Players debate characters' looks in everything from Marvel Rivals to The Witcher 3, but Silent Hill 2 devs sent them a warning 24 years ago: "Maria was sexier when we first started out, but her plunging neckline gave us too many technical problems"

Silent Hill 2
(Image credit: Konami)

Now, the world is locked in perpetual disagreement; a black mist obscures blue skies because people 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:just can't 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:figure out if the female protagonists in their favorite video games 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:are sexy or not. That's why we must 💙turn our heads to the past, wherꦡe Silent Hill 2 developers protect the key to our salvation.

In a behind-the-scenes video included with the 2001 game's European Special Two-Disc Edition, by streamer Fungo, Team Silent character artist Sato Takayoshi explains that there's an expensive cost to being too beautiful: "Maria was sexier when we first started out," the video narrator quotes him saying, "but her plunging neckline gave us too many⛦ technical problems."

Takayoshi says he wanted to make sure Ma♏ria – the physical manifestation of protagonist James' wet daydreams about his murdered wife – seemed "disturbing. And, uh, sometimes looks cute."

He's proud of the fact that, unliꦉke the Final Fantasy games he cites, where "the main girl character doesn't have a wrinkle," Maria is "more realistic."

Silent Hill 2

Some fans arg🅰ued that the 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake's version of Maria needed to be🅷 more seductive. (Image credit: Konami)

"If you are attracted by some woman," he says, "she's not perfect. If you take her pictures… sometimes, her face is" – here, Takayoshi makes a strategically ogre-ifi𝓡c expression – "like that. It's not perfect. [...] You're in lov♏e with her because she's human."

I think he's right. While I've always believed that certain games benefit from their characters looking like 🤪complete fantasies – Soul Calibur and its surprisingly curvaceous reptile knight, Lizardman, come to mind – others require a soft brush of imperfection to fire up your feelings.

When Maria was at her hottest, the narrator explains that Takayoshi wasn't "happy with the𝐆 way the graphics looked." Eventually, in what the narrator describes as an interest in turning "the head of any red-blooded male player," Takayoshi decided to model sensual facial expressions for the beautiful ghost Maria on himself, an approachable, flesh-and-blood man.

"I couldn't trust the face motion capture," he says💞. "But if I make [certain faces] in front of the mirror, I can notice it," the physical subtleties of emotion, like muscle twitching and tightness, "I can capture it."

You are what you love.

Silent Hill f game director says "it was absolutely critical" for the game set in Japan to not simply "copy" previous titles – it had to "really understand" that horror atmosphere.

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Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and I𝄹nverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horꦇror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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