so many reviews of this game have people saying "oh it sucks but i love it" or "it's obviously not GOOD but it's good" which is The Coward's Copout. I have no respect for this line of hedging your bets for fans and people who hate it, especially since Sonic Adventure is good.

I am bold enough to say that Sonic Adventure IS a good game. It's creative, made with love and passion, and actually makes good on the no doubt stressful task of translating Sonic into 3D. Of course not everything is going to work, Sonic Team were just fucking nuts, and I have way more respect for a game that shoots for the sun than something that is just another product.

So enough with this "The game is bad but I like it" bullshit. I think for having no other template to work off of, the amount Sonic Team gets right here for technology of the 90s, is genuinely impressive and shouldn't be given backhanded compliments. Sonic Adventure deserves either your love or hate, not some shit in-between.

I was meant to play this game and I was forged in the fire of it.

Okay, that sounds insane so let me explain what I mean. In an issue of Game Informer that came out sometime during the 00s, there was an ad for a game.
I remember the ad very well. The game it described was fascinating. A tense survival horror game, a genre I'd never played. One where you were alone in a run-down village. But what interested me the most was that its story was told out of order, the levels taking place at different times, and you'd have to piece everything together yourself if you wanted to understand the full story.

I remembered that this game was called SIREN, and I never forgot that. Thinking back on it, the ad was likely for Siren: Blood Curse, the remake/remix of this game for PS3, but what cemented itself in my mind was the PS2 game. There was no point in time where I ever wondered "What was that game I saw the ad for?" ; I never forgot. Every once in awhile, I would think about Siren, and wonder if one day I'd ever be able to play it. I never looked it up, never watched any videos of it. I just kept it in my head, a gaming white whale, like Asura's Wrath is for me still.

But in December 2016, I was able to buy the game. I had no idea it was even on PS4, upscaled with trophy support. It was like a miracle, like they'd put it there just for me. Maybe it wasn't important, but it felt important. And I resolved that I wouldn't just play the game, but I would stream it, every time I played it. This isn't something I often do, there's only a handful of games I've streamed all of and most are shorter than Siren.

What I quickly discovered was that Siren is not an easy game to play. Its controls are only slightly better than tank controls, the levels don't give you much direction, sight-jacking often requires a lot of waiting around for enemies to move where you want them to, and dying could often set you back pretty far. For someone like me who usually tries to play games without looking anything up, it was a real challenge. Even learning that the manual had tips for every mission only helped a little bit. Eventually I did have to look two or three things up online. It took me a year and five months, but I eventually beat Siren, getting the full ending, doing everything but getting all the archive items.

It was tough. At times I disliked the game. There were streams where I'd only manage to do one level, parts of the game that I absolutely dreaded getting to. But even so I saw how special it was. Especially these years later, the bad memories fade away and I mostly remember the parts I loved.

And those parts are fantastic. The atmosphere and area design is second-to-none, I feel like there are probably Japanese villages that look exactly like this. The village has 9 areas and you can see exactly where they are in relation to each other. After awhile, a couple of those areas transform as the monsters build new structures over them. I can still describe every single area.

The sound-design creates ever-present tension. The monsters are awful and memorable. The archive isn't just data files or audio logs, they're random bits and bobs that you find around town, sometimes offering insights, sometimes just adding color to the world. The main characters are rendered in this way where real photos of facial expressions are recreated in polygons and animated - it actually works really well, even with the british accents they give everyone in the dub. Each of them is distinct and once again I could easily describe every one, even if I couldn't remember all their names.

For every way the gameplay is frustrating, Siren is a master-craft in another. Even its story, its out-of-order, incredibly confusing story, still feels cool and epic even if you only get the broad strokes. I came out of it being thankful for having played it.

There's one level in the game specifically that bowled me over. In it you play as a pre-teen girl looking for her parents. You go through the farmland/dried-up river area, and it looks different from when you've seen it before. The air is full of bright lights like fireflies. There's weird noises all around. It's almost beautiful. But the enemies are still there and you still have to avoid them like usual. So you sneak through, coming close to being detected once or twice but - phew - they don't notice you. You wouldn't have any way to defend yourself if they did. Finally the girl reaches the church where her parents are. The door is locked. She goes to the window and knocks on it, yelling for her mom and dad. In the church her parents shriek and move away from the window. Then you see - the girl has become a monster herself, the zombie-like shibito that wander the village. First I realized, oh, that's why the level looked weird, because that's how shibito see the world. And it gives you insight into some of their actions later in the game. But then I realized something else, and thought "Hold on a minute...If this girl is a shibito...And the monsters in the level are shibito...Were they even looking for me? Would they even have hurt me if they caught me?"

I later tested this and found that, no, they wouldn't. They completely ignore you, you're just another shibito like them. Throughout that level, the fear is entirely in your head, and even if you get within a distance where they'd normally notice you but they don't, you probably don't even realize it, you just think "oh, that was a close one, they almost saw me." I don't know how this level plays out for everyone but I imagine that figuring out that the enemies are harmless during the level itself is a rare occurrence, because it goes against everything you've done up to that point. It's incredible.

One day, a youtuber will discover this and put it in a video essay and Siren will begin to get the respect it deserves. For now, it'll continue to be played by horror game fans and Silent Hill lovers - neither of which I am - and influence Japanese horror games, including, seemingly, director Keiichiro Toyama's next game, Slitterhead, which also features a realistic Japanese setting - urban this time - and has creatures that look like shibito on steroids.

I don't have a great way to end this review, but if this sounds like an experience you'd get something out of, it's on the PS Store; try throwing yourself into that fire.

Incredibly underrated gem. This horror game had some of the most interesting lore, characters, and presentation I have seen in a very long time. The graphics and sound design are extremely impressive for a 2003 game.

The gameplay was incredibly fun for a horror game imo. Most horror games are a lot of wandering until you stumble your way into the next cutscene to advance the story. This game operates with mission objectives, in which you clearly know what the goal of each level is. Some would call the game tedious or difficult, since it is a lot of revisiting areas and trial and error, but each map changes significantly on each revisit. To me, this serves to make you feel more acquainted with and immersed in the town that is afflicted by this curse you're trying to uncover the truth of. Each map also has key locations and points of interest, so as long as you remember those you won't have any trouble.

The English dub is a bit shoddy, but it only adds to the old school PS2 era horror charm. Great game, 8.5/10.

Siren is probably one of the most progressive and bravely designed video games I have ever played - especially in the genre of survival horror, which, for a brief time was very expressive but became rather conventional. Siren, however, wields the familiar genre conventions in a terrifyingly strange way that places all of your training into question. There are only so many transferable skills from Resident Evil, Silent Hill, the other classics.

Siren comes at you with a sword - a seemingly familiar enough combat encounter, this should be easy- but you slowly realize something about it is so fucked up because Siren is holding that sword by its blade and still looks at you like a bloody dead monster who wants to KILL you. There is nothing like Siren out there. You would need to be brave to be like Siren, and Siren was far too brave for its own good. It is an extreme game. And using a walkthrough can only alleviate some of its stress because theoretical knowledge will take you just so far when you actually have to perform well to survive.

Even as a survival horror connoisseur Siren still managed to make me feel powerless and scared in the way I remember feeling at the start of my horror gaming career. And personally I loved the British voice acting.

If you like cool games then Siren is an absolute must.