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Siren (PS2/Sony)
by IGGY
04092004
The Game!
The most important screen of the game is a menu chart - with the rows telling when the mission happens and the columns telling who it happens to. The game takes place during 3 days, and the missions are presented like this: "Onda Lisa, Miyata Hospital, first day, 22:00". The table will stay extremely empty, and you will only see the defining moments of each day for each character (all happening simultaneously). When you have a gap of more than 6 hours in the life of a character, you may have a chance to see him if he meets another character (in this other character's column). If you're not that lucky, then you'll have to think about it by yourself (or maybe the character is simply sleeping; those 3 days must be quite tiresome).
There are a little more than 30 missions, each having 2 objectives (so you will have to finish each mission at least twice). The first mission will most of the time involve the action the character actually does ("going from A to B without being killed" or "protect the other character" for example). The second objective is most of the time used to create a narrative link to the next scenario (find a particular object lost by someone, and the next mission will be focused on that new character). By the end of the game, the importance of the objectives will be reversed, and the first objective will be there to help you become familiar with the level, while the second objective will be the real important action of your character. Most of the time, the two objectives will be completely different, so you won't have the feeling to do the same thing again and again (or only when you fail 20 times in a row at the same objective).
The missions are really varied. Depending on your character, you may have to walk to a certain place without being noticed, or to solve some puzzles, or kill everything on sight because you are in one of the few missions of the game where you can afford to do it and it's good to do it sometimes. Most of the missions mix those 3 actions to different degrees. Since the maps are barely re-used more than twice, each mission will feel completely different from the others.
The puzzles can be both more natural and more sophisticated than the average "find the memo where Jim wrote that Tom told him that the new secret password to open the toilets was 9475"-Hazard. For example, in a particular mission, you have to get a particular item in a room where a shibito locked himself to eat. First, with another character who had a mission there a few hours earlier, you would have to plug in the fridge, then go get a towel, wet it, then go back all the way to the fridge and put the towel in it (and then to finish your normal mission alive, or the sub-objective won't be saved!). Then, with the other character a few hours later, you can go to the fridge, take the iced towel, and balance it in the kitchen near the room where the shibito is eating. Then, you put a mug on the rigid towel and hide. The ice will slowly melt, the mug will fall, break, and the shibito will come out to see what happened, allowing you to sneak in and take the item you need. There are a lot of sub-objectives; some secondary objectives require you to complete up to 5 sub-objectives to complete them.
In the easier missions, the game can seem quite rigid. You try once, you fail, and you die. You try again, die again, try again, fail again, and then, you finally find the perfect pattern and you'll do exactly the same thing every time you'll redo the mission afterwards.
It seems like nothing changed since Makaimura (<Editor’s note: Ghouls and Ghosts>).
But if you talk with other players, you will notice almost everyone finished some missions in his own ways. In some cases, a player will run through the level, zigzagging to dodge the bullets, and then another player will hide somewhere and look through the eyes of every shibito of the level, memorizing where they are going, what they are looking at, for how long, then find the exact moment when he will be able to cross the street without anybody noticing him. In the example of the mug, you can also take it and simply break it yourself; in this case, the shibito (angry, holding a gun and at point blank range) will open the door and you will have to knock him out with you Mighty Hammer before he shoots. Despise how it may look at first glance, the game can be incredibly flexible, even with seemingly straightforward objectives ("get the gun? Ha! I don't need weapons!")
The translation
The translation may be the biggest problem in the game, even more than that whole thinking thing. The original game is 100% spoken, without subtitles, and you will need a perfect mastery of Japanese to get what's going on. The game has been translated in several European languages and should hit the states sooner or later. There, the game seems to be aimed towards an audience interested in Japan (they kept the katakana of the original name on the cover), which is a clever move (a story set on a Japanese folkloric background is, after all, more interesting then the same story on an American background, especially when Japanese people make the game in both cases), but, but, BUT the game has been dubbed. Not only is it as inept as dubbing a movie, since the characters are modeled after the Japanese voice actors, but it is also a horrible waste to hear such charismatic characters played by these particular talent-deprived western voice actors. The terrible dubbing changes the game completely, and for me, who felt in love with each of the characters, playing the French version was a real torture. And I don’t even want to mention the poor translation. This is a game where each sentence is important, because it may be the tiny little clue you needed to understand a detail of the story. The lack of quality of the French dub (and some reports say the other versions are horrible as well <Editor’s note: the English dub is quite poor>) completely ruins the game. It’s as simple as that.
If you can’t understand the scenario, and if the characters all talk with that weird monotonic voice, I don’t know what could motivate you to reach the end of another extremely hard mission. The saddest part of this is that the localization must have cost a lot, and I don't think the game will be nearly as big as Resident Evil or Metal Gear out of Japan (where it already isn't very big in the first place). Of course, maybe it’s because I’ve played the original version to death, maybe someone who never played it would not notice the difference, but I can’t help thinking a simple subtitle with some clever archive editing would have been far cheaper and would have completely reproduced the feeling of the original game. For a game that requires you to think, reading subtitles shouldn’t be so hard, should it?
Oh, yes, the Archives. The archives are extremely hard to adapt. A few of them have some shibito symbols written on them, and when you read the message, it gives a sentence in Japanese. Some of them have been adapted to give something in each European language, but unfortunately, some of them are still in Japanese after the decryption. Another problem with the archives is that some of them have an incomplete description on purpose. For example, the description of a library card says the name of the book, the name of the last person who borrowed it, then "the rest is illegible". But if you look closely to the archive, you can actually read at least the name of the penultimate person who borrowed it, which is quite a surprise. Of course, they could have added the name of that person to the description of the archive, it would have robbed the player from the great pride of having won, with his own personal skills, a fight against the game, to have found a little evidence the game shouldn't have let him find that early. But it would have been better than forgetting it, so that no occidental player will ever know who borrowed the book before that last person. That’s what the localization does. After all, it's not important, is it? "It's just a game..."
That really seems to sum up the general attitude towards the game. The official site of “Forbidden” Siren seems well done; you see 4 characters talking about themselves, their lives, and so on. They talk in Japanese, which makes wonder even more deeply why they dubbed the game. Unfortunately, on the mere portion of the site I've seen, I already saw 2 big spoilers (well done!), an approximation on a certain detail of one of the character's background, and, though it's well done, Kyôya's chamber is far too intellectual for the dumb character he is. And if it were not enough, the people who wrote the monologs are definitely not Japanese. Some sentences sound like English translated word to word in Japanese. Someone just gave the text to a random Japanese person and said "Read!” The general impression the site gives is that Sony Europe has decided to spend a lot of money to get every player interested in Japan to play the game, but without investing much skill in the adaptation. All this bullshit is nice, but it's useless, and it's the exact contrary of the Japanese site, which had these 4 short stories written by the original staff, to intrigue, to reveal what they wanted to reveal and nothing else. As I said, these 4 stories are important to understand some seemingly minor details of the universe of the game, they are not related with the main action, but they definitely give something to their reader. It looks like the occidental players won’t even have the choice to read them or not, since they got some inept spoilerific flash crap instead. And if Siren Maniacs is not translated and edited outside Japan (and why would it be, it’s “just a book about a game”!) they will miss entire threads of the game.
This bad adaptation is the worst thing that could have happened to the game. Siren is revolutionary on a lot of levels, it has a narrative flow that neither a book nor a movie could emulate. The game is really fun to play, and really hard, which is a huge plus when you think of the number of games you can finish without ever seeing the “Game Over” screen. It is quite long compared to the other games of the same genre (between 20 and 40 hours), and it succeeds at the same time to be perfectly serious (no space ship ending) without being ever ridiculous (At least, the original version. The dubs seem to be full of potential "What's going on in this town!" and "Watch out! It's a monster!").
Siren innovates deeply, without making the gameplay suffer for it. The fear it tries to raise in the player is more mature then just a "oh no! a big scary monster is trying to out-ugly me!” It's a completely different type of horror, closer to something like "a horde of psychopaths escaped from the asylum, they are in the streets, it's late, they don't know I'm here, I know what they would do to me if they find me, and I don't know if I'm going to reach my house alive". The videogame, as a media, has at last a name he can proudly put in front of the biggest horror movies and novels. It would have been so great if people without Japanese skills could have discovered it in good condition. Sorry.
IGGY is not regret.
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Hosted in French by The-Sugoi! who also provided the screens.
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