SCE Japan's Nico channel goes over the development of old games from the studio. So it could just be about that rather than a hint of things to come. But Toyama has stated that he's interested in making another horror game. So it's certainly possible. But he may just decide to develop a new IP.
Siren: Blood Curse was actually already on my radar but I hearing about it's stealthy experimental gameplay style is putting it into the must have territory =D
Did you say #1 and #2 were available on PSN? [didn't read all of OP as I wanted to avoid spoilers =)]
Amazing series! Some of the most unforgettable, shocking and frightening moments in all my years of gaming were from the Siren games. Yorito Nagai's ending in the 2nd game is forever seared in my mind. Genius stuff.
I admit I've never finished the first Siren, since I found it too hard and frustrating to play. Played a bit of the second game, but I ended up selling both.
But I finished Blood Curse and really enjoyed it. It has a very strange ending, though.
I actually played the PS3 Siren some months back for the first time. Very unique and unsettling game. The sections where you play as Bella are some of the scariest moments in the game by far. I'd really like to try the 2nd game, but I may have to settle with watching a LP to see what it's about.
Blood Curse spoilers:
The game's cast of characters being in an endless time loop was pretty messed up.
The ability to move around while sight-jacking the enemy didn't seem all that useful to me, from what I remember. I think it was the noise filter, combined with the drop in frame-rate that made it far more difficult to actually see what I was doing. Not sure if this was actually by design or technical limitation, though.
I remember the first game having shockingly awful (and as a result funny) voice acting in PAL version. Proper cockneys!
Also remember it being creepy as fuck as actually rather clever. I finished it (I think), and did play the sequel (definitely didn't finish that) and never played the PS3 version. I thought it was actually a straight remake.
I played Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame etc. but Siren is a series I never played. Was never sure if I will like it because I hate hide&stealth horror games. I love me the comfort of a gun/camera in the more classic way of survival horror^^ Still have Siren 3 on my wishlist though (it's 5-10€ gamestop most of the time). First in line is Yakuza 4 and a replay of Dino Crisis. Maybe after that, ... maybe ...
Thank you for a great overview of the series. Always like your "Let's discuss..." threads.
EDIT: I played Clock Tower though and loved that game. So maybe I will enjoy Siren^^ Who knows...
Siren: Blood Curse was actually already on my radar but I hearing about it's stealthy experimental gameplay style is putting it into the must have territory =D
Did you say #1 and #2 were available on PSN? [didn't read all of OP as I wanted to avoid spoilers =)]
I think only #1 is a PS2 classic and #2 was only released in EU/Japan. Regarding Blood Curse, I'd suggest waiting for a sale as the regular price is $40 (or it was for a long time).
Oh, just realized this is a Dusk Golem thread. No wonder it's awesome. You're the guy who convinced me to play White Day (with your thread, not by actually talking to me about it).
I imported the EU version and tried with swap magic to get it to play right on an NTSC PS2 and it wouldn't. The game was in black and white with a lot of problems. I assume it's just because PAL stuff does not display properly on NTSC hardware. I had to rip the game and play on an emulator years later.
Edit: Note this was when Forbidden Siren 2 launched. I dunno what's available out there now as far as solutions for playing PAL games on NTSC hardware.
Blood Curse is the weakest game in the series in my opinion. You lost the event flowchart system, which in my opinion is what makes Siren 1 and 2 standout horror games.
My cousins brought this when they visited from Washington, along with Silent Hill 2 and 4.
I remember this the most, though, because of how much it scared me. I don't think we even got passed the second part.
I really should go back and give it a try now that I'm more grown/less prone to being horribly scared because of horror games.
Blood Curse is the weakest game in the series in my opinion. You lost the event flowchart system, which in my opinion is what makes Siren 1 and 2 standout horror games.
Blood Curse is a "reimagining" of the original Siren, with a lot of the cast being replaced by Americans who get caught up in events that are basically what happen in Siren 1 with some differences.
It doesn't use the event flowchart system and instead is presented as linear "television episodes" complete with an "episode preview" at the end of each one, since it was originally released episodically on PSN. Thus, you lose the crazy intricate ways to unlock events that Siren 1 and 2 had.
I waited and imported a physical copy from Hong Kong, and even the disc based version does the "NEXT TIME ON SIREN BLOOD CURSE" stuff.
I still believe sightjacking is one of the cooler mechanics introduced in gaming. wasn't one of the main girls in Siren 1 blind and she had to sightjack people to see where she's going? I thought that was genius!
one of the scariest moments I had in a horror game was in Blood Curse. back then I was aware of the series but never really played it. so, I entered a house, got attacked by a shibito woman, smashed her head and she fell down, assuming she died. I went on to explore the area to progress. when I returned I noticed the shibito woman's body was missing. panic mode! got surprise attacked by her again in a different room.
I also like how the shibitos are less zombie and more crazy mutated people who do their own things instead of just waiting to jump scare you. it makes the world you're in more believable and scary.
Blood Curse was amazing and my favorite PS3 title up there with Demon's Souls.
The episodic format was great with the 'What's Next' preview imitating Lost and ultimately made me binge the game in fewer sittings.
Blood Curse also had probably the best mix of cultures I've seen in videogames with all characters (American and Japanese) played really well. The real language barrier was actually used to great extent as a plot device. It also has tie-Ins to a website with village live streaming and plenty of lore and character story hints.
A couple of devoted Siren 1 purists in this thread but for me Blood Curse is easily the series best, the first one was very clunky design wise and technically.
The first Siren was possibly one of the scariest games i've ever played along with P.T., but it encapsulates the "difficulty to a fault" idea to a T.
Later stages in the game become so frustratingly punishing, that you get actually pulled out of the atmosphere and start to read it as just a series of mechanics, just to get through it, so it ruins the magnificent atmosphere the earlier levels had.
The second Siren is much more lenient on you, and it's also more packed with crazy shit and ideas, on some level it's probably the high point of the series for me.
The only problem i with it was the obtuse nature of some second objectives, it's straight up Old Style Adventure Game "put banana on head" level of nonsense in trial and error, but with immortal things chasing you and trying to kill you at every corner.
But still an absolute must play in my opinion.
In one mission you use a blind kid guided by his dog!
The third game (technically a remake of the first, but not really, it's very different) is where they really became lenient, and so you're more free to get immersed in the atmosphere, and although you do get a bit over powered by simply getting any weapon, you're still not mowing down Shibitos like nothing, so it still maintains the tension.
Plus graphics, sound, and controls have never been better in the series, and the interwoven stories make more sense in this one, i also like the "foreigner" angle, it creates more tension.
I consider this the GOTY of 2008 (over MGS4) one of the best games you can play on PS3, and one of the best horror games ever made.
I imported the Asian "SIREN NEW TRANSLATION" (instead of BLOOD CURSE) version, because i couldn't wait for it to get out in EU.
The movie was kind of bad, but i still enjoyed it, it's not that close to the game at all, and it looks sort of cheap, and it's not scary in the slightest, but not a complete turd, either.
Wouldn't waste a lot of money to import or anything, if i were you, but if you don't have to jump through a lot of hoops to see it, go ahead.
EDIT: Also forgot to mention, the teaser sites and meta internet games they did before Siren 2 and Blood Curse were awesome!
I remember spending hours looking at those webcams in the woods, lol.
One of the best Sony franchises for sure. Since Sony wanna do HD remasters so much how about this one? It deserves the extra exposure and I'm sure Japan would like it!
I pointed this out in the remaster thread, but Sony had a livestream yesterday for Siren where they showed off a bunch of behind the scenes footage
That's Yasuhiro Kitao (Sony producer), Keiichiro Toyama (Silent Hill/Siren/Gravity Rush creator), and Naoko Sato (came up with the story concept for Siren along with Toyama). Sato has been heavily involved in every one of Toyama's games, including Silent Hill where she did some of the monster designs and was one of the motion/story demo designers.
Blood Curse is the weakest game in the series in my opinion. You lost the event flowchart system, which in my opinion is what makes Siren 1 and 2 standout horror games.
I disagree with the bolded, but i do think the flowchart had potential, however the execution was far too obtuse, and unlocking some chapters without a guide was stupidly complicated, in my opinion.
Switching it for a TV-show style development wasn't maybe the best choice though.
I didn't like getting spoiled on the next episode, when i finished one in Blood Curse, and it was cooler to piece together all the pieces in the previous Sirens.
I've been a Siren fan for quite some time, but admittedly am yet to finish a single one of the games... I read this thread last night and it inspired me so much that I picked up where I'd left off about 10 months ago on Blood Curse
(Episode 7 - Chapter 3, where you need to go into the shibito nest core... basically the scariest part of the game up to that point for me)
I finally managed to get past that part
(after repeatedly being killed/mauled by the weird shibito in that area who function a bit like the slurpers in Silent Hill 3, i.e. rapey), and am now up to Episode 8
- fuck yeah!
I also played a bit of the first Siren which I bought on PSN about 2 and a half years ago but have never gotten far into. I'm on an early level where there's a sniper (must be the first area with a sniper) and I managed to get up onto the roof the sniper shibito was on (without really meaning to) and kill him, but then another Shibito killed me right after as I didn't have time to reload my gun so as to defend myself. Super frustrating to die at that point but I was still glad I had managed to get that far, and will probably be able to get through the whole area soon enough if I stick with it.
I'm also familiar with Forbidden Siren 2, which was actually my first game in the series. I live in Australia, so I bought a PAL copy on ebay in 2010 and played it as far as I could before getting stuck. I think I ended up stuck on a carnival kind of level where there were merry go rounds and stuff, I could never get past there for some reason. I would need to set up my old PS2 to play it again which isn't ideal with my Wii U, PS3/PS4 already connected to the one TV, but I think I may not be able to resist after reading this thread haha. I never even got up to seeing the more freaky Shibito (and yambito) varieties in FS2, I actually felt like Blood Curse had the creepier enemy variety personally, but that's obviously just based on what I've played of all three. The weirder variations get introduced a lot earlier in Blood Curse than I imagine they would in Siren 2 though so I take that into account.
I think the creativity of the missions and complexity of the story etc in Siren 2 is the strongest of the series, but from what I've played of Siren 2 and Blood Curse, I generally preferred BC and personally found it creepier and more overtly scary than the other two games. I'd kind of compare the BC atmosphere (at its most intense) to something like Silent Hill 3's otherworld, where the atmosphere in the first two games is definitely creepy but more toned down and subtle.
Something about the atmosphere in BC just feels more intensely "wrong" and nightmarish to me, though of course having played none of them to completion my opinion is based on what I have played of each. It intrigued me to read about some of the Siren 2 enemy variations as I found that a strong point in BC and would love to experience some more twisted enemies in Siren 2.
The flying shibito and the various forms of the "Shibito brain" in BC really make my skin crawl. I find Blood Curse scarier than just about any other game I've played, rivaling the scariest Silent Hill games at the peak of it's scariness, and even games like Condemned which I rate very highly as a horror game don't quite get under my skin the way Blood Curse does. I did find the cut scenes with the more Americanised characters a bit off putting at the start of the game, but during the actual gameplay the atmosphere is just too well done for me to care about any of that.
I definitely found that in the more intense areas in BC, sightjacking is basically pointless as you'd just be leaving yourself open to the half a dozen relentless enemies in your vicinity, so would definitely give the nod to the first two games in terms of sightjacking really feeling like an integral part of the gameplay, then again in earlier parts of BC it felt like I was sightjacking the usual amount, before shit had gotten too real to comfortably do so...
I definitely rate this series right up there in terms of how scary I find it, and I enjoy the gameplay in a weird way too despite it not being designed to be that "fun", it's still quite original and can be really engaging in all 3 games. I often hear people say the Fatal Frame games are the scariest thing they've played and to each their own, but I find Siren (and of course Silent Hill) much much more frightening and unnerving, though the FF games are awesome games in general too and obviously easier for casual gamers to get into than something like Siren.
A new game would be amazing, and it would be awesome to see the first 3 remastered and re-released so that everyone could have a chance to play the second one. Really I'd be more than happy if they just put it up on PSN as a classic like they did the first game a couple of years ago.
Great post, OP! It really makes me want to go to the basement and fetch my copy of Siren 2.
To me the second one was easily the best one since the first was too frustrating and the third one got a bit too easy and 'boring' (still scary as fuck though).
What I remember is that the second one got more fucked up in the later levels with some very strange enemies and plot twists. The thing with the series is that I really didn't know what in the poop was going on. There were always some obstuse cutscenes with some badly acted lines and that was it for the level. Really strange storytelling but that's also what makes these games so interesting: they are strange from top to bottom.
I also remember playing some levels in 2 over and over again. Fuck the ferry-level
Great series. I somehow managed to overcome my fears and finish Siren 1 when it came out, but I never did that with 2. I got lost in the obtuse timeline system, repeated chapters several times without knowing what to do and ultimately just quit. Wish that Sony would release both as PS2 Classics on PSN, so I could go back and try it again.
Blood Curse was also great. It had some of the scariest and most tense gameplay sections of any horror game I ever played. Especially the chapters when you control the little girl in the hospital and the creepy house afterwards.
Played a few chapters of Blood Curse but never beat it. I enjoyed it. Was always kind of bummed that the NA version was censored in some areas, including just normal violence.
Very interesting stuff. They showed and early prototype of the first game and plenty of behind the scenes stuff. I wonder why they did this stream, is not like is the 10th anniversary of the series or any important date, and the last game was released in 2008.
I did some research and the manga has yet to get a tankōbon, the magazine publishing the manga only comes out four times every year (April, July, October and December), I guess they don't have enough pages yet.
The magazine is called コミック特盛, below some covers:
Blood Curse is the weakest game in the series in my opinion. You lost the event flowchart system, which in my opinion is what makes Siren 1 and 2 standout horror games.
You could have a fusion of the two concepts, maybe introducing branching paths, based on the actions you performed (open a gate, kill a character, fail to save someone, etc) in a level.
Instead of making it a puzzle-like approach, just go with the flow and engage with whatever direction the player takes, instead of requiring them to take X action for completion's sake.
OP, you may have omitted this purposefully, or not... but there was a whole Siren hub on PS Home for a while where you had to make it through a gauntlet and if you achieved certain objectives while doing so you would be rewarded with outfits and set pieces for your personal spaces. I LOVED that hub.
That said, I also remember a streamer on Twitch playing this game constantly. I think it was Ariablarg and she would just non stop scream into the microphone and cry and have meltdowns the entire time she was casting.
One of her more "tame" casts of the Siren games.
If you can find any when she had weird hair colors that's when she was experiencing the games for the first time.
Remember stumbling into my bros room while he and his girlfriend played blood curse. They got too scared and I lucked out, finished the whole thing while they watched. I love horror games, and I fuckin lovedd siren blood curse.
Two, actually. There also was Banjō Daichi's Siren 〜Eternal Siren〜, which, like the movie, was (very) loosely based on / released around the same time as Siren 2.
Forbidden Siren (Film)
A film adaption of the series which released at the same time as the second game, and loosely follows the second game's plot threads. It follows the mysterious blackout and disappearance of the island that leads to Forbidden Siren 2's plot 20 years later.
Nah, they're entirely separate stories, really. Even the name of the island isn't the same (same spelling in Latin alphabet, but different characters in Japanese).
Also, the movie got a novelization (with a slightly different ending).
I loved all three games, mainly the first two thanks to the huge number of stages, side goals and hidden items as the third game was far more linear.
The first game is probably still my favourite despite the difficult controls, difficulty spikes and hilariously vague direction (I'd never get the best ending without a walkthrough for sure). I remember one particular secondary mission requiring you to escort a girl to the exit when you play as the old sniper character. Problem 1 is that its timed so you have to be incredibly efficient in terms of your playthrough of the level. Plus you get no timer on screen so its a complete pain in the ass of a level to complete successfully. Its probably the hardest bit in the game though, so if you can do that bit you should have no problem with any other bits in any of the games...
Siren 2 did a lot to refine the first game, especially in terms of controls and requirements in levels. The increase in action though wasn't the greatest thing to me. I much preferred the original games bigger focus on stealth vs guns.
My favourite level in the series is the
level set in the house in the first game where you play as the small girl. Unarmed, you have to escape the house. Apart from it being pretty tense at times in terms of sneaking past the enemies, the most un nerving part of the level was using the sight jacking power to observe the enemies going about a "normal" life. It was probably the freakiest thing in the game.
Fyi Siren Blood Curse is available to rent on PS Now for those who don't have access to a PS3 anymore. That's likely how I'll play it after my gaming binges with Witcher 3 and MGS V have ebbed.
Very interesting stuff. They showed and early prototype of the first game and plenty of behind the scenes stuff. I wonder why they did this stream, is not like is the 10th anniversary of the series or any important date, and the last game was released in 2008.
I did some research and the manga has yet to get a tankōbon, the magazine publishing the manga only comes out four times every year (April, July, October and December), I guess they don't have enough pages yet.
The magazine is called コミック特盛, below some covers:
Blood Curse is up there with SH2 as my fav horror game of all time.
Specifically the scene inside the shibito family house when they are trying to act like a normal family I found so twisted and creepy. One of my fav scenes in a game ever.
I had one of these games on PS2, and blood curse on PS3. Didn't like either of them. Terribly clunky gameplay and voice acting so hilariously bad it ruined alot of the atmosphere. They just felt like a poor mans Project Zero to me
i've been trying to persuade Patrick Klepek to play the first two games on his spooking with scoops series, I'm pretty sure he has played blood curse and loved it, but I think that game is pretty diluted compared to the original PS2 games.
Seeing yourself through the eyes of a shibito shortly before being murdered to death is the creepiest thing.. a new game would be amazing but even just ps4 hd versions of the whole series would be great. i think the bad (or are they good?) graphics of the ps2 games actually suit the theme really well in a way that just adds to the creepiness.
