Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game, a genre largely defined by things falling apart. In The Last of Us games, Joel, Ellie, and Abby can scavenge melee weapons to bash skulls with — zombie and human ones alike — but even the most durable of those improvised armaments break after a handful of good whacks.
And in Call of Duty‘s Zombies mode, you’re often boarding up windows, only for the undead hordes to bust through. Guns empty, healing items grow scarce, and light sources run out of gas/matches/batteries. It’s a genre built on entropy and, ironically, that’s a solid foundation.
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Silent Hill 2 Hands James A Bat And Tells Him “Go Wild”
Which is what makes it so goddamn funny that Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland picks up a piece of wood with some nails sticking out of it in the opening hour of the game and never has to replace it. At least, he hasn’t had to yet. I’m seven hours in and am using the nail bat to bludgeon the game’s creepy gray enemies every chance I get, and I have not seen a single crack in the wood. It’s a truncheon with some punch.
I’m having a great time comparing this indestructible piece of trash to the Master Sword as it appears in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The Master Sword has always been the most powerful and important weapon in Zelda, and that is unchanged in the Switch duology. In both of Nintendo’s big open-world outings, every weapon breaks after you use it for a while. To make the Master Sword feel more powerful, Nintendo exempted the iconic weapon from breakability.
But if the Master Sword doesn’t break, what reason do you have to engage with the game’s weapons at all once you find it? If the sword didn’t break, the game kinda would. So Nintendo gave it an energy meter. Once it ran out, you had to sheathe it and use your other weapons until it charged back up. So, this legendary sword of myth is reduced to working in the same ways as the RC monster truck I got one Christmas, charged for four hours, and got to play with for 20 minutes before the battery died.
The Master Sword Is A Baby Weapon For Babies
That’s a funny bit of ludonarrative dissonance on its own but, after seeing how Bloober Team handles James’ nail bat in Silent Hill 2, I’m finding it downright hilarious. In the fantasy game about a mythic hero saving the world from an ancient evil, the sword that seals the darkness stops working every other fight.
Meanwhile, in the survival horror game about a regular guy constantly getting the crap kicked out of him as he attempts to find his wife in an abandoned town in Maine, his weapon, which he randomly picked up off the ground, will never be destroyed. He may need to hunt for ammo for his gun, and needles and juice to keep him standing, but he will never need a new cudgel. The nail bat trumps the Master Sword and it isn’t particularly close.
It all goes to show that different games go for different things. The Legend of Zelda wants you to feel like a hero who has been out of the world-saving game for a hundred years, and is getting his ass kicked as he learns to be that hero once more. And every time you encounter one of those enemies in a creepy apartment hallway, Silent Hill 2 wants you to feel Willie Mays hitting a homerun. Different strokes.
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