Alyssa Hamilton

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“	DAMN YOU! You're not my grandfather, I don't know WHO you are anymore! But I know that I'm a Rooder. I'LL DESTROY YOU AND SAVE MY MOTHER!	„
	~ Alyssa, confronting Dick Hamilton.

Alyssa Hamilton (b. 2nd April, 1988) is the hero of the survival horror game, Clock Tower 3. She is an ordinary schoolgirl, oblivious to the fact that her female ancestors have protected humanity from evil for centuries.

She was voiced by Kirsty Dillon (English) and Chika Fujimura (Japanese).

Biography[]

Background[]

Alyssa was born to Philip and Nancy Hamilton. Alyssa's maternal grandfather, Dick, chose the name "Alyssa" for her. Nancy told baby Alyssa that, one day, she would inherit a clover necklace - its four leaves symbolize love, friendship, hope, and courage. Alyssa is a descendant of the Burroughs Family, though she is unaware of this. Since Dick discovers this, it is unlikely Nancy knew.

When Alyssa was a baby, she lost her father after he was apparently killed with an axe in a freak accident. However, Philip was actually murdered by Dick. From that point, Alyssa was raised by Nancy and Dick. At age 12, Alyssa was sent to boarding school away from her home for unknown reasons by Nancy, and was told not to return until she was at least 18 years old. Around this time, Dick goes "missing".

Clock Tower 3[]

During the game, Alyssa is almost 15. A few days before her birthday, Alyssa receives a letter from Nancy, urgently telling her to go into hiding. However, Alyssa becomes homesick and defies her mother, and returns home. When Alyssa arrives, Nancy is missing; the only other living person in the house is a mysterious stranger, known as the Dark Gentleman, who offers Alyssa cryptic warnings and clues as to her mother's fate.

Though frightened, Alyssa becomes determined to find her mother. She explores the house and finds a bottle of holy water, along with strange symbols on doors that only the sacred water can break. Eventually, her search leads her into her mother's room, where a piano begins to play Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu wildly. Terrified, Alyssa dashes from the room and is transported back in time, to London, circa World War II, 1942, which Germany's Luftwaffe is bombing.

Her search leads her to a tailor shop, where she witnesses the gruesome murder of a young girl. The crime is perpetrated by a mysterious man wielding a sledgehammer; he notices Alyssa, and begins an obsessed search for her. As Alyssa evades him, she runs into other angry ghosts. By returning particular items to each spirit, she is able to placate them and lay them to rest.

Eventually, Alyssa pieces together the mystery: May Norton, a 12-year-old piano-playing prodigy, was brutally murdered on Christmas Eve by a madman with a sledgehammer. While still exploring the tailor shop, Alyssa sees memories from the past; when May's father, William Norton, tells her that he is going to war, she gives him a pocket watch as a reminder of his wife and May. While in battle, he is hit by an explosion and lands on a row of barb wire, dying instantly.

Alyssa decides to free May's spirit, which is trapped on Earth, but on her way to do this, she is confronted by the killer. Her vial of holy water becomes a longbow, and she destroys the villain in a shower of golden light. Alyssa gives the pocket watch to May's spirit, who proceeds to play the piano once more. After a short while, May is reunited with her father, and the two thank Alyssa before ascending into the afterlife. Alyssa then passes out.

She wakes up in her room, lying on the bed, believing it was a dream. Her childhood friend, Dennis Owen, knocks on the window while hanging on to the windowsill. An annoyed Alyssa helps him up, wondering why he would try to enter her residence through a window. Dennis reveals he contacted Nancy who told him to give Alyssa the key to her grandfather's room if Nancy was not back in time.

While searching through the room, she learns about a surprising secret in her family. The girls in her lineage are known as "Rooders", young women with the supernatural ability to communicate with the dead. She also learns of a ferocious dark power called an "Entity", which can infect certain humans and drive them to acts of crazed murder. The agony and despair of the souls of the murderer's victims feeds their dark power, and grants the villain - now known as a "Subordinate" - immortality.

The Rooders are fated to find and free those tortured souls, breaking the Subordinate's magic and allowing them to be destroyed. These powers peak at the age of fifteen, and wane afterward. Henceforth, the women in Alyssa's family marry young and quickly bear a daughter. Alyssa realizes that she is a Rooder, and that Sledgehammer was a Subordinate, feeding off of young May's soul. With this new knowledge, she moves back in time again.

Alyssa enters a house with an elderly blind woman, Dorothy Rand, and her son, Albert Rand. After being blown away by a gust of wind, Alyssa looks at a memory where the man and his mother are murdered viciously with sulfuric acid. During the struggle, the shawl that the son made for his mother drops into a sewer. Files reveal that the murderer, known as Corroder, claimed to be a distant relative of the Rands - it is unknown if this is true. Alyssa finds the shawl and destroys Corroder, freeing the mother and her son.

Upon returning home, Alyssa begins to wonder why her mother wanted her to stay away. Soon, she realizes that the mysterious "Dark Gentleman" hopes to gain immortality by becoming an Entity himself, using the Ritual of Engagement. This dark ritual requires the "heart of a Rooder". When the Clock Tower begins to form, Alyssa is sent to the top of the tower to confront the Dark Gentlemen. He throws her down the tower to "Hell", which resembles an underground factory. Regaining consciousness, she confronts another Subordinate known as Chopper.

After temporarily escaping from him, Alyssa looks back at a memory from when she had just been born. Hearing a scream from the stair balcony, Alyssa runs to find her father struggling against her maternal grandfather. Dick throws Philip off the balcony onto an axe head, splitting his head in half. Alyssa denies that her grandfather truly meant to kill her father and engages into a battle with Chopper, but fails to kill him and is sent to a graveyard.

Once there, she meets the spirits of other Rooders who lost battles against the Subordinates. Alyssa fights the Chopper again and, with the help from the Rooder spirits, is able to vanquish him. After completing this mission, Alyssa is warped in time once more to the home of the mysterious Darcy Burroughs, who lived on the very land on which Alyssa's house now resides. At this point in time, it is the location of the titular Clock Tower.

Obsessed with the secrets of the Entities and Subordinates, Burroughs hires the homicidal twins - Scissorman Ralph and Scissorwoman Jemima - to murder for him. Burroughs plotted to become an Entity himself, but his daughter died on the eve of her fifteenth birthday, ruining his plan and driving him insane. He died crushed in the Clock Tower's gears, swearing revenge. Alyssa reunites with Dennis and he sees his sister Linda in a hospital, but Linda transforms into Jemima and the Twins abduct Dennis, so Alyssa sets out to save him. Eventually, with Dennis' help, Alyssa overcomes the twins in Burroughs Castle.

Once Alyssa returns to the present day, she discovers that the villain behind her mother's disappearance is her own grandfather, who'd lived with the pair since Alyssa was a child, and performed extensive research on the Rooder powers. However, he was descended from Burroughs, and was eventually driven insane by the connections between his and his ancestor's situations, and allowed Burroughs' evil spirit to fuse with him.

On the top of the clock tower, Alyssa encounters Dick, who intends to complete the Ritual of Engagement. When Alyssa refuses, Dick transforms into Burroughs, destroys a Nancy who was transformed into a statue, and plots to fulfill Burroughs' plan with Alyssa's heart. Just before Alyssa is killed, she is rescued by Dennis, who falls off the clock tower in a struggle. Alyssa proceeds to fight Burroughs.

Nancy transfers what is left of her own Rooder power into Alyssa, granting her the strength to destroy her grandfather and Burroughs. After she defeats him, she immediately reunites with her revived mother. The tower then collapses and the evil spell of the Subordinates is permanently lifted. Alyssa awakens in a field of flowers. Clutching her clover necklace, she runs over to hug Dennis nearby. Smiling, she says, "Mum, we did it! We did it, Mum!"

Personality[]

Alyssa is responsible, intelligent, and wise for her age. She is very polite and respectful of others, and is shown to be caring and kind. Alyssa's compassion is shown when she comforts May and Dorothy. A young Alyssa has been called lively, strong-willed, and wise beyond her years by her grandfather in "Dick's Notes 1". These qualities make her a strong candidate for helping the tortured victims of serial killers as she risks her life for the chance they can be at peace.

Although she solves puzzles, she can be perceived a bit on the illogical side, and even the disobedient side. For example, when her mother told her to go into hiding for a single day, her reaction is to immediately not do that and return home out of worry. She also does not call the police nor try to get outside help when she begins discovering dangerous and supernatural events occurring in her mansion (though this is done so the player would have a game to play). In addition, Alyssa knows that only a Rooder can vanquish a Subordinate, so she takes this role upon herself.

One of her weaknesses is that she tends to be very emotional and sensitive, and this shows when she is forced to see a series of extremely disturbing and violent imagery during the game. However, as the story progresses, she becomes more tenacious, strong, independent, and emotionally resilient throughout her experiences.

Similar to Jennifer Simpson, Alyssa also lost her father at a young age. She views her grandfather Dick as a paternal figure. She has significant character development when she gains the courage to confront her relative whom she once loved and respected, even yelling "Damn you!" to his face. She reluctantly accepts the harsh truth about her grandfather, as well as the conditions and burdens surrounding her Rooder birth and existence.

Clock Tower 3 is effectively Alyssa's coming-of-age story, albeit a very dark and morbid one. Regarding her interests, Alyssa expresses interest in owning a computer, as seen upon examining her mother's desk. She also has an implied interest in reading, as her room has a bookshelf full of books.

Appearance[]

Alyssa has bright turquoise-blue eyes. Her Venetian-blonde hair is at chin-length, laid around her face on the sides, with a straight-cut fringe that rests on her eyebrows. She wears her boarding school uniform; a green blazer, a white blouse underneath, a red neck-tie, a tartan patterned blue-and-orange skirt, white socks, and mauve-brown shoes with black soles.

Powers and Abilities[]

She is a Rooder, a member of a mystical clan with the power to fight evil entities and their incarnations, the "Subordinates". As a Rooder, Alyssa has the supernatural abilities to communicate with the dead and summon a sacred magical bow and arrows to destroy the evil entities.

Gallery[]

Trivia[]

Alyssa is the series' first protagonist to wear a revealing outfit, though only in the western releases.
Alyssa shares two similar extra outfits with Haunting Ground protagonist Fiona Belli: Cowgirl and Leather.
At some point during the development of Clock Tower 3, Alyssa would be the young daughter of a hotel manager.
An anime-styled Alyssa is the game's memory card icon. If the player considers deleting the save file, Alyssa looks away in fear.
Alyssa is similar to Clock Tower II protagonist Alyssa Hale. Both their names start with "Alyssa Ha", both their uniforms also look somewhat alike (green jacket, short shirt, red tie), both have male characters that help them (Bates and Dennis), both return from school only to discover something insane, both have relatives named Philip, and both uncover their heritage through their relatives' diaries.
There is a notable fan theory that Alyssa and Dennis are actually dead in the ending and that the clover field is actually some sort of afterlife, or that they may be ghosts, or the entire clover field scene is Alyssa's dying hallucination. Dennis inexplicably "survives" from falling off the top of the castle, and Alyssa somehow "survives" the crumbling of the castle. The ultimate fates of Alyssa and Dennis are never mentioned anywhere else.
Alyssa has been called "the most Asian-looking Caucasian girl ever" by fans, making fans wonder if Nancy is of mixed ethnicity, or if this is simply an unintentional inconsistency. Alyssa also has a noticeable change in facial features during the high-quality cutscenes, since her high-quality model is Minami Hinase. A similar thing occurs in Final Fantasy X (more so in the PlayStation 2 version, as later versions tried to fix the jarringness), where the characters seem to switch ethnic features between certain cutscenes. If Alyssa is of mixed heritage, then she is similar to Aya Brea and Ashley Mizuki Robbins, who are light-haired and mixed ethnicity.
Alyssa Hamilton is the only Clock Tower protagonist who is the sole protagonist of a game.
- Although Jennifer Simpson is the sole protagonist of Clock Tower: The First Fear, she is later the co-protagonist of Clock Tower 2, alongside Helen Maxwell, Nolan Campbell, Stan Gotts, and Samuel Barton.
- Alyssa Hale and Alex Corey are the protagonists of Clock Tower II; Fiona Belli and Hewie are the protagonists of Haunting Ground; Leonard Cosgrove, Monica Flores, and Rooney Simpson are the protagonists of NightCry.

Licensing[]

This article contains content derived from the "Alyssa Hamilton" article on the Clock Tower Wiki, licensed under CC-BY-SA.