Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Last month, a wave of "random voting PK" was popular in European and American game circles, grouping historical masterpieces of the same type randomly in pairs to decide the most popular works in the form of voting elimination.

Different from all kinds of voting in the past, such "random melee" outstanding is an unlimited rule, unreasonable, is pure "kitchen competition."

Tens of thousands of people voted in the category of "visual novels," from "CLANNAD" with love theme to "Thirteen Soldiers Defense Circle" with sci-fi suspense, from "Lance" with R18 to "Reverse Judge" for mainstream public, from "Fate / Stay night", which was still a work of the same people's association in those years, to "Heavy Dependence on Anchor Girls", a popular independent game newly promoted in recent years... In short, it basically covers masterpieces in various sub-fields of this type. Just looking at the primary list makes one think it will be a chaotic battle with unpredictable results.

Surprisingly, the winner of the poll ended up between two books by the same author-Dragon Knight 07's When the Cicada Cry and When the Sea Cat Cry.

More than 7,000 people participated in the final vote, and finally "Cold Cicada" beat "Sea Cat" and became the champion of this vote. Even fans of Dragon Knight 07 were surprised that "Cold Cicada" born 20 years ago still contains such popularity. They took this opportunity to actively recommend this creator and his masterpiece to the new generation of players, for fear of missing this rare "highlight moment."

But the really big surprise came a month later.

The long-dormant Silent Hill franchise has released a number of new news today, including a remake of Silent Hill 2, a new film adaptation, Silent Hill Ascension, and the most high-profile new sequel Silent Hill F, written by Dragon Rider 07.

This news surprised almost everyone, and it was difficult to associate the games Dragon Knight 07 had made with Silent Hill.

When the characters of Cold Cicada came to Silent Hill, it was probably like this. In the past ten years, the call for the return of Silent Hill has never weakened, but now its new appearance is not quite the same as everyone imagined.

1

Silent Hill: Storm, released in 2012, was the last console game in the series to be released to date, and with several sequels cancelled the following year, the project, which had launched more than a dozen related titles since its birth in 1999, fell into a long silence.

Fans blame the results on publisher Konami's eagerness to squeeze too much.

After Silent Hill 2 sold millions of copies, Konami distributed the series, originally dominated by Japanese producers, to more small and medium-sized studios in Europe and the United States for mass production.

Although several of these spin-offs have been well received, Silent Hill no longer has a stable self-style. Commercially, although it was not as good as the Zero series, which could only sell five figures per game, it was far inferior to Resident Evil, which sold millions of copies steadily.

After exhausting Silent Hill's potential, Konami chose to put the series in the cold, allowing frustrated fans to rant.

Things took a turn in 2014, when Hideo Kojima, then vice president of KDE (Konami Digital Entertainment), set out to revive the company's frozen series of game brands, including Silent Hill.

In August of that year, a free demo called Playable Teaser was quietly uploaded to the Playstation store. At first glance, the Demo only allowed players to walk back and forth in an endless corridor, but it was gradually excavated with a lot of hidden information, which eventually pointed to the new silent hill by Hideo Kojima himself.

Successful clearance of this demo DEMO can see the preview of Silent Hill S starred by "crossbow brother" This Demo has a distinct style of Hideo Island, such as movie-style mirror operation, fragmented narrative, and finally use the microphone on the handle to input voice puzzle, Silent Hill S is naturally considered to be only the island can complete the work.

However, just a year later, the conflict between Hideo Kojima and the top management of Konami surfaced, and a series of conflicts broke out between the two sides over the direction of the company's development, ending with Hideo Kojima's loss of power and departure. The cancellation of Silent Hill S and the subsequent removal of P.T undoubtedly led more people to support Hideo Kojima. After all, for players, this meant that a widely anticipated work had died.

At that time, nearly 200,000 people petitioned Hideo Kojima to continue to complete the work, which also put pressure on Konami to save the "P.T" that no longer had a channel to download. For a time, even PS4 equipped with this demo DEMO was expensive and was fired to a high price. This "Fantasy DEMO" has also been spread more and more mysterious, and there are still people trying to dig out the hidden information. There are also many fans who say that it has led the development trend of horror games in the next few years, inspired a series of independent games represented by Escape, and promoted Resident Evil from action games to horror style...

At this point,"Silent Hill" further became a difficult to hide the scars on the body of Konami.

2

In 2019, Hideo Kojima completed his first game since leaving Konami, Death Stranding, which partly inherited the original Silent Hill squad, starring, for example, crossbow brother and Mexican director Gilmore del Toro, who was scheduled to direct Silent Hill S.

However, this does not mean that the regrets left by P.T have been made up. On the contrary, there are more and more calls for Hideo Kojima to return to restart the Silent Hill series. From time to time, half-true rumors flow out, claiming that a sequel to Silent Hill is already planned, led by Sony and produced by Kojima.

Even though Konami has clarified this many times, but many people still believe that, after all,"P.T" has become the "Silent Hill" series can not get around the hurdle, they think that the solution must be tied to the bell, in order to make this series smoothly restart, only Konami soft please return to the island Hideo.

This eventually turned into a farce in 2021.

That year, a Dutch game studio called Blue Box released a video for the game titled Abandoned. A little-known production team, a lackluster promotional video, has garnered unprecedented attention among fans of Hideo Kojima because some believe it is a new puzzle Kojima has thrown at players.

They created a section on Reddit to analyze the connections between Hideo Kojima, Blue Box, and Silent Hill. From the banner on the company's website to the reading list Kojima shared on Twitter, it can serve as hard evidence that Silent Hill's new book is about to be announced.

"Silent, he said Silent" Time proved that all this was just a rumor, the relationship between Kojima and Konami showed no signs of easing, and Abandoned was really just a small company's difficult birth game. Such a strong bond between Silent Hill and Hideo Kojima began to antagonize fans of earlier Silent Hill episodes.

Before Hideo Kojima, Team Silent, who was responsible for making games for 1 to 4 generations, was the founder of the Silent Hill series, and its soul characters included Akira Yamaoka, art designer Ito Changda, screenwriter Daiwa Hisahiro and many other members. The game's characteristic psychological horror atmosphere, intriguing character stories, and well-known monster images were established by this team.

One of the triggers that led to the shutdown of Silent Hill was that Konami disbanded Team Silent and completely handed over the game to European and American studios, causing players to lose confidence in the series.

Silent Hill, produced by Team Silent, is not similar to the later P.T., and fans of the original find it hard to accept that Silent Hill is now referred to as an incomplete P.T., which is unfair to former producers.

Most importantly, although Hideo Kojima and Konami have completely broken up, many members of Team Silent still maintain a cooperative relationship with the company. The pressure exerted by P.T. fans will also be a resistance to the original style "Silent Hill" restart.

Although the conflict is not fierce, Silent Hill's following group has quietly split into "Island P.T." and "Original Class."

3

In August, Hideo Kojima tweeted about Silent Hill for a long time, uploading a classic cover of P.T. with the caption "8 years."

His director friend Gilmore quickly retweeted the tweet and left the message "F.K," which naturally means "Fuck Konami."

Gilmore's statement was tantamount to denying the possibility of Kojima returning to take over Silent Hill, but at that time, few people thought that their feelings at this time might be due to knowing in advance that Silent Hill was about to bypass the news of P.T. restart.

Over the next two months, rumors of new silent hill titles increased and became more credible. In early October, Konami officially announced that silent hill would return, and on the 20th of that month, a series of new titles mentioned at the beginning of the article were published live.

The stage of Silent Hill F changed from a small town in Europe and America to a Japanese village, full of wind elements. Silent Hill, which was criticized for being too "Europeanized" in its sequel, is now directly set in Japanese. Inviting authors active in the field of visual novels like Dragon Knight 07 to directly write scripts for traditional games was also rare in the industry.

As a result, such a choice seems to be quite clever. European and American players 'acceptance of Dragon Knight 07 is quite high. Since the news was announced, many fans spontaneously introduced and praised Dragon Knight 07's writing standard and achievements to others, believing that his hidden and tortuous narrative style is in line with the original atmosphere of Silent Hill, so that more people accept the changes of the new book.

At the same time, the old members of Team Silent, represented by Ito Changda and Yamaoka Akira, also showed considerable support for the new work and actively forwarded relevant content. Especially Ito Changda, who once designed the image of "triangular head," specially forwarded the self-introduction of the new art designer, which conveyed some recognition of his successor as a senior.

At the same time, Geoff Keighley, the host and founder of TGA, published the promotional picture of "P.T." Although there were no lines attached, the intention of arch fire was expressed in words, and Hideo Kojima himself retweeted the tweet.

This tweet also received a lot of likes, but the comment area is no longer all "Fuck Konami," many people leave messages saying "almost got it," think "Silent Hill" is not the exclusive island Hideo, let alone Geoff to rub traffic.

The contradiction between the supporters of "Kojima P.T." and "original class" gradually became fierce as the parties took sides. Predictably, Silent Hill F's performance will not only determine the future of the series, but will also bring new influence to the long-standing conflict between Hideo Kojima and Konami.

conclusion

In fact, just in February this year, Ito Changda suddenly posted a tweet saying,"I wish I TM had never designed a triangle head," but refused to explain why he made such a feeling.

Some fans interpreted this as a complaint against his employer, Konami, who, even after the Silent Hill franchise went silent, was still squeezing the character's value by selling his rights to guest stars in other games.

At that time, fans had bought the long-abandoned domain name" Silent.com" of Konami, displayed the image of "triangular head" on the home page, and then replaced Ito Changda's tweet, which is still the case today.

This practice is obviously also an open challenge to Konami

Now Ito Changda praised the change of the new work, no doubt let the players who once thought they were on the same front with him appear a little embarrassed, and can only blame themselves for being too deep into the play.

Before Silent Hill really returned, countless people had imagined how much Konami would pay for it to regain the players 'understanding. But it turns out that business is business, and players ultimately care more about what kind of game they can play.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Game Research Society (ID: ysaag), author: Lushark

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