The Top Shelf: The Second Round 028: Forbidden Siren 2

by mento

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

It may be a few weeks away still, but I'm getting ready for October and the Halloween season with a number of horror and horror-themed games coming up on Shelftember. The first, and most intense, is Forbidden Siren 2, the second game in a spiritual successor series to Silent Hill devised by many members of the first Silent Hill's development team (Project Siren; who, curiously, now develop the Gravity Rush games). However, if Silent Hill is nightmare fuel, then Siren is the high-octane stuff you only put in roadsters and airplanes. Like Fatal Frame, the game is built around a focal feature that - entirely deliberately, I have to assume - makes the game that much more terrifying to play.

In Siren 2, as in Siren, the player adopts the roles of multiple playable characters who find themselves in a cursed location cut off from civilization by an immense lake of crimson water. In Siren 2's case, this includes: Mamoru Itsuki (the closest the game has to a main protagonist), the editor of a magazine dealing with the supernatural; Private Yorito Nagai of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, who crash lands on the island with his unit with only his taciturn superior officer Misawa for company; the quack tarot-reader Akiko Kiyota, who was kidnapped by deadbeat Abe Soji after a misunderstanding with the authorities and finds that this incident is giving her for-real psychic powers; the disgraced and overwhelmed cop Shigeru Fujita, who befriends and protects the schoolgirl Ichigo Yakura; and the blind famous author Shu Mikami, who is accompanied by his guide dog Tsukasa, to name a few. Each finds themselves on the abandoned Yamijima Island for different reasons shortly before an enormous red tsunami hits, taking out power and communication to the mainland and awakening an evil force trapped deep beneath. Surrounded by "Shibito" ("corpse people") who resemble zombies but have enough sapience to still be dangerous and cunning foes, the scattered survivors rely on the newly acquired ability of "sightjacking" to stay alive. This allows them to see through the eyes of all creatures in the vicinity, including anyone they happen to be travelling with and the many Shibito that prowl Yamijima Island. Through sightjacking, the player can figure out enemy patrols which they can subsequently avoid, or learn information that might prove useful later like the combination to a dial lock. When not agitated by the player's presence, Shibito simply go about their half-remembered business, like the mall zombies of Romero's Dawn of the Dead - they're terrifying when they're chasing you down while laughing maniacally, but just as disquieting as they mumble to themselves while performing the same task over and over.

The game has a fragmented narrative that bounces between person to person often going forwards and backwards through time: there's a reason for this, beyond simply being disconcerting, which is that you can perform actions with a character in one location that will subtly change that same environment when another character eventually passes through hours later. Also, a character might find optional items that could be used later in their particular story thread. Sometimes, it just feels like butterfly effect stuff, where a chain of events might result which changes a scenario halfway across the map. The player can also find "archive" items; items that impart more of the game's lore and the backstory of Yamijima Island and those of the characters involved, many of which are video and audio documents that have to be accessed via the main menu. Some are better hidden than others, and I believe all are required to unlock the game's extra epilogue(s).

The game's Excel-like 'Link Navigator', which keeps track of all the missions you've played and how they relate to one another by character (x-axis) and chronologically (y-axis). It's less confusing than it looks, often because there's only one active mission at a time (barring those you can revisit to complete additional objectives, which are those slanted ones).

It's hard to put into words just how scary this game is. Like Clock Tower, it's one where the protagonist is often completely helpless and must rely on hiding and stealth to proceed. Some characters can carry weapons and take down Shibito, but only temporarily, while others have no weapons at all with which to defend themselves. Siren 2 quickly starts introducing a second type of enemy - Yamibito, or "Darkness People" - who are far more dangerous than even the Shibito but have a debilitating weakness to light. Shibito and Yamibito will fight on contact, and the player can stack the odds in their favor by manipulating light sources: either creating more light to keep the Yamibito at bay, or destroying light sources to stay hidden from the Shibito. As the game proceeds, the Shibito and Yamibito start evolving into more dangerous and increasingly inhuman forms, and begin to include the extended cast that weren't able to survive, letting the player know in no uncertain terms what happened to them after they stopped appearing in their own vignettes. Visually, the game has this grainy found footage look to its cutscenes that enhances the game's occasionally shaky but otherwise super effective facial animations, which aren't so much rendered in 3D but use 2D animated photos of the actors' faces superimposed on their character models. Sometimes parts of these faces, like a lower lip, can get cut off during particularly expressive reactions but the effect is otherwise seamless: they look like real faces making genuine expressions of fear, surprise, concern or amusement, and you can imagine how effectively creepy that uncanny tech can be utilized in a horror game.

The Siren games might get a little too convoluted and disorderly with their narratives for their own good, but the minute-to-minute gameplay of finding a quiet spot, sightjacking nearby enemies until you see a window of opportunity to move forward, and picking your way through dark environments while never being quite certain if you're able to walk into a Shibito's field of view is almost paralyzing in its degree of terror. It's a game that requires a lot of dedication and some degree of luck, as you'll often find yourself revisiting characters and scenarios to find the one item or unlock the optional objective that is required to progress a different character's story chain somewhere else, not to mention balls of solid stainless steel (you know, in case you pee all over them in fright. This was a poorly thought out metaphor) to push yourself onward to the inevitable grim fates the game has in store for its many characters. It's a little much for me right now, but an hour turned out to be enough time to learn the ropes (or nooses! (!!)) of the game's exploration, combat and sightjacking mechanics, so maybe I'll pick it back up next month if the spooky seasonal mood strikes me just right.

(Post-edit: I almost forgot to mention! This game was never released in the United States. Just straight up skipped over 'em. Like many Japanese games that stopped at Europe, such as Xenoblade Chronicles for a long while, its localization is distinctly British: British dialect, British colloquialisms, British voice overs. Kinda neat to see, though obviously a bummer to US horror fans who missed out.)

Result: Progresses to the Final Round.

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