Silent Hill 2 Spoilers
I will admit, it is looking better than before. Still not totally sold on it, but it is looking better.
I think the trailer is a little bit too spoilery, like with two of the red pyramid things coming out when previously in the game you'd always think there was just one until this moment. It's a really cool reveal and to just put it in the trailer is unfortunate. Or things like Eddie's breakdown. I know most people playing this remake will have already played the original, but I am sure a lot of people haven't played it yet too... so the trailer having things that are pretty wild moments is unfortunate.
I also don't really jive with the lead guitar in Laura's Theme. I can't think of the right musical term for it right now, but the notes played don't last as long as they should and it leaves some weird empty space. It sounds like an amateur playing and stopping their notes too early. The guitar tone also just sounds a bit more cheesy... honestly it sounds like a MIDI guitar.
I am curious as to why they felt the need to remake the soundtrack at all. It's not like it was originally recorded on cassette tape and that's the only version they have left, or it was made with MIDI to begin with or something. It's full CD audio, probably with studio reference versions that are in much higher quality than that. The only two reasons I can think of are that 1) it's great for advertising or 2) they have implemented some dynamic music system into the game. I hope it is mainly the latter, and I hope it actually works well.
More Silent Hill 2 Remake thoughts
From what I've seen of the combat, I'm not personally a huge fan. Looks a little generic to me. Monsters that stun you when they scream sort of sets off red flags for me here. I've heard that the combat is a lot closer to something like The Last of Us and has the same sort of dodging thing going on that Callisto Protocol had, but I haven't watched any of the leaks or anything like that so I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'd rather get hands on with it myself. From the little I've seen in the trailers, it does look a little snappy and guided just like TLOU is. As long as it isn't over the top action like Resi than I think it'll be at least okay, but I am still worried that it is going to be focused on a bit too much.
There's this kind of idea going around that a lot of Silent Hill 2's "issues" are due to technological limitations, or because that's "just how people made games back then," but you'd think that if Team Silent wanted to make the game with a fully functional camera and more action, then they would've done it. PS1 would have been a little harder to do something like that on, but we're talking PS2 here. SH2 came out around the same time as stuff like Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy X did, not to mention Konami's own Metal Gear Solid 2. It's design in pretty much every facet is just about as intentional as it gets, in my opinion.
I see a lot of people who say that Bloober just needs to do what the REmakes did, fundamentally missing the point that Silent Hill is only just tangentially related to it as a survival horror game. It feels like a lot of people, including the devs, are sort of missing the point in a lot of aspects. Or, if they really are trying to go for the original intended design, then they are missing how the changes we ended up with built the game's identity. I just worry it'll only be skin deep. If we really want to talk about games as an art form but then reduce them in this way, I'm not sure that's really selling that idea. I know that gets a little philosophical but it's just what's on my mind.
And yeah, that extends to Pyramid Head too, just like what they did with him back when Silent Hill really tanked. It's like, hey, everyone really like this character, we should put him into more stuff. Hey, everyone really likes RE2's remake, we should make SH2 remake more like that. They're both horror games so it's pretty much fine, probably.