So officially there isn’t a Fatal Frame 4, but the dedicated fans team Riivolution made it happen. A commendable effort really, almost inline with the remakes of classics like Ultima V and Quest For Glory 2, thanks to the Wii’s extremely friendly hackability and import capabilities — we are not responsible for what you do with your Wii, sure you can play this easily on Homebrew with a prepatched disk image, but being law abiding citizens, as long as you own a copy of ้ถ ๆ่ใฎไปฎ้ข, you can run a patch downloaded from here and turn your imported Zero 4 into the unofficial English version of Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.
Ultimately we can’t talk about Fatal Frame 4 until we’ve discussed the beginning of the series — the first game on the PS2 was loosely based on a true story — and we don’t want to get into the debate whether ghosts (or gods) are real — scientifically nothing is real until it is proven so but you can look at the phenomenon of ghosts with an open mind — the first Fatal Frame was not revolutionary in its mechanics, it was a survival horror game slapped onto a Japanese Horror movie — but the result of the atmosphere the game has created was mind-bogglingly and hauntingly fearsome — it literally will pump fear into your soul and haunts you when you are not playing the game, especially when you are not playing the game, like brushing your teeth and suddenly you feel this chill behind you as something menacing lurks at the corner of the reflection inside your bathroom mirror.
And of course we can’t talk about Fatal Frame until we have dissected the survival horror genre, though Alone in the Dark is the beginning point, Resident Evil is the pioneer that began the term. In literal comparison, if Resident Evil is compared to Stephen King, with its cheap thrills and monsters of the day and cardboard horror tale, Silent Hill can be thought of as the representative of Dean Koontz’s earlier writing, at moment thoughtful, original, and mind-bendingly dreamy, that you don’t know whether it is a science fiction UFO abduction or a flashback moment before death. And our favorite Eternal Darkness is the dedicated homage of Lovecraft, that it tells an epic story with such classic horror imagery and allegory that it emanates fear with a certain classy feeling of terror, and finally Fatal Frame — which we would think of as something like a heart-chilling short story from Edgar Ellen Poe, only if he was Japanese.
Fatal Frame lifts everything that is dreamy and psychological from the Silent Hill series — that you never truly know what is really happening, snap it onto an Asian setting which intensifies the horror by 200 fold — if anyone wants to argue with us that the Asian cultural belief in the afterlife plus its ceremonies and things and ancestral worshiping and reincarnation and its own versions of hell does not makes it 300 times scarier than any western standard of the same ideals — and if you belong to that culture you are subject to what governs that culture’s belief (and its curses), for reference one may want to watch the movie Skeleton Key (to get the idea), and then go watch something like Juon or the Ring, both in its native language (not the remakes). What makes Fatal Frame real horror isn’t just the Asian setting and the realism of the ghosts, its also the cinematography which makes Japanese horror a force to be reckon with, translated fully onto a 3D survival horror game, and lastly but most importantly the mechanics of the game, which forces you into the tunnel vision of the Camera Obscura — the only method that you can deal with the ghosts, that you are helpless against them unless you peek into the tiny tunnel vision the camera lens provide, and you must focus and wait for the camera to charge up, while you loses all peripheral vision around you, that anything can sneak up upon you, and the camera shot is only the most powerful at the last moment the ghost attack you point blank (aka the name Zero — which is the last minute shot) — everything makes this an unforgettable experience that haunts you for the rest of your life.
Another thing that the Fatal Frame series differs from Resident Evil is how helpless the protagonists are, as helpless scrawny teenage girls (I’m sure some perverts get a kick out of this) that runs at the pace of a crawl — comparing to the combat-ready Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield from Resident Evil that not ever for a moment you would feel like the protagonists would have been in true danger, in Fatal Frame the protagonist is truly helpless — so helpless that she makes Harry from Silent Hill looks like some kind of God of War. Of course the series don’t just excel from its clever settings, immersible atmosphere, likable yet helpless protagonists, brilliant gameplay mechanics that is designed to strike fear into your heart; Fatal Frame does very well with its exotic yet believable storytelling, like any good Japanese horror films or novels, or even more so, because of the superior medium that the story is told on. Yes, sometimes games don’t tell better stories than books or movies, but sometimes they do.
The pinnacle of the series is hands down Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly — of the heart-wrenching story it was trying to tell — a tale of two twin sisters, of one cursed to be sacrificed, of the other ones destined to crush his sister’s life with the grip of her very hands, and the metaphor of the mark on her neck being — Crimson Butterflies. Oops I forgot to put up spoilers alert, but what would you be doing here 2 games later if you weren’t already mesmerized with Crimson Butterfly? Fatal Frame 2 was hands-down terrifying, and to experience it in full you probably would have wanted to play it in the dark and in an abandoned mansion like I had — I played through the night because I was too scared to sleep. The red doll which you stalked you, which you eventually had to hunt, but you just never knew who was the hunter and who the prey, that it would pop up in the most unexpected places with its creepy countenance,ย was probably the most chilling moment in gaming history ever, and nothing short of virtual reality would ever top it. Fatal Frame 4 tries to return to the kind of atmosphere and style of story that was Fatal Frame 2’s backbone, but at the end it felt inferior. Not that what part 4 had to offer was anything bad, it just wasn’t as good — but it provided its own surprising twists and turns that makes it a worthy game in its own rights.
The graphics hasn’t improved much from the PS2 era, but it’s fitting on the Wii. The wiimote controls are actually, surprisingly a good thing, that it is used well as a pointer of where the flashlight of your character is pointing to and the direction of the camera Obscura; but what it really excels at are moments that you need to shake the wiimote to get out of a tight situation — that you can use it to avoid any attacks, only if provided that you have mastered the move. Yes it makes Fatal Frame 4 actually easier, and much more friendly to new players, that you have infinite amount of your weakest films and you have almost an unlimited amount of points that you can purchase items with if you played on an easier setting — a nice change of pace from previous entries, which placed its ammo and health items in the style of Resident Evil, only sparingly. The third character also came as a pleasant surprise, that the style of play is totally different — you will control a male character who uses a flashlight to take pictures instead of the camera, which is fun because that character never felt any real danger as opposed to the female counterparts for he’s not restrained by the claustrophobic view of the Camera Obscura and the flashlight more or less worked like a shotgun Resident Evil style — so it nicely breaks up the tight pacing of the other two helpless heroines. But another new feature of the game that excels on the Wii (and coming from us that is high praise) is how it utilizes the wiimote to scare you, that ghosts would banshee-cry inside the speaker as you banish them and the effects of that is at times chilling. Not to mention whenever you need to use the phone in game, your wiimote will also act like a phone, of course this excellent feature is also used (plagiarized?) in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
If there was one annoying part of the game was the piano playing which is an integral part of the game, that you are forced to use the wiimote to play and it is not the most friendly input device ever, and when you get to the end boss, who is easy enough by herself, but that you had to play a song following the tunes perfectly or she would resurrect and you had to go through it again, we spent 9 times trying to beat that sequence and it was painful yet satisfying. It reminded me of playing piano when I was a child in HK, a long hallway behind my back and I always thought something was watching me behind me, but I would turn around and… viola…, nothing, just a chill that ran down my spine.
Lastly, no matter how good or bad Fatal Frame 4 was, I guess we would have to praise the commendable effort the people that made it happen. I guess we could see the reason that why such a game would not come to this side of the shore, being as hardcore as it is and that the demographic of the Wii is simply the antithesis of that (and obviously we still aren’t fans of the system). But the effort in translating it is very well done — that the translation itself is professional and flawless, well it had some spelling errors here and there but it felt no less than a professional effort. Some text were hard to read on an HD TV but that was probably a problem with the low resolution more than anything, and some of the fonts’ edges brought in other graphics as if the translator used a font sheet but the rectangle that hosted some particular fonts were bringing in other things from the edges. But in any case we can’t complain about something that is free. We also heard a speech patch was coming but I couldn’t begin to fathom what for — I actually thought FF4’s original voices with subtitles is much superior than the dubbing of the previous titles, which just kills the atmosphere with the bad English dubs. Regardless, Fatal Frame 4 is something hardcore gamers and horror fans really need to experience. And well, that’s enough writing for the day. If you wanted to spoil yourself, feel free to click on the video below just to experience one of the awesome ending songs of the Lunar Eclipse, Zero no Chouritsu performed by Amano Tsukiko, and you can only get this by playing the hard mode (which makes us shudder).
Great site!!!