I don't feel optimistic for Ryukishi after Higurashi Sou, but i also doubted Bloober and they managed to pull it off so maybe he will do something great with the IP
im so sick of Konami's the silent 1 & 3 erasure. i think the only reason that dbd even got cheryl and the silent hill 1 characters was because bhvr insisted and made sure kona got a big fat cut to let them use them.
@MistarZtv at least we got a half baked remake for 2 instead of one for 3. It would have broken my heart to see how off they would have done vincent and claudia
@@LyndsayW1194I don't think the remake was half bad. I expected a trainwreck but what i got was a pleasant surprise. I hope blooper improves on the game's formula. It looks like re remake on the outside but it does managed to do it's own thing where the focus is on atmosphere. Though it's not perfect. I had bad technical difficulties and some areas take a bit too long. I do hope Komami can see that Silent Hill still has potential and use the remake as a separate timeline so that pyramidhead actually stays in the one game unlike homecoming.
@@MrConredsX gou and sotsu was actually largely the fault of passione, not ryukishi. he wasn't even a director or producer on it. of course he still gave the approval, but ryukishi's involvement was nothing more than providing a guide. he basically told the director to adapt it however he liked, and well, we saw how that turned out.
My favourite tidbit of Silent Hill: Ascension lore is that due to the inclusion of custom character cameos, people decided to do a little trolling and purposely flooded the cameos with avatars bearing Kojima's likeness. You can actually see them littered throughout the video such as 18:05 and 18:21.
Bold decision from Konami to replace the psychological horror and feeling of isolation with high school drama. Imagine if The Shining had a sequel where the entire movie was just a group of people being mildly annoyed and infatuated with each other.
There is a Shining sequel. And its full of soap opera drama. Dr Sleep, 2013 Stephen King novel. In the defense of Dr Sleep, the ORIGINAL Shining as in the book wasn't that good either. Almost everything people like about the movie are original inventions by Stanley Kubrick not taken from the novel.
And the crazy thing is, they took the best opportunity to make something at least slightly interesting out of the petty drama and just DROPPED it. They have a literal orgy happen, and no one even mentions it again afterward. The scene of Rachel finding out about the "merging ritual" pretty much writes itself. It probably wouldn't be good or well-written, but it would be something actually happening, which is way beyond what most of Ascension is. And they just said "Nah, we're not going to bring it up again. Here's a bunch of less-interesting petty drama."
Yeah lmao. I can’t even get mad at this game for existing because his sheer desperation to make the “merging ceremony” happen and the stunned silence during it made me laugh so damn hard.
i was just about to comment on 16:50 how everyone is WAY too chill with seeing rachel's gouged out eye socket but then tango addressed it 😭 which thank god she did bc i felt crazy, the way they just look at her like nothing's wrong was driving me nuts
Ascension really seems to have the vibe of that one Mass Effect: Andromeda character saying "my face is tired", but it's every single character in the whole show.
I have never understood what is so weird about that line. I think it is completely normal thing to say, in fact, something I could say. Maybe that says something about me.
@@ristoherranen816The problem is that the line neither worked in context of the conversation, nor in context with the model. The line was said by someone who had been trying to keep a doomed giant ark space station running with most of the population missing or dead, the ships that wer supposed to arrive all coming late or missing, and with a race of hostile aliens trying to kill them. "My face is tired" in that context comes off as an extremely weird thing to complain about, because why would they complain specifically about their *face* when they'd just have general exhaustion and stress from everything going on? As for the character model... It looked like someone that had been stung by bees and coated in a thing plastic layer. They didn't look tired, they looked like they had a bad Botox injection, at least from what I remember of the pre-patch days.
I'm pretty sure people were getting together to make their cameos either look like Hideo Kojima or weird ginger bean people. This happened so often I was always disappointed when the cameo wasn't one of the two.
I was actually one of the 10 people who kept up with Ascension as it airs at first because while it was terrible, I thought it was kinda funny. But the obviously botted voting process was a huge problem because we always ended up with the boring option lol. Then the mid season break really killed off any interest I had. This was not a "show" that could afford a hiatus.
I honestly kinda feel like it has only become liked because everything after it was so much worse. Not even that long ago all I heard was negatives and how bad it is, but nowdays most people seem to agree that it was merely flawed in execution, but had some really good ideas. Now it's basically "at least it's not as bad as downcoming"
Silent Hill's insistence on revisiting the plot of SH2 has made it less "In my restless dreams, I see that town." and more "I keep seeing that same fucking town in my dreams."
Given a quick search for the writing team, _(because, yeah, the popular criticism that this story was written by AI at least had to be addressed)_ I discovered that half of the writing team has some KILLER credits! God of War Ragnarök, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Resident Evil Village, Telltale The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, Telltale Batman, and *every* Dead Space game. And while these combined credits are somewhat impressive, these are nonetheless not big names you just slap onto your staff for the name recognition. So... what happened? How can half of the team be renowned writers in their field, and the series turns out like... _this_ anyway? I am *dying* to know what the hell Konami told these people what they were supposed to write, or even better, what kind of restrictions and additional stipulations Konami had for the writers. But I doubt that we'll ever know, which is a shame.
An AI generated story would have been *better*. AI-generated animation would have moved more like real people do. That's not a defense of AI at all--it's actually the thing that makes me nervous. We have to be able to prefer the human generated stuff even when it sometimes is worse.
@@Nassifehit's no different than the change from hand made to mass produced. People said they would reject it. They didn't. And that's when the benefit was just price, the hand made stuff being of a generally higher quality.
I'm still of the suspicion that AI was used extensively in writing this script. It would explain the quick turnaround times for scripts based on audience choices, the pointless, circular conversations that padded out most of Ascension's air time, and the nonsensical fade-to-blacks. The entire show had a general _sense_ of a dramatic scene, demonstrating familiarity with how they tend to play out in TV shows and movies (which generative AI does based on scraping media) but without any understanding of what makes dramatic scenes work, or why techniques like fade-to-black are used. To my mind, all of that points toward reliance on AI, even if it got polished by human screenwriters before the final stage.
@@NeoHellPoet Yap, "artists" don't realize that to big corporations, their opinions don't matter, what matters is money! And there is money to be made with AI.
absolutely hilarious that the best thing to come out of silent hill in nearly a decade was an outsourced remake from a company with a horrendous track record
Yes I had zero hope of it turning out well but sometimes devs improve. The devs that made the RoboCop and Terminator games for PC that I enjoyed made a terrible Rambo game first.
Having an angel of death character be practically a footnote on a SILENT HILL piece of media is a crazy ass choice on the tier of homecoming using soldier ptsd as set dressing
I've never heard of Ascension, and this is probably why. Forcing people to download your app is a gimmick that rarely works, and always seems to be a frustration feature. I've been a Silent Hill fan for a long time and I can't wait to try out the Silent Hill Remake - I also jumped at the idea of the Japanese Silent Hill, especially with the writer of Umineko, that's going to hit very hard. Is the animation with the flowers and the woman kneeling from Ascension or from something else? Cause that was a beautiful addition.
The animation with the girl/flowers is from the (only) trailer currently released of Silent Hill F, which is the game with the Umineko writer! I agree, it's a very beautiful trailer - hope the final release keeps up that style 😊
The hilarious part is that all the the characters in SH:Ascension were built using Unreal Engine's built in metahuman system, and that system already came with it's own robust animation rigs. The only thing the Ascension team had to do were create their own custom characters using FREE assets and animate them properly and they can't even do that. And to add salt to the wound, every paid avatar cosmetics for the game are basically just them asset flipping free Unreal Engine assets lmao.
You have such a phenomenal speaking voice!! I'm sure you're aware as ya know video essays and all but, just in case no one's told you in awhile here's a reminder. Great work on the video as well, I wasn't aware of this project whatsoever until I saw your thumbnail. so appreciate your act of martyrdom for us all, and hope all is well on your end. Be safe please
I think the huge main issue with ascension is that I feel like people would have bought it if it was a until dawn game which would have been easy just trim it down a fair bit and you’ve got it It also was the FIRST one like idk if R, or silent hill 2 the remake came out first people would be less angry about it
It makes literally no sense to do that sort of format with Silent Hill though. Until Dawn and The Quarry (same devs) both are way more shlocky and stupid - intentionally at that. Because psychological horror doesn't work well as an interactive movie.
@@eightcoins4401 I think people would have ate it up, it would have been at least more acceptable than the format they did go with these 5 minute episode daily things that could only have one route, this could also mean the options could be more easily worked on as their own thing
New Tangomushi video!! So happy. I really love your videos (also for some reason, I really like your voice too, it's so soothing), love the passion and the level of research and the insight you put together. Can't wait for more videos from you; in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy this 50 minutes video about Silent Hill. Keep it up!
The problem with Ascension is it was made by people who wanted to make content, not art. Besides Silent Hill I don't believe fits this idea well, though I do find it could have been done well if it was made by people who where good story tellers, high on the social end of the spectrum (meaning they could read the room well.) and had a good community around them.
I think it's less to do with being able to read the room, and more that there were several studios and companies involved trying to make the best of a really terrible idea in order to hold onto that Konami money.
@@matildarose Honestly I do like the idea, as 'contenty' as it sounds, I think people picking show a story turns out homestuck style, (at least early on homestuck) but as a tv show is cool. But Silent hill? No, as a Silent Hill product that was a bad idea.
@@RallyTheTallyahhh, i get what you mean, now. One of the developers, Genvid, is pursuing that angle with different franchises in the future. I wonder if some of what happened had to do with a disconnect with what Konami wanted and saw as profitable, vs what Genvid thought. Something like Silent Hill'd work, but on a smaller level, ie like how streamers have had fun with the Dark Pictures Anthology. However, there wouldn't be the means to capture constant funds like here, which may have been the main push.
What the HELL is that THING at 10:09. It has the look of a child, but the idle animation has the energy of an adult. Creepiest SH has been in years. Also, does no one in this series have functioning light switches in their homes?
Hahah, I know! I first thought he was called Olsen, and I was like.. why give a last name as a first name. Its such a weird choice, especially when the rest of the names were so classic and typical ones, (well apart from Ava, unless its supposed to be Eva though it seems to say Ava in the subtitles). I'm curious what's Hauge(n)-character's first name, or if she even got one? Had to snort out loud when I heard Stilledalen tho
I cringed so hard when you said the town was called "stilledalen" directly translated as "Silent Valley" in Norwegian. Also noticed that I had never heard the name "Orson" before either, checked with the SSB (Statistc Central agency) and "there are fewer than four or no one named Orson". They were NOT cooking making the Norwgian half of the game.
See, this kind of interaction would work really well for a comedy- like the Clue movie! But for a serious minded, dramatic horror series? Like .... c'mon.
great video as always but i did spend most of the runtime thinking about the clip of the person walking at 13:18 because it did look like they were hitting the griddy 😭😭😭
Honestly there’s still so much interesting stuff that could be explored even when leaning on silent hill 2. Imagine if homecoming hadn’t used the twist that your character wasn’t a real solder and instead played it straight? See what silent hill could do with the demons of a ptsd riddled war veteran who may have done questionable things
I only saw SH Ascension on stream, and you are so right that the lack of emotion hurts the story so much. There was some potential in the story behind all the voting and paraphernalia Konami tried to push as a "game".
I'm so glad you uploaded this, I kept saying, while I knew ascension was bad, I wish someone would go into what it was and why it was bad beyond the surface depth we can all see at a glance. I'm also so glad bloober's remake has restored some hope for this franchise
You know, with those cameo characters always showing up in different places, looking different but bearing the same voice, wouldn't it have been funny if the cameo characters turned out to be the villain? As in the audience was the eldritch entity torturing these people for its own amusement
Thank you for this video. I was skeptical about this, but I did tune in for the Halloween launch…and immediately was both disappointed and kind of tired by it. It was too much work to be a TV show, not engaging enough to be a good game, and neither the characters nor the plot, let alone the graphics and presentation, were very interesting. So I checked out, then I started seeing people talking about things like the “It’s Trauma” sticker and just thought “oh no.” I’m impressed it actually completed its run, but disappointed they scrubbed the site. That makes videos like yours and Super Eyepatch Wolf’s media preservation. As always, I really enjoyed your thoughts. I’m glad the SH2 remake was good and am crossing my fingers for SHF.
I caught this on tubi last month and was so confused and initially thought “oh maybe it’s because I didn’t play it or have a hand in the decision making”. Glad to know it wasn’t just me lol
That was one hell of a journey. Except I don't know where I started from, I don't kno where I got and I'm pretty sure I was blindfolded through the majority of the road.
I personally think a Telltale or Supermassive style game set within the world of Silent Hill (with the writing to accompany it) would have been far better than what Ascension turned out to be.
The microtransaction system was so weird... I do think this would've been way more interesting as a comic, and it might have been easier to do a branching storyline with still images/written dialogue rather than animation and voice acting.
I'm so glad someone has done a good deep dive on this. I was always deeply curious what they did with this but heard it was trash and never took the dive. Thank you for doing the Lord's work with this video.
A Silent Hill experience like a haunted house type thing would have been cool. Build a replica of the town and have different plots on certain times and have guests go through escape rooms and haunts. But if they did a show again, just don't make it interactive and it should be live action.
This thing was doomed from the start. Can you imagine being a writer, voice actor or animator and being told you have to make make a different scene for every audience option? Just hundreds or iterations on the same plot beats, almost none of them with real stakes. The whole thing is this constant malaise. Most of it is boring, sometimes you get a child with a gun, someone cutting out their eye or a surprise ritual orgy but nothing feels like it carries weight. With a small number of exceptions, all of the decisions characters make feel arbitrary, because they are. Nobody makes a choice because it's truest to their character, they make their choice because the audience decides what they want to see. I've been told that the choices were always broken into three categories and the audience almost universally chose the "redemption" options. Except in Rachel's case who they chose "suffering" for. The third type, "Damnation" was almost never seen. It's a shame, it's like the audience of a Slasher movie calling in to make sure the characters only make rational decisions, it's missing the point.
Playing Silent Hill Ascension is your own personal Silent Hill Hellscape. The more you play, the more you contemplate your own existence. The people you wronged. The choices you've made. We were all in Silent Hill all along and we didn't even know it. This game is next level meta.
The fact that they also LABELED each user choice as "good" "bad" "third option" and people always whaled on the choice marked good made that part of watching the series live so much less entertaining Edit: I really appreciate what you said about downpour and homecoming's themes still link back to Silent Hill, while Aascension just... didn't at all.
The problem with ascension is that they couldn't work even without its main gimmick. They made all choices quite meaningless with how much they just talk about stuff that we aren't able to see. While interactive TV shows exist, they are a hell to plan and to execute. ( Bandersnatch being the most successful one I know) You need to account for narrative changes that take into account the choices you are presenting. If a character is missing an eye, people should comment on that fact, and they should know what this means on the gran scheme of things. But the worst offense is simply not making the effort to connect the two narratives at all... This is already double the writing. If the team was incapable of writing one setting, making two were just setting itself for failure.
On the same level as "I may not know my flowers, but I know a bitch when I see one" Just only one of the two is from a schlocky 70s cult classic gaysploitation film - the other from something attempting to be horror
The most annoying part is that the finger placement on that music mini game aren't even the right positions for the chords. They could have at least been teaching us the chord shapes at the same time and we could have learned to play some SH music.
At first i completely forgot what Asscention is, but slowly you brought back memories i involuntarily supressed, yeah this was SOOOOO BAD it was like Uwe Bowl made it, and you watched it 3 times?!?!
A great breakdown on Ascension and how it's ultimately fails to be about Silent Hill. There is also technically one connection to the other Silent Hills… but it's minimal in that the Ghost King monster (the one who seems to be the big boss monster) is wearing the Seal of Metatron on its belt.
12:40 I never bothered watching anu of this myself so this vid is like my only window into it and holy shit that phone toss is fucking killing me hahahahahahaha
Konami said they don't need money when they canceled Silent Hills, the demo that stirred up the Internet and left thousands of walking simulator clones in it's wake.
I've been awake all day and night and nothing really happened. You didn't miss anything sleeping in. And anyway your body needed it since it didn't wake you up. I'm not a doctor, but my doctor's orders are a cup of tea or coffee, some videogames, and then some TV to unwind. 😊
the biggest jumpscare in this was realizing your shirt was official silent hill ascension merch when it looks like something not even modern day hot topic would stock
Appreciate you covering this, seemed like an interesting spin off but there’s no way I would’ve been able to keep up with this beast. I respect your dedication to documenting it, I’m gonna be thinking about jam guy for quite a while. I’m also really hyped that ryukishi is getting a shot at his own adaptation good gaming news is hard to come by…
I'm a professional 3D artist and it really stood out to me how cobbled together the models and scenes were. It really felt like Konami gave the team a 50$ budget lol
I still can't believe how bad Ascension really was. I started watching it, hoping it would at the very least not completely fail, but after two weeks I couldn't do it anymore. Later I watched the whole compilation and treated it as a parody which helped a lot, lol.
29:02 Didn't expect my account to pop-up here, what a nice surprise. Overall a great, informative video since basically anything other than the show itself is either deleted altogether, or just sits on some server, locked away (I haven't spent any money on it so I'm not bothered, but some people might be).
"I like to make jams" - a phrase shared by musicians and SH Ascension Jam Man
AAAAAAAA EUROTHUG AAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAA heyyy AAAAAAAAAAA i'm a fan AAAAAAAAAAAA
my grandma, as well
Eurothug and Tangomushi, the two best channels I discovered from eyepatch wolf
@@pedro-e-o-lobo I have no clue who that is
And Nostradamus
So, Konami's big plan for bringing Silent Hill back was Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 2 and Higurashi.
I don't feel optimistic for Ryukishi after Higurashi Sou, but i also doubted Bloober and they managed to pull it off so maybe he will do something great with the IP
im so sick of Konami's the silent 1 & 3 erasure. i think the only reason that dbd even got cheryl and the silent hill 1 characters was because bhvr insisted and made sure kona got a big fat cut to let them use them.
@MistarZtv at least we got a half baked remake for 2 instead of one for 3. It would have broken my heart to see how off they would have done vincent and claudia
@@LyndsayW1194I don't think the remake was half bad.
I expected a trainwreck but what i got was a pleasant surprise.
I hope blooper improves on the game's formula. It looks like re remake on the outside but it does managed to do it's own thing where the focus is on atmosphere. Though it's not perfect. I had bad technical difficulties and some areas take a bit too long.
I do hope Komami can see that Silent Hill still has potential and use the remake as a separate timeline so that pyramidhead actually stays in the one game unlike homecoming.
@@MrConredsX gou and sotsu was actually largely the fault of passione, not ryukishi. he wasn't even a director or producer on it. of course he still gave the approval, but ryukishi's involvement was nothing more than providing a guide. he basically told the director to adapt it however he liked, and well, we saw how that turned out.
You're gonna look soooo foolish when the JamMan is a super plot important in Silent Hill Descention. Another banger video Tango!
Justice for Jam Man! 😂
Silent Hill ƒ:
ƒoraging
My favourite tidbit of Silent Hill: Ascension lore is that due to the inclusion of custom character cameos, people decided to do a little trolling and purposely flooded the cameos with avatars bearing Kojima's likeness. You can actually see them littered throughout the video such as 18:05 and 18:21.
Bold decision from Konami to replace the psychological horror and feeling of isolation with high school drama. Imagine if The Shining had a sequel where the entire movie was just a group of people being mildly annoyed and infatuated with each other.
Reminds me of American Psycho and its sequel, American Psycho 2 lol
There is a Shining sequel. And its full of soap opera drama.
Dr Sleep, 2013 Stephen King novel. In the defense of Dr Sleep, the ORIGINAL Shining as in the book wasn't that good either.
Almost everything people like about the movie are original inventions by Stanley Kubrick not taken from the novel.
@@eightcoins4401 But I like the novel over the movie .__.
And the crazy thing is, they took the best opportunity to make something at least slightly interesting out of the petty drama and just DROPPED it.
They have a literal orgy happen, and no one even mentions it again afterward. The scene of Rachel finding out about the "merging ritual" pretty much writes itself. It probably wouldn't be good or well-written, but it would be something actually happening, which is way beyond what most of Ascension is.
And they just said "Nah, we're not going to bring it up again. Here's a bunch of less-interesting petty drama."
I'm so mad "I'm a bitch, not a monster" is stuck in this god awful show i love that line so much
The whiplash of seeing the SH3 cutscene footage having so much more expression and movement in the rigging than Ascension (imo) is absolutely wild
I watched Super Eyepatch Wolves playthrough and it was one of the most entertaining thing I've ever watched. So funny.
Yeah lmao. I can’t even get mad at this game for existing because his sheer desperation to make the “merging ceremony” happen and the stunned silence during it made me laugh so damn hard.
Did he ever go back and watch the 10 episodes he missed? I stopped watching after that.
It was more entertaining watching him than the show for sure
"😲 THE OOGLIE-BOOGLER! 😱"
Because of his stream, when I face a boss in a game it makes me think “The Oogly Boogler” in his voice and I laugh out loud.
i was just about to comment on 16:50 how everyone is WAY too chill with seeing rachel's gouged out eye socket but then tango addressed it 😭 which thank god she did bc i felt crazy, the way they just look at her like nothing's wrong was driving me nuts
they just didn't want to be impolite by bringing it up, you see. (I am joking. I am very much joking.)
Ascension really seems to have the vibe of that one Mass Effect: Andromeda character saying "my face is tired", but it's every single character in the whole show.
I have never understood what is so weird about that line. I think it is completely normal thing to say, in fact, something I could say. Maybe that says something about me.
@@ristoherranen816 It's less the line itself and more how the character model looks when delivering the line.
@@ristoherranen816The problem is that the line neither worked in context of the conversation, nor in context with the model.
The line was said by someone who had been trying to keep a doomed giant ark space station running with most of the population missing or dead, the ships that wer supposed to arrive all coming late or missing, and with a race of hostile aliens trying to kill them. "My face is tired" in that context comes off as an extremely weird thing to complain about, because why would they complain specifically about their *face* when they'd just have general exhaustion and stress from everything going on?
As for the character model... It looked like someone that had been stung by bees and coated in a thing plastic layer. They didn't look tired, they looked like they had a bad Botox injection, at least from what I remember of the pre-patch days.
Some people see fire in silent hill, others fog. Tangos silent hill is being stuck in ascension
Throughout all the Ascension plot summary my mind just kept repeating "What the hell does any of this got to do with Silent Hill?"
I'm pretty sure people were getting together to make their cameos either look like Hideo Kojima or weird ginger bean people. This happened so often I was always disappointed when the cameo wasn't one of the two.
I was actually one of the 10 people who kept up with Ascension as it airs at first because while it was terrible, I thought it was kinda funny. But the obviously botted voting process was a huge problem because we always ended up with the boring option lol. Then the mid season break really killed off any interest I had. This was not a "show" that could afford a hiatus.
38:55 thank you for mentioning The Room! I often see the game get so much hate for no reason
Silent Hill 4 is my favourite in the franchise, I’ll always find time to rep that masterpiece 💖
I honestly kinda feel like it has only become liked because everything after it was so much worse.
Not even that long ago all I heard was negatives and how bad it is, but nowdays most people seem to agree that it was merely flawed in execution, but had some really good ideas.
Now it's basically "at least it's not as bad as downcoming"
To be fair, when it came out it was the worst Silent Hill. But now after Konami's massive decline we now how much worse it can get.
@@tangomushiThe Room is my favorite as well!
The Room has immaculate vibes but the second half being one game length escort mission was definitely A Choice
Silent Hill's insistence on revisiting the plot of SH2 has made it less "In my restless dreams, I see that town." and more "I keep seeing that same fucking town in my dreams."
Given a quick search for the writing team,
_(because, yeah, the popular criticism that this story was written by AI at least had to be addressed)_
I discovered that half of the writing team has some KILLER credits!
God of War Ragnarök, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Resident Evil Village, Telltale The Walking Dead, Tales from the Borderlands, Telltale Batman, and *every* Dead Space game.
And while these combined credits are somewhat impressive, these are nonetheless not big names you just slap onto your staff for the name recognition.
So... what happened? How can half of the team be renowned writers in their field, and the series turns out like... _this_ anyway?
I am *dying* to know what the hell Konami told these people what they were supposed to write, or even better, what kind of restrictions and additional stipulations Konami had for the writers.
But I doubt that we'll ever know, which is a shame.
I know “this looks ai generated” is a REALLY overused observation these days but…can you really blame folks in this particular case 😆
An AI generated story would have been *better*. AI-generated animation would have moved more like real people do. That's not a defense of AI at all--it's actually the thing that makes me nervous. We have to be able to prefer the human generated stuff even when it sometimes is worse.
@@Nassifehit's no different than the change from hand made to mass produced.
People said they would reject it. They didn't. And that's when the benefit was just price, the hand made stuff being of a generally higher quality.
It reminds me more of Hunt Down The Freeman (pejorative.)
I'm still of the suspicion that AI was used extensively in writing this script. It would explain the quick turnaround times for scripts based on audience choices, the pointless, circular conversations that padded out most of Ascension's air time, and the nonsensical fade-to-blacks. The entire show had a general _sense_ of a dramatic scene, demonstrating familiarity with how they tend to play out in TV shows and movies (which generative AI does based on scraping media) but without any understanding of what makes dramatic scenes work, or why techniques like fade-to-black are used. To my mind, all of that points toward reliance on AI, even if it got polished by human screenwriters before the final stage.
@@NeoHellPoet
Yap, "artists" don't realize that to big corporations, their opinions don't matter, what matters is money! And there is money to be made with AI.
genuine miracle that SH2 Remake turned out as well as it did after all of Komani’s previous blunders
absolutely hilarious that the best thing to come out of silent hill in nearly a decade was an outsourced remake from a company with a horrendous track record
Yes I had zero hope of it turning out well but sometimes devs improve. The devs that made the RoboCop and Terminator games for PC that I enjoyed made a terrible Rambo game first.
@Ahrimane the difference being the Rambo game came out years ago while the medium, visage came out like 2 or 3 years ago
@@seniorsterling1064the gap between the Rambo and terminator games weren't that big actually.
@icravedeath.1200 you mean resistance right
Having an angel of death character be practically a footnote on a SILENT HILL piece of media is a crazy ass choice on the tier of homecoming using soldier ptsd as set dressing
Rewatched the siren video bc I’m playing slitterhead and in anticipation of a new tangomushi video coming today
wake up girlies, new tangomushi video
Its 2:28 am here and I'm about to watch this shit in FULL
@@alexb7039Same here I got work in 5 hours FUCK IT
I'M UP~!
I'm not a girly though.
I've never heard of Ascension, and this is probably why. Forcing people to download your app is a gimmick that rarely works, and always seems to be a frustration feature. I've been a Silent Hill fan for a long time and I can't wait to try out the Silent Hill Remake - I also jumped at the idea of the Japanese Silent Hill, especially with the writer of Umineko, that's going to hit very hard. Is the animation with the flowers and the woman kneeling from Ascension or from something else? Cause that was a beautiful addition.
The animation with the girl/flowers is from the (only) trailer currently released of Silent Hill F, which is the game with the Umineko writer! I agree, it's a very beautiful trailer - hope the final release keeps up that style 😊
The hilarious part is that all the the characters in SH:Ascension were built using Unreal Engine's built in metahuman system, and that system already came with it's own robust animation rigs.
The only thing the Ascension team had to do were create their own custom characters using FREE assets and animate them properly and they can't even do that.
And to add salt to the wound, every paid avatar cosmetics for the game are basically just them asset flipping free Unreal Engine assets lmao.
You have such a phenomenal speaking voice!! I'm sure you're aware as ya know video essays and all but, just in case no one's told you in awhile here's a reminder. Great work on the video as well, I wasn't aware of this project whatsoever until I saw your thumbnail. so appreciate your act of martyrdom for us all, and hope all is well on your end. Be safe please
Konami be like: We don't need Hideo Kojima! We'll make our OWN Silent Hills - with blackjack and hookers!
That was Silent Hill: The Short Message. Konami just paid someone else to make this one.
and pachinko. so much pachinko.
@@TheAntiSanta
That one was also kinda... meh.
I hate posers associating Kojima with SH, just because of that 1 demo
He doesn't belong to SH
@@spicydong317 No, he was just the last one to do anything cool with Silent Hill.
I think the huge main issue with ascension is that I feel like people would have bought it if it was a until dawn game which would have been easy just trim it down a fair bit and you’ve got it
It also was the FIRST one like idk if R, or silent hill 2 the remake came out first people would be less angry about it
Like this was the first figurehead of silent hill franchise v2 and dead god it had no chance
Also idk if it’s just bc everyone’s very cheap 3d models but damn did everyone feel wooden
It makes literally no sense to do that sort of format with Silent Hill though.
Until Dawn and The Quarry (same devs) both are way more shlocky and stupid - intentionally at that.
Because psychological horror doesn't work well as an interactive movie.
@@eightcoins4401 I think people would have ate it up, it would have been at least more acceptable than the format they did go with these 5 minute episode daily things that could only have one route, this could also mean the options could be more easily worked on as their own thing
New Tangomushi video!! So happy.
I really love your videos (also for some reason, I really like your voice too, it's so soothing), love the passion and the level of research and the insight you put together.
Can't wait for more videos from you; in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy this 50 minutes video about Silent Hill.
Keep it up!
You know you messed up when your rooting for the cosmic horror monster to destroy and kill everyone in the town
In my restless dreams, I see that Pizza Hut
They promised me breadsticks, but they never delivered
Well, I'm alone here now. Waiting for my marinara
The problem with Ascension is it was made by people who wanted to make content, not art.
Besides Silent Hill I don't believe fits this idea well, though I do find it could have been done well if it was made by people who where good story tellers, high on the social end of the spectrum (meaning they could read the room well.) and had a good community around them.
I think there are many problems with ascension, if I may be so bold
I think it's less to do with being able to read the room, and more that there were several studios and companies involved trying to make the best of a really terrible idea in order to hold onto that Konami money.
@@matildarose Honestly I do like the idea, as 'contenty' as it sounds, I think people picking show a story turns out homestuck style, (at least early on homestuck) but as a tv show is cool. But Silent hill? No, as a Silent Hill product that was a bad idea.
@@RallyTheTallyahhh, i get what you mean, now. One of the developers, Genvid, is pursuing that angle with different franchises in the future. I wonder if some of what happened had to do with a disconnect with what Konami wanted and saw as profitable, vs what Genvid thought.
Something like Silent Hill'd work, but on a smaller level, ie like how streamers have had fun with the Dark Pictures Anthology. However, there wouldn't be the means to capture constant funds like here, which may have been the main push.
Yeah maybe stfu about autistic people??
What the HELL is that THING at 10:09. It has the look of a child, but the idle animation has the energy of an adult. Creepiest SH has been in years. Also, does no one in this series have functioning light switches in their homes?
I loved your final words in this video, we need more people like you in the fanbase, people who want the franchise to continue! 🙌🏻
The scariest part of this video was when Tango said the words "Silent Hill" and "Comic" and I had flashbacks to the IDW Silent Hill Comics.
As a norwegian, there are literally no people here named Orson
Hahah, I know! I first thought he was called Olsen, and I was like.. why give a last name as a first name. Its such a weird choice, especially when the rest of the names were so classic and typical ones, (well apart from Ava, unless its supposed to be Eva though it seems to say Ava in the subtitles). I'm curious what's Hauge(n)-character's first name, or if she even got one? Had to snort out loud when I heard Stilledalen tho
I cringed so hard when you said the town was called "stilledalen" directly translated as "Silent Valley" in Norwegian. Also noticed that I had never heard the name "Orson" before either, checked with the SSB (Statistc Central agency) and "there are fewer than four or no one named Orson". They were NOT cooking making the Norwgian half of the game.
I also couldnt believe they choose Orson as a norwegian child name like the rest have generic ass names and then theres Orson....
It's a coincidence that Jam Man forages as a hobby; he's actually named for his music production skills. He was offering to sell his mixtapes.
Me: Oh cool I love Tangomushi's vids I can't wait to see what... IS THAT SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG WITH A PARTY HAT!?
See, this kind of interaction would work really well for a comedy- like the Clue movie! But for a serious minded, dramatic horror series? Like .... c'mon.
phenomenal video tango, so glad to see a vid from the #1 silent hill ascension expert
great video as always but i did spend most of the runtime thinking about the clip of the person walking at 13:18 because it did look like they were hitting the griddy 😭😭😭
Honestly there’s still so much interesting stuff that could be explored even when leaning on silent hill 2. Imagine if homecoming hadn’t used the twist that your character wasn’t a real solder and instead played it straight? See what silent hill could do with the demons of a ptsd riddled war veteran who may have done questionable things
aww man less than five minutes into a drop??? MY LUCKY DAY
*sits with tea*
I only saw SH Ascension on stream, and you are so right that the lack of emotion hurts the story so much. There was some potential in the story behind all the voting and paraphernalia Konami tried to push as a "game".
It’s funny that you mention The Walking Dead, because the company behind Ascension, Genvid, did a Walking Dead show and it was even worse lol
How was it? I can barely find anything on it.
A new work week is here and you are top of my playlist. Thanks for brightening my week 🙏😃
I'm so glad you uploaded this, I kept saying, while I knew ascension was bad, I wish someone would go into what it was and why it was bad beyond the surface depth we can all see at a glance. I'm also so glad bloober's remake has restored some hope for this franchise
As someone who also watched this, your summary somehow makes it sounds more coherent
You know, with those cameo characters always showing up in different places, looking different but bearing the same voice, wouldn't it have been funny if the cameo characters turned out to be the villain? As in the audience was the eldritch entity torturing these people for its own amusement
The video opening with "Unseen intruder" from 13-2 has activated all my neurons. I love the trilogy so much
Thank you for this video. I was skeptical about this, but I did tune in for the Halloween launch…and immediately was both disappointed and kind of tired by it. It was too much work to be a TV show, not engaging enough to be a good game, and neither the characters nor the plot, let alone the graphics and presentation, were very interesting. So I checked out, then I started seeing people talking about things like the “It’s Trauma” sticker and just thought “oh no.” I’m impressed it actually completed its run, but disappointed they scrubbed the site. That makes videos like yours and Super Eyepatch Wolf’s media preservation. As always, I really enjoyed your thoughts. I’m glad the SH2 remake was good and am crossing my fingers for SHF.
Yes! I was trying to remember the name of this channel the other day and now I got a new video in my feed.
Your highlight of the *fabulous* animations (especially the woman throwing the phone) had me HOWLING. Like damn, PS2 games moved better
I caught this on tubi last month and was so confused and initially thought “oh maybe it’s because I didn’t play it or have a hand in the decision making”. Glad to know it wasn’t just me lol
That was one hell of a journey. Except I don't know where I started from, I don't kno where I got and I'm pretty sure I was blindfolded through the majority of the road.
I personally think a Telltale or Supermassive style game set within the world of Silent Hill (with the writing to accompany it) would have been far better than what Ascension turned out to be.
The microtransaction system was so weird... I do think this would've been way more interesting as a comic, and it might have been easier to do a branching storyline with still images/written dialogue rather than animation and voice acting.
Thank you for blessing us with this video, you are awesome.
I'm so glad someone has done a good deep dive on this. I was always deeply curious what they did with this but heard it was trash and never took the dive. Thank you for doing the Lord's work with this video.
A Silent Hill experience like a haunted house type thing would have been cool. Build a replica of the town and have different plots on certain times and have guests go through escape rooms and haunts. But if they did a show again, just don't make it interactive and it should be live action.
oh nice, was looking forward to seeing your perspective!
THANK YOU!!! the traumatic plotline in SH is sooooooooooooo overdone and im glad someone shares my sentiments
This thing was doomed from the start. Can you imagine being a writer, voice actor or animator and being told you have to make make a different scene for every audience option? Just hundreds or iterations on the same plot beats, almost none of them with real stakes.
The whole thing is this constant malaise. Most of it is boring, sometimes you get a child with a gun, someone cutting out their eye or a surprise ritual orgy but nothing feels like it carries weight.
With a small number of exceptions, all of the decisions characters make feel arbitrary, because they are. Nobody makes a choice because it's truest to their character, they make their choice because the audience decides what they want to see.
I've been told that the choices were always broken into three categories and the audience almost universally chose the "redemption" options. Except in Rachel's case who they chose "suffering" for. The third type, "Damnation" was almost never seen. It's a shame, it's like the audience of a Slasher movie calling in to make sure the characters only make rational decisions, it's missing the point.
Playing Silent Hill Ascension is your own personal Silent Hill Hellscape. The more you play, the more you contemplate your own existence. The people you wronged. The choices you've made. We were all in Silent Hill all along and we didn't even know it.
This game is next level meta.
You know it's not a game, right?
@@Dizzula it's a bot. Just report it.
Thanks so much for summing it all up!!! You're the best!!
Thank you for reassuring me that Townfall and f both have great writers working on them. I knew that, but for some reason I was still worried
Approve of the use of Klonoa music for the critique section!!!
The fact that they also LABELED each user choice as "good" "bad" "third option" and people always whaled on the choice marked good made that part of watching the series live so much less entertaining
Edit: I really appreciate what you said about downpour and homecoming's themes still link back to Silent Hill, while Aascension just... didn't at all.
Glad you covered your thoughts on the most excellent SH2 remake at the end. Never have I been so happy to have my worries proven wrong before!
The problem with ascension is that they couldn't work even without its main gimmick. They made all choices quite meaningless with how much they just talk about stuff that we aren't able to see.
While interactive TV shows exist, they are a hell to plan and to execute. ( Bandersnatch being the most successful one I know)
You need to account for narrative changes that take into account the choices you are presenting.
If a character is missing an eye, people should comment on that fact, and they should know what this means on the gran scheme of things.
But the worst offense is simply not making the effort to connect the two narratives at all... This is already double the writing. If the team was incapable of writing one setting, making two were just setting itself for failure.
“I’m a bitch, not a monster” is one of the lines of all time
On the same level as "I may not know my flowers, but I know a bitch when I see one"
Just only one of the two is from a schlocky 70s cult classic gaysploitation film - the other from something attempting to be horror
On the same level as "I may not know my flowers, but I know a bitch when I see one"
25:49 LOOK MA, I'M IN A TANGOMUSHI VIDEO!
(Fantastic video, Tango. You never miss
The most annoying part is that the finger placement on that music mini game aren't even the right positions for the chords. They could have at least been teaching us the chord shapes at the same time and we could have learned to play some SH music.
I was going to click this video no matter what, but that thumbnail is powerful.
At first i completely forgot what Asscention is, but slowly you brought back memories i involuntarily supressed, yeah this was SOOOOO BAD it was like Uwe Bowl made it, and you watched it 3 times?!?!
Why does this feel like Silent Hill Mad Libz? Dead wife, dead person writing a letter, guilty consciouses, like was there a checklist?
A great breakdown on Ascension and how it's ultimately fails to be about Silent Hill. There is also technically one connection to the other Silent Hills… but it's minimal in that the Ghost King monster (the one who seems to be the big boss monster) is wearing the Seal of Metatron on its belt.
never forgiving them for not giving us silent hills. i know i speak for everyone when i say this
12:40 I never bothered watching anu of this myself so this vid is like my only window into it and holy shit that phone toss is fucking killing me hahahahahahaha
A large chunk of the cameo characters being designed to look like hideo kojima is so funny
TAN-GO MU-SHI
*clap, clap*
*clap clap clap*
This was a great video! Very good analysis and critique, and I liked having a summary too. Thank you for making this! o7
I'm guessing because it wasn't Silent Hill 🤔🤔
I've been waiting for this for the longest time! Thank you Tango!!
Shoutout to the viewers that Cameo'd Kojima into the game. Truly doing the lords work
Jam Man out here like hot dog guy in The Happening
"You know, hot dogs get a bad wrap."
He makes jam. He could bring you some.
Konami said they don't need money when they canceled Silent Hills, the demo that stirred up the Internet and left thousands of walking simulator clones in it's wake.
Oh cool i can throw money at you directly now??? Hell yeah 🎉
The...the foundation WASN'T the enemy?
Accidentally slept through the entire day and I wake up to a new Tangomushi upload LETS GOOOO!!!
I've been awake all day and night and nothing really happened. You didn't miss anything sleeping in. And anyway your body needed it since it didn't wake you up. I'm not a doctor, but my doctor's orders are a cup of tea or coffee, some videogames, and then some TV to unwind. 😊
39:57 that monster straight up looking like a Mad Max villain.
the biggest jumpscare in this was realizing your shirt was official silent hill ascension merch when it looks like something not even modern day hot topic would stock
Everyone in this “story” talks in trailer-ese and it never ends or arrives at any meaningful payoff
Appreciate you covering this, seemed like an interesting spin off but there’s no way I would’ve been able to keep up with this beast. I respect your dedication to documenting it, I’m gonna be thinking about jam guy for quite a while.
I’m also really hyped that ryukishi is getting a shot at his own adaptation good gaming news is hard to come by…
I'm a professional 3D artist and it really stood out to me how cobbled together the models and scenes were. It really felt like Konami gave the team a 50$ budget lol
I still can't believe how bad Ascension really was. I started watching it, hoping it would at the very least not completely fail, but after two weeks I couldn't do it anymore. Later I watched the whole compilation and treated it as a parody which helped a lot, lol.
twitch plays silent hill chat censoring kojima but not slurs is something you cannot make up
Great video Tango, your hard work pays off 🔥 another banger 👏🏽👏🏽
need an american horror story / haunting of *blank* house style anthology series set around silent hill
29:02 Didn't expect my account to pop-up here, what a nice surprise.
Overall a great, informative video since basically anything other than the show itself is either deleted altogether, or just sits on some server, locked away (I haven't spent any money on it so I'm not bothered, but some people might be).