Half a year after the release of Silent Hill f, Ryukishi07, writer of Silent Hill f and the When They Cry series, has been working on a manga adaptation of the game in collaboration with illustrator Ame Gokin, with the promise of a brand new ending.
While not unusual for post-game adaptations to have new endings, f is in an interesting spot for a retelling considering its currently divisive legacy.
A Conflicted Gaming Experience
Silent Hill f has a very compelling protagonist and concept through Shimizu Hinako, a young girl who deeply fears becoming a servile housewife while fending off a haunted town that constantly taunts her of this inevitability. This premise, alongside the game’s warped depiction of conventional beauty, familial structure, and social posturing, gives this story a more universally anxiety-inducing narrative than some of its previous games. A very understated positive is f’s gorgeous art style, which informs so much of the setting’s cultural history and the oppressiveness that comes from it.
It is also a story that feels hampered by its nature as a game. Though the game has some fantastic monster designs, Hinako is so bizarrely powerful at fighting that it weakens the narrative of her being a tormented, vulnerable 17-year-old. Several negative reviews at the time even likened the game’s combat to being a souls-like, monster-slaying game rather than a survival horror one.
Ryukishi07’s brand of anachronistic, ARG-like storytelling shows its weakness in F, having multiple contradicting endings with a lack of clarity as to which timeline or dimension is portraying the real events of the current story.
A problem that is especially clear with Silent Hill f’s first playthrough locking you to its most unclear ending, regardless of player choice, with a demanding task to replay the entire game for more unclear revelations.
A New Medium with New Chances
Regardless of its reception, Silent Hill f’s bold themes and style gathered a strong enough fanbase that is perfectly satisfied with the better parts of the experience. The manga does, however, offer another take on “telling” aspects of the same story that, even if it isn’t better, can at least be an interesting way to see how this narrative can be told more linearly.
So far, f’s manga only has two short chapters covering the first 15 minutes of the game. Though the story isn’t exactly different on the surface, there are some notable presentational differences worth mentioning.
Chapters 1-2 and Some Immediate Differences
Ame Gokin’s drawn art style offers a more charming character expression than the mo-capped models of the game. Though the awkwardness of Hinako’s friends was undoubtedly an intentional choice (a hallmark of Silent Hill weirdness as a whole) there’s a bit more of a friendliness in the interactions here even if the dialogue is written exactly the same.
I particularly liked the short action scene in Chapter 2 with the Kashimashi (the female doll monster), which was far better at establishing Hinako’s self-defense efficiency than her immediate Souls-like movement in the game.
One very simple, but very welcome change is the quick introduction of the red pills and Hinako’s use of them in Chapter 1. In the game, this was an enormously plot-critical detail that oddly required the player to constantly check Hinako’s diary for the specifics. This diary is also a huge storytelling issue that would often spoil too much of the game’s mysteries, which would’ve been better depicted in the game’s cutscenes.
The only negatives I can give are that I’m not exactly fond of the more hysterical character designs of Hinako’s parents, when the game smartly obscured them in order to make them seem bigger and more alien figures in their daughter’s life. I’m also mixed on Junko’s (Hinako’s sister) absence in the intro, considering her importance in Hinako’s self-image issues in the larger narrative.
Far Far Away
It’s not unusual for game-to-manga adaptations to take quite a while (Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’s manga series lasted up to six years, as an example), and while parts of the first two chapters tell the story a bit faster, we’re a long way from whatever this new ending is going to be. The manga has yet to prove itself as a worthy follow-up within this time, but I believe it’s likable enough to check on once in a while.
Silent Hill f’s manga can be read on comic-walker.com, though an English translation is yet to be released.
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