have finally overcome the hurdle of 'not finding this game fun' by doing a playthrough with a huge club and smacking the shit out of everything. have realised they nerfed straight swords to shit here to encourage use of the expanded rpg mechanics and that's why i was having a bad time

as for everything else? i am literally completely neutral on it now LOL - ds2 has some of the older fromsoft games' vibes for sure but i do think it lacks a lot of the genuinely interesting design + aesthetic decisions of games like evergrace or shadow tower abyss

the soundtrack is particularly mediocre, i wasn't a huge fan of sakuraba's ds1 offerings but his compositions here are as uninspired as they come, and while i think yuka kitamura's work here fares better overall, it's still not nearly as good as the later games' OSTs

fun little game with some good ideas though! just obviously made with a lack of time & confidence, ambitious in scope but not entirely willing to commit to what it puts forward, i long for the original version of this game before it changed hands as well as the one that got to deliver on its revised set of concepts fully

Silent Hill 2 is a very complex and deep game, and one of the most important horror games made by Team Silent, the problem is, that almost nobody understands it. Silent Hill is the most misunderstood franchise in the gaming culture specially SH2, mostly because people tend to spread false information about this game, like saying that Mary isn't abusive (even tho Masahiro Ito which is responsible for the symbolisms of this game, says that the flesh lips is a metaphor of Mary's mouth which was used to abuse James), saying that James is a bad person, didn't loved her, or that James or Pyramid Head is a r4p1st, non of these are true, are all made up lies that goes against the evidences and the whole meaning of the game and it's plot. So sad how a beautiful game got in the wrong hands of some people. This game has a defined canon and it's not open for "interpretations" this game is just complex, and people who doesn't do their research tend to spread this idea that the game is open to interpret however u want, which isn't true. This game is very inspired by the works of Sigmund Freud, James's relationship is very complex, and James got his reasons to end Mary's life.

Every monster in this game has it's symbolisms, so the areas of this game, like that part of James walking down the stairs, which represents that we are getting deeper into James's mind. This game has a lot of details and everything in this game is just pure genius. I've made a 7 hour analysis of this game, and i got to say, this game will forever be a timeless masterpiece, i doubt the remake will ever be able to get close of what SH2 is.