I don't live in Room 302.

Despite being a sensational interview that has circulated for over 20 years, there is nothing in the headline to highlight it. Was the ambiguity in the relevant parts meant to prevent pushback from the interviewee through an interpreter? Using the Eurogamer and Boomtown articles on SH4, this looks at, the bias toward English-language sources and the bias against Asia among those who trusted the English articles over the devs and the work itself.

Across articles by the same writer, the numbers change, while they match across different writers. There are no photos of the interviewee, and the Q&A content is almost identical, just rearranged and restructured by each writer. The articles people trusted because they came from two sites may actually share the same source.

This breaks down the inconsistencies in the Eurogamer and Boomtown articles about SH4, which have circulated in the English-speaking world for over 20 years, featuring side-by-side image comparisons. I also show the correct official info.

......Tried to be cool, haha.

It might be surprisingly little known that even if you don't heal before the final boss fight, entering the red room fully restores you. I never noticed either because I was busy chugging drinks in the room beforehand to prepare for the boss fight, haha.

I only learned it from someone who was doing a no-healing-items challenge run. That said, taking it on with zero recovery items is still pretty rough.

A little extra:

Some pages on a certain site say those came from the manual, but those are official website info. So they have navigation links like Next and Back.

🖌️High brightness, high contrast + Diffuse glow filter.

I tried playing around with Photoshop's filter features. Henry looks so fragile, like he could fade away any moment… haha.

Since I mentioned "Ghostwire: Tokyo" yesterday, here's a bonus.

In one of its sub-missions, there's a girl playing "Moonlight Sonata." Apparently, it's an homage to RE, and the one playing is Mikami-san.

Incidentally, the layout of this house closely resembles the one in the movie "Ju-on."

This image in the SH4 OST is a final boss battle scene depicted as a (Buddhist) Hell Scroll in the style of an ukiyo-e print of the famous ghost Oiwa-san.

Oiwa-san is characterized by her long hair and rotting eye, and Sadako from "The Ring" is said to be an homage to her.

The ghost Cynthia is believed to be influenced by Sadako, so ther's a double layer of influence here.

In normal mode, the pipe gets in the way.

In One-Weapon Mode you pick a single weapon in the subway, so the steel pipe never appears in the opening cutscene. In other words, you can actually see Henry's face.

There's a Pokémon collaboration train running on the Tokyo subway right now, and it's really cute, but there were so many people that I didn't feel comfortable taking a photo… This is the only shot I got.

It's a play on words combining Ditto's Japanese name "Meta mon" with the "Hanzo mon Line" and its light purple color.

I erased Eileen on the left, so feel free to imagine whoever you like instead (…what?).

Like this: On a nice date 💞

In an interview for the official guide, Tsuboyama-san was like, "Walter's gaze is subtly shifted with the intention of making it look like you don't know what he's thinking."

*Although some community resources translate this as "ever-so-slightly averted," the original text says "subtly shifted," so it refers to the gaze itself being intentionally off.

Silent Hill 4 Official Guide Complete Edition, p.218

Sure, when you see it in the cutscenes, his eyes are slightly wall-eyed and sanpaku-style (with the whites visible). Because it's hard to tell where he's looking, that gaze heightens the player's sense of unease.

In the midst of that, his eyes only meet yours perfectly when it's confirmed he's a "dangerous guy" and when you peer through the door hole.

But even then, in the peephole scene, he doesn't blink even once, which makes the direction feel even more unsettling.

For @henrytownshendtryinghisbest

Tofu

I got excited seeing Tofu and took a screenshot, but it probably makes no sense, so here's some context no one asked for.

Tofu's a joke time attack character in Resident Evil. He chips when he takes damage.

Summary (slightly revised on April 17):

If you look closely at the two articles from Eurogamer and Boomtown that often appear in the "SH4 was originally created as Room 302 and then forced into the Silent Hill series" theory, which is the exact opposite of the official information in Japan, the content and the unnecessarily high number of 500 enemies defeated are the same. Even for a joint interview, this part wouldn't normally match.

Eurogamer "By the end of the game, we'd killed nearly 500 enemies, which to us seemed excessive…" Boomtown "By the end of the game I had killed nearly 500 monsters, which seems a lot compared to earlier games."

More digging shows both articles are similar. They don't have any photos, despite describing the scenes as if interviews were actually conducted. It also turns out the former once ran a content distribution service. It is likely they distributed their own content to the latter.

As a result, since both companies ended up putting out similar articles, that seems to have helped the rumor spread.