An unintentional rambly rant and a question about the ending

I'm playing Silent Hill 2 for the first time and I have run into a bit of a problem.

I like to play these kinds of games with the minimal amount of killing possible, for item preservation and so forth. So far I've managed to avoid every enemy in the game, but I've reached a point where trying this is getting me rather, annoyed, to put it extremely lightly. As a result I am now more than willing to slaughter everything in my path.

One thing that I have never heard of when it comes to Silent Hill 2, is the fact that the camera is atrocious. This revelation has taking place in the hospital, where the sexy nurses call home. The nurses attack fast and damn do they attack hard. Every time you enter a room the camera is facing behind you. No game, I do not appreciate this lovely camera angle you've giving me. I'd much rather see the three unstoppable killing machines in front of me that I'm blindly running towards. It was infuriating. Every damn room! Any attempt to get the camera to look down the numerous halls resulted in me staring at a wall instead. On top of that, after the game loads a new area it remains a black screen for a moment, meaning enemies can attack me before I have a chance to react. I still haven't finished the hospital because I was so pissed with it.

I don't know, maybe I'm doing something wrong here and this camera is actually the greatest camera to have ever graced a video game. Or it really is a blight upon this, so far, wonderful game.

But I digress.

What I actually started this for, before I rambled into some sort of mini rant, was for a simple question.

Will killing the enemies have any effect on the ending? And if so how egregious does my rampage have to be?

Now the quickest way I probably could have answered this was by randomly gallivanting through this beautiful cesspit we call the internet. But I would like to avoid spoilers. This game is over 10 years old and I've managed to avoid them so far. So obviously giving my luck, now is the time when they'll all come pouring into my eyes.

Any time is a good time to jump into Silent Hill 2!

Anyway from what I can remember killing enemies doesn't impact any of the endings. Most of the ending related criteria are moments throughout the story some pivotal, some being really subtle things that you do reacting to events. I do think though that how you use healing items does have an impact on certain endings (e.g. running around with low health or something) hopefully that's not too much of a spoiler.

Out of curiosity which version are you playing?

Yes, it has an affect along with a great number of things.

It is a 12 year old game and I found that if you just reset the camera often enough it becomes tolerable.

Best of luck

In my opinion, you should forget everything about trying to get a particular ending until you've finished it at least twice.

The camera is quite bad, but, man, is that game good!

Killing guys doesn't have an effect on which ending you get.

What does effect the ending is how much damage you take, and how quickly you heal that damage, how much damage your escort character takes and how close you stay to them, and how much you look at a certain item in your inventory.

Don't worry about it though, the 'bad' ending is actually probably the most tonally correct one. So just play the game and don't worry about the ending being fucked or making some judgement about you.

@lazlow:

That's good to know. Thanks. I got the SH collection on PS2, so a lot of my game playing will be spent in Silent Hill for the foreseeable future.

Well I must say reading these responses has made me a bit more relieved about the whole thing.

It's not that I want the good ending exactly it's just that I want to avoid as many encounters as possible. Unfortunately I can take this to a breaking point, as you can see here. The health stipulation is an interesting one. I'll try not to dwell on it though.

Thanks for the help everyone! Time to bust out my shotgun.

The tip is that it's actually somewhat expedient to just deal with guys as soon as you see them. Avoiding guys works in the short term, but eventually you will be missing a thing or can't find a door, and you will be wandering around and have one of these things sneak up on you. Run past shit on the streets, run past mannequins being launched from the lake, but inside a building, take care of business. Especially with nurses or lying figures, they can cause problems.