Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Director’s Cut

(I suppose I could start calling these post-mortems of mine “reviews,” as that’s what they’ve been shaping up to be lately. I’m not sure if I like calling them that, as they don’t match the usual description…but “reviews” what they usually end up as. So!)

I finished Fatal Frame II over the weekend, after several weeks of pretty steady play. It’s the first game from the ‘serious’ side of the horror genre that I’ve actually completed, and aside from some irritatingly obvious padding near the end (yay, multiple-fetch quests), I enjoyed it on the whole.

It’s perhaps the first game since the original Silent Hill that’s scared me nearly as much as that one did. I tend to try to save horror-game play sessions for the hours closest to bedtime, which is when I’m always the most mentally exhausted and open to suggestion. Silent Hill took advantage of this and ran off a cliff with my sanity whenever I played it. Fatal Frame II (henceforth FFII) didn’t play with my well-being quite so carelessly, but still, it never took more than a minute or two during a play session for me to get goosebumps and start tensing up at every ambient noise or odd flicker of shadow.

The developers did an excellent job of creating a completely coherent, spooky atmosphere. They’ve managed to avoid things like weird clipping, incongruous animation, inconsistent model/background appearances, and other technical niggles to an extent I haven’t seen in the genre yet (mind, I haven’t played a Silent Hill after the first for any decent amount of time). The way the flashlight throws accurate shadows all over is absolutely perfect. They dance and play just as real shadows do when you’re swinging a flashlight around, and while I became better at sorting out just what was a threat and what wasn’t as I progressed, early in the game I was often unnerved by the effect. While walking around in the game’s rotten, dilapidated Japanese village, it’s hard to know exactly what one might come across, and so I was nearly always kept on my toes.

Perhaps the biggest surprise I came across with FFII was the scoring system. It covers all encounters with ghosts you experience during the game, be it combat or the sometimes-fleeting, non-combat encounters you might come across that show the fate of some poor soul. Each exorcistic photograph you take receives a point score that’s based on how close the subject ghost was, whether you used any special shot techniques, whether you took the photo during the specific window of time known as the “fatal frame” (which is different for each ghost and usually involves the most risk in trying to time the shutter release to it), and so on.

The combat system is robust and well-developed. The highest-scoring photos always deliver the most damage, and doing the most damage always requires quite a bit of risk-taking and skill. I found it really fun to learn each enemy’s timing in order to hit their fatal frame multiple times in a row (up to a three-hit chain can be managed), and to try to get as many ghosts in the frame as possible to multiply my score.

The player’s highest photo score is kept track of on the status screen, and each photo’s score is added to a running point total. The total includes all of the photos you’ve taken during and outside of combat, and provides a good overall grade for your performance at the end of the game. It’s a much more satisfying gauge of performance for me than the usual letter grade, time taken, health restoratives used, and so on, and it gives me a strong desire to do better at the game.

The overall structure is not too different at all from the mold first used by Alone in the Dark and expanded upon by Resident Evil. There are many key items that unlock doors and several abstract mechanism-puzzles here and there. Nearly every chapter’s player goal involves trying to reach a destination that’s past one or more locked doors. Thankfully, the game’s puzzles are well enough integrated with elements of the story that they don’t stick out too much or feel arbitrary.

There’s one exception to this. There’s a chapter-long puzzle smack near the end of the game that involves returning to locations visited several times over already in order to find components to use in a puzzle mechanism that’s already been used once in a previous chapter. This smacks of a last-minute decision to extend the length of the game by an hour or two, and I didn’t find it much fun at all. Returning to these locations so many times deadened their impact on me, because it took the mystery out of them and caused me to see them more as game environments than the locations being portrayed. I would have been fine with seeing that chapter axed entirely.

After a week or so with the game, it started to become difficult for me to return to it at night, because I could only think of the stress I’d inevitably go through while playing it. The stress came not only from getting spooked out of my skin every few minutes while playing, but from uncovering the very poignant and disturbing storyline. Some pretty terrible things occur during the game and throughout the game’s history, and the amount of simple human cruelty and ignorance and suffering driving the story became hard for me to take at times.

The game’s story is told through scraps of paper and journal entries found by the player, as well as through interactions between the game’s twin protagonists and through prerendered video clips here and there. These are all typical means of storytelling in a horror game like this, but the way the traditional Japanese-style ghost story is endlessly folded in upon itself and told in both the game’s present and past was very compelling to me. In fact, the story was one of the most coherent and interesting I’ve seen in a Japanese game in recent memory.

I’m often finding myself clamoring for better writing and more compelling stories in games suited to them, so I find myself in a bit of a strange spot with FFII. It is very much a video game that is often quite fun to play, but the subject matter is so dark and hard to deal with that it’s hard for me to let myself skim over it in order to enjoy the scoring and secrets more. It’s almost too coherent as an experience: it’s hard to find fun in going through what these girls and this village go through during the course of the game. The game never really steps back and lets you say “Hey, it’s just a game” in the way a Resident Evil or a Metal Gear Solid does. The mood is always consistent, you’re always scared out of your mind, and you’re always fighting for your life.

The disparity is made even more apparent by the extras you get after beating the game. There are many costumes and accessories that can be unlocked, including game-appropriate kimonos and matsuri wear, as well as less serious bikinis, maid outfits, and a witch hat. These extras make me want to traipse through the game on higher difficulties while having Mio and Mayu wear them, but it seems almost cruel to make light of their plight or the story as a whole. An alternate mode with story bits removed or with ghosts replaced by humorous equivalents would have gone a long way toward making additional playthroughs possible to enjoy in a more light-hearted manner. But of course, that would be totally contrary to the point of the game and might even cheapen things a bit.

Still, I do plan on going through it again on higher difficulties. There are at least a couple of alternate endings that I’d like to see, there are more ghosts to see that are only available on repeat playthroughs, and I’d like to improve on the E rating I received the first time around. The galleries with promotional images and production material and design documents provide a nice carrot for me, too. The game’s turned out to be the most satisfying in the genre yet for me: more coherent and polished than the scatterbrained and incomplete Siren, and more scary and compelling than the ultimately unfulfilling (and admittedly now actiony) Resident Evil 4. I look forward to trying the first Fatal Frame soon.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Director’s Cut
Published by Tecmo Inc.
Xbox
Released 11/11/04
$49.99