James Sunderland arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a mysterious letter from his wife, Mary, who died from an illness three years ago.[3] The letter is beckoning him to their "special place", though James has no idea what this means.[4] James is one of three people who have been "called" to Silent Hill under suspicious circumstances: A young woman named Angela has also just arrived, looking for her mother.[5] The third visitor is a slow-witted man named Eddie. James encounters each of them during his trek, and both characters strongly advise him to leave.[6][7]
James decides to check out "Rosewater Park", a place which he suspects might be their "special place".[8] When he reaches the park, he meets a woman who strongly resembles Mary, but with a more provocative wardrobe and personality.[9] She calls herself Maria, and claims that she has never met or seen Mary. Because she is a civilian, James agrees to let Maria tag along. James also has a brief encounter with a young girl named Laura, who is immune to the effects of the town (as she is unable to see any monsters).[10]
Over time, the mental instability of both Angela and Eddie becomes apparent. James finds Angela lying on the floor in an apartment; she is toying with a knife, apparently suicidal. James persuades her into handing him the knife for her own safety, at which point she flees in panic. Eddie, on the other hand, is always defensive with James. He tends to linger around areas with corpses, though he denies having anything to do with their deaths.[11]
James meets Maria at Rosewater Park.While looking for Laura inside a hospital, James and Maria are ambushed by a fearsome monster called "Pyramid Head"; Maria is killed by the monster just as James slips between the closing doors of an elevator.[12] James nonetheless resumes his task of finding Mary. His second guess as to her whereabouts is the old Lakeview Hotel, where he and Mary spent their vacation.[13] While en route, James inexplicably finds Maria alive, unharmed and locked in a prison cell.[14] She greets him with a lascivious pose.[15] Before he is able to rescue her, Maria dies once more while James is away, presumably at the hands of Pyramid Head.
While traveling deeper into a catacomb, James finds Angela in a room with a monster, whom she calls "daddy". After killing it, Angela becomes furious with James and confesses that her father used to molest her.[16] A newspaper article that James finds implies that Angela stabbed her father to death. In the basement, James confronts a gun-wielding Eddie, who has now completely lost his mind. Eddie admits that he maimed a bully and killed his dog before fleeing to Silent Hill.[17] Eddie believes the reason James was "called" to the town is because he is a killer, just like him.[18] James is forced to kill Eddie during a pitched gunfight inside a meat locker. Following this, Mary's letter reverts to a blank piece of paper, calling into question whether or not James actually received it, or if the letter was all in his mind.
James reaches the Lakeview Hotel and finds that it is still in pristine condition. In their old hotel room, he plays a videotape which depicts him at the bedside of his dying wife. At some point in the recording, James snaps and smothers Mary with a pillow.[19] Once James remembers that he killed Mary, the hotel's alternate side in the "otherworld" is revealed: a burnt-out shell which is gradually flooding with water. James meets Angela one last time in a burning staircase. Angela accidentally mistakes James for her mother, and asks James to give her back the knife, which he refuses.[20] Angela begins to ascend the staircase, disappearing into the flames.
During one of the final battles, Maria is once more resurrected; she is held in a torture rack and at the mercy of two Pyramid Heads. Maria cries out for help and is promptly killed by them. James finally realizes that the Pyramid Heads were created because he needed someone to punish him. Accepting this, he fights the Pyramid Heads, defeating them and making his way out of the hotel. On the rooftop, James finally reaches what seems to be Mary. Depending on the choice made by the player throughout the game, Maria is either disguised as Mary,[21] or it is Mary herself.[22]
[edit] Endings
While it has multiple endings determined by the player's actions, like the other games in the series, Silent Hill 2 doesn't have a canonized ending. The fourth installment of the series reveals that James and Mary never returned from their trip to Silent Hill, but the circumstances are not specified. Official statements from Konami have kept the canonicity of the ending ambiguous.[23][24] The final release of Silent Hill 2 has a total of six possible endings, three which can be achieved on the first playing, and the other three enabled by acquiring new items during a new game+.
In the "Leave" and "In Water" endings, the woman in the room is Maria once again, dressed as Mary in an attempt to trick James. James rebuffs her, however, and she mutates into a monster similar to the "hanging men" in the hospital, becoming the final boss.
Following her defeat, in the "Leave" ending, James is next seen having a final meeting with a dying Mary, to whom he confesses he killed her to reclaim his life from the strain of looking after her. Mary forgives him, handing him a piece of paper which is presumed to be the full content of the letter that he had in the game. As the letter is read onscreen, James is last seen leaving the town through the graveyard with Laura following him ahead. This suggests that James adopts her, as Mary wanted to if she ever got over her illness.
The "In Water" ending is identical up to the point that Mary dies during the meeting before forgiving James, and he takes her body into the car he arrived in and drives into Toluca Lake, killing himself.
A special ending entitled "Rebirth" (available only during a replay game) will also end with James killing Maria, but the final scene shows him in a boat with Mary's body, planning to revive her using secret occult objects the player can collect throughout the game.[25]
The "Maria" ending is earned if the player takes actions that seem to show an attachment to Maria (checking on her frequently, keeping her out of harm's way). In this case, the woman in the room will be Mary, who has apparently not forgiven James for killing her. She will then turn into the final boss, and after her defeat James dismisses her as being just another hallucination. He then discovers Maria, inexplicably resurrected again, and leaves town with her.[26] Maria starts noticeably coughing, implying she has the illness Mary suffered from, and the events that drove James to murder may repeat themselves.[27]
There are also two joke endings available on replays. The first, "DOG", ends with James discovering beyond a normally locked door a Shiba Inu which has apparently been controlling all the events of the game from a large computer console. The second, "UFO", is a continuation of the UFO ending of the first game in which James is abducted by a group of aliens with the help of the first game's protagonist, Harry Mason.
