is most interesting about endings 2 and 3 together is the asymmetric ending requirements, because those have implications. ||You need an "evil" magical sword to resist a kitsune. And you need a mythical super-medicine to... separate your other self enough for a kitsune to exorcise it?||

Regarding the sword:
In Ending 3 ||Everyone uses negative words to describe its supernatural power, and positive words like "purify" to describe the removal of that power, but apparently she can just use it without the alleged evil-ness ever coming up? My read is that the Revenge Diary going "actually the oldest thing was the sword, not the Inari statue" is telling us that it's Tsukumogami in the sword, and now that we've seen what Tsukumogami looks like, the Diary makes it clear this is a being who's fought kitsune in the past on behalf of The Tree. So in Ending 3 the sword being possessed doesn't cause any trouble for us simply because it's 100% on board with us fighting a kitsune.||
In Ending 2 ||when you purify the sword (I know I can also just never pick it up but this was my Ending 2), Hinako says something like "I can display my will without your help now." But this sword being unpurified is a requirement for Ending 3. Is Hinako just... wrong? I'm not sure where else to go with this but that apparent contradiction is super interesting.||

Regarding the agura, I think the questions I had are readily answerable, but there's enough going on here it's definitely worth spelling out. First, before I even saw this ending I was consciously wondering ||how does a "sexist society is horrifying actually" story manage a "what if I just did what society wants anyway" ending if it's not "the bad ending" without feeling like it's thematically contradicting itself. That got a clear answer: Hinako does have a mental condition, so the bad ending is the original one where she has a complete mental breakdown. And the mid-credits scene made absolutely clear that this ending still has the enormous downside that she's crushing a genuine part of herself, even if the mental instability has been resolved.|| So then why the asymmetry with the item requirements? ||Because these endings are all about the power balance between Shimizu and Hinako. By the time we're playing the game, they're roughly even and neither can win. Admittedly this is hardly her natural state since the drugs split her in the first place and there's probably some kitsune mind control elevating Hinako's influence. But the agura gives the kitsune more power to undo the drugs' effects/exorcise Shimizu (I don't think it's an accident we find it in the same level as the three ceremonies), and the Tsukumogami sword gives Hinako power to resist kitsune. If you bring both, presumably they would cancel out and we're back to ending 1, although I doubt they made a whole extra cutscene for the "Hinako drinks the agura, Fox Mask fails to exorcise Shimizu because angy sword, etc" version of events.||

separately, I can't be the only one wondering if ||Agura no Hitei-sama|| and the ||Aglaophotis|| from earlier SH games are the same thing, or related things

NG++ immediately giving me new journal entries

[torpid forge]

before I play further I want to figure out exactly which items I'm missing for max completion so I don't have to do a 4th playthrough

looks like two omamori I genuinely missed, because they silently spawn behind you and the rest are random draws from shrines so I might keep trying to find all the money items for that

the achievement-relevant documents I missed appear to be exclusive to NG++, so I guess it's a good sign I have all the ones accessible earlier

the actually final ema is also NG++ exclusive (they made me think I had the final one already because you aren't allowed to buy a 5th omamori slot until NG++)

[torpid forge]

if I'm parsing all this right I have literally nothing new to do before Worship Hall this playthrough

it's getting kinda ridiculous how many of these walkthrough sites are just blatantly wrong about basic factual information

e.g. I already have more parts of "Sakuko's Diary" than most of these sites claim exist at all

[spark kraken]

I think the final ending will answer all your questions regarding these ideas

[torpid forge]

but first, pizza and youtube catchup

oh, localization details I thought were interesting: the first ending is described as

Coming Home to Roost
Drown in a bottomless pit of self-doubt.
in JP it's
呪いは雛の如く舞い戻る / Noroi wa Hina no gotoku Mai-modoru = Curses come back like baby birds
終わらぬ自問の沼にて溺れて死ぬ / Owaranu jimon no numa nite oborete-shinu = To drown and die in a swamp of unending self-questioning

1. JP doesn't have the "coming home to roost" idiom, so it's interesting that EN gets to use that here, though it does lose the "hina"
2. the specific use of numa/swamp here stood out to me here because, at least in the JP dialogue, I distinctly remember hearing this word used only (NG+) ||on my 2nd playthrough / Ending 3 run where the Hinako's Room scene has Hinako describe her feelings as a swamp, unlike how love is supposed to feel||

the other ending descriptions so far seem much more straightforward with nothing to comment on

[torpid forge]

might've gotten a bit too sidetracked there

let's finally start NG+2 for real

(some of the walkthrough sites used "NG+2" and I realize that's a better term than "NG++" since there's no question whether someone typo'd the extra +, so I'm using +2 now)

oh, I don't even have to redo this, it's pre-placed

first noticeable dialogue change is ||that alleyway again, this time the unseen women are whispering about kitsune possession||

URAGIRIMONO

at this point it just sounds like a verbal tic

[spark kraken]

Ohhh nooooooo the game has NG+2 changes too and I'm not gonna know anything about them

I'm gonna be out of the loop for all of that

[torpid forge]

what I've read so far implies that it's smaller than the NG+ changes, and I'll definitely mention anything else I notice here

I'm already confident the enemy placement is the same as NG+

it's definitely clear that the big changes all start at Worship Hall, that's where most of the achievement-critical NG+2-only documents are, and then Ebisugaoka 5 has the new condition for Ending 4 I'm sure you're familiar with

I'm assuming the stuff after that will vary about as much and at the same points as the other endings did

for cutscenes, now that I know the game itself will warn me if I try to skip a real change, I'm going to trust it and skip most things, which should speed this up dramatically

huh, apparently that first fight outside Chizuruya has some grabby plants I've never run into before

[torpid forge]

Oh. Okay. I guess that's just how NG+2 rolls then.

there's a radio in the Ebisuoka rice paddies that I think played a different message this time ||I caught "it's okay Hinako" and "a woman should follow 3 steps behind the man"|| but I'm not sure

ah, I think the messages you get from the Ayakakashi puzzle are different on OG, NG+ and NG+2 (not the clues and solutions, those only depend on puzzle difficulty, but the note you get after each correct answer)

[spark kraken]

It feels a little cruel for players to put these many differences

It's too many playthroughs to fully get the whole experience

[torpid forge]

I do think it's pushing it

but I'm good with this amount, since nothing stopped me from lowering to story mode, skipping cutscenes, and breezing past most familiar enemies

in fact I could be doing this even faster if I didn't feel like re-searching for treasure to buy the last few upgrades

I feel like Nier Replicant's 2nd playthrough (or rather, the "repeat half" before it diverged) was a taller order overall, but maybe that's beacuse it was a much more front-loaded case so I had to trust the reputation significantly more than I do here where the very first cutscene has meaningful if minor NG+ changes

[spark kraken]

It's funny because right now the entire Silent Hill community is on fire arguing about how this ''isn't a true Silent Hill'' because either it doesn't even take place in Silent Hill, has no cult stuff, and there's too much combat (and also because of woke, of course)
meanwhile my complaints are just that there's too much game

I also don't like the emphasis on combat but I do believe that it reinforces story themes like Hinako's inner strength and resolve to take control of her life and fight her way through the horrors

[torpid forge]

to put this into perspective, my save file has 24 hours on it at ~2.25 playthroughs

there are so, SO many games that take two or more times than long for one playthrough

and I'm being thorough

[spark kraken]

It took me 20 ish hours to finish Nier once

[torpid forge]

exactly!

so, like, I get the complaint

I do think more ways of skipping the unchanged parts would be even better

but I think this is absolutely fine

not just in a "I played <other game> ten times so you don't get to complain" way, but in a "I'm still genuinely enjoying this it's not even a slog" way

[spark kraken]

It's funny because even that is not really that much of a complaint anyways, like I feel strongly about it now but like, 4 months down the line when the freshness sets in I'm probably gonna appreciate it more especially since no other Silent Hill game does this

They have the different endings and requirements, but never to the point where it's almost a necessity to play the game over and over again to piece the whole story together

It's almost always just a different ending

[torpid forge]

and because this is a Silent Hill story in all the ways that matter, it's extremely hard to judge it until afterward, you kinda do have to take a narrative like this on faith all the way to the end

[spark kraken]

Overall I'm very positive that this is the brand new mainline Silent Hill game

the complaints have been surprisingly minimal from my side

[torpid forge]

oh yeah the announcement of F and 2RE was the first time I had any hype for Silent Hill in eons, and I'm so glad both of them turned out great

F especially since this is the one that proves whether or not they can actually make new ones instead of just join Capcom on the remake treadmill

[spark kraken]

Well, even saying that is pushing it a little bit though

There's no guarantee they'll work with neobards again, and Bloober is only doing remakes right now

Since Konami isn't developing them in-house like Capcom

so there's time for all of this to come crashing down still

[torpid forge]

oh there always is

we're talking about current outlooks, nothing is ever guaranteed

f could have sucked even with Ryukishi07 writing it

[spark kraken]

I'm just wary because I've seen other people also say something along the lines of ''wow Konami is back'' and I feel the need to always make the distinction that this is not Konami actually making the games

just so people don't get their hopes up

I saw someone say that the endings in f are just different routes in a visual novel and they're totally right

[torpid forge]

tbc I'm very aware Konami is just a publisher now

but I have zero complaints about them "being back" in publisher form if it means their IPs get good games again

I guess that is more true of F than it is of the past Silent Hills

and ofc to be expected when you bring on a VN writer

NG+2: just found a new note right after the Naginata room

[spark kraken]

I almost wish I was actually playing the game myself and completely go out of my way to document everything in a guide and post it since we're already documenting all the differences anyways just because it stresses me out when all the guides for a game are just completely wrong or incomplete like what's happening right now

[torpid forge]

I'm sure in a month or two someone will make the youtube video that side-by-side compares all cutscenes in OG, NG+ and NG+2

actually, would you like to see the NG+2 notes? I dunno how thorough your sources were

here's the new naginata one:

[spark kraken]

My sources are none because I've only went through the NG+1 playthrough besides the base one I don't think anyone's even posted a single NG+2 walkthrough yet

I only checked out all the other endings in full after the NG+1 playthrough

[torpid forge]

well in that case I'm definitely going to post what I do find, especially the ones I know are coming in the Worship Hall since so far everything's pointing to those ||Sakuko and Rinko Diaries|| being significant

wow I actually speedran that boss, that might've been under 2 minutes?

apparently when you're used to it the naginata becomes better than the kaiken

I wonder if combat difficulty affects her health

[spark kraken]

I don't think so

I think it's just enemy damage

[torpid forge]

this radio near the school has a message I also do not remember hearing before: ||Fox Mask says "This is the path to your school, right? If it were possible, I wish I could've gone there with you."||

ok yeah I'm not imagining this, there's another radio inside the school ||where Fox Mask and Shuu talk over each other ||

this time the NG+/||Fox's Sacrifice|| classroom has a creepy song on its radio to go along with the game

here we go, time for Worship Hall

I'm thinking of ending this session after I get to the end of this area

[torpid forge]

for Nire, Sakuko's Diary 7:

Sakuko's Diary 8:

the rabbit observation log also had a new section but I think it's basically giving us the same info as Diary 8

[torpid forge]

ok, Rinko's side had a lot of new documents, I'm not posting all of them

but Rinko's Diary 1 seems by far the most important for our theorycrafting:

[torpid forge]

I'm kinda glad there are separate achievements for finding all the omamori hidden in the world, and buying all the omamori from shrines; I'm still missing seven of the latter and I kinda doubt there's 7000 faith worth of items left in this run

[versed raft]

There's currency in the game?

[torpid forge]

yeah, several of the consumables you find throughout the world can be left as "offerings" at the Hokora shrines to earn "faith", which can then be spent on upgrades

[versed raft]

Huh, interesting

[torpid forge]

it's certainly not a standard thing for Silent Hill to have you thinking about maximum health/stamina upgrades or which omamori to equip, but I've been enjoying it, and the way it's done here I don't think causes any problems

if anything you have even more incentive to scavenge for items than usual in a survival horror

[torpid forge]

the whole Main Hall level might be 90% optional on NG+ but damn there's a lot of faith you can scavenge here

what on earth is Junko's mask supposed to be, I still haven't figured that out

[torpid forge]

Nire's gonna want to see Clinical Trial 3 (NG+2):

ooooh, I just made the connection that ||the purifying red water irl is right next to the oldest Inari-sama statue, which fits perfectly with this whole Tree/Tsukumogami vs Kitsune narrative we've been building up since NG+||

this radio in Ebi 5 has I think a new message ||Hinako's mom is telling dad that he needs to ask Hinako's forgiveness||

and at long last, the spot where we commit to Ending 4

||"I need time to think about whether I should accept this..."||

[torpid forge]

lol, in the end I got all the money ones before I even reached the level with the last hidden one

I think this puzzle is tied to ending, I've never seen it with all but one of the people crossed out before

[torpid forge]

lol

(any playthrough late game) ||apparently you just have to come back here after solving the photo puzzle, and this unmapped hallway just exists now. At the end is a version of Hinako's room with entirely too much blood everywhere, and the last omamori I was missing||

Okay, if you've/Nire's only seen the 4th ending, not a proper NG+2 run, then arguably the biggest NG+2 thing you've missed is the new cutscene in ||Shimizu Residence 3rd floor||. They moved the hina key door from the dining room(?) to the parents' bedroom, and inside ||Kimie explains her side of things, and Kanta's side, explicitly correcting misconceptions Hinako had about them because of how they act differently in front of the kids. In particular, she explains that Kanta had to give up on his dream because his best friend stole all his money a long time ago (I knew this from notes but ofc it hits different here), and that she's not as weak as Hinako thinks she is because when she and Kanta really fight it's always Kanta who gives in in the end.||

[torpid forge]

yeah the ||Hinako's Room|| NG+2 scenes are also pretty big:

• the first visit on the 2nd floor has a flashback where ||Hinako asks Junko about her marriage. Junko explains the standard arranged marriage process. Junko's husband is finally named as 中上 (Chuujou? Nakaue?). Hinako says "the biggest difference between me and the world" is that she feels "there's something more important than 'being happy': deciding for myself. I don't want someone to make me happy, I want to find my own happiness."||
• on the last visit after completing the puzzle, as usual there's a cutscene, this time ||Kanta apologizes to Hinako. Hinako refuses to accept it and shouts at him to leave. This time Shimizu starts the multi-personality conversation by interjecting that Kanta wanting to apologize still means something. "You don't have to forgive him, but you do have to listen. At least accept his feelings." After Hinako starts listening again, Kanta says Kotoyuki and Shuu are both better men than him, and Hinako can decide who she wants to marry.||

[torpid forge]

Treasure Hall seemed basically identical, only noticed one tweak to a voice line where ||Hinako goes "...stop..." instead of her usual trance-like obedience||

[torpid forge]

the dialogue in the center of town was completely different, essentially this time they're talking about the real conflict instead of the metaphorical one

huh, ||when Shimizu wakes up in Dark Shrine, the first time she finds the doll she says "Who are you? Why have you been trying to control me?"||

here we go, ending time

oh

she just said the thing out loud

||"We're being toyed with. By something that wants me to get married, and something else that doesn't."||

took me approximately 3 endings to figure that out so... yeah, common Ryukishi W

||"Why can't we talk to each other without killing?"|| EXCELLENT QUESTION

[spark kraken]

Oh you're there already

[torpid forge]

things are happening yes

[spark kraken]

This is Ryukishi going ''do you get it yet? player? do you get it yet?????''

''if you didn't, let me make it very clear''

[torpid forge]

and I can legitimately claim to have figured out two big twists before the game just went "okay time to make this perfectly clear"

which is mostly a compliment to the author for making it possible to put them together without being 100% sure

JUST LIKE THE SH2 VIDEOTAPE REVEAL

have y'all picked up on the fact that this is just as good as classic SH yet

[spark kraken]

I do still wish the game had like one less playthrough/ending just because I still think it's too many

but I guess they had to make it this way because it's the only way to fit: || a 'bad' ending, a 'neutral' ending, a 'choose highschool crush' ending, a 'choose fox boy' ending' and the true ending ||

[torpid forge]

that's completely fair, it's right on the edge where it's not a problem for me but I can also easily see places where they could've made the replays even easier, e.g. there are whole levels where nothing significant changed but there isn't a huge shortcut like the Main Hall had

[bold torrent]

also the ryukishi07 curse, needing an editor to be like 'maybe cut like, 20%'

[torpid forge]

but if those additional shortcuts were added then I think I wouldn't cut any of the "real" content

ok sadly I need to restart to get a decent framerate here

OOOOOH

||the doll was Tsukumogami ||

ok you got me there, I did not put that detail together at all

[spark kraken]

That's the only part I didn't fully get because || I don't really know what that enemy is representing ||

so when I saw || that now it was the doll instead of Shu I wasn't sure what to make of that ||

[torpid forge]

there we go

awww

[spark kraken]

|| hug ||

|| now go, while I go fight my drunk dad ||

[torpid forge]

||"yeah, I had to do that earlier today" ||

[spark kraken]

|| hinako: first time? ||

[torpid forge]

||ah, so the water dragon still got angy after we told both of the other gods to f off ||

tbf that's probably true of all endings besides 2, even if 1 never confirmed it

[spark kraken]

all the stuff about || the water dragon god and the tree and all that completely went past me, I think I totally wasn't paying attention to any of that because I thought it was all just misdirects and red herrings ||

I can't tell if that's supposed to be || the town flooded or if that's just a river, the scale of the houses with the terrain is really confusing, also in the playthrough I watched that entire scene is completely obscured by fog which is really funny to think that nowadays the fog effect that is meant to completely hide away any far away scenery is now gone in lower settings lol ||

[torpid forge]

makes sense, I was coming at this from SH2 and 3 experience, where there was always a genuine supernatural element, in addition to the psychological and metaphorical stuff, so I continued to favor that sort of mixed explanation as long as there was no strong evidence against it ||especially as NG+ started throwing in heavy evidence for it||

granted in 2 and 3 it's much clearer much earlier on that there's a mix, e.g. in 2 when Laura just tells you to your face that she hasn't seen any monsters

[torpid forge]

maaaaybe, but one of the few graphics settings I did keep enabled was "indirect lighting" precisely because when I turned it fully off the fog just disappeared and this is a Silent Hill game so fog is mandatory

[torpid forge]

maybe it's because I'm actually playing and you spend half of each playthrough running back and forth all over this town, but at least in the screenshot I just took, it's super obvious to me that this ||river|| cannot possibly have been there before

||granted, Hinako's dialogue about the town having never been this silent could be describing her own mental state, as well as the town literally being a ghost town after natural disasters and evacuations, but IMO it's both||

Also, let's just state the "obvious" for the non-JP speakers who didn't look this up: the oka in Ebisugaoka means "hill". The final ending achievement is "Ebisugaoka in Silence" (not to mention the dialogue). It's a title drop.

[torpid forge]

lol, immediately confirmed. Since this exact shot turned into the main menu background, I can now trivially test it on higher graphics settings, and on the "Performance" preset instead of custom potato mode, it looks like this:

||I can still see the river there, but you're right that it's much less clear.||

[torpid forge]

Although, I guess it's also worth noting: even if none of this was literally true, it still would've been worth paying attention to for decoding the metaphor. Back when I wasn't sure how much was real, I was thinking ||is all the fox/inari stuff here because that's the local Ebisugaoka religion Hinako was raised with, so the concept of being spirited away to a fox wedding just feels like the obvious metaphor to her? If so, then we still need to look closely at the elements which aren't supposed to be part of the fox wedding folklore, like the self-mutilation rituals and that doll and the red water and so on.||

[spark kraken]

Yeah that's kinda what it looked like to me a little bit lol

I want to believe that it's just weird scale and that's just the river mentioned earlier in the game

but yeah I think like I said here when I saw that ending myself i think it's the nicest silent hill ending by far

[torpid forge]

it's certainly the nicest ending for Hinako

||hopefully they figured out a way to warn everyone else they'd need to evacuate...? ||

[spark kraken]

I'm completely unclear on || whether that whole thing was real in the end or not real at all ||

but it would explain the lack of people

[torpid forge]

which whole thing? ||the natural disasters?||

[spark kraken]

|| yeah I don't actually know if the whole thing about the geysers and whatever natural disaster stuff going on was actually real ||

although, it would explain the incredibly bizarre || way the bridge at the beginning was broken, since it was broken upwards violently ||

[torpid forge]

so I've been convinced that was real ever since ending 3, mostly because I can't think of any "metaphorical" way to read that mid-credits scene ||with the radio announcing evacuations||

[torpid forge]

oh right, I keep putting off thinking about that detail and then forgot about it completely

I agree ||an unexpected geyser directly under it|| is probably the best explanation we have

technically ||the UFO route-triggering radio said an "unknown object" attacked it||... but I feel like we can safely take the UFO ending as entirely non-canon, except for the lore about which cheesy sci-fi movies they watched as kids

it's also worth noting that the very first things we find on the first playthrough of the game are ||a note talking about geysers and I think it was sulfur hydroxide gas? hydrogen sulphide hurting people in the area|| and ||the path behind Hinako's house being blocked off by a landslide||, or at least first for me because I turned left like a good metroidvania player

[spark kraken]

Oh I totally don't even remember that

[torpid forge]

admittedly, I have an unfair edge on remembering that specific note, because I didn't have a reason to learn the Japanese for "hydrogen sulphide" before

[torpid forge]

I knew I forgot to talk about something

The dates on the calendars in the "house dungeon" are 1962 October 6, 1960 May 26, and 1961 April 7. I'm a little unsure which calendar maps to which scene, but together these imply that the events depicted in all the flashbacks we see there all took place over about 2.5 years of in-universe time. This just barely allows for the possibility that ||not only is my "1st playthrough is just after the marriage proposal, NG+(any) is later when the proposal's accepted and she's about to move in with him" theory possible, but it's possible they are actually in high school for the Ebisugaoka scenes in both time periods. Maybe the families agreed to wait until she graduated? The "necktie line", our one hard contradiction of the school attire, was during a non-Ebisugaoka scene in Ending 2, after all; it's presumably set at least slightly later when they'd moved on to wedding prep.||

[spark kraken]

Oh good, these videos are starting to come out now lol

[spark kraken]

See that's the sort of details I just completely missed, if I wasn't told I would've completely missed the one note in SH2R that apparently finally puts a date to the game

[torpid forge]

I am shocked the wider internet contains people who are incapable of processing a story like this with actual nuance

[torpid forge]

yeah I completely forgot to think about these the first two playthroughs, then this time I picked up a calendar and went "wait a minute THIS IS A DATE, what am I even doing"

we just casually pick up a literal timeline object and continue going "gee I wonder wtf is going on here"

[spark kraken]

I still think that || that entire section is happening in the in-between time between Hinako moving out of town and coming back before the wedding || but honestly even after all the runs and endings there's still a couple of parts that are still up in the air so sure, maybe it is doing that, although it could easily just be || her imagining different dates the same way we never actually see any of the characters in their present time adult forms or clothing ||

[torpid forge]

mm-hmm, my usual approach is to take as much literally as possible, and there's definitely still enough left vague that we're going to get multiple reasonable interpretations of the details

[spark kraken]

It seems to be especially a thing for this writer to do this sort of thing too from what I've heard

I'm not familiar with Umineko or any of his other works

[torpid forge]

afaict, I can take the calendar dates literally, and the clothing literally in >90% of the Ebi scenes (but clearly not all of them, and not most of the non-Ebi scenes), so that's where I'm at for now

which sort of thing?

[spark kraken]

The whole ''you never know what is actually happening, what is factual, what is a metaphor, what is real'' etc etc

[torpid forge]

(I've read all of Umineko, I'm vaguely aware of Higurashi but never properly read/watched it)

ah

[spark kraken]

That's what I've heard anyways just in reference to that being a thing in SHf and seeing people be like ''classic Ryukishi'' and whatnot

[torpid forge]

so I would say... yeeeeeees but not quite in the Silent Hill way where anything could be (and many things are) your unreliable player character being off their rocker

in Umineko, there was never any doubt that Battler Ushiromiya was of sound mind, the confusion there was about multiple possible timelines and witches magically interfering and of course bogstandard murder mystery liars

the thing that really strikes me as specifically Ryukishi about SHf's construction is

Umineko has 8 parts, grouped into 4 "question arcs" and 4 "answer arcs". In SHf, it really feels like Ending 1 is "the question playthrough", and then every (non-joke) ending thereafter gives you some solid answers.

[spark kraken]

It's especially worse for me because of how much I like old horror games and especially ones like Silent Hill because these types of people also happen to be the same ones that will sing praises for the original games and just refuse to even acknowledge any of the newer stuff exists and if they do it's only to hate on it and say how much of a disgrace it is to the classics, so I feel weird now everytime I'm a bit of a nerd about how much I like old horror games because I don't want to get lumped with these people lol

[spark kraken]

I would ask what Umineko even is about, but I think I want to maintain it as a mystery for me for the rest of my life

It's one of those things I constantly will see come up and hear about every so often and I've somehow managed to dodge everything about it so I know nothing about it

[torpid forge]

it's an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery (complete with a mansion on remote island!) that... plays out multiple times in different ways because magic bullshit

that's as much as is worth knowing if you've never read any of it

ftr I loved it

and if you think Silent Hill f is too long then HAHAHAHAHAHA

[spark kraken]

Yeah I've heard a thing or two about Umineko's length as well

I would say I'd look into it sometime but I'm not very big on visual novels so I would probably be completely lying

[torpid forge]

to be fair, length in a visual novel is very different from length in a AAA video game

[spark kraken]

I guess they're only as long as it takes you to read through them

[torpid forge]

there's also zero risk of "losing progress", especially now that every competent VN can skip through all previously read scenes to get back to the impactful choices in a matter of seconds

the effort involved of trying other routes is a fraction of a percent of what it is in any video game with non-trivial gameplay

and Umineko doesn't even have choices, unlike some VNs

[spark kraken]

then how...?

[torpid forge]

how what?

[spark kraken]

How do you get different runs if you don't make any dialogue choices?

[torpid forge]

yeah I was making a broader point about VNs vs games and then realized "oh that part doesn't even apply to Umineko"

[spark kraken]

[torpid forge]

in a linear VN like that there's just no way to have your time wasted in the sense that a game can force you to replay a huge chunk of content if you died in an awkward place or misunderstood an ending requirement

(only in the "I think this scene is rubbish" sense, which applies to all media)

so the fact that Umineko is probably something like 60+ hours to read all 8 parts is a lot easier to stomach

plus, by the time you finished part 1 you're gonna have a pretty solid idea whether you care about the other 7; you don't need to commit to the whole thing upfront

a video game expecting multiple playthroughs to get multiple endings is just an entirely different effort/reward calculus

regardless

you see now why "Silent Hill f written by Ryukishi07" had me sold instantly and I didn't even watch the trailers

[spark kraken]

A lot of people had that reaction and I'm glad it ended up being good because by the time f was announced the only thing we had to go off of was Ascension

[torpid forge]

yeah, I imagine the internal marketing discussion went something like "we need a way to convince people this new SH is nothing like Ascension" and someone figured out that hyping up the writer was a solid way of doing that

[spark kraken]

Still waiting on Townfall.... no news at all about that one

and then after that one it's gonna be a while before anything new I suppose, SH1 remake is probably barely getting started anyways

but this is gonna have people talking for a while especially with all the endings being basically required

[torpid forge]

yeah I've heard nothing about Townfall

in fact the second google result is "we haven't learned anything new about Townfall"

[spark kraken]

It's just unfortunate that now that Silent Hill is crawling back into mainstream audiences, it's inevitably gonna end up getting wrapped up in whatever culture war nonsense is going on right now and nobody's gonna be able to have an actual honest nuanced discussion about the quality of this new game

[torpid forge]

sure, but so is every other game, and only if you're plugged into that side of culture war propaganda in the first place

[spark kraken]

The only thing I know about Townfall is that it's being made by the same people as Stories Untold and that game is pretty pretty good

[torpid forge]

stay where the sane people hang out and you'll get the high-quality video essays I'm always watching instead

(would you believe I am watching a video about culture war nonsense in video games)

[spark kraken]

I'm thankful my youtube feed never recommends me any of that stuff, but man it's really really sad that whenever I go into incognito mode to search for like a specific thing that I don't want to plague my algorithm with, youtube's default feed recommends pure trash and it kind of blows me away that that content is what the average person is getting recommended by the platform

[torpid forge]

and by all accounts, the "average person" isn't immediately repulsed by all of this

[spark kraken]

Well it's what gets them clicking so I guess it's what they like to see, for whatever reason

[torpid forge]

the optimistic take is that it's a very shallow engagement and people who don't like being angry all the time will quickly bounce off but the videos got their clicks and that's why this system keeps doing what it does

and/or soon enough it will be common knowledge that this kind of anger farming is just the new yellow journalism and you shouldn't take it any more seriously than a tabloid headline

I don't have the data to disprove that optimism so I'm gonna stick to that for now

[spark kraken]

The more years go by the more I just ended up noticing this sort of thing has always been a thing it just manifested itself in different ways before social media and phones were so prevalent so at some point I kind of ended up feeling so strongly about it because I realized it's a phenomenon that's gonna continue to happen anyway, just the fascination and attraction to this certain type of content, not that I stopped hating it, I just stopped being so alarmed and stressed about it

[torpid forge]

mm-hmm, what is new is social media sites surfacing the most extreme ends of it to a far wider audience than would have been exposed to it in the past

[spark kraken]

on the topic of video game video essay stuff though, I've also found it a bit harder to find pretty good ones in the last few years, with how easy creating videos has become I sometimes feel like the average quality of any video essay you find has decreased too, I remember in 2019 every other video essay channel I found would be pure quality, but then again I haven't been actively looking for any new ones I kinda have been sticking with the few I've known for years

[torpid forge]

my hope is that this is ultimately short-sighted behavior and will drive genuine engagement away from such platforms, or at least such algorithms on those platforms, once enough of the general public wises up to how bad and also entirely artificial it all is (perhaps the AI slop will accelerate this)

[spark kraken]

I almost forgot about AI for a second there, maybe my brain just wanted to forget

[torpid forge]

tbf we are in a Silent Hill thread

[spark kraken]

not looking forward to that future

[torpid forge]

this is some of the most high-brow anti-AI kind of clearly-made-by-a-human art it's possible to get in the medium

[spark kraken]

well I guess it's only a matter of time before a horror game about AI comes out

though maybe it's more cyberpunk territory

[torpid forge]

and arguably we've had several by older, broader meanings of "AI"

we've certainly had plenty of games where a Skynet-like AI was the villain

System Shock 2 being the obligatory mention

or Deus Ex having the "let an AI manage humanity" ending

[spark kraken]

Which is why I say maybe it's more Cyberpunk's territory than Horror, just because I mean the super insidious nature of how AI is expanding and encroaching everything you know and love right now, not an AI, just generative AI as a concept on everything

though with the sort of things AI is promoted to be able to do like upscale your 90s low res baby photos! and whatnot ,maybe you could do some horror stuff there with slowly replacing all your beloved memories with purely manufactured artificial AI generated ones slowly each year

[torpid forge]

btw should I take this as a request to name some video essayists? :)

[spark kraken]

I mean I'm not gonna say no, I've got a ton of video essays on my watch later playlist but there's room for more in there

[torpid forge]

sticking to just the (at least partly) video game and game-adjacent ones then: Jacob Geller, NeverKnowsBest, Josh Strife Hayes, Whitelight, Moon Channel, Shaun, People Make Games, Trolligarch

[spark kraken]

Jacob and Whitelight I've already been following for a bit but I'll check out the others

Liam Triforce is a good one too

[torpid forge]

I probably should subscribe to Liam, I've watched more than one of his too

Razbuten is another one I keep watching but never subbing to

[spark kraken]

Suzi/The Sphere Hunter for any horror related game stuff, she got me into horror video game essay type stuff a lot when she was starting out and I found her channel

[torpid forge]

yeah, there's a lot of game-specific or franchise-specific channels that are also great

[spark kraken]

Though she makes more review style videos than 'video essay'

[torpid forge]

like mossbag and fireborn for HK-related lore and speed/challenge run vids respectively

or Kosmic, pannenkoek and Kaze Emanuar for old Mario-related speed tech, glitches and technical details

[spark kraken]

Oh neverknowsbest is the guy that made that ''entire history of horror'' video I kept getting recommended for weeks

[torpid forge]

yep, he's done a bunch of Entire History of <genre> videos

[spark kraken]

See the funny thing about that is I kept ignoring that recommendation just because I already know the entire history of horror games but because of all the video essays I consumed across a decade in youtube

[torpid forge]

that's part of why my favorites were the ones for "RPGs" and "MMOs"

those were the videos where almost all of it was new to me

and even the part of "RPGs" where "I showed up" was completely different in context, and a lot of my past self's reactions to the RPGs I did play suddenly felt very stupid

[spark kraken]

Yeah this video about horror rpg is kinda interesting me a little bit I might watch it later
I was gonna say I hope he mentions Parasite Eve and I just now read the description and sure enough he does, it's the one classic survival horror game I never played but it's the one that I keep hearing about all the time

[torpid forge]

oh right I still need to watch that one

and now that I'm done with SHf I probably can

I have seen videos about Fear and Hunger but I know absolutely nothing about Parasite Eve

[spark kraken]

Well there's a new game in the style of Parasite Eve coming out, complete with fixed cameras

Parasite Mutant I think is what it's called

I want to say it's cool, but I never played Parasite Eve, but people seem to be into it so hey, maybe horror rpgs are coming back

[spark kraken]

I'm glad this channel is answering the most burning questions everyone is thinking of

I might check that video on stop killing games

Oh hey I actually know Shaun I watched the video on Stellar Blade and how incredibly bizarre and manufactured and fake the outrage over that game was

[torpid forge]

that's the one I'm watching!

it just felt so relevant to... the whole SHf everything really

not any specific outrage over it but like the actual themes

[spark kraken]

It's really funny to me that every single post I saw about that game when it was popular at no point ever actually described anything about the story or gameplay in the slightest

[torpid forge]

without even looking into it you could just feel that the wider gaming community had looked at the released game and reacted with a resounding "meh"

[spark kraken]

I remember seeing just one more video about that game because I honestly just didn't care for it and it was the only video where a person was actually playing the game and telling me about its gameplay and story and not only did they describe it as such but it also just looked to me to be a very okay game that I personally had no interest for so I never looked at anything about the game again

and unsurprisingly it's completely fallen out of relevancy by now

Oh people make games are the ones that put together that massive disco elysium documentary

[torpid forge]

yeah, that's where they got my sub

I probably should check more of their back catalog than I have

[spark kraken]

okay..... you know what, sure, I'll watch a video about a minecraft bank

also wow Habbo Hotel, that takes me back

[torpid forge]

yeah this is why I specified "game-adjacent"

[spark kraken]

I'm going through my list of subscriptions to see if I have any recommendations but I'm noticing that a lot of the video essay stuff I've watched through the years is probably like one or two videos from different channels instead of multiple videos from the one channel that got me to subscribe to them

oh there we go, Nerrel is one of my favourites

[torpid forge]

ok, never heard of them

wow the youtube algorithm has me figured out today

[spark kraken]

Majuular is also a good one, for more 'retrospective' style videos rather than purely review or video essays

he's got a massive series on Ultima and he's got a bunch of videos on point and click horror games I really love coming back to

[torpid forge]

wait am I not subbed to majuular

I was just watching the Serpent Isle video in between SHf sessions the other day

ok I am subbed

guess I just missed it when I made the list earlier

[spark kraken]

You didn't mention it but Super Eyepatch Wolf also

[torpid forge]

haven't heard of this one either

[spark kraken]

Oh wow I for sure thought you would've

I've only seen a few videos of this channel so I can't vouch for the quality just yet but Dungeon Chill if you want general horror videogame stuff they seem to cover a lot of obscure old horror games

I had their video on Haunting Ground on my watch later but then I played the game for myself so I haven't seen it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUWg905fGTA
Soviet doesn't tend to do video essays of this sort, most of his videos are humorous massively over-edited clips of his various gaming sessions with his gaming clan on various online games but he has this 3 hour long essay on The Forest and a 3-part video series on Arma and DayZ that are pretty damn good

[torpid forge]

huh, I don't remember finding this "note"

[torpid forge]

hard disagree

ok now I've finished that old pile of spoiler-tagged messages that wasn't safe for me at the time

looks like most of what I could've said about them, I already said when I got to those endings, and when you replied to what I said

although it's funny that you initially thought four playthroughs were necessary, not three, which likely contributes to our different perceptions of the total length question

[spark kraken]

I guess it's only three that's necessary but I would count the other two endings asides from the 'true' ending to be pretty necessary, or at the very least they help a lot to reveal important details

So I guess if I count all of them you need five

[torpid forge]

right, but they don't require whole playthroughs

[spark kraken]

oh my god maybe that's what f stands for all along

[torpid forge]

I got five endings in three playthroughs

with a little reloading

[spark kraken]

Right right, I wasn't counting for the whole thing about reloading and just doing things different from a save point

I didn't really know how it worked at the time admittedly

[torpid forge]

the UFO one in particular is extremely easy to just finish up in a few minutes then reload and keep going (...if you read a walkthrough to know where the triggers are)

tbf for ending 2 vs 3 you do have to repeat the whole ||Shimizu Residence|| and endgame sequence so I guess it'd be more accurate to say 3.1 playthroughs?

[spark kraken]

also this whole time I was trying to find even more video essay channels and I ended up just doing a full cleanup of my subscriptions instead since I've had this account since 2012 and that was long overdue
...I really need to stop getting sidetracked like that

[torpid forge]

in retrospect, it really wants you to be locked into an ending by that point so the scenes in that area can be tied to it

[spark kraken]

We did find out that NG+2 has differences compared to NG+

[torpid forge]

yeah, the 3rd playthrough was honestly more substantial than I expected

[spark kraken]

I really thought NG+ would be it and any other differences would just be the endings, I really hope most people will take the time to actually go through the game these many times and not just think the other endings are fun extras and that the first ending is all there is to it

[torpid forge]

I'm certainly curious how many people will do that

the fact that a single playthrough is just not that long (especially if you're less thorough than me), plus the main menu prominently showing an ending list with (mostly) clear criteria, plus the first ending obviously raising way more questions than answers, PLUS this series' reputation for having multiple endings with meaningful differences... I sure hope a lot of people would engage with that

oh, and an easy mode for combat, that's yet another big help

[spark kraken]

The other games do do the ending thing a lot, but the part that worries me is that a lot of the times the endings are ''but what if the main character dies'' ''what if this other character survives'' like SH1-3-4, SH2 is the only one that meaningfully completely changes the entire ending but even then, even with the different endings you still get a satisfying complete story regardless, f though has like completely new interactions every playthrough that all add new pieces to the story which other games did not do so I'm also really hoping that people will engage with the multiple playthrough aspect of it

I mean if people did it for Nier Automata surely it won't be that weird for this

[torpid forge]

true

on the plus side, the hard-to-miss differences start only a few seconds into NG+

I also hope before long someone puts up a big video compiling all the differences, since there will absolutely be people who want to engage with that, but not to the point of committing an extra 10-20 hours like I just did

[spark kraken]

Or at the very least a reddit post or some guide or something

Someone out there surely will do it

[torpid forge]

at least I could give you the quick-and-dirty version of that

I did leave out a bunch of NG+2 notes but still you know where the differences are distributed

[spark kraken]

Yeah I think we did a pretty good job at documenting every different thing we found as we came across them

[torpid forge]

I guess I forgot to check if I managed 100% journal completion

it felt like I did, since a lot of that NG+2 stuff finished off the character entries that had been suspiciously not marked complete this whole time

I know you technically can't fully complete the journal without doing way more full playthroughs on a single file, just because some of the final bosses get separate entries, which explains why there's no achievement for that lol, but I suspect I have seen every page of it that can be unlocked

[spark kraken]

Yeah I'm usually all for completing or 100%ing games but I don't know if I'd actually do a full 4 playthroughs or so just to get the full journal you saw em and that's all that matters

[torpid forge]

oh speaking of the journal, one minor change that I appreciated was that, you know how the portraits for several character entries change later in a playthrough? I noticed that the late-game "Me" portrait had a new version on Ending 4 (for obvious reasons)

[spark kraken]

Oh yeah we noticed the portrait change when you get || the fox devil trigger || but I hadn't seen any of the other ones

Interesting that she || doesn't have the fox mask in that one though ||

[torpid forge]

indeed, which matches the final cutscene of that ending

I think this is the only journal picture that changes differently for NG+2/Ending 4, though there's a few entries that gain new art on their last pages

[torpid forge]

if you mean what I think you mean, the others are Shuu, Rinko and Sakuko's changing after ||you "kill" them in Worship Hall||, and Junko's ||after you've seen her mask||:

these I'm pretty sure are the same every playthrough

[spark kraken]

Yeah I hadn't seen any of those actually

I don't remember if || the mom and dad ones || also change

[torpid forge]

not that I can recall, and I double-checked they have not changed on this save file (Shimizu Residence NG+2, locked into Ending 4)

[spark kraken]

Interesting

[torpid forge]

it's possible they change later in the ending when you get the rest of their entries and I somehow only noticed the new text, but I'm not double-checking that lol

[spark kraken]

Yeah I'm sure, I can imagine what they are if they do change anyways

[torpid forge]

yeah, I didn't record those earlier since they mostly reflect the content of the scenes I did describe

[spark kraken]

so now that we're done done with this, I guess I'll start setting up SH1 on Duckstation so I can go through that for october, I'll try to do that early now that I'm finally finishing up some work that had kept me busy the past few months and prevented me from playing mostly anything new, I'll probably be finishing RE2 as well

I happened to find a youtube video with 10 views of the last journal entry after the true ending lol, I don't know if we mentioned this

[torpid forge]

I suspected I missed an entry there, since so much else was going on in that ending

[spark kraken]

I still think this was the most surprisingly nice Silent Hill ending so far

it all ended surprisingly amicably

usually it goes far worse

[torpid forge]

hm

I guess the "surprisingly" is a matter of perspective

I think SH2 Leave has a lot in common with SHf Silence

both involve the major characters moving on with their lives after, at the risk of sounding reductive, "getting over it", everyone involved in-universe seems to agree this is a good outcome, and (unlike SH2 Maria or SHf Wedding) there's no out-of-universe implication it's secretly bad

have you noticed I forgot the 1 and 3 endings yet

[spark kraken]

I think Leave is up there too I actually really like Leave ending and it's my personal canon ending just because it makes me feel nice inside to imagine someone getting a good ending out of this hell
I guess the part that surprises me the most and what I think is nice is that || Hinako ends up being able to achieve her goal of living and deciding for herself what she wants to be, and Shu and Kotoyuki end up being surprisingly receptive to this, including the other 'fake' ending where she goes off with Shu and he recognizes him as the boy from town and even calls him one of their own which was really nice ||

Hell, even the other 'fake' ending || where she stays with Kotoyuki and Shu reluctantly accepts it they end up being surprisingly nice to each other, after Shu got him a few times with the baseball bat of course ||

[torpid forge]

did you mean "goes off with ||Kotoyuki||"

[spark kraken]

No I mean the fox wets its tail ending or something like that I think is what it's called

the one where || he turns into an ACTUAL demon fox ||

[torpid forge]

ah I misread something there

oh the surprising part is ||the others being receptive||, okay

[spark kraken]

Yeah it feels surprisingly nice for a silent hill ending I guess

especially || the hug ||

[torpid forge]

well I guess I'm not surprised about Shuu since one of his very first lines in the game is that ||he'll accept any decision she makes, and he's very consistent about that; the only times he "opposes" her are when he's convinced she didn't actually make a decision||

the other guy's interesting though

||I was on the fence about Fox Mask from the start, partly because the whole scenario and how nice he is at first is such an obvious setup for him doing something awful as soon as you give him an inch of trust... but even when the three ceremonies happen, it's very obvious that Hinako is a willing participant. Or at least acting like one, has convinced herself she is one, etc, etc. There's zero sign that Fox Mask is intimidating her or pushing her or doing anything more nefarious than participating in furry cult society and what society thinks is normal. He is the model good husband. So from there I was convinced that he intends to be benevolent, and is only culpable for being a product of his time. And then in Ending 3, he comes dangerously close to doing the classic incel/misogynist "I did all the things on the checklist why won't you love me" schtick... but from a weirdly sympathetic position of explicitly being a non-human trying to figure out how to get a human to like him, by following the example of (oops) sexist humans. And by the end of that fight he's already arrived at "okay fine if you want freedom that much go ahead," so he's way more open to the idea than most irl misogynists (makes you wonder what kitsune gender roles are like...).||
So with all of that in mind, no, I was not personally surprised by his behavior in Ending 4 by the time I got to it.

[spark kraken]

I think I mention that specific thing in one of my freakouts when I was going through the endings myself mentioning how many times the game fakes you out on fox man

but no, he || really was just a really chill guy after all ||

who may or may not || be possessed by an actual real demon fox || but you know you take what you can get

[torpid forge]

I still think it's pretty clear he is but agree to disagree

speaking of character analysis, this guy is particularly fun to look at name kanji for

[spark kraken]

I still don't know if || the fox demon thing is supposed to be real or a complete metaphor for his father and the wishes of his father and his father before him etc etc society society || but I don't have a super hard opinion on it yet so if you think that's actually real I'll take your word for it because I was wondering about that

[torpid forge]

||常喜 寿幸 = 常 tsune/eternal 喜 ki/joy 寿 koto/longevity 幸 yuki/happiness|| like wow laying it on pretty thick there

[spark kraken]

Oh yeah I don't know why I didn't bother to look into their names

[torpid forge]

the really quick version is I don't think ||the natural disasters in endings 3 and 4, or his banishing of half of Hinako in ending 2|| make much sense as mere metaphors with no genuinely supernatural element

there's a bunch of "softer" evidence in the form of plot points that could be metaphors but just don't seem nearly as tightly written to me if they're mere metaphor (e.g. ||everything to do with the sword, the agura, the tsukumogami||), mostly because the characters who would be generating the metaphors are meant to be unaware of all of those plot points until ending 4

and the increasing pile of notes of people going "I believe in science and all but man this makes no goddamn sense unless kitsune magic is legit"

and to be fair, 99% of this is NG+ and NG+2 material; by the end of playthrough one it's absolutely reasonable to be thinking nothing out of the ordinary happened

[spark kraken]

Hey if there's evidence to all the supernatural or even some of the supernatural stuff actually happening I'm happier for that, I just kept thinking that all the evidence I found was all red herrings or some sort of metaphors and I kept trying to wrap my brain around them to try and find meaning but maybe there really is supernatural fox magic going around

that one note about fox possession in the doctor's house was the one that I started wondering about for the first time

Can't remember if it was NG or NG+

[torpid forge]

I guess ||Kotoyuki being unsure if his love is real|| in Ending 4 is another example of "soft" evidence that could work either way but I think makes way less sense if none of it's real

[torpid forge]

the one where he specifically describes ||Kotoyuki|| that way I'm confident is NG+, though the general concept might've been mentioned in OG somewhere

[spark kraken]

Oh yeah he actually namedrops him specifically

I think that's the first time you get his name too

[torpid forge]

might've been

to the backlog!

yeah oldest hit for that name in this thread is me describing that exact note

[spark kraken]

I'm kinda surprised I even remembered that

[torpid forge]

I think his name may have been given ||in the park flashback|| but I didn't catch it at the time. I distinctly remember seeing it in the subtitle and failing to hear how they pronounced it.

[torpid forge]

lol yeah I completely misheard it somehow

that might be the one and only appearance of the name in the entire first playthrough

||They clearly don't want you to be able to connect him to fox mask yet. I mean I guess "a fox bit him, therefore he's Fox Mask!" is a thing a player could say but ... lol||

[spark kraken]

Yep, I was gonna say, you get his name but until like NG+ you don't make the connection at all

so he's a loose end until a subsequent playthrough

[torpid forge]

so that NG+ doctor's note is the earliest moment you could rationally put together that ||Fox Mask is a kitsune-possessed Kotoyuki who fell in love with Hinako that day at the playground||

which I think is exactly what I did, for all the aforementioned reasons I was looking for something like that anyway

[spark kraken]

Yeah I thought so too when I got to that point, but I guess it's a little obvious too

[torpid forge]

I guess a lot of this is "obvious" after you find all the relevant evidence

[spark kraken]

Well this particular detail a bit more just because || you already associate him with the fox stuff anyways so that plus him being bitten by a fox plus the fox possession thing... ||

but by that point you still don't have any hard evidence, all that just clues you in

[torpid forge]

I'm just happy I put together that ||fog monster = bride hinako|| and ||the two hinakos were being controlled by opposing gods|| before the 1st and 4th endings respectively confirmed those things

the latent uncertainty we have about certain details feels well within what I'm completely happy to leave vague in a story like this