Great game, horrible voice acting

This is something that has been thrown around for years. This is a long deconstruction, but I think it is worth saying considering how often the VA is brought up for Silent Hill 2. It's a lot to cover, but I hope you read all I have to say. Here goes.

The voice acting is not perfect, and is very much rough around the edges compared to today's standards; that's no doubt. However, there's a method behind this. The original Team Silent behind SH2 were incredibly particular about everything in this game. When you have the main CG director/co-writer (Takayoshi Sato) hand-animating details like having one of Eddie's eyes always looking away from James to create a sense of unease, you know this is a meticulously crafted piece of work.

I say all that to make this point: much of the dialogue exchanges in the game are intentionally off-putting and odd. Particularly the scenes with Angela, who was made to look and sound much older, when she is only 16 years old (to show how much her abuse has aged her). She often talks very slowly, as if drained. Other times manic. The fact is, these are all incredibly disturbed characters, whether they realize it or not. The VA compliments this in a number of ways, and adds to the strange atmosphere.

Now...if you aren't familiar with the entire Silent Hill HD collection debacle, you need only look at the voice replacements. You can find comparisons on YT. In the HD coll, they brought in all new VA's to redub the entire game. The result? Pretty appalling. The voices themselves are not all bad. Troy Baker (redubbed James) and Mary McGlynn (redubbed Mary/Maria) both have rich voices, and are talented, professional VA's. But this is exactly why they do NOT work for this game. The audio sounds far too crisp and clean, as if they are on a radio talk show doing a podcast. The sound processing on the original VA's adds a layer to the atmosphere that you don't even realize until you hear the redubs. But most importantly, you don't feel disturbed anymore. At all. When you hear these deep voices doing Hollywood-esque drama acting, it takes away almost all of the subtle, unhinged, surreal undertones that the original had.

Hearing unknowns for the voice talent brings a level to this game that can't be fully quantified until you hear the game without them. When you recognize the overtly dramatic voice acting of 'professionals', it seriously diminishes so much of the experience. Eddie's new voice is just straight up objectively terrible though; he sounds like someone they pulled off the street who has a breathing problem.

Guy Cihi who is the original voice of James, did not always have the best delivery, even he would admit that. But his unique vocal timbre gave James a unique identity and added to the character's jaded attitude; he is meant to sound weaker and confused, not like some moody action hero (which is what the redub gave us). Near the end of the game, he really hits it home and actually delivers great VA for the more emotional scenes. In fact, Cihi stated that during his audition for the role, they told him to react to the news that his wife had died. He got very emotional and even had tears during the audition, which let the producers see that he could tap into that dark place (he had experienced an unhealthy relationship with his ex-wife at the time).

Finally, the voice of Mary/Maria (Monica Taylor Horgan) is easily the strongest performance in the game and delivers almost every scene. An essential role to this, is that Mary and Maria are supposed to have different manners of speech. She is 100% spot on as Mary, from the iconic "In my restless dreams..." opening, to the hallway V.O. scene near the end. And then she transforms her voice for Maria, taking on the suductress. Mcglynn fails to deliver a distinction between Mary/Maria's voices in the redub.

To wrap this all up, let me just say one concluding thing. The final letter reading at the end of the game, is up there as some of the best voice acting I've ever heard in my life. I am genuinely not exaggerating. This single letter reading makes up for ANY faults in the original VA of SH2. That's not acting. That is what you call real. Few performances, with just the voice, make you feel like you are listening to a real, unfiltered, vulnerable human being. This letter reading is one of those few times. Monica T. Horgan said she read the letter in one take, and broke down into tears. That one take was all they needed.

For the most part, I loved the OG SH2 voice acting. Resident Evil basically established the idea that survival horror voice acting was not to be taken too seriously, and I'm guessing they were keeping that in mind when making the classic Silent Hill games. I really doubt the SH2 director was trying to get award winning performances out of the cast. IMO most of them did a fine job, relatively speaking. So many dialogue lines from that game have lived rent free in my brain for almost 25 years now, bona fide classics.

The only exception was Angela. Her voice actor sounded like a retarded alien who had come to earth and listened to humans speaking English for less than 5 minutes and was trying to imitate them from memory a year later. She was far beyond "intentionally off-putting and odd," the performance was just plain AWFUL. That actor played Claudia in SH3, and she was quite good in that role. I suspect the SH2 director told her something like "this Angela character should be nervous, unsure of herself and on edge at all times," and the best she could come up with was crap like, "This, uh, this, um, this ~tOwN~... there's something wrong with it." The Angela actor in the new remake is so, so, soooo much better.

I played the SH Collection version on PS3 when it came out, but I don't think I ever got around to checking out the updated voice actors. In fact, I think my experience with that butchered version of SH2 was so bad that I never even bothered playing SH3, so I never heard those updated actors either.