Reviewing EVERY Fatal Frame Game

it's halloween so what better time to talk about taking pictures of ghosts than now i believe i discovered the fatal frame series through the best friend shitstorms but i never ended up owning them myself since yeah sadly this is the only way to get your hands on the xbox versions of one and two i have played series that have been inspired by fatal frame like dread out but i think it's finally time to sit down and review all the fatal frame games like my previous multi-game review videos i will be writing these reviews as i play through the games so if something comes up is fixed or explained in a later title i won't know about it as i have not played it yet so let's kick this video off with talking about fatal frame director's cut for the xbox original [Music] initial feelings after just finishing the game are positive but a little surprised at what the first game was i kept my expectations relatively low since an ip's first installment can be kinda rough as they iron out the kinks with future entries i feel that this game for the most part strikes a really nice middle ground between clunky jank and competent game aka it's a great ps2 era game that my monkey brain lights up when playing the biggest thing i had to overcome with this game was getting used to the controls at first they were somewhat off-putting and in one case was throwing me off for a good chunk of my playthrough before i realized what it actually was when using your camera to fight ghosts you will look around using the left stick holding x to pan the camera faster and tapping y to do a 180 degree turn you move your body around using the right stick and i don't know if you could consider this tank movement but it definitely feels as awkward as how the tank controls in sly 2. this was most likely done to add to the survival horror of the game since cumbersome controls seems to be a genre staple i wouldn't consider these bad controls they just require me to unlearn the modern controls of fps games think of it like trying to write using your non-dominant hand i felt like i was playing with inverted controls but instead of the inversion just being directions it's the analog sticks themselves initially i thought the game had a sprint button so when you hold it down you would run that's technically true but it's not the type of sprint you come to expect from modern games when not holding the x button you walk pretty slow it's really nice at times because it allows you to soak up the game's stellar atmosphere but when you hold down the x button the character will run in the direction you're facing without requiring you to move the analog stick at all it kept throwing me off when camera positions would change so sometimes the character would freak out because it was getting two directional inputs at once after about two hours in where i realized how the sprint actually worked and became acclimated with the first person controls of the camera it was smooth sailing from there i love fixed camera angle horror it's a shame that it seems to have been abandoned as time moves on fixed angles require the devs to really put a lot of thought into their composition since just having a fixed perspective doesn't instantly mean your game is going to be scary which even this game is guilty of at times with some rather flat shots in some areas but boy does it hit it out of the park in other areas with its unsettling composition fixed camera angles really are their own art form making people feel unease just from camera placement alone and i think this isn't brought up enough it also helps that this game holds up well visually with only a few of the ghosts looking goofy and human character faces looking not the best at times the mansion that this game takes place in is great while the decay is very visible as sections of the house have completely fallen apart you can still see what was once a luxurious home through environmental details the first thing that comes to mind when i tried to articulate this notion is the famous quote from dark souls director hidetaka miyazaki don't rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon can't you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to slowly and possibly endless descent into ruin as an american this atmosphere and location is elevated even more due to it being foreign to me i'm experiencing parts of someone else's culture through this it's one of the reasons why a lot of my favorite horror media is based on other cultures folklore like detention which i've recommended a lot on my channel in the past i really cannot praise this game's atmosphere enough when all the moving parts are succinct and firing on all cylinders the game simply has a great energy to it that i really vibe with even if this game didn't manage to scare me once i still don't really get this feeling from any other modern horror game's atmosphere the one thing i felt was underutilized was the game doing unique things with lighting the prologue has this really cool desaturated filter with some aggressive grain on top of it i felt like i was watching a classic horror movie i'd never heard of at a friend's house that his dad put on and told us not to tell our moms because they would be really mad about it the only other time that the game does something like this in actual gameplay is when the main antagonist shows up and you have to run away from them or fight them but a decent amount of the cutscenes do vary it up with some interesting filters and you can really see the inspiration from low and high but japanese horror films that the devs mentioned watching a bunch of in an interview when talking about what went into making the game but while the majority of this game holds up really well there are a few things that i think hold the game back some of these sound effects really take me out of the moment due to being at this point very overused generic sound library effects like this screaming in the background when fighting the blinded ghost obviously this game was made in 2001 so at the time maybe some of these sound effects weren't nearly as overused and generic that anyone with imovie or windows movie maker has access to them the english voice acting also sticks out like a sore thumb with how stilted flat and lifeless it can be at times our main character miku sounds like she doesn't have a pulse the ghosts have more life in them than she does i wonder how long it's been since my brother and i began to see things other people can't see one line in particular that made me unintentionally laugh is when miku had a vision of a former owner of the house finding his wife hanging from a tree in the backyard it sounds like the line is delivered with the same level of enthusiasm as neil breen and fateful could findings be jim jim call 9-1-1 i can't believe you committed suicide i cannot believe you committed suicide how could you have done this how could you have committed suicide it also doesn't help that there are no subtitles in this game and the mixing can be really bad at times so good luck hearing some of these lines i touched on gameplay a little with controls a bit earlier but let's get into the actual meat of it our sibling main characters mafuyu and miku go to this mansion in search of a writer who has since gone missing after staying at it to research for his new book mafio goes to the mansion alone at first in search of mr takamine only to be captured himself by a female ghost in a white kimono then his sister miku goes and searched for him at the mansion and the rest of the game will be playing as her you'll be exploring this mansion in a way that feels very reminiscent to resident evil 1 getting items to solve puzzles opening new pathways while also unlocking shortcuts that connect to what was once isolated sections of the mansion their mother left them the camera obscura which is what allows them to combat the ghosts that you will be encountering while hostile ghosts are nearby the filament on the right side of your screen will light up as orange the filament will glow brighter if you are facing the correct direction and how close the ghost is to you taking pictures of the ghost is how you deal damage to them the longer you keep your circle on them the camera will accumulate mystic power the more it's charged up the more damage you do along with taking pictures at specific times the circle will glow red to do a zero shot you have access to four types of film throughout the game and the higher quality the more mystic power that comes pre-charged of course like plenty of the other great survival horror games the ammo for your camera is limited and by the end of the game i started to worry if i was going to completely run out after fighting so many ghosts i couldn't figure out if some of the ghosts spawned at random or if the game had adaptive difficulty as sometimes i would fight ghosts in certain areas but if i was to die later and pass through the area i didn't fight them again or in one instance the location of the ghost i was fighting changed as the first encounter with the wandering monk was in this little garden but after dying to it so many times it eventually started spawning in the hallway which made the fight actually even harder the one thing i wasn't expecting about the camera was the fact that you can upgrade it and that it has auxiliary functions that you can unlock like stunning ghosts pushing them back and revealing them for extended periods of time to use these auxiliary abilities you must expend a spirit stone that you can find throughout the mansion i appreciate that the game is very upfront about them at the start telling you to be frugal with their usage besides hostile ghosts you will encounter benign ones throughout the mansion that are either hidden in plain sight or will run by you incredibly fast i seriously have no clue how they expect you to be able to capture some of these on your first playthrough without following a guide or having prior knowledge that they're about to appear since they pass you in a split second when i called the game janky earlier it was because i ran into a lot of instances where i would get caught on geometry and invisible walls for no reason i have no shortage of clips where this happens at times it's clear that i'm slightly angled wrong but then there are others where there's something obviously blocking my path for no reason and i can't see it so i have to stop moving and start again to get past it i should note that i am playing on the xbox 360 so there are two known spots in the game where cutscenes are broken this is what it looks like normally and this is what happens on my console i can still hear what is happening but it's just a fuzzy black screen so maybe this awkward geometry is also a product of playing on the xbox 360. the last thing i want to touch on is how i felt the difficulty massively skyrocketed on the third night like i said at the start the biggest challenge i had was acclimating to the controls but on the night of the calamity i'm suddenly fighting a shit ton of really difficult ghosts and to make it even harder they were in the mansion's narrow hallways i must have saved more times on the final night than i did for the rest of the game combined because i was so worried about losing progress fighting the four headless monk boss fights and then the master of the house fatal frame 1 was a really enjoyable experience it was janky but really charming of course i could be completely wrong here but i could really feel their admiration for the genre and what inspired them i definitely want to replay this again on fatal difficulty which is exclusive to the xbox version sadly i wasn't able to do that for this video as i am on a strict deadline and trying to get this video out on halloween yeah that didn't happen so i do not have time for multiple playthroughs of five games i'm really excited to play two and see what they innovate and refine in that game [Music] wow this game is even better than the first one i don't want to come off like i'm putting fatal frame 1 down to elevate 2 but jumping from the first to the second game back to back you can really see the refinement of ideas fatal frame 2's atmosphere is even better than the first ones this time around the setting is a small village instead of a giant mansion it still has the same feeling i described from fatal frame 1 but now on a much larger scale the fog effects on the bridge the film green when in areas like the cemetery and the spectacular wide shots that create an amazing atmosphere that rivals things like silent hill 2. [Music] [Music] this game has also visually aged much better compared to one it actually managed to scare me in a few places part of that is like i just mentioned where the visuals have aged a lot better so half the ghosts don't look like they were from my halloween special of reboot or cgi sections encourage the cowardly dog off the top of my head there was only one ghost that was really goofy and sticks out like a sore thumb the other part being that this time around the devs didn't go overboard with the sounds the ghosts make when fighting them they went for a more restrained approach which i think works a lot more in its favor no extremely noticeable public domain sound library stuff but of course some of the ghosts like the children have some really obnoxious repeating combat parks that just made the fight more annoying than scary movement has been refined so it no longer feels as slippery in the moment-to-moment gameplay all they really did was give the player character a slower turn animation instead of just instantly flipping around while at times traversal can seem slightly slower than ones it feels incredibly more fluid it was only in one instance with two really awkwardly placed camera angles did i feel the common complaint people have towards fixed angled games with movement between transitions and the position your analog stick has between them the geometry of the world is also far better this time around so no longer was i getting caught on invisible things in the environment due to the game taking place in a village with a lot of open spaces even indoors there is almost never the issue from one where you're fighting ghosts in tight corridors and they're spinning around inside the walls and it feels impossible and nauseating to fight them i think this in turn makes the game slightly easier since 90 of the ghosts aren't flying around like crazy which may turn off some fans of the original but i think it makes the game more enjoyable for me there is nightmare difficulty for those who want it but sadly it comes locked until you beat the game at least once i still think the better option is to just allow people to tune their gaming experience to how they want it but since this is a short ps2 game with a rating system like resident evil it obviously wants you to play through the game multiple times for replay value the story of fatal frame 2 is that two sisters mio and mayu are out in the woods visiting a place they used to play as kids before it gets uprooted to becoming a lake while mio is lost in thought mayu starts to walk off into the woods alone following a crimson butterfly seemingly in a trance as mio chases her sister further into the woods it becomes night and they are transported to a lost village seemingly out of time i wanted to give a basic setup to the game's story even if i don't fully cover it just so i can give a better frame of reference for the rest of the gameplay for most of the game you'll be playing as mio and for a decent amount of it mayu will be following you around the game established at the very start that mayu has a weak leg due to falling in the woods when they were kids once i saw this i feared that she would really drag the pace of this game down requiring you to be slow so she can keep up i did in fact go slower when mayu was with me because i got this idea in my head that since this was a ps2 horror game with a companion following you maybe it'll be like silent hill and certain actions towards your companion will affect the ending you get like if you periodically checked inspected the picture of mary and her letter it would affect what ending you got i thought that maybe if i kept getting too far ahead of mayu this would get me a worse ending since mayu will constantly call out for you to slow down or that her leg hurts this ended up not being the case because the sisters are separated multiple times throughout the game during specific points of the game you'll be taking control of mayu and the game has a filter over it similar to the one when you played as mafiyu or when you fought kirier in fatal frame 1. this happens when mayu is in a trance again and follows the crimson butterflies these are a little weird since they're really restrictive as you can only go down the path the game wants you to and the rest of the game world you pass will have invisible walls i felt the game struck a good balance with the amount of time you are with and without mayu so it didn't ruin the pace that much if i wanted to go slow and not feel like i'm leaving her behind the only issue i felt was that the game seemed to run out of ideas as to why we would have to keep being separated so it just repeated past reasonings for separation i guess there's only so many ways to write and then the sisters were separated and mio was really worried about mayu but the fact that multiple times it was just mio was looking one way and then mayu just walked off in the trance it started to really feel repetitive the combat has been re-worked for the better in this game i really love the direction they took combat in for fatal frame two in one you had to keep your camera reticle on the ghosts as the camera charged power the more you charged the more damage you did and if you timed it right you'd get a zero shot this time around it's proximity based the ultimate survival horror risk versus reward to do more damage to enemies you must put yourself in harm's way in order to get a zero shot and if you wait to the very last second as they're about to hit you you can get a fatal frame which scores you tons of points damage and staggers the enemy while pushing them back the real issue comes in when some of the ghosts are so slow and have such small windows to get a zero shot or fatal frame which ends up dragging out encounters so long that they lose all the tension they built up and just become annoying also the sound the camera obscura makes in this game is so fucking bad i hate it so much the first game's camera sounded great it sounded like the mystic powers of the camera were tickling my ears as they prepared to send these ghosts to the shadow realm now and two it sounds like the dubstep farts from battlefield 3's theme the other amazing refinement to the game's combat is changing how the camera's auxiliary abilities worked and one they were gated behind the spirit stone currency and the game told you to be frugal with them at the start in this game they made it so you could use the auxiliary abilities as long as you had the meter to do so and you gain more meter with the more damage your shots do so now you can do some stick combos with abilities like the blast or zero lenses and part way through the game you'll find an upgrade that allows you to on-the-fly swap out abilities in a group of three the only change i was iffy on at first was the upgrade system in one you used points that you got from killing ghosts and taking shots of benign ones to upgrade your camera two still does this but now they have another currency you need to get set upgrades each of the upgradeable parts of your camera has three slots to insert orbs into that you can find throughout the world and are rewards for beating certain ghosts you need to insert an orb into the section you want to upgrade first before you can even spend the points that you actually have to get it it really seemed like a needless addition to have a second currency to buy upgrades but by the end of the game i had the basic stats and all the auxiliary abilities i actually used fully upgraded with orbs and points to spare on the ones that i never touched the only real gripe i have with the moment-to-moment gameplay is there are a ton of things that you could pick up like film stock and journals to get more of the story throughout the village but their presence isn't denoted in any way most items have a glowing sparkly orb when they are on a shelf or the ground but plenty of them are just in the world and you need to actually know their location in order to find them this resulted in me just rubbing my face against every surface of the game and mashing the interact button like i was playing some shitty point click adventure game trying to find the magic pixel to pick up the item that the game didn't tell me about because of this i ended up mashing through text boxes accidentally on more occasions than i could count it only really bothers me because most of the items have a sparkle to stand out so i don't get why these don't this was an issue in the first game that i didn't bring up there since it was only a minor inconvenience but i felt it was more of a problem in this game with how so many of the plot revealing files are sprinkled throughout the world like this while i really liked this game and think it's good i felt that the second half was not nearly as strong as the first like i mentioned earlier with the game seemingly doing the same thing again to separate the sisters the puzzles also felt a little too cryptic to my liking cryptic might not be the best word to describe this but i wasn't too hot on how i felt like i was aimlessly backtracking through all these houses to find things like doll parts or the pinwheel keys or this one corner of the doll maker's room that was burned one reuse that stood out is really odd to me was when i had to get one of the pinwheel keys in the osaka house you need to fight this ghost woman that comes out of a box for some reason she now has a cut scene to introduce her where mio opens the box and sticks her hand in only to get grabbed by the woman this was the third enemy you fought in the entire game only 55 minutes in same introduction and everything minus the actual cutscene was i supposed to have fought her that early if so then why not just use a different ghost because of this it made the cutscene which obviously took time and effort to make feel really redundant i couldn't shake the feeling that the second half of this game was running out of steam because it had you fighting other ghost bosses again maybe it's just because the increased size of the world that made backtracking and repeating some fights feel incredibly repetitive this is the one thing that does make me worry about the story of the future games while fatal frame 1 and 2 have plenty of differences to their narrative that makes them unique they still for the most part follow the same formula siblings go to a haunted place and end up fighting ghosts time distortion siblings getting separated from each other due to the main antagonist ghost shenanigans there is an evil ritual that sacrifices innocent children to seal the gate of hell the ritual ended up failing the last time which is why the location is in the current state it is the main antagonist ghost is also a victim of circumstance that they were born into the canon ending ends with one of the main siblings dying to prevent further calamities so the other can live again i really want to stress that i don't think these games are one-to-one exactly the same the basic formula they follow works well for both of them and they are both enjoyable as their own game and as companion pieces but the thing that worries me in the back of my mind is can this keep up for three more games if the next three games follow the basic plot structure will they not just get really repetitive i hope not because i really liked both of these games and i didn't want to come into this video hitting any of them fingers crossed that 3 does something different or i fear by the time i get to 5 i will find the formula really stale [Music] fatal frame three boy was this a nightmare to try and record i have mentioned in previous videos but i play my ps2 games on actual hardware and use the framemeister to capture it so it looks as accurate to how it did when the game came out as possible i am well aware that this is stupid but i really care about preserving the original experience of a game there is a great video that came out recently talking about the re4 hd project and i think it really articulates how i feel on the matter basically when playing older games on newer hardware or emulating them while they look better at times i think it hurts the overall atmosphere and potentially the art direction of the game because it was designed with things like crts and standard definition in mind so when you play it on an emulator that noise in grain is gone and with it the game loses some texture that i really value not texture in the literal video game sense more in an artistic feel kind of way so while i was messing around with these settings on the framemeister because holy shit was it too dark with the basic settings i had when i recorded destroy humans 1 i started to notice horrible sound coming from the game it sounded like the background music was stuck and after pausing the game it would go away [Applause] so after getting the settings as close as i could get to the original with referencing old youtube let's play footage the game froze about 30 minutes in [Music] and wouldn't play past this [Laughter] brand new sealed my ass so now i'm playing on a ps3 with the ps2 digital classics it does look noticeably cleaner and more well-lit comparatively so that makes me a little sad but oh well not the end of the world the load times when opening doors is way faster so that's a sacrifice worth taking i think this is the game i feel like i have the most to talk about so far so to prevent this section from being more unfocused and rambly than it already is let's get the combat out of the way the combat for this game is a blend of both one and two's approach thankfully they went back to the sound of fatal frame one for the camera obscura's charging power they also went with the charging system of one but it kept the auxiliary power system from two so you could still do some really fun combos but it felt like the abilities charged away slower in this game but that might have just been because of my upgrade choices three kept the functions from two but this time around some of them are only obtained so late into the game like you could only get the function to see ghost hp values after doing a missable side quest in chapter 9 of 13. the game is practically over at this point why have it so late in the game and make it missable this was something that just came with the camera and won and you got it super early in two it just feels really weird and other functions don't feel nearly as tight as they did in the past like the track function which snaps you to the closest hostile ghost in this game it felt really inconsistent sometimes you would snap flawlessly and other times it would do nothing this was a major annoyance in the final hours of the game where ghosts were doing massive amounts of damage healing items do a lot less compared to two unlike two where i was never in danger of dying because i had so many healing items that replenished almost all of my missing health in one use three i actually had to ration my healing items the game takes place in two major locations the main character rey's house and the manner of sleep each night when rey goes to sleep she is transported to the mythical labyrinth that is the manner of sleep when returning on the following night to the manor all the items that you could pick up in the world like film stock and herbs are replaced eventually in the story you get the ability to leave the manor without completing your current objective to return to the real world but it's still night time until you actually complete your current mission in the manor i noticed this part way through my playthrough but ended up not fully testing it once you get the ability to exit the man or mid chapter once you wake up in the real world you could then immediately go back to sleep and then wake up at the exit in the manor i had suspected that maybe this replaced all the items even if i didn't complete the chapter which would make this incredibly exploitable the reason i ended up not testing this till after i finished the game was i knew if i figured out and it turned out that this was true which it is my feral monkey brain would not allow me to stop until i stockpiled every single item until i had 99 of it which would then invalidate anything this game was trying to go for i knew i would do this because i did the exact same thing in death stranding i spent 30 hours in chapter 3 alone just getting a coast to coast highway this is such a massive balance oversight that i wonder how this made it into the final product was it unintentional or if it was intentionally put in the game why the quality of voice acting is definitely better this time around but the audio itself sounds awful for most of the game they sound like they're talking through soup cans and i don't know why are you okay oh it was nothing ray may i help you with something oh i just wanted to ask you i think this is the weakest of the three from a sound design standpoint so much of this game's sounds just hurt my ears more than they made things tense for example when you're being chased by the blue tattooed ghost it plays the worst ear bleeding ringing sounds i love how this game approaches explaining the lore to the player keeping notes and conveying the internal thoughts of the main character rey is a freelance photographer so all of the notes in this game are formatted like personal notes of a reporter or journalist these did a great job at always conveying what rey was thinking at any given point of the game because she honestly doesn't talk that much so without them the only thing you would have to go off of were her reactions to being chased in the manor and the few cutscenes in her house since her fiance was a folklorist his old journals notebooks and research function as a great way to recap the previous two games to the player without feeling like it was really out of place it's just so natural and flows really well some of it even reads like the devs are being self-aware about the tropes of the games and the formula their narratives follow the other thing i really love was how the story started the game opens to our main character in a car accident which takes the life of her fiance so now she drowns herself in work with miku from the first game making a return as her assistant just in the opening hour of the game where you could walk around rey's house and interact with things you could really get to feel her inability to move on and how she's consumed by grief and survivor's guilt like how she has left his room as is or how there are boxes still in the closet with his stuff or how his shoes are still in the shoe box at the front door taking up space so miku can't put hers in there but rey can't bring herself to throw them out the game perfectly captures the trapped in place feeling from losing a loved one along with the complex and at times contradictory thoughts of self-forgiveness acceptance and moving forward with one's life all these complex and painful emotions and desires manifest in rey being drawn to the manner of sleep a place where people are able to see their lost loved ones but as they go deeper and deeper into the manner they are unable to come back and are eventually spirited away after going slowly insane and sleeping more and more in a lot of ways it's like the classic tales of letting the dead rest and stop trying to bring them back a very monkey's paw-esque with only bad things to come if you try to go against the natural order of life and death this is further exemplified in the ghosts you encounter on your journey through the manor tons of them are people who have lost loved ones and couldn't let them go and their self-destructive natures an unending longing for them drew them to the manor where they now suffer as ghosts roaming the halls like the mother and daughter who were looking for the lost father or the woman who was the only survivor in a plane crash and suffered from massive survivor's guilt as her entire family died from the accident all of this is also really tastefully done i found myself really empathizing for these poor ghosts this could have easily been extremely tasteless and preachy in a lesser writer's hands the shifting from the manor to rey's home is also really cool you get two completely different locations that both in different ways feel cold and unwelcoming and rey's home only becomes more hostile as it becomes more haunted as the curse spreads from the manor materializing as a blue snake tattoo spreading across her body and the ghosts are starting to appear in the real world i loved waking up in a new chapter and then instantly running around the house to try to see new haunting events [Music] hello hey you're just mad because i'll be able to do something with my fucking guitar and hands that you'll never be able to achieve in your entire life kid so yeah you're gay [Music] while i didn't find the game that scary while playing it the concepts and setup instilled this feeling of dread in me and to the game's credit it did make my hair stand up on a few occasions when the sound design wasn't making me wish i was playing the game muted i think there are two predominant types of horror the unavoidable and the oh god i hope this never happens to me in the case of oh god i hope this never happens to me types at least these are usually based in scenarios that can be just avoided that doesn't make them any less scary they just instill a different kind of fear i can just not go to an evil looking woods while i'm hiking in the middle of europe with a storm roll again i could as an american not go to the balkans and get kidnapped into a secret cult torture dungeon what i can't do is escape the normal everyday bodily functions this is why i really think the best horror conventions are based on things that are unavoidable in life eating drinking breathing sleeping and shelter the home should be like your safe haven or sanctuary so when they are not there is nowhere to escape to and that just makes it all the more horrifying this is why one of the horror games that has stuck with me the most even if i realize it isn't that good of a game compared to other horror games is dungeon nightmare 2. i realized as i was typing this that it actually has a lot in common with fatal frame 3. both of these have you explore ever-expanding maze-like settings when you go to sleep and inevitably wake up there only to then wake up in the real world and you have to walk around your creepy home or in the case of dungeon nightmare 2 an apartment building floor i played dungeon nightmare 2 for the first time a few years ago just as i moved out of my parents house and started living on my own and i had to walk home from work late at night like midnight to 1am kind of late down some dark streets with no lights and it scared the shit out of me at first this is also why going to the manner of sleep is always ever looming over the characters because there is no way to avoid it you have to sleep eventually your body can only go on so long without it i really liked how one and two were both mostly self-contained stories that function well on their own but three also works great at reincorporating both of the previous two games with the return of miku following her struggles after the now confirmed canon ending where mafuyu stays with kyrie at the gate and dies you eventually get to play as her and even have bits of the rope mansion as part of the manner of sleep along with bringing back some old puzzles from fatal frame 1. the same thing happens with playing as the new character k who is the uncle of mio and mayu from 2 and parts of all god village specifically the osaka house is brought back you could look at this from a real cynical perspective of oh they're just reusing some stuff from the previous two games and it's really lazy but i don't think that because they only use small little bits of these games and even remix them to play towards your expectations of their layouts the manner by itself is also massively complex in its layout without even taking these two small sections into consideration i feel like if i was playing these games as they were coming out and there were year gaps between playing these games i would have even more appreciation for these callbacks in this game they straddled the very hard to manage line of a good callback reincorporation and continued continuity and the remember this thing type fan service but if i did have to give one criticism it would be that at times it feels extremely convenient that all these characters and events are now connected from off-screen characters that we have never met up until now that knew all the older characters like kaye just happened to be best friends with the main character's deceased fiance and also be mio and mayu's uncle and her fiance also happened to be best friends with mafio miku's now dead brother and all three of these guys worked under the same folklore as takamine that mafia went to find at the mansion in the first game this is realistically a minor criticism that stopped bothering me after about 5 minutes but one thing that did end up bothering me about the story is about halfway through the game at this point both rey and miku have been going to the manner of sleep and the curse is spreading on them i wish they would have said something to each other it makes sense that they wouldn't be open about their trauma since they are both suffering through the pain of loss daily but at points i was just looking at my screen and they're vaguely talking about dreams and rey can see miku in the manor when she sleeps but she doesn't pursue it any further at this point if she just went i know you're having dreams of the manor too or something it would have saved a lot of needless guessing of things on rey's part and it would have moved the plot forward in a much smoother pace of all the people i feel like miku and rey could have been open to each other about their situations given how much they've researched it and at this point in the story the amount of people they have been surrounded by so even if rey was open about it earlier it's not unreasonable to think that miku would instantly understand of course this isn't really a deal breaker either but it was gnawing at the back of my mind a lot throughout the game wishing they would just talk but i guess that's part of what the game is going for thematically it's hard to open up and let people in after tragedy befalls you for about eighty percent of the game i was just having a blast loving it but then unfortunately it started to dip for me three started to have the same issue i had with the end game of fatal frame two way too much backtracking scavenger hunts for items some of which i felt like i was aimless in what i needed to obtain maybe i missed the memo of what i needed to in some cases but yeah just some of the backtracking in the final chapters could have been trimmed like you had to get this mirror as miku to put in the shrine then as k you had to go around and get all these nails for the ceremony then as rey you had to go around and get the mirror pieces because it broke after k went to the shrine at the bottom of this pit i really hate to say it because i did enjoy the backtracking resident evil style nature of these games but there is a point where i felt like the game was just dragging and would have been better off if it was slightly shorter which kind of has me worried since i have been told by some friends who are big fans of the series that 5 is really bloated by this besides the bloat of the tasks in the end game the story also starts to fall into the same formula as the previous two games i felt it disappointed me more here because the game started so fucking strong with its own direction and identity while bringing back plots and characters from the previous two games i love this game's themes and internal character drama but those take a back seat for the last fourth of the game to have the same plot again with evil religious groups with their horrible traditions to prevent even bigger evils from hell seeping into the real world and the main ghost woman is a shrine maiden that is a victim to all of this i guess this time the cult or whatever you want to call them have a more negative effect and actively cause all this by killing the maiden's lover right in front of her which she then has to look at their dead body for all of eternity which i think this is a neat divergence from the formula but i really wish they kept the focus on the personal struggles of our three main protagonists who have lost loved ones especially rey who felt like she was shoved out of the story for the third fourth of the game playing a bunch of the chapters as just miku and kay these elements are still there mind you they aren't completely abandoned and dropped but yeah i think the game would have been better off if they left these in the forefront oh and fuck this final boss i sure love a phase in a boss fight where if the boss touches you it insta-kills you requiring you to load a save and walk down a long hallway all over again just to start the boss fight and hope to get good rng with their attack patterns where sometimes she will just do nothing and walk straight at you so she is no problem and other times she is just flying through the air like a fighter jet and even if you can consistently land a fatal frame on her while she is dive bombing at you like a pokemon they will do piss damage because you didn't get a chance to power up the camera realistically it probably would have been a lot easier if i wasn't down to the type 14 film and had no mirror stones on me because i used them in the previous fight against the little shrine maidens at the bottom of the pit and the game started to shit itself since they couldn't handle three ghosts on the screen at once so i had massive slowdowns like all these tecmo games have jokes and play within my control aside the phase i mentioned a few sentence ago is so annoying you know when you're stuck in a bad dream where you're trying to fight someone or run away and you're stuck in slow motion and you have no control over your body and it feels like you're one step away from sleep paralysis well that's what this feels like i guess it's apt given that the game is all based around dreams and they accurately capture this feeling in video game form but this [Music] this is video game hell one time she just spawned on top of me and because they are slowed down and the seemingly slower turn speed compared to two i just got fucked and lost the boss fight and had to start over all the way from the beginning when i was about to beat her i know i just spent the last page of this section complaining about the game but i still think it's really good even if slightly flawed sure it struggles with some pacing issues in the last act but i felt like it stuck the landing with the ending despite the overall depressing nature of the game and its subject matter it ends on a positive note but i don't like how they lock the very minor other ending if you're generous enough to even call it that behind a second playthrough all it does is change the pictures shown in the credits so k doesn't die in the shrine but is stead left trapped asleep in rey's house this is such a minor change behind beating the game a second time that i don't think it's actually worth doing and is better to just look it up on youtube either way i came away really positive on this game and i hope that 4 is good because it's the one that i was actually the most excited to play going into this video [Music] so for you the viewer it's only been about 5 seconds for me it's been at least a week and the main reason why this video got delayed fatal frame 4 was the game i was most anticipating going into making this video because instead of being developed by tecmo it was developed by grasshopper manufacturer co-written and directed by one goichi suda who is one of my favorite devs right up there with taro kojima itsuno and kamiya you know if one of these guys drops something it's going to be a fucking ride even in their weakest titles there is still something to admire and love about them unfortunately 4 is the only fatal frame to never be released outside of japan reggie said in an interview with mtv that nintendo had no plans to bring the game to the americas this prompted people to wonder if other localization companies like nisa would take the reins a tecmo spokesman then gave this statement to ign nintendo holds the publishing rights to fatal framewii which was developed by tecmo ltd and grasshopper manufacturer and was released in japan on july 31 2008 nintendo of america has since decided not to publish this title in north america consequently the title will not be released in these territories as the owner of the iep tecmo feels very unfortunate that the fans of the series in north america will not have the chance to play this game but respect the final decision made by nintendo of america there was still hope for it to come out in europe as a french magazine published an ad of the game in their march 2009 issue while it may not have been coming to america fans could still get it in english if they imported the game the wii is region locked but it's a nintendo console so that shit can be easily modded or you could just pirate it since it's not available in your country so there is no legal way to obtain it even if you wanted to no lost sales if there's no sales to begin with but then sadly nintendo made another statement saying that the european release was at one point planned but has since been cancelled thankfully a fan translation has been made for the game so we are able to actually experience it getting this fan patch to work properly can be a pain in the ass so like my early episodes of the hitman retrospective i'm going to give a mini tutorial so you don't have any issues that i had and end up hurting your experience like i did for spoilers for my own review a good game i'm going to link the english patch in the description below and the fixes i used can be found in text form on the dolphin wiki page for the game and a few form posts newer versions of dolphin aren't able to play this version right away because like i mentioned earlier the wii is region lock so the emulator and the emulation are region coded you'll need to open the iso in a hex editor and change a single line of code make sure you have the gpu texture decoding setting on or else your text will be all fucked up like it was for me which ended up making me miss some crucial tutorial prompts and resulted in me playing the game wrong for most of it but we'll get into that when talking about combat there are a few ways to play this game you can play this game on mouse and keyboard which i did not do so i can't comment on the quality and usability you can map controllers to work as a wii mode you can try and see if you can get the ps4 controller working on it because it has gyro but i had no luck with it there are a few controller profiles out there that you can download and import i used omentumgaminghd's profile which i will link to their channel and the google drive link for the profile in the description the last option which is the one i recommend the most but it does require you to spend money is get a dolphin bar off amazon it's a wii sensor bar by mayflower that connects to your computer via usb and has a built-in bluetooth connector it's 30 on amazon so it's not too expensive and it'll work for every wii game you want to emulate so i think it's a good deal and it worked pretty much flawlessly for me that should be everything if you have any other issues that i didn't cover consult the dolphin wiki page i linked below and the dolphin forms so let's finally start talking about the actual game fatal frame 4 mask of the lunar eclipse is the first game to no longer have fixed perspective now i don't hate third person horror games i think they have their place in the video game medium and some of my favorite games like dead space 1 and 2 are but the atmosphere created by fixed camera angles is something i really value in horror games and at times while playing through this game i could picture in my mind how they could have composed some shots in specific areas and how unsettling they would have been they do have these angles when opening some doors throughout the game but as a whole they will be sorely missed i don't think this game would work if it had fixed camera angles the third person perspective in this game is very deliberate with controls and game mechanics based around it in previous games you had a flashlight that was controlled with the right stick to swing it around based on where you were facing it was never really that important as areas were usually well lit by natural lighting or the general casting of the flashlight in this game you swivel your flashlight around with the wiimote instead of items being a shiny little ball that announced their presence as soon as it's on screen when you enter a room now you have to look around with your flashlight and pass over it to create the shimmer to be able to pick it up you used to instantly pick up items like in other classic survival horror games but now they have a reach out mechanic where you have to hold down the a button to slowly reach your hand out to pick up items which it was instantly apparent that they were going to use this for cheap jump scares with ghost hands grabbing you or something and oh boy does it get really old by the end of the game the camera filament that has been present for the previous three games to alert you to the presence of ghosts with blue being benign and red being hostile four now has it functioning to alert the player to know that there are items nearby so it's another way to reinforce having you comb through a room with your flashlight as soon as you enter it i'm guessing this needed to be a thing because the player character is always smack dab in the middle of the screen instead of in one of the thirds so they end up blocking your vision it's really annoying in some areas because the hallways are even more narrow than they were in the manner of sleep in fatal frame 3. maybe it's because of the third person perspective but i feel like you are moving at a snail's pace when running in this game this has to be the slowest you've ever been in the series this made backtracking really unappealing as you slowly trot down long narrow hallways that feel unending this never creates tension like i think they were going for it just really is annoying and i wish i could just fast forward the game everything for that matter feels way slower than the previous games it takes 10 million years to lean in and open a door and i'm not talking about the actual act of opening the door because that's clearly there to hide loading areas i mean reaching out to the doorknob the clip i just showed may not seem that bad but imagine this for 11 hours and this is what happens for every single door the biggest issue i have with the game is i find that the controls can be clunky some of this was eventually alleviated over time but i want to comb through how i played this game during my playthrough i played the game three different ways my first hour and a half of the game was using the xbox 360 controller with the profile i mentioned earlier their video showed them playing the game with no problem and while it did work i couldn't really get comfortable and wrap my brain around it it also didn't help that the first recording session i didn't have the gpu texture decoding setting on so all my tutorial prompts looked like this i ended up missing the fact that the game has a regular lock on so i played through roughly 70 to 80 percent without knowing of its existence at the end of my first recording session i felt like i wasn't getting that much out of the game as i felt like i should have due to playing the game on a controller that wasn't a wiimote so i went to best buy and bought a cheap 7 usb bluetooth dongle and played the game on a weeb mode at this point i didn't know of the existence of the dolphin bar so i went the caveman route and used candles as a replacement for the sensor bar because the wiimote will react to candle flames with its ir sensor it felt nice to actually be playing the game on proper hardware it still felt clunky but i thought that was just the game itself part of it was but in the end i ran out of candles and once candles were burning for a bit i began to notice input delay and what could only be described as uncalibrated movement this is when i discovered the existence of the dolphin bar and bought that and this is how i played the rest of the game post chapter 4 and i was much better off for it while some of the clunkiness was felt due to controller setups the game still has some awkwardness to its controls when using the camera obscura you will use the wiimote to move the camera up and down you could also swivel it around a bit but to move it left and right you have to use the nunchuck stick it took me a while to realize it but this was the core of where i felt the clunkiness stemmed from while playing the game it just dawned on me why can't i use the wiimote to just move the camera around in all directions why do i have to use the nunchuck to look left and right instead of use it to move my body it would be the logical evolutionary next step with how the previous three games controlled now implementing motion it just really kept creating this disconnect in my brain because you could move the wiimote all over but in the game it could basically only move up and down with a little bit of wiggle room it's like playing the original doom on a modern pc without using the vertical mod so when you move your mouse up and down it doesn't do anything and it creates this really awkward disconnect other awkwardness from controls was due to weird collision with the game's environments which caused me to get stuck on things akin to fatal frame 1 and needing to be at specific angles to actually pick up items and take pictures of things in the environment so many times i felt like i should be able to pick something up but the prompt wasn't showing up or i felt like i was in the right position to take a picture only to realize my position was off by two centimeters and four degrees now that we have controls out of the way in the context for how i played the game we could finally talk about combat at first i thought this was the hardest game in the series with trying to keep up with ghosts that kept crouching and swinging around before attacking this was because i didn't know the existence of the lock-on as listed earlier due to a texture glitch in emulation this game in actuality is by far the easiest in the previous games you had a camera attachment that would allow you to auto track ghosts at the cost of a spirit stone or spirit power you accumulated in the bottom left of your camera in this game that is just the normal function of the z button right from the get-go when you're locked onto a ghost you actually get the ability to move your body around with the nunchuck stick like you could in the previous games this makes all of my complaints with the controls completely go away as it utterly trivializes combat encounters the only time that lock-on isn't the most broken thing ever is when ghosts are slightly in walls and it can't seem to find them but it also is kind of inconsistent as a few times i was still able to track them while having zero vision of them at this point calling it survival horror is kind of an insult to actual survival horror games i think it's pretty obvious that the lock-on is the way it is because it's a band-aid to the overall lackluster controls as seen with me struggling to keep up with ghosts without it and finding it really frustrating as i'm fighting with the controls as much if not more than the ghosts unless you play the game i don't think i can articulate how easy it really is it's to the point that fighting ghosts becomes a chore a thing blocking me from further solving the mystery and not in any fun and meaningful way difficulty is such a hard thing to design i've talked about it endlessly on this channel there isn't any sole right way to go about it and there isn't anything wrong with a game that is easy or hard it's the context surrounding why it is one or the other and if you personally gel with how the game goes about doing it in the case of fatal frame 4 the game literally plays itself fatal frames the attacks you could get when ghosts are about to hit you are extremely broken in this game so you could just use the lock-on to track them and wait till the last second as they're about to hit you release the lock-on and then take the picture if you land a fatal frame the game now will auto-track the ghosts through all of their flailing in pain and allow you to get more fatal frames for free this kills most of the basic ghosts you will encounter and who knows maybe if you get one of the upgrades that i ended up not getting you'll be able to do even more than just three fatal frame combos even if there are instances where the lock-on can't do all the work for you the way the game incorporates items further trivializes any combat encounter or horror that they're trying to convey when you beat the campaign in the previous games you would unlock a shop where you can buy items using points from taking your pictures throughout your playthrough this is just how it is in regular gameplay you thought that entering and exiting the manner of sleep to respawn items was abusable well having access to a shop to buy your healing items and camera stock at every save point is a million times more broken after the first 20 minutes of the game you will never have to worry about ammo or healing items ever again as long as you are consistently landing fatal frames over and over which isn't asking much when the game is basically doing all the work for you you'll have so many points that anything you expend in an encounter will be tripled with the points you got from fighting at the end of the game i was sitting on 60 herbal medicines so i was just iv dripping that shit anytime i took damage some combat encounters i exited with i want to say 300 000 points which is 30 healing items or a shit ton of ammo this is on normal which is the highest selectable difficulty on a fresh save i can't imagine how easy easy difficulty is but fatal frame 4 is the first game in the series to have a different approach to combat and gameplay with the third playable character kiroshima not having a camera obscura instead his only method of combat is using a spirit stone flashlight compared to the camera obscura where you need to keep the reticle on the ghost for as long as possible as it charges power so you could deal more damage the flashlight has you casting a circle of light right in front of you and the longer you charge it and hold the a button down the more damage accumulates so once it's fully charged and you release the a button while shining its light on a ghost it will deal maximum damage the spirit stone flashlight doesn't have access to the incredibly broken lock-on that the cameras have and since it doesn't require you to be as precise as the camera i feel like this is the best use of the wiimote that this game has to offer and makes kirishima's sections the most fun the only weird thing about his gameplay is that there is a very noticeable lighting difference from when you're in third person in the moment-to-moment gameplay traversing the areas and when you're in first person using your flashlight it can be kind of disorienting and threw me off a few times when entering combat now i don't want to give off the impression that i hate this game it has its issues but it still does a lot of great things and i ended up really liking it and even with its flaws i think it's still worth playing i think it has the best creepy atmosphere and successfully left me with chills running through my body on multiple occasions to get the most out of these games i specifically only played them during the middle of the night with the lights off and this was the only time that i ever considered turning them back on all the ghost designs really hold up the fully black eyes with dripping black blood make them especially creepy to me a lot of the things that actually scared me were moments that could easily be missed and the game puts no emphasis on them with obnoxious sound cues like this moment where a mannequin i was looking at turned its head to look directly at me the game doesn't play any jump scare sound bites when this happens i just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time and i felt because there was no emphasis it was all the more scarier like fatal frame 3 i really enjoyed the story setup and themes this game's narrative went with the moon and memories playing a crucial role throughout the story the people of the island this game takes place on suffer from a disease called luna sedata syndrome this was the name made up for the english fan translation as it's called getsuyuu syndrome originally for simplicity's sake i will be referring to things by their fan translation this disease causes memory loss sleepwalking like states where the patient will seek out light of the moon and people will find them staring at it similar to how fatal frame 3 is based all around grief in the loss of loved ones most of the story is told through very analytical and clinical lenses via doctor's notes and research papers it feels like a medical drama at times as you read these hospital workers papers doing whatever it takes for them to try to find a cure for their patient and prevent further loss of memories one story idea that seemed to be carried over from three is the idea that people live on through your memories of them one note in particular stood out to me as ruka one of the main characters felt as if her family was essentially dying again as the disease was making her forget about them the poor girl was suffering even more due to the feeling like her father would die again if she was to forget about him i felt like the game tastefully captured the feeling of someone who is suffering from mental illness like dementia and how it affects them and the people around them like in one flashback where one of the main characters sees a doctor escort another patient away as they become more delirious and hostile the pain of knowing this is completely out of your control and no matter how hard you try to fight it these cherished memories and loved ones will be taken away from you but then there is also the other side of the coin with ideas and themes like maybe some things are better off being forgotten living in ignorance as bliss and you will only be hurt by knowing as seen with one of the notes from a female patient who committed suicide after her memories returned or in one of madoka's memos specifically the fifth one as she begins to remember what happened to the girls on the island when they were kidnapped as kids then the rest of the notes suddenly descends into nonsense and insanity some of ruka's mom's sayaka's notes give the situation almost a lovecraftian feel to it as she remarks the change in the islanders and how her husband has become obsessed with mask making something otherworldly beckoning him to keep trying to perfect the mask that his elders and ancestors failed to make the game does a lot of cool things narratively and while it does eventually fall into the same formula like the other games i felt it struck the perfect middle ground of having both the illness and the ritual stuff being the focal point of the story i do want to note that 4 is the most straightforward of the four games i can't think of a single time i was aimlessly wandering around for things in this game looking for some random item or a spot to take a picture of in this game the benign ghosts of the past that you can see walking around basically guide you from point a to point b of the story more so than any of the other games ever did this made it so i never felt like i needed to backtrack unless i was specifically guided to by the ghosts it made the game feel far more linear comparatively which isn't a bad thing but i felt like it needed to be said in the chance that this is also part of the reason for my biggest complaint with the story of this game outside of miku from fatal frame 1 i feel like ruka and misaki are the weakest and most forgettable characters of the series miku only really felt this because of how flat her voice acting was in the case of this game i couldn't tell a single character trait from ruka or masaki they kind of just blend together in my mind and i had to keep checking back to footage to see which character did certain events i have a few ideas why i might have felt this like i just proposed the idea due to the lack of backtracking i did possibly cause me to miss events further characterizing them the big thing i think that caused this forget-ability is that neither of these characters have anyone to really play off of in two you had mio and mayu in three you had rey miku and k along with rey having her journal filled with notes so you could always see how she was reacting to new events internally and four after the opening where misaki has madoka to bounce off of there is nothing for them at least here you could see some sort of characterization [Music] it might be kind of reductive but after this both ruka and misaki's character can only be described as scared girl who do anime gasps any time that something happens i felt a pretty big disconnect from both of them so much so that that section earlier where i mentioned a note from ruka as a child talking about losing her memories and the people like her father she knew would essentially die again i originally wrote that section as another nameless patient the only thing that i feel supports this notion is that kiroshima is more memorable than both of them not by much but it's still a noticeable margin that it's worth analyzing why he basically has everything that i felt the girls lacked throughout his section of the game he is chasing after the son of the hospital's director yu haibara so he has a person to bounce off of along with flashbacks of talking to ruka's mom sayaka and in two instances actually talking to her since he is a detective he has notes that update as you obtain new information and you can see how he reacts to these revelations just like rey did in fatal frank 3 along with tape recordings of his original investigation of islanders when the girls were kidnapped 10 years prior he also has a decent amount of cutscenes where he is talking to himself and starts to wonder what's going on it also doesn't help ruka and misaki's case that they are following up rey who i felt was the most compelling character in the entire series so that might be adding insult to injury this game ends on a really cool note as your final confrontation is at the top of a lighthouse under the lunar eclipse finishing off with you playing the full tsukimori song on a piano these piano puzzles which there are three of in the game are the only time i ever felt like i had any issue with the dolphin bar but this might have just been an emulation bug and not the fault of the peripheral itself either way i overcame this weird bug by hitting the sync button on the dolphin bar while trying to do the puzzle and this seemed to have worked these are also the only puzzles that i really felt like it was properly utilizing motion controls of the wiimote fatal frame 4 is kind of the odd game out of the series due to it never being localized and requiring so many hoops to jump through in order to play it despite these issues and its shortcomings i still think it's absolutely worth playing i never really felt like this game took advantage of the wiimote in a way that couldn't easily have been translated to a proper controller so ideally one day if tecmo wanted to with a little work in an actual official translation maybe this game could see itself having an official release in the west in an hd bundle hell i would easily pay 40 to play this game on the switch or any other modern consoles with an hd port similar to the recently released no more heroes 1 2 ports we are now in the final stretch of this video with only having fatal frame 5 made in of black water or the wii u left to cover i've heard some mixed things about this one from friends but hopefully i will come out overall positive i have no idea how to intro this section of the review so let's just start off with spoiling my conclusion and working backwards from there yup this is definitely my least favorite in the series but before i had finished the game being a little over halfway through i still felt like i liked it and was having a hard time laying out where i would rank all 5 games as my favorites well thanks to some of the revelations at the end of the game this is easily my least favorite and soured the whole experience but we'll save that for last so let's talk about what this game does right first since this is a wii u game it actually makes perfect use of the gamepad it takes some getting used to having to bring up the gamepad like a camera to your face and move it around using the gyro along with the standard initial weird feeling of playing a wii u game having to take your eyes off the screen to look at your map on the gamepad you can actually just play the full game on the gamepad as it allows you to on-the-fly swap between showing gameplay and a full map of the area at times i felt tempted to just stand up and play it like a vr game because using the gyro is really good and you could just look around in all directions with it these controls feel like an actualized idea of what fatal frame 4 was attempting on the original wii there was only one time where the gyro was freaking out for me at the end of the game but i think this might have been just due to my gamepad's battery almost being dead in the game lagging because the final level has you fighting a bunch of ghosts at once so the game begins to chug really bad for as amazing as it feels to fight ghosts i sadly can't say the same thing for the basic third person camera in the moment-to-moment gameplay the easiest way to describe it is that it feels drunk it has this awkward swivel to it and extremely slow startup this is the highest sensitivity setting and look how slow it is in any other third person game this is what it looks like at default or slightly below default the big problem with it that i realized after editing and watching back through footage is that the camera will slow down as it's trying to pass over things in the environment the camera actually moves at a pretty good pace at max sensitivity when in open environments but for a lot of the game you're in tight corridors or in parts of the forest with tons of trees that the camera will get caught on i also experienced a bunch of times where the camera freaked out while trying to turn around because not only does the left stick move the player character but if you try to rotate the camera to look behind you the character will also turn around since the right stick is tied to the flashlight to avoid this just use the left trigger to snap the camera behind the character once you turn their body around using the left stick on the topic of the flashlight it feels really pointless in this game as almost all the environments are really well lit with natural lighting or because there are tons of lamps and fire while said environments look really good i think this game has the weakest atmosphere of the five i think outside of the aged visuals of fatal frame ones ghosts this has the worst ghost designs of the series since the main motif of the game is water and drowning all the ghosts have this watery shimmer to them so they look like they're lubed up for a porno along with how they all look like they have their own unique light source from everything else in the environments so they stand out in the worst kind of way compared to the ghosts of the previous games which had a very grounded look and felt like they fit right within the environments of their games it also doesn't help that this game is following up fatal frame 4 which i think had the best ghost designs its art direction and level design feel really uninspired again to reiterate i don't think it's particularly bad it just feels like a compilation of things we've already done and seen nothing gave me that wow and wonderment feeling that the other games managed to consistently give me the only thing that felt really unique were the two chapters in the game that have one of the main characters ren play five nights at freddy's tower defense on the security cameras as the other main characters are passed out and ghosts are trying to haunt the antique shop i really like this section because you have no control over the cctv cameras as they swap around the building and it feels perfectly creepy as it'll jump from one camera and you'll see a ghost off in the distance slowly closing in and then it'll swap to another leaving you wondering where it's heading it's the only time that the game actually felt like it had anything scary and unsettling up its sleeve everything else is incredibly predictable the map on the gamepad actually spoils upcoming scares as you can see when doors are locked highlighted by a red line so when you enter a large room and you pick up an item on the other end of it and you see the door turn red you know when you walk up to it and the door is jammed something is going to spawn behind you the other thing that really drives the uninspired and samey feeling of this game is the excessive amount of bloat it has the game has a lot of needless backtracking as each chapter starts with you going up a mountain you'll be retreading old ground more or less depending on the chapter some start you where your objective location is while others will start you at the bottom once you finish the main objective of the chapter you will have to go back through these locations again down the mountain it feels pointless and is completely arbitrary as some chapters have you needing to backtrack almost the entire thing to the bottom and other chapters will decide to fade to black and transport you back to the antique shop it's like what if we took the manner of sleep idea from fatal frame 3 and made it worse it really ruins the pacing of this game the only time it ever felt justified was when the path down was being blocked and you had to go through the collapsed tunnel and fight ghosts of people who were trapped inside the game also lacks enemy variety which adds even more to the repetition lacking variety in the ghosts you fight has been an issue to some degree in each title four mitigated this issue slightly by having less encounters five has a unique system to it called wetness where due to being attacked by enemies or being in the rain or walking through bodies of water your character's clothes will become wet the wiki says that this makes your spirit power stronger which increases the damage your camera obscura does but this will also increase the encounter rate of ghosts i kind of see this as a double-edged sword more damage means you'll be able to get through fights faster but because of this you'll be fighting more and there are two ways to undo your wetness slowly waiting in a dry area or using one of the embers which there aren't that many you could find in the world you can buy them using points at the start of a chapter but then that means you'll have less points to use towards your upgrades you could see this as risk versus reward decision making because this creates a scarcity of points where you have to decide do i want to use them on embers or do i want to use them on upgrades but in actuality all i see it doing is just extending the bloat of the game in fatal frame 5 i honestly felt like i couldn't go 20 feet without running into the guys carrying boxes on their back or the drowned maidens and on top of all this they kept that stupid reach out mechanic from four it does feel for the most part faster than four's but good lord is it the most pointless time-wasting piece of shit mechanic i can't think of a single game off the top of my head that makes something as simple as picking up items a chore this doesn't add anything to the game it's never scary it doesn't even do any noticeable damage or steal the items so it's not something you have to watch out for it's just something that needs you to stop slowly picking up your item so you can watch the same animation all over again or have the prompt disappear so you have to spin around in a circle until the game allows you to pick it up again another thing that picking up items in this game does that brings my piss to a boil is when you almost have the item cap for something if you pick up said item that would push you over the 99 cap instead of topping you off leaving the difference on the ground like most games do instead it doesn't allow you to pick it up at all so i had a bunch of instances where i would just waste my time taking 5 photos so i could pick up 19 more to reach 99. the one unique thing that this game does that i think is really neat is fatal glance after you beat a ghost you could walk up to them and touch their disintegrating body before they fully fade away this allows you to see their memories and gives you some info on the lore of the setting and the plot for ghosts that don't have these memories you just get 500 points the only potential drawback i see with this is if you kill a ghost and they are out of bounds you can't reach them this happened to me a few times as i got a fatal frame or a shutter chance and it pushed the ghost back and i was fighting one of them in the force so it pushed him into a patch of trees i couldn't walk to and in another case i was fighting a ghost in a room that was locked by it so when i killed it with a fatal frame it pushed them into the room next door but since the door didn't unlock until they fully faded away i was trapped inside unable to fatal glance i have no clue if these ghosts inform you more on what's going on since i didn't get a chance to fatal glance at them and i didn't really want to reload the checkpoint for this other new additions include a actual dedicated sprint could you imagine having the slow trotting of fatal frame 4 in these environments with all this backtracking and the dead space main quest guide marker which appears as a foggy ghost mirage to show you the path toward progress so this further de-incentivizes you exploring these areas besides the fact they almost never have anything that is worth your time like i said at the start for almost the entire game i was writing an overall positive review in my head thinking eh it's all right the combat is really fun in carrying this game but the story is kind of nothing with only a few cool motifs like water and surface exploration of deep subjects like suicide compared to three and four which explore things like grief and mental illness far more then the story actually started to unravel and i wish it stayed as forgettable nothing this game brought back miku from fatal frame 1 and 3. now she has always loved her brother and was crushed by his death at the canon ending of one and then kind of retreaded that again so they could have the plot of three which was kind of lame at first but it was actually used well to support rey's arc in that game now she loves her brother a little too much in this game so much so that she abandons her daughter at the age of three so she can have what is called a ghost marriage which puts a shrine maiden in these wooden boxes filled with black water so they can become pillars and hold back the underworld from leaking into hours with her brother yeah they completely ignored the ending message and her arc in fatal frame 3 so she can be obsessed with seeing him one last time again despite this being her motivation in three and she got to at the end of the game then they completely ignore rey's existence with miku constantly saying that she was alone despite the fucking ending of three where both of them were going to continue to live on because as long as they were alive their loved ones lived on through them we can get through this thing together everything's gonna be okay just remember you are not alone then he left me and i was all the way just me and my pain i really need to go to the other side but don't give up when i saw him he's already [Music] one more time please [Music] i never understood why we survived but now i realize why we were allowed to live i'll go on living even with the pain [Music] then it reveals that miyu miku's daughter and one of the three playable characters is a shadow board a person born from a living person and a ghost and then it really doubles down on how much miku loves her brother it doesn't outright say that mafiyu is the father although it might as well have in the notes with lines like she got pregnant from the ghost of her beloved after showing visions of her getting ghost married to her dead brother's ghost then i went and checked the wiki to make sure i wasn't interpreting this wrong and i'm not as it remarks that the official guidebook of the game confirms that mafia impregnated miku while she was in the abyss of the horizon at the end of fatal frame 3. i guess that means it did acknowledge fatal frame 3 happening in a book outside of the game that's still ignores rey so to recap they brought back miku for the fifth game so they could have an incest plot where she gets impregnated by her ghost brother while she is trapped in the sleep dimension at the end of the third game while also ignoring every other aspect of that game's story messaging characters am i dumb for getting this invested in the plots of these games i think the story of three is genuinely great on par with other horror games that explore complex emotions and difficult subjects like silent hill so it makes me mad when everything that game stands for is trounced upon for this fucking drivel if it's any consolation prize at least since there is a chapter select to get the other endings you just have to replay the final chapter since all the requirements for every ending are within it so no longer do you have to do a new game plus playthrough to get a new game plus exclusive item to get an alternate ending which only changes 5 seconds of the ending by adding a picture or giving you something less satisfying or in the few cases a happier but non-canon ending i'm really conflicted on this game it's gameplay is really fun but the story is shit and the backtracking bloat makes the game a slog at times part of me still wants to recommend this game because despite its issues i was having fun i guess just ignore the story if anything i feel like i would be remiss to leave out mentioning the bonus secret chapter of fatal frame 5. since i had no idea how to include it in the previous section it's getting its own mini dedicated part of the video after completing the main story of fatal frame maiden of black water you unlock a bonus campaign where you play as ayane from ninja gaiden and dead or alive the big reason i feel i should bring this part up is because it has a completely different gameplay style from the rest of the series the setup for this campaign is that ayani has hired to find one of the missing girls whose file we saw in the antique shop in the main campaign as hasoka was originally hired to find her before she was asked to stop by her family instead of the ghost mirages that you follow in the base game it's even more like the dead space quest markers i compared them to since it's now actually just a straight line with a purple thread since ianni doesn't have a camera obscura her first encounter with the ghosts of the mountain end poorly so she gets some magic cursed tattoo on her back that brings her to the brink of death so she is able to sense ghosts along with hide from them and the tattoo artist gives her a spirit stone flashlight back for round 2 we get a proper introduction to gameplay unlike kiroshima's flashlight from 4 ione can't kill the ghosts but instead can only stun them this means her core gameplay is stealth ghosts have three phases blue where they don't see you at all yellow where they are on alert and looking for you and will react to the sounds you make but the game actively tells you to just stand in place when this happens and red where they are hostile and actively trying to kill you trying to sense sumugi with the purple thread will alert nearby ghosts but this is easily circumvented by not holding down zr long enough for the thread to appear since if you tap the trigger it'll face you in the direction of progress the weirdest thing about this campaign is it felt like it was one single chapter that they split into four as the game will at points just fade to black and give you a score where if the game just kept playing like it was normal nothing would have seemed out of place the only time that the main game ever faded to black was so that the characters could be transported back to the shop instead of having to traverse all the way back down to the mountain or when the perspective was being shifted from one character to another the bonus campaign is also really short with only taking the 45 minutes in total and the main game had chapters that could go up to almost an hour and a half so i don't think they did this for time reasons especially when chapters 3 and four only took me three and five minutes respectively while i don't know if this would work for an entire full-length game the genre shift was a neat attempt and if they were ever to make another game maybe one of the characters could have in-depth stealth gameplay it's a shame that this for the time being is the final entry in the series and even then it really didn't get a fair shot at being a hit since 4 never came to the west people rightfully really wanted 5 to be localized it eventually did come out a year later but it was digital only in north america and had a very limited physical release in europe and australia so it might as well been digital only there too not to mention the fact that it was on the wii u with basically no marketing which if you're going to make your series sequel installment a wii u exclusive and its name isn't monster hunter or a first party nintendo title you are basically sending that shit out to die and on top of all of this fatal frame has always been a rather niche series with each game sporting humble sales numbers compared to its contemporaries they did do that experiment that some wii u games were doing during that era with the free to start model allowing you to play the first two chapters for free then you can buy the full game and play the rest if you wanted to since this is a digital only title in america and basically every other western region unless you're willing to shell out hundreds of dollars on ebay which i don't think is worth this game will eventually disappear when the wii u eshop inevitably shuts down [Music] to close this video out i want to take a moment to order the games from my favorite to least favorite and list what each of these games really excels at i know i could come off really negative towards games at times but i seriously had a lot of fun with the series so it should come at no surprise based on how i've talked about it in the past 3 sections but my favorite is fatal frame 3. this game easily has the most compelling narrative and character of the series and outside of the final boss which can suck my balls through my jorts i don't really have any major issues with this game next is fatal frame 2 amazing atmosphere amazing art direction still holds up visually 16 years later biggest weakness is that the story is one of the more generic of the bunch and kind of starts to run out of steam by the end then we have fatal frame 4 another game with amazing atmosphere the game that consistently had chills running down my spine with subtle and restrained scares and its sound design it probably has the best ghost designs of the series like with three it explores heavy subjects like mental illness and a lot of the cutscenes presented via blurred and relapsing memories are pretty unsettling in how they portrayed doctors at the hospital the main characters were staying at as kids its biggest weakness is being the hassle it is to set up along with being pretty piss easy and the controls even after using the dolphin bar can be kind of clunky next is fatal frame one it's rough around the edges but it's a great first attempt at a new franchise and it has the perfect 6th gen jink charm that i love so much its biggest weakness is that the english voice acting is awful and will pull you out of the moment all the time with how flat and stilted it is given how tense a lot of the scenes are and of course in last place is fatal frame five i really don't know how to articulate that this game is a firm the needless blow brings the game down and i don't doubt there will be people out there who won't be bothered by the game's story for shitting on the moral of three as much as i do to redo miku's missing brother for the third time and for all i know the incest plotline could have been in the earlier titles but was omitted in the western localization i don't usually give scores since i really dislike them because they only cause confusion when comparing games with the same score despite the context of why each of them got that score being entirely different but to hopefully clearly convey how much i am torn on this game my score would probably be a 6 out of 10 or if i was being really generous a light seven that's how much i found the combat to be really fun in carrying this game at the end of the day i really enjoyed my time with the series i would honestly recommend playing all of them yes even five despite how much shit i talked about that game it's still really fun i advise you to take your time with the series unlike me who played through all five of them in the span of a single month it's unfortunate that because the xbox version of one and two are not available digitally at least at the time of recording they are really expensive otherwise the series would be really cheap outside of 5 which is still 50 bucks on the eshop i think if they made an hd remaster collection of 1 through 4 i think they'd have to exclude 5 since i don't know how you can make that game playable without the gamepad since it's so integral to its gameplay it would sell really well especially if you put it on pc horror games have become way more popular since the series was originally releasing with the rise of things like youtube and twitch with let's plays and live streaming and the sheer fact that more people are playing games than ever i would love to see a fatal frame six and would buy that shit day one i would like them to do something more different with the game and not fall back into the same shrine made in preventing the apocalypse by blocking the hell gate formula that these games seem to not be able to escape 3 and 4 show that there is more you can do and explore while fighting ghosts with a camera than just this sadly i don't think this will happen as in 2012 nintendo became the co-owner of the fatal frame ip and they have already made their apathy for this series especially in the west loud and clear if you've made it this far into the video i just want to say thanks for watching as always if you really liked the video please pass it around because this one took a lot of work and a lot of time to make i want to shout out the artist who made the thumbnail for this video enoch a link for their twitter account will be in the description below you should go check them out they make some really cool horror art that i like a lot if you really like the channel maybe consider becoming a patron on patreon all patrons have access to videos a day early and i am now going to shout out my five dollar and up patrons who really help support the channel bully lucy the fox comrade fox tristan the white wolf slemth tingle matthew elliot dusty the zombie filthy finger 69 clivermort william moore tyler schertzer sum panda joshua deloreno poke joke s chichomatrias ben johnson sarah chan oods of nudes fish commie joe nizen alejandro benitez star fox flar boop and mitchell thanks so much guys if you want to keep up to date with the channel please follow me on twitter and if you're a card game player of any kind i have a tcg player affiliate link in the description below any purchases you make using my link will give me a small kickback so it's another way to easily support the channel as for what's next on the channel there should be a small review on crash 4 coming out soon hopefully that won't take too long to make then i'm going to do a review on yakuza 7 or yakuza like a dragon as it's called here then after that i should be starting the yakuza 2 retrospective and hopefully that'll be out before the year ends it might not since that's going to be a massive project as i'm going to be playing yakuza 2 and kiwami 2. either way i hope you look forward to whatever's coming next and as always thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Cvit

Views: 459,872

Keywords: Cvit, Fatal Frame Review, Fatal Frame 1, Fatal Frame 2, Fatal Frame 3, Fatal Frame 4, Fatal Frame 5, Reviewing Every Fatal Frame Game

Id: mZqt4CjIMVQ

Length: 89min 46sec (5386 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020