Silent Hill: Ascension

Yes, it seems like a disjointed series of cutscenes.. but it isn't godawful. I thought that perhaps it could have been better, (of course), but it does not warrant the scathing anger that everyone seems willing to hurl at it.

Sort of like watching the Rings of Power.. if you go into it expecting something, then you will be sorely disappointed. However, watching it with an open mind, and just suspend disbelief, it really isn't awful. The graphics... are meh. But the actually characters aren't bad. You can tell that trolls seemed to try and influence both it's creation and reception.. It's not that bad, and trolls influence aside, it's enjoyable.

I watched almost three episodes. At first, I was hyped. Silent Hill was my first favorite video game, and I thought that I would gladly consume any type of Silent Hill content because of how rare something new comes up. And the idea where users have an influence on the story? So cool! It can't go wrong, right? Oh dear, sure it can...

It's terrible.

Story? It's not "Silent Hill". It could be, but it's not. The sequence is chopped, disconnected, incoherent, filled with completely unnecessary scenes, important scenes are not developed enough. It feels more like a YouTube fan made fiction montage using cutscenes from a video games, then a series. This is not a professional product at all.

Characters? The last ounce of creativity was spent on modern characters (bossy women, flimsy men, mustachioed girl, zoo of all races, etc.), so there was no creativity to add at least some complexity to any character. That's exploitation.

Video? That would be cool for a ~2010 game, it's a bit late for a 2023 series. Hell, the series never took any of the advantages of computer graphics (impossible angles and transitions). Lip-sync is hit or miss, faces are mostly stuck in a single emotion.

Music? Ha-ha... ha-HA-HAHA. No.

There's nothing of value here.

Obviously, this "product" has nothing to do with the actual creators of Silent Hill.

I'd rather play Silent Hill Pachinko Machine till my last breath than finish this series.

This is the worst that has happened to this franchise. The writing is abysmal, nothing fits or makes sense, there is so much forced exposition, nothing feels authentic. Its like the characters don't even hear what the others are saying at times. No wonder people think this is AI generated.

The animation is not much better. Its like PS2 level of animation upscaled to PS 3 level. There are tiny glimpses of good animation but the majority feels incredibly outdated.

The voice acting can't get anything across and seems wodden and monotone most of the time. When the voice acting is there, it doesn't fit the animation.

Silent Hill Ascension is only worth your time when you come together and laugh about how bad it is.

A completely disjointed storyline, incomprehensible character writing and editing, it's amazing it got made. The voice acting is miserable, but is matched only by how bad the animation is. I have no clue what the story is supposed to be, or what any character motivations are. Every scene is both completely forgettable and reaching new depths of misery. Silent Hill Ascension fails completely on every single level. This isn't even including the absolute mess that is the paid "season pass" that offers almost nothing, the insane background characters designed by the audience, or the fact that decisions are made by the highest bidder, despite them doing apparently nothing to the story. It's so bad it's almost entertaining. I can't wait to watch the documentary in 10 years about how somehow people who have presumably watched a TV show before allowed this to be made.

Man, where to start? The first thing that stood out to me was the writing felt like it was written by very earnest teens in a Spooky Story Club or something. 100% dumb tropes, disjointed (in a BAD way) dialogue, just really awful and a lot of it was extremely uninteresting.

Uninteresting? Yes, it was more interesting to try and figure out why a majority of the voice acting was so over-the-top terrible. The pacing was off, the voicework was either deadpan or emotionally out of place for no real reason. At one point a girl just found out her Grandma died and is trying to ask her Grandad if he killed her Granny, and she put about as much emotion into it as if she were asking someone to pass the salt.

Oh, don't worry, that wasn't a spoiler or anything, because the entire show is such a disjointed toilet mess you really won't CARE what's going on about 15 -30 minutes in when you realize you are only sticking around to see just how bad the show will actually get.

Even if this were a traditional Console or PC game, the voice acting and jank story and writing would have resulted in negative reviews, even in a day and age where Retro is cool again. Just like tank controls, this Show or Game or whatever it's trying to be should have been left as what it was: a really, really bad idea.