The Silent Hill 2 remake managed to surprise a lot of dedicated fans with a faithful retelling of a much-beloved story, and to celebrate the game's release, Bloober Team shared a behind-the-scenes video that demonstrated how much thought went into creating not only the remake, but also its protagonist.
"I don't know if it shows, but I'm actually old enough to have played the original Silent Hill 2 when it came out, and without any exaggeration, it was a life-changing experience," the lead writer, Andrzej Madrzak, says in the video. "I don't think I would be doing what I do now if I hadn't played it at that point in time. And a lot of the impact it had, had to do with James and the way the game portrayed his inner struggle in ways which were just ground-breaking."
Our news writer Joshua Wolens was pleasantly surprised in his preview of Silent Hill 2, saying that the acting felt very modern while being very faithful to the original. Although one of the biggest changes in the remake was that each character's dialogue was rerecorded. Some players may miss the slightly janky old performances, but I actually prefer James' newfound stage presence and slightly different design.
"We wanted to stay true to the original design, but we also wanted to use modern technology to expand on the concept of an ordinary man pushed into extraordinary situations," creative director and lead designer Mateusz Lenart says. "Our version of James has three-day facial hair—you will see his clothes getting dirtier and his face more tired as he progresses through the game." This is a pretty small feature, but one I think makes the remake all the more enjoyable—finally, James will look the same way that I feel after trekking through the foggy, nightmare-filled town of Silent Hill.
"It would be very easy to get carried away with a very flashy design, but this would miss the point of who James is," Pablo Poliakov, lead character artist, says. "He had to be not too cool, not too good-looking. There is this aspect of James of being a bit more of a pretend hero than an actual heroic figure."
James still definitely gives off the vibe of someone more accustomed to fighting a broken office coffee machine than freakish bloody monsters, but I do think that Bloober gave James something of a Leon Kennedy makeover. The new James seems to have had at least a few retouches to his face, but something was always going to change, at least a little bit.
The behind-the-scenes video also dives into what it was like for James Sunderland actor Luke Roberts. "It was very important to have an actor who was able to portray all of those emotions, and Luke Roberts was our best choice," Lenart says.
Roberts was clearly up for the task, especially as so many fans of Silent Hill have come out in support of the actor's rendition of the stilted and dreamlike dialogue. "James' voice actor (Luke Roberts) absolutely killed a near-impossible task," one player says. But apparently, it wasn't always smooth sailing for the actor: "It's funny because during Luke's initial audition, everything went wrong," Barbara Kciuk, senior narrative designer, says. "The audio quality was terrible—we were running super late, and the lines got mixed up. But there was just something so special about this particular actor embodying this role."
The secret to James' character hasn't really changed despite a phenomenal graphics face-lift—it needs to be clear that he's not cut out for all this fighting, and he's lost in every sense of the word, and I'm really happy that Roberts understood this task so well. "[James] is eminently relatable, and he's out of his depth which is one of my favourite scenarios," Roberts says. "So he's not an action hero by any means—he is just a guy who is a little lost."
