Movies of War

As a longtime horror video game fan, the Fatal Frame series has always been a shameful blind spot of mine. While the franchise never really reached the mainstream appeal that Resident Evil or Silent Hill did, there are so many lists out there that call Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly the scariest game on the PS2. Fast forward over twenty years, and I’m presented with another chance to give the game a shot with its brand new remake (its second remake after a Wii version from 2012), this time from Team Ninja. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake is rebuilt from the ground up, moving away from the original’s fixed-camera perspective to a more modern third-person over-the-shoulder view. It retains the clever camera-based combat that became so iconic for the series, but it works in twists to make it a more robust experience. Additionally, Team Ninja added new elements, including side stories and a new ending, offering surprises for longtime fans of the series who have loved the game for decades. At the beginning of the game, twins Mio and Mayu visit a forested valley where they used to play as children, before Mayu is led deeper into the woods by a crimson butterfly. The player controls Mio, who gives chase, following Mayu to Minakami Village, a haunted location rumored to trap those who get lost. In the village, they find a never-ending night haunted by ghosts of the past tied to a strange ritual from the town’s history. The setup feels like a great mix between folk horror and ghost stories, making a compelling hook to get you into the action quickly. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of spirit photography, so Fatal Frame’s signature Camera Obscura is right up my alley. It’s your only weapon throughout the game, able to defeat spirits through the use of various films and filters to augment your power. Not only is it your only means of survival in the ghost-infested town, but it also acts as a puzzle-solving device, too, making it a compelling gimmick to build the game around. New Camera Obscura Upgrades Leads to Aggravating New Combat System At first, I was a little overwhelmed by all that was going on with the Camera Obscura. As you progress, there are several filters that unlock, each with its own puzzle purpose and combat utility. In addition, there are several different types of film, which also have stats to remember regarding power and reload speed. Charms can also be purchased at save points, which allow for even further bonuses to be applied. On top of all that, there are upgrades you can get by spending prayer beads, a collectible found all over the town, allowing you to unlock and improve various functions of the camera. Once you get this all down, it’s not too bad, but it feels like so much off the bat, causing you to fumble as you try to remember what you need for the encounter. For example, it’s not as easy to distinguish between two types of film at a glance as it is to switch between a shotgun and a pistol in another type of game. This becomes crucial because combat in this game can be rough and not always in a fun way. When you bring up the camera, there are dots near the center that represent focal points. To do more damage to ghosts, you’ll want to line up more of these dots over their body. The camera will also circle the ghost’s face and show you a health bar for them, along with the amount of damage that you will do if you take the picture at that moment. Since the film takes a while to reload, Fatal Frame II’s combat rewards patience, asking you to wait for the right moment for maximum damage. Time your attacks right, and you can enter Fatal Time, allowing you to take a flurry of photos in rapid succession to do massive damage. In addition to having a standard health bar, Mio also has a Willpower meter that’s new to the remake. If the gauge is fully depleted, she will enter a state where she can be knocked down by spirits, making her vulnerable to extra-harmful attacks. Willpower is depleted when she’s hit, dodges, or runs during combat. It can also be used to power a special shot for the camera, which varies depending on the filter equipped. You can recover your willpower by taking successful photographs or using specific items, so there are ways to get out of a hole when you find yourself in one. All these mechanics sound great in theory, but in practice, I found them to be pretty clunky for much of the game. Even with a dodge, movement can feel very stiff and slow, making certain encounters frustrating rather than tense. In old survival horror games, clunky mechanics were often used well to add tension, making the player decide if they wanted to stand and awkwardly fight or try to make a run for it, but too many times in this game I was locked into small arenas with enemies that needed to be defeated before I could progress. Early in the game, before I was able to upgrade my camera, it felt like combat encounters were taking forever. I swear some of the first encounters with ghosts took me about five minutes, and there wasn’t much change in strategy as the fight went on. I would run to a side of the small room, turn around, wait for the picture, then run to the other side and keep repeating that until the ghost was defeated. The aforementioned dodge is helpful, but feels really stiff at the end of the animation, putting you at a disadvantage for a beat afterwards. On top of that, the overall movement speed feels a bit too slow, making many encounters feel like a slog. The most frustrating thing for me was a mechanic where ghosts have the chance to become aggravated at certain points in the fight. Not only do they become more aggressive, but they also recover health. The first time this happened to me, after spending several minutes chipping away at an enemy’s health, I said “Oh come on” out loud to myself. For me, this wasn’t an exciting moment, like an epic boss fight where the enemy regenerates its health bar and reveals its second phase, but rather an artificial way to add ‘difficulty’ to the encounter in a way that felt unearned. Their transformation is also a visual one, making them more red, which doesn’t stand out as much in some of the arenas, making it easier to lose track of them. This was exacerbated when fighting multiple enemies at once. I understand that it could be tactically interesting to have to manage each of the ghosts, trying to be careful how much you attack each one to prevent yourself from having two aggravated at the same time, but oftentimes you would be fighting multiple copies of the same ghost, which made it hard to keep track of which was which until you got the camera out and saw the health bar. It felt very bad to be trapped in a small room with two aggravated spirits, and that was something that happened to me several times throughout the game’s thirteen-hour runtime. Willpower was also a bit of a mixed bag for me, never really feeling as well thought out as other stamina-like mechanics from other games. Since certain films will take a while to load, which happens automatically after you take a shot, dodging is essential to staying alive when you have multiple ghosts after you. Constantly being low on willpower from dodging means you’ll be susceptible to being knocked to the ground, which is another element that can make these encounters feel like they are taking forever. Obviously, I had a lot of issues with combat, but by the end of the game, I think I was starting to find a better balance. Part of the way through the game, I changed the difficulty from Normal to Story, not because I thought it was too challenging, but because it wasn’t fun for me to have these long encounters. By the end of the game, with several upgrades to my camera and all the filter options, fights felt more in line with what I was hoping for, even when they added multiple ghosts into the mix. There’s some fun to be had with the camera combat here, just know that it might take some patience and fine-tuning on your part to get to it, because it does not feel balanced from the start. One aspect of the Camera Obscura that was a complete success for me was the way it was utilized for puzzle solving. The different filters each have different puzzle-solving functions, such as being able to track echoes of spirits, bringing things out of the past, or opening up sealed doors. I particularly loved bringing things out of the past, as it required you to find a photograph, locate that spot in the world (where something from the photo was missing), then line up the shot in the same way to bring that missing item into existence. They aren’t the most challenging puzzles, but they double down on the camera gimmick in a smart way that makes the game feel extremely cohesive. The Remake Brings New Ghost Encounters and Upgrades Every once in a while, you’ll run into ghosts that are unkillable, forcing you to run and hide in order to survive. While I’m glad that this provides some variety to the way you interact with the enemies, this felt a little underbaked as well. To escape, you’ll need to find a place to hide, but during these sequences, the game becomes black and white, which sometimes makes it difficult to see where I am going. Too many times, I would be running, turn a corner, and find the new area too dark to figure out where to go, allowing the wraith to kill me before I could get my bearings. These types of chase sequences can be exciting, but if you die and repeat them over and over, they very quickly lose their luster and become irritating rather than exhilarating. Even once you get to the hiding spot, it doesn’t feel entirely great. I often would think the game was trying to tell me the creature had moved on, but when I emerged, it was just around the corner, ready to instantly kill me. There are a couple of times where you have to stealth around as an unkillable ghost wanders an area you’re exploring, and it doesn’t feel like the game makes any attempt to give you tools to make the stealth fun. Sure, you can turn off your flashlight to make yourself a little less noticeable, but the only thing you can really do is watch it move around and hope its seemingly randomized pattern doesn’t lead it into the path you’re trying to go down. In addition to the Camera Obscura, you have another creepy piece of tech in the Spirit Radio. Occasionally, you’ll come across little stones that have recordings of people’s thoughts on them, giving you eerie little audio logs to fill in the story as you go. There’s a crackly filter on the audio, making it truly sound like you’re getting a message from the other side. Journal entries and other notes are also scattered around the levels, forcing you to explore to learn the intriguing lore of the tragedy that led the village to its current state. Ghost stories are such a great medium for telling tales of how the past echoes into the present, and all these little storytelling touches only make it that much more poignant. For a remake, there are some nice quality of life upgrades that make it smoother than revisiting the original. You no longer have to go into your inventory to use healing items, instead being able to quickly use them in the middle of the encounter with a push of the button. There’s also a minimap on the screen at all times, which isn’t quite as easy to use as the main menu, but still is helpful when you are trying to hunt down objectives. I fully acknowledge these are all things that many modern games do already, but it’s nice to see the attention they took to add some ease of use features for the remake. Even with the map, I did find getting around the village a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the game involves you entering similar-looking, old, abandoned, rural Japanese houses, which have a good aesthetic but quickly become hard to distinguish. By the third level, I was starting to get them all confused, making it harder for me to navigate. The level design is decent, with puzzles slowly unlocking areas like any good survival horror game, but the backtracking was a little more tedious, as the shortcuts in some stages aren’t as useful as others. The setting really shines through, but a bit more variety and density would make the game stand out more. One of the big changes that they’ve touted with this remake is the ability to hold hands with Mayu. This comes with a few benefits, the biggest among them being the fact that you slowly heal while doing it, providing you a way to get back to full health after an encounter without having to use valuable healing items. When holding hands, you can also guide Mayu around better, which helps when trying to keep her from getting attacked by spirits during encounters or chases. It feels bad to get a game over from a ghost killing her, so I’m glad that you are given at least some tools to mitigate that chance. An Old School Title with Some Modern Touches Graphically, the game looks very sharp, while still retaining the style of the PlayStation 2 original. The village and its buildings are beautifully rendered, brought to life by evocative use of lighting, which looks particularly great combined with the flashlight you carry. There’s still an anime-inspired look to the main character models, which may not be to everyone’s taste, but I found the stylized nature added to the charm, harkening back to its retro origins. Like the original, there’s a film grain applied to the screen, which works nicely thematically but honestly might be a little overdone. Given how much of the game is dark, it makes the screen a bit hard to parse at times, especially in the chase sequences. For a game that had been remade from the ground up for modern consoles, I was a little surprised to run into performance issues. While I’m not usually a frame rate guy, I could tell that this was not running smoothly, noticeably down in the 30 frames per second range. It also had weirdly long load times, which only made the cheap deaths during chase sequences feel worse. The controls also felt like a strange relic of the past, with odd choices that constantly made me stumble. I could not get used to the fact that square was the menu, X was dodge, and the triangle button did absolutely nothing. Of all the things to modernize, you think the controls would be first on the list, but that was not the case here. I’m someone who appreciates older games, warts and all, so I’m always worried that a remake like this will sand off some of the edges that made it interesting in the first place. It’s both a positive and a negative that Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake retains the feel of an old school title, albeit with some modern touches. There’s so much here to love, from the rich story to the moody atmosphere to the clever use of the camera for both combat and puzzle solving, but there are so many things that got in the way of me fully enjoying it. I know they did a lot of work to make the combat feel more robust, but in doing so, they made it feel more dragged out, taking away the tension and replacing it with tedium. Though encounters felt better by the end, it felt like the upgrade path made the combat go from feeling bad to feeling acceptable, rather than starting at good and elevating to great. Even with all my reservations, I was tempted to fire up a New Game+ after finishing it, which definitely says something about the lasting charm of this game. Based on my time with the remake, it’s easy to see why the original was considered a classic. I just wish this modern version felt a little more modern. Code provided by publisher. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake launches March 12 for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam. Related Topics:Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly RemakeKoei TecmoNintendo Switch 2PCPlayStation 5steamTeam NinjaXbox Series Aaron Boehm Game Designer, Tabletop RPG GM, and comic book aficionado. Advertisement You may like Capcom Adding Story Expansion and More to ‘Resident Evil Requiem’ Psychological Horror Title ‘Birds Watching’ Out Now on Steam [Trailer] Sony May Have Potentially Spoiled the Protagonist for ‘Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse’ Previously-Unannounced ‘Hunter: The Reckoning’ Game Leaked by ‘RoboCop: Rogue City’ Update ‘Go Home Annie: An SCP Game’ Heads to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series on March 31 [Trailer] Warehouse Horror Sim ‘Order 13’ Out Now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series [Trailer] Click to comment