Lusipurr.com – Presenting the Sundry Opinions of Lusipurr and Friends

There are two things that make Silent Hill better than Resident Evil: the characters and the enemies.  Now, I love both series, so do not misunderstand me or flame me for “hating” on Resident Evil.  Resident Evil may have brought the survival horror genre to the mainstream with its release in 1996, but Silent Hill has perfected it.   In this article I will describe why I feel Silent Hill usurped Resident Evil’s crown of survival horror king.

Two great titans battle for the final time...

Silent Hill’s characters are much more engaging than Resident Evil’s.  A majority of the Resident Evil characters are some sort of public safety officer, or ex-safety officer, who fights zombies because the zombies attacked Raccoon City.  Any other character in the game is either one of the previous characters’ siblings or some sort of mutated enemy.  All these characters are highly trained in hand-to-hand fighting and weapon-based skills, so if one of the zombies get too close, the player can easily push them away.  The Silent Hill characters are just normal people who were drawn to the town of Silent Hill by some unknown force.  These people are not trained in any sort of fighting or weapon skills, other than clumsily swinging a large axe around.  Another thing that makes these characters so engaging is the fact that all of them have some sort of mental psychosis.  The main character in Silent Hill 2 has a secret so dark that the player is not sure he or she even likes the character after the game is over.  Whereas Resident Evil’s characters are either “good” or “evil,” the characters in Silent Hill ride the line of “grey” between the two.  These character defects are often reflected in the enemies.

Zombies are so overdone; they are just not scary anymore.  Even in the newer games in the Resident Evil series, where the enemies are changed to simply mutated humans, they are still not that scary.  However, in Silent Hill, the enemies are a reflection of the main character’s secrets or neurosis.  The main character of Silent Hill 1 is attempting to find his daughter, so all the enemies look like children or child-like drawings.  Silent Hill 2 involves a man’s dark secret about a woman, so most of the enemies are feminine like in appearance, and even include one famous enemy raping another in an unforgettable scene.  The most interesting monster is in Silent Hill 3, whose female main character encounters a monster from time to time whose only purpose is to turn valves, which represent the female menstrual cycle.  I really do not think anything in Resident Evil can live up to that.

So, there are my two reasons why I feel Silent Hill is a much better survival horror game series than Resident Evil. I would love to hear what our readers have to say, so feel free to defend any point you would like to make, and even rank the games from best to worst.