This video has been
sponsored in part by Skillshare. When someone asks me “What’s your favorite
book, your favorite food, your favorite... The Cure song
or like, idk, your favorite video game”
or something like that - I pretty reliably freeze up,
overwhelmed by the agony of choice, since it makes me feel like I
have to pick my favorite child. There are always multiple things
that immediately spring to mind, but they’re up there for very different
reasons and putting one above the others feels like saying “those other ones are therefore
lesser than” and that just feels wrong to me like.. hurting them. And what if I forget something that should
be on there – god forbid! Ironically though,
Fatal Frame is a curious exception to this: It’s a series I’ve already dedicated
two heartfelt videos to in the past, one of them even boldly proclaimed how Fatal Frame
II - Crimson Butterfly comes as close as it gets to “perfection” in a horror game – a claim I still 100% stand by by the way. But strangely enough, when it comes to this
very series, I don’t even have to think for a second to know that it is, in fact,
the third entry - Fatal Frame III - The Tormented, that undisputedly earns the accolade of being
my “favorite” entry in the series from me. At the end of my my video on Fatal Frame 2,
I had already teased how Fatal Frame III was my “secret favorite” in the series - but to be
honest that statement was based on decade-old memories from back when I had played them
for the first time, where I felt the margin between them was rather.. uh.. marginal. (incoherent mumbles) But now, over a decade later, when finally revisiting the third, I was gobsmacked by
how much wider that gap had grown by my newfound impressions of it, so much so that I can declare,
without a sliver of doubt that yes, The Tormented is to me, by far, the strongest entry in an
already peerless series of survival horror games. Fatal Frame III is secretly genius because
it manages to surpass its predecessors without ever attempting to outshine or push them down
under itself – but quite the opposite: it manages to retroactively pull its older sisters
along with it, enhance them posthumously and even turn both the first and second entry
into a more coherent, holistic and rewarding folkloric experience. A feat that only the rarest kind of video
game gem ever manages to achieve. This final episode of my
long-spanning “Fatal Frame trilogy” revisit will be my personal logbook, and on this journey,
you’ll be the Diane to my Agent Cooper as I explore, explain and hopefully unravel what
exactly is it that makes Rei Amakura’s dark journey into the Manor of Sleep my uncontested pinnacle
of the Fatal Frame series. (Monsters of the Week Intro Music playing) Alright, before we go on, I'd like to express my thanks
to Skillshare for sponsoring the making of this video. So in return,
let me show you what they've got to offer to you! Skillshare is an online learning community curated
specifically for convenient and efficient learning, with thousands of classes on topics like video editing,
audio recording, graphic design, 3D modeling and animation,
game development, writing and a lot more. I’ve been using Skillshare for my own use for
quite a while for many different things actually, like, you might have seen me use this
effect here in some of my videos in the past, it’s called 2.5D or Parallax animation,
where you take a photo and make it appear 3 dimensional and alive with layered movement and animation. One of the best resources to really properly explain,
teach and cement the use of this technique is the class Bringing a Photo to
Life with 2.5D Parallax by Joe Fellows, Founder & Director of the Motion Graphics, Visual
FX and Video Production Company Make Productions. It’s a really well-structured, straightforward
and efficient course that gets you to create stunning visual effects like these with just some
basic Photoshop and After Effects knowledge; or in my case,
I’m just doing it in Premiere instead. Skillshare Premium costs less $10 a
month if billed annually and if you’re curious, the first 1000 people to
follow the link in my description will get an instant free
trial of Skillshare Premium without forced subscription or
disclosure of any payment information. Go check it out! Thanks a lot again, and now,
I hope you enjoy the rest of the video! Rei Amakura is not in a good place in her
life. Several months ago, the 23-year-old freelance
photographer had lost her fiancée Yuu in a car accident one rainy night – when she
was driving. Plagued by soul-crushing guilt, depression
and sleepless nights, Rei tries to drown her sorrows in hard work. She, together with her assistant Miku, is
working on a documentary photo series that captures abandoned places across Japan that
are rumored to be haunted. Most of these places are just that,
rumors, but we, the audience and hard-boiled
veterans of the Fatal Frame series know that this narrative
universe has more to offer than just some atmospheric, forlorn places
that stimulate the imagination. One day, when exploring one such supposedly
haunted place, Rei suddenly finds after-images of her late fiancée in the viewfinder of
her camera. Startled and confused, She attempts to pursue his spectral apparition
deeper into the abandoned house. Like in a waking dream,
Rei finds herself from one moment to the next standing in a completely
different place: colors faded, snowflakes gently falling, a courtyard
of an age-old estate, candles dimly illuminating an
age-worn diorama of gravestones. [Rei] "This place..." The place emanates an uneasy calmness that
you can feel. This is when we take control of Rei for the
first time... At first glance, if you’re coming straight
from the previous games or from most other Survival Horror games of
the PS2 era, everything feels extremely familiar. The controller options support the same layout schemes
as in Fatal Frame II – we move our protagonist relative to fixed-positioned
wide camera angles, or - if we prefer - we can change it to
traditional tank controls in the options. Objects of interest can be inspected or interacted
with via a simple button-press and at any given time,
Rei can pull out her camera and enter Fatal Frame’s signature investigation- and combat mode, where we peek through the
seeker-lens of the Camera Obscura to discover and capture
ghostly apparitions on celluloid. But as much as the
controls feel familiar, once I started following
the beckoning spectral image of Yuu deeper into the corridors of
the manor, I felt.. um.. a bit confused to be honest, when I noticed one long-time default-feature of
previous titles had (seemingly) been removed: In the predecessors, whenever
you would spot a ghostly apparition and hit the camera-button, your character would
automatically “snap” their view into the exact direction of it and focus the
viewfinder straight up on them. All you had to do was press
the trigger to take the picture. It pretty quickly turns into an
intuitive “pull out -> shoot” reflex which was
certainly.. convenient, but it also put your mind
on auto-pilot because it didn’t really
force you to be fully aware of the 3-dimensional space your
character was in at all times. Fatal Frame 3 drops
this mechanic – at first; when you want to snap a ghost in
good-old series tradition for the first time you’ll realize that “oh wait
what I have to manually ... whoa”. It feels intuitively..
worse? at first, because it’s less... comfortable,
less convenient. But the question is really: “Is this a bad
thing - in a horror game?” My personal answer to that has
always been “Not necessarily... if the removal of convenience is done on purpose, it can be a powerful tool” In Fatal Frame 3, this feature - the
automatic targeting of ghosts in the vicinity - has been turned into an
active ability that you can unlock later in the game and activate or deactivate at will. The interesting thing about this is that this
little example of a mechanical change foreshadows one of the central
themes of the entire game: Discomfort Where You
Expect Comfort to Be. We’ll get to that later in more depth,
but the gist is that the designers make extremely deliberate
use of the omission of comfort in order to enhance the effectiveness
of its mechanics on the game’s feel, its message and - the horror. So, we follow Yuu deeper into the mansion – drawn by an allure that
Rei can’t place just yet, and whose unraveling is going to
be at the center of her quest. But just before she can reach him as he walks
away into an old-shrine house, she’s interrupted
by a feverish vision: a mysterious spectral woman
covered head to toe in tattoos stalks her, grips her and suddenly
Rei finds herself tied to an altar-slab where young shrine maidens
drive nails through her hands and feet while a sinister patchwork of
tattoos spreads violently across her body. What first appears like a simple hallucination
or daydream quickly turns out to be the start of
an ancient curse Rei was exposed to due to the sorrow and
guilt she’s been carrying with her. She returns home, haunted by restless nights,
and eventually discovers that what she saw was not just a figment of her imagination. From that point on, whenever she falls asleep, Rei finds herself transported
back into the Manor of Sleep, living on in a parallel world of nightmares
that are innately connected with the waking life: pictures she takes with the iconic camera
obscura in the dreams miraculously appear within the real-life antique camera
obscura she found in her late partner’s room - and the more she learns about
the mansion’s lore and mysteries and the more she attempts to fight the curse, the more the same tattoo she had seen in that vision
before, slowly but inexorably spreads across
her body when she’s awake. So, since there is literally no way to
escape the haunted nightmare estate, since we all gotta sleep eventually – Rei braces herself and takes up
the fight against this ancient curse with the best and only weapon we have to combat the
uncanny powers of mysticism and folklore: (camera flash) Knowledge! (ghost screams) Folklore has always been one of
the most front-and-center elements that have made the Fatal Frame games unique
in how they present and explore their narrative, both when it comes to the
story and setting of the games, as well as the role of the player therein. The central thesis of my first video in this
little mini-series was indeed how Fatal Frame brilliantly incorporates Folklore into
writing, design, scripting and the gameplay itself as a vessel for horror; an aspect that the
second entry in the series drastically expanded upon. But if we're completely honest, there was
always a little bit of a gap, a certain ludonarrative disconnect
between the role of the game's protagonist and the one of the player themself. In Both Fatal Frame 1 and 2, you take control
of a protagonist who is stuck in a singular, uninterrupted event throughout which
she must uncover forgotten knowledge around the folkloric perils she encounters. While the player gets the scattered beats
and snippets of information syphoned uncommented on their screen, having to
piece together story and lore in their own mind. It is silently assumed that
the player's state of knowledge, including the conclusions they draw at all
times... sort of overlap? with that of the protagonist; but the situations couldn't be more varied, could they? Fatal Frame is a series that deputizes the
player to amateur Anthropologists - it's a central part of the appeal of
its.. archeological style of storytelling. Fatal Frame 3 takes this aspect of the series’
concept to a whole new level and tries to completely shatter the
gap between players and protagonist. Because deciphering and interpreting long-forgotten
folklore through ancient texts and artifacts is a long and arduous process that requires
tedious research and a broad set of skills, sources and first and foremost, patience. And that is precisely what Rei Amakura's
vocation as freelance photographer focuses on. The game's story, in contrast to its predecessors,
takes place over the course of multiple weeks, and a vital part plays out in Rei's very home
- the place where she lives, sleeps, develops her photographs in her dark room and actively
researches the folkloric origins of her subjects by resorting to a range of different resources
she has at her disposal. When we take photos of important objects,
apparitions or points-of-interest in the Dream World, we find those photos as undeveloped
film in our camera back in the waking world. We can then develop the pictures in Rei’s
dark room - and then go on to do research on those photos directly,
by, for instance, searching her fiancée's bookshelf filled with
papers and works on various folkloric topics, or we find matching exhibits
in his collection of artifacts - or we listen to audio recordings on
the tape recorder in her room. We accompany Rei the protagonist herself,
in the process of researching to uncover the mystery,
including things she doesn't know or comprehend yet. Every time we obtain new information, Rei actively
writes into her extensive and well-sorted journal, where she keeps track of people,
places, stories and other information. Our state of knowledge (when playing
the game for the first time of course) is identical to Rei’s
at any given time, and the things she says
and writes down... reflect that. Learning the folkloric background behind events,
places and people we encounter in the dream world through Rei, bit by bit, piece by piece,
makes the player feel far more in sync with the protagonist's thought process, and getting the
information drip-fed feels far less like video-gamey exposition-dump -
but more like both Rei and the player go through the same process
of gradual discovery together. At the same time, Fatal Frame doubles down
on the narrative weight of the Camera Obscura -- in previous games, it was already a central
element that embodied the symbolic efficacy of the empiric over the powers
of make-believe and folklore: capturing a ghost on celluloid
and proving its existence – documenting it for posterity is
what literally saps its life-force. - [Jesse] Yeah Science! - [Ragnar] But in Fatal Frame 3, it takes the
Camera Obscura’s role another step further, because the "pictures" you take
are no longer just a byproduct – useless collectibles that reduce the
camera itself to a metaphor-ghost-cannon, but since you record and then
process the information later at home - with the players actively
developing the film in the darkroom (which is a really cool feature if I might say so), it makes the iconic Camera finally an
integral part of the Folklorist element of the games. It's... genius; now on even another level. It is well known that many hands make light work and that is just as true for
folklore as for anything else – and luckily, Rei is a firm believer of this maxim. She’s working together with her assistant
and photography student Miku, who conveniently lives together with her as her
roommate in her house, and she doesn't just assist Rei with
lighting and setup on her outdoor photoshoots, she's also exceedingly helpful
when it comes to research. Whenever we develop a picture that contains
something of interest for our studies; we can ask Miku to do some
external research on her own, and she'll get back to us some time later with
all the info she can scrape together. And yes -- series veterans know, this roommate
of ours is none other than Miku Hinasaki, protagonist of the first game and survivor
of the Himuro Mansion incident, which was the catalyst for her to move in with Rei and take interest in photography
and folklore studies in the first place. Rei’s fiancee Yuu happened to be a close
friend of Miku’s brother Mafuyu, who went missing during the events of the first game. After the Himuro Mansion incident, Yuu took
Miku in after Mafuyu's disappearance, and they lived together in
Rei’s house from that point on. At the same time, Rei regularly receives
investigation notes in the mail from Kei Amakura, another close friend of her late fiancée
who's not yet aware of Yuu’s death. Kei happens to be looking into a similarly
strange curse that has befallen his niece who... turns out to be none other than Mio Amakura,
protagonist of Fatal Frame II - Crimson Butterfly. Kei regularly sends us updates on his
findings which turn out to overlap with and thereby actively contribute to our own research, and later in the game he even joins us in the
house and becomes an active part of the Team. It's a vivid process of multiple people actively
working on uncovering the same mystery together over a long stretch of time, by giving their
unique perspectives and cross-referencing their respective
pool of information with each other. It feels... believable. (College & Electric Youth - A Real Hero playing) Now.... this next part is where some people might
feel inclined to disagree on a personal level, because it might seem like this is
more of an opinion than an objective analysis, but my point here is really more structural
to how the game is written than.. subjective because Rei is, in many ways, a far better written
protagonist than any of the previous main characters. That doesn't mean you can't *like* the other
characters more, individually, but Fatal Frame III goes a long way to
really create a believable, relatable character with an actual personality profile,
back story, quirks, dreams, fears, habits, mannerisms that make
her feel like a (♫real human being♫) and that in turn makes her
motives that much more grounded in and relevant to the story she’s central to. Now, I'm not saying that a long-winding backstory
always makes a character "deeper" or better - just think how much personality Samus Aran
from the first Metroid games conveyed through purely
incidental and organic storytelling vs. how flat she felt. with hundreds
of lines of soliloquoy droning on about a barely related backstory in Other M. But in many ways, if we're completely honest,
the previous protagonists *within their respective games themselves*
were relatively generic shells -- Miku was a schoolgirl whose brother went missing
so she went to Himuro Mansion in search for him; - [Miku] Ni-san... - [Ragnar] Mio was a school girl whose sister went
missing in the rural Japanese Minakami village so she went in search for her. - [Mio] Onee-chan... - [Ragnar] And sure, their characterization
grows across each game through their actions, their attachments, fears and the experiences they
make during their respective ordeals, no question.. but their stories don’t really encourage to become the
subject of deep character studies like pretty much every Silent Hill or Rule of
Rose character has received over the years. Because there... really
isn't that much to explore. (Miku gasps) I dunno – I might also be a bit biased though
because Rei’s also the protagonist that I personally relate the most to - so take
my opinions with a pinch of salt. Always do that actually, no matter what. But for starters: For the first time, our
protagonist is not in high-school anymore but a fully-grown adult professional woman. She has devoted years of her life to studying
her passion (photography) and turned it into a career (relatable). She has also, and as it’s insinuated, always
had, the tendency towards overworking herself, and often uses her work as a coping mechanism
and escapism for difficulties in her private life -- a character trait that was strongly
amplified by her recent traumatic loss, which pushed her into deep post-traumatic depression. Her attempt to suffocate her depression with
endless work then, in turn, resulted in severe sleep issues (RELATABLE). Especially since we don't just experience
Rei within the Dream Manor, the place where discovery and fighting takes place,
but also accompany her in her private space where she lives her everyday life, her character is given so much breathing
room compared to previous games. We can deduce a plethora of details about her as a
person from environmental storytelling for instance: she’s shown to like and dislike things (wow), she has things she’s fascinated
by and that she hyperfocuses on. (SUPER RELATABLE) (80s drums) Her apartment alone is a mirror that tells
us so much more about her as a person than we were allowed to discover
about any of the previous protagonists across the length of
their respective games. And to top it all off, she and Miku have a cat! And you can even pet it! (80s drums) And because she is a far more fleshed
out character is incredibly conducive to the story and the horror game experience – because her motives are more complex,
clear and understandable. At the center of the story is a curse that
revolves around people stricken with very similar troubles to her, post traumatic stress disorder
caused by the loss of a loved one – and a deep sense of survivor's guilt. Rei herself is tormented by this due to
the car crash that she feels guilty for, not just for having caused it, but she’s torn by
the remorse over having survived while her partner lost his life in it. This motivation, while learning how other
tormented souls in the Manor of Sleep suffer from similar experiences of loss and guilt, makes exploring and learning
more about this lucid purgatory while trying to find a way to aid those similarly
afflicted to Rei so much more engaging and motivating. If the previous games had one major
downside it was exactly this aspect that its protagonists felt comparably
interchangeable for the stories they were central to. Rei Amakura is the antithesis of this: the story of Fatal Frame III
is the story of her own internal strife, which makes her the seminal
thread in a deeply interwoven network of victims who find themselves trapped in this sinister curse, and whose only hope is that
Rei takes up their suffering... ...and makes it part of her own. Now it might have sounded like I was a little
harsh on Miku and Mio here but let me say that this is really something
that I've only really started realizing once I played the third game, and felt the impact
a more deeply fleshed out protagonist and a purposeful meta-gameplay
can have on my investment into a game’s story. But this is where one of Fatal Frame III's
most brilliant aspects comes into play: In my previous video, I mentioned how Fatal Frame
II is a standalone story in the same mythologic universe
that takes place before the events, and has only a few, relatively obscure direct links to
the first game. It works.. completely on its own. But instead of doing its own thing again,
Fatal Frame III takes both of its siblings by the hand and unites them
into a trinity that makes each entry better than it is on alonw on its
own two (proverbial) feet. And it does that by neither.. retconning overwriting
retroactively trying to improve anything destructively nor by introducing new elements that contradict
the first two games. They still stand on their own. The keys to this are - yes - the mythological
universe these stories share - but more importantly, the emotional long-term
effect the incidents in the first two games have on the characters involved. Because Fatal Frame 3, as I mentioned before,
brings back the people from the previous games and makes them a central part of its own narrative, most prominently the first game's protagonist Miku – but here, these characters are given equally
more space to breathe and to develop greater depth – room to flourish As. A. Person. In Fatal Frame 3, Miku lives together with
Rei and we are now, for the first time, given the chance to experience her
everyday life and family situation as well and just like with Rei,
discover stuff like... her caring and supportive nature, especially
around Rei in the aftermath of her personal loss. And we also get to paint a picture of her
personality through how she lives, how she decorates her room,
how she cares for the cat, things she collects that matter to her,
that she finds pretty or cute, and so on. Environmental character building. And none of these clash with or contradict the
comparably trivial character depicted in Fatal Frame 1 but these new, added layers of personality
serve to enhance Miku within the setting; so much so that replaying the first game afterwards
gives you a satisfying feeling of greater familiarity with the
character as a series veteran. That is especially the case because Miku also
ends up being heavily involved in the Tattooed Curse of the Manor of Sleep. Because Miku is likewise trying
to process and come to terms with the loss of a loved one – and... we get to witness
the effect this has on her first hand in Fatal Frame 3. Because ultimately,
that’s what The Tattooed Curse is all about; it feasts on vulnerable people
who have experienced painful loss and ensnares them in the grips of the Nightmare Estate -- and Rei happens to be at the center of it all,
taking on the role of the bound one who takes up "The Tormented"’s fears
and anxieties within herself. This interconnection of fates leads to the
game’s wonderful twist that in certain chapters when Rei goes to sleep and finds
herself transported into the Manor of Sleep, she enters the haunted place in the
shoes of none other than Miku herself. It was a wonderful surprise for me when I
encountered it for the first time I gotta say - the sequence introducing her first
segment is a wonderful throwback to the opening shot of the first Fatal Frame. And this inclusion of other people’s mental
landscape makes the entire setting feel so much more surreal and otherworldly, ESPECIALLY if you have played
the first two Fatal Frame games. This purgatorial scenario is molded from the
innermost sorrows of a host of people, which is represented in the
very structure of the building: a collection of the places associated
with traumatic memories of different people amalgamated into a singular,
grotesque architectural construct. We play the first few chapters as Rei and
gradually explore and uncover more corridors, courtyards and rooms of the haunted estate,
Metroidvania style, until we eventually rediscover the same
place through the eyes of other people and find parts of the architecture
that represent the very rooms we still remember from
Himuro Mansion itself, the setting of from the first game, but seamlessly
integrated into the structure of the Manor. There is something seriously uncanny and...
wrong about how this feels - and.. I wanna say.. this is a tremendously cool
effect that only works quite like this if you've played the first game and have become
intimately familiar with its layout and most iconic places
across the duration of the game and then suddenly find them within a place
where they just... shouldn’t be. But it’s also not a complete replica of
Himuro Mansion -- it’s only a partial mirror, conflated and condensed, like someone’s memory who only
remembered the most striking landmarks that left the biggest impression
on their long-term recollection of it. It is how dreams and memories work. And it's not just Miku, but we also get to
embody another character who himself struggles in his
own way with the loss of a loved one brought about by the
events of previous games: The second deuteragonist Kei,
uncle of Fatal Frame II’s Mio, who's been fervently
researching the strange curse that has befallen his niece after
her ordeal in Minakami Village. His segments too give access to directly interlinked
segments of the Manor of Sleep that seamlessly integrate into the location,
but that are also, clearly, places from Fatal Frame II various houses: (camera flash) There’s segments of the Kurosawa House,
the Osaka House and even the cell that Mayu was locked in during
the 4th chapter -- only that this time it's the spectral
recollection of Mio who's trapped and Kei the one searching for the keys,
trying to free her from captivity. And the beauty of it is the way in which these
places tie into each other, which makes you wonder just how many different jigsaw
pieces the Mansion is truly assembled from -- because Miku and Kei, and by extension Mio as well, are
only a few of a good many of other “Tormented” souls whose sorrows and memories form the foundation
of the Manor of Sleep and its Tattooed Curse. (Rei gasps) On top of that, playing three different characters
in a lucid hot-seat during select chapters of the game isn't just a neat
gimmick, it also comes with some really
enjoyable gameplay twists: All the previous titles were,
typical for Survival Horror, Metroidvania-structured. The first game exclusively
took place in a single location, a large traditional Japanese
estate whose corridors and chambers gradually opened up new
wings and segments to the player; like when you got the right key, the right
piece of information, solved a puzzle or acquired other things that would
unlock previously closed-off spaces -- and then regularly you’d unlock a shortcut
closing back to the main loop. Fatal Frame 2 expanded this
approach to a grander scale by playing out across an entire village,
with multiple self-contained locations that were pretty much individual
mini-metroidvania stages in-between. Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented returns to a single,
self-contained location again: the convoluted and maze-like Manor of Sleep, but it is one that stays largely
interesting and versatile by incorporating many different
locations and buildings into its structure -- often in a way that doesn't make sense;
a somnambulistic, non-euclidean labyrinth; with the twist that each character
doesn't just play slightly differently -- like Kei for instance
introduces stealth passages where you encounter Ghosts you can't fight back,
but have to actively hide from and the respective characters’ cameras have
different functions, strengths and weaknesses and you level them individually -- but each of the playable characters can
enter spaces that others can't. Like Kei for instance is physically
stronger than the other two and can move furniture that's
blocking off doors and corridors around; and once you've done that, these roadblocks
stay out of the way for the other characters too -- or Miku is a bit more petite,
so she can crouch into smaller spaces. And let me just say,
some of those crouch-spaces... phhh... have some of the nastiest ghost encounters
in the entire series waiting for the player. (Miku screams, ghost wails) In my personal experience, this was really
the Fatal Frame with the most absolutely cleverly pulled off scares that really
caught me by surprise and made me jump – all emerging from gameplay and
not cheaply scripted in a sequence; which is quite the feat for someone
who's usually extremely stoic at any attempt to startle
me in games and films. The combat in Fatal Frame III is just as perfectly
orchestrated as in previous games and clearly stands on the shoulders
of the second game's achievement. The camera obscura that you customize with rare, but
strong film and various additional features like for instance pushing back
ghosts upon flash or slowing down your enemies movements,
so you can more easily get that perfect shutter chance
shot for maximum damage - the eponymous Fatal Frame. It’s the iconically unique and
combat style the series is known for! But even though the fights are just as well,
if not even a tad better-designed and engaging as in the universally
beloved Crimson Butterfly, and even though the game does its best to spice up the formula with
interesting little twists in enemy-design even moreso than its predecessor,
it is the three different playable characters who ultimately save it becoming too monotonous
over time, for they bring a genuinely refreshing twist to the formula that keep the gameplay
diverse and help break up the perpetual cycle of recurrently
revisiting the same location over and over again. But yeah, just like Miku, who was more of
a passive observer in the first game, has been given more space
to grow as an actual character, in the same way Kei's struggle in
helping his niece to overcome the curse – as well as the plethora of deeper
folkloric background his work provides – gives Fatal Frame II's story more
background and depth in hindsight. And this, in turn makes replaying the second game,
equally, more enjoyable once you know so much more about the
protagonist and her personal background. Fatal Frame III genuinely made me want to
pick up the first two games again after getting through the trilogy,
and it was great! It's really something I
didn't expect from myself as someone who constantly struggles to
find enough time to play games just for myself. I thought it would take me years until I got around
to revisiting them after having just played them, but Fatal Frame 3 added so much
to the trinity as a completed piece that it almost felt like discovering
them with completely new eyes. And that is one of the rarest master strokes a game,
or... a sequel can achieve. And... a big part of this character-centered
approach in doing that also makes a lot of sense for what
Fatal Frame III is trying to achieve, because in the entire series --
The Tormented is by far and away the most clear-cut
"Psychological Horror"-Fatal Frame there is. (Akira Yamaoka - Silent Circus playing) Fatal Frame III adds deeply personal elements
to the established formula. Of course, previous stories always had a "personal"
stake for the protagonists; rescuing family members from peril and such,
but as we've established before, in Fatal Frame III we don't just play out the
immediate events surrounding the loss of a loved one; we deal with the psychological
aftermath of losing one. Rei's fiancée... has already passed away and his spectre in the Manor of Sleep
is a manifestation of her personal grief and the guilt she feels over it and that she
can't bring herself to absolve herself from. And the House itself is an ID-machine, a landscape
woven from painful memories, fears, anxieties and trauma of multiple people who
suffer from similar loss of a loved one and the resulting sense of Survivor's Guilt -
the leitmotif of the curse. In that way, the Manor comes far closer to
a surreal nightmare landscape like the Town of Silent Hill,
which manifests the trapped victims' innermost demons into literal fierce adversaries that haunt and torment
them while they try to work through their regrets. The place is their very own, personal purgatory,
a cruel but cleansing place that directs them towards self-realization and eventually,
hopefully, redemption. Similar to Silent Hill 2 for instance, it’s a patchwork
woven from multiple people's subconsciousness, since the Manor of Sleep combines elements
that are close and personal to Rei's very own story, but morphs them together with elements through
which she enters the personal hell of other people. "Hell is Other People." One aspect I talked about in the previous chapter is
how Fatal Frame 3 uses different playable characters to break up monotony; and this is also a
bigger theme the game consciously embraces: Rei's home is a place that, very similar to
how it functions in Silent Hill 4: The room, serves as a central hub and a place of refuge between the bouts of exploring
the isekai - the otherworld. In both games, Rei’s house,
and respectively, Henry's apartment, are places that you regularly return to and where you
can feel relief for a moment from the constant tension, a safe haven where players can rest and recuperate
from the dangers of the nightmare world out there. I love this element because it allows for
a change in pacing that diversifies the gameplay of the Mansion-sections: in Rei’s home it mostly revolves around routine
and feels more like doing classic adventure tasks -- talk with Miku, receive a phone call,
develop photos, explore, read up on stuff... pet the cat! do some research; these segments
establish a difference-in-kind that makes returning to the mansion after a short
break feel more... engaging again. When you highlight everything in a text,
you highlight nothing; And that's the same for survival horror gameplay. sometimes it’s good to take a breather once in a while. It helps the action segments stand
out more within the tension graph. (camera flash) (ghost squeals) Classic Survival Horror games often have a
very limited range of difference-in-kind: explore, fight, inventory-management, puzzle-solving,
which "can" get stale after a good while of reiterating the same rotation over and over
again -- so where previous entries in the series had you perpetually under peril (like,
if you strolled around for too long, you’d eventually get attacked
by random encounter ghosts, meaning you really never had a
moment to let your guard down) in Fatal Frame III,
these segments of "home" make the fight more bearable and generally work towards a
more diverse play experience. (Diablo Tristram Theme playing) Giving both players and the
protagonist a place to return to, a haven and emotional anchor is an incredibly
effective method to establish a sense of belonging. I bet that there are a great many
people having incredibly fond associations with the music that’s playing right now; and that doesn’t just come from the track by
Matt Uelmen being an excellent piece of music, but it has to do with the associations
formed over many hours of playtime in which this guitar arrangement was
gradually conditioned to be associated with the emotion of
returning to relative safety. - [Deckard Cain] Hello my
friend! Stay awhile and listen! - [Ragnar] But, and this is something
I always admired in games-- I also mentioned earlier that Fatal Frame III makes the deliberate omission or withdrawal
of comfort a recurring design theme, and the house is one of the
most striking examples for that. Because very similar to Silent Hill 4 over time, this carefully established
sanctity and safety of Rei's home becomes gradually invaded from the nightmare realm. At first it is sounds, glitches,
foreign sensations that are out of place. Something’s not right. A pair of feet behind the curtain that disappear
the moment you look closer. Footsteps heard in a part of the house where
there shouldn’t be anyone. But then gradually these happenings
become stronger and more threatening, and it gets clear that the Dream Manor is bleeding
into reality -- and that makes Rei's ordeal all the more perilous. Not only can she not escape
the horrors when she's asleep, but now it even follows her into her own home, sullying the taken-for-granted
comfort of her own four walls to truly torment her every step of the way. Convenience-is-the-Fear-Killer! Horror, by definition, is pretty much the
opposite of having a fun and light-hearted time. And this invasion of privacy and sanctity
is an excellent means of interactive storytelling only possible like this in video games, to make players
feel the perpetual anxiety Rei herself is experiencing. Through that, Fatal Frame III manages a damn near
perfect blend of folklore and psychological horror, wrapped in a tried-and-true,
honed PS2 survival horror package. And hey, the inclusion of a modern Japanese
single-family home as a recurring setting makes Fatal Frame 3 – the third entry in a series that
already boldly wore its inspirations on its sleeve – (loud scary percussion) (Rei gasps) even more feel like playing a
bonafide early-2000s J-Horror movie. (the iconic Ju-On clicking noise) (TV static) Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is yet another
example of a piece of video game history that gets increasingly hard to preserve. If you want to obtain an original PS2 version,
you gotta expect to find used copies among the more pricey collector sales. It's not quite in the regions of a Kuon or
Rule of Rose just yet, but it certainly doesn't make it easy to
get access to the game the legal way. Your only digital option at the moment of
release of this video is a re-release within the PS2 classics
lineup in the PS3 online store. No further releases came after that -
and I'm not incredibly optimistic it's gonna happen anytime soon,
because – with the Fatal Frame entries that came out after the third for Wii, 3DS and
Wii U gradually dropping in acclaim and popularity – And Nintendo,
who by now owns the complete publishing rights and has all the say over what
does and doesn’t happen with it, doesn't appear all that interested in
engage with Fatal Frame anymore, despite producer Keisuke Kikuchi
repeatedly stating that many of the old team would be eager and willing
to revive the series any day. And even if the Fatal Frame series gets picked
up, you can usually expect it to be primarily centered around its far more
prominent second entry Crimson Butterfly. So as with many abandoned classics,
emulation does a lot of heavy lifting for the heavily neglected preservation of this
game. If you’re interested in
emulating it yourself, the footage in this video was
recorded with the PCSX2 emulator and I’ve provided a link in
the description to a google doc with instructions on how to
set it up to make it run neatly. But this lack of availability
and publisher interest renders Fatal Frame III a seriously
overlooked and underrated jewel, and in many ways it is the most interesting entry in
one of the most seminal Survival Horror series in history,
that never really got the credit it deserved. Fatal Frame III remains my favorite because
it is a game that dares to change the formula with things off the safe path, and that’s
always something that I’ve highly respected, more so than the aspiration for perfectly
polished mechanics and systems: (ghost making constipated pain noises) Aside from that it resonates much stronger
with me personally through the character of Rei, I also love the game for going the
bold path of actively omitting comfort to create tension with game systems; it's
something that a lot of people intuitively loathe, and think of as a bad thing but that I've personally always
held in extremely high regards. It is the potentially more rewarding path of
higher resistance from a game design perspective, and the result is a story that I intrinsically care
deeper about, as a player, because I feel more strongly
immersed in the story and its systems; I feel more like I’m an active part of its narrative
than just a generic schoolgirl. And most of all, I love this game because
it makes me appreciate its predecessors even more than I did before. Fatal Frame III embraces and cherishes what
made the series so special in the first place and combines the three into an inseparable,
unholy trinity of survival horror games. And here we are, thank you so much for watching! We’ve now gotten, pretty much exactly a
year after the first one – to the end of my video essay crusade
through the classic PS2 Fatal Frame trilogy! This doesn’t mean it’s gonna be
the last thing I do on Fatal Frame, I have some more things potentially in mind, but
none of it is, like, written in stone at this point. So let me know how you feel about
branching out on the series in the future! A big reason why it took me an entire year is that
each of these videos took a long time to make, start to finish; from the initial
idea over replaying, intensive recording, note-taking, writing, copy-editing over the whole
production process each video was developed over the course of multiple
months until the final result. That’s how my channel, as a one-man operation,
has been working for a long time and why the one-upload-per-month schedule was
the most I could manage while working full-time on it. But thanks to your loyalty and
the generous support of my Patrons, I firmly plan to increase this rhythm this year,
and after I’ve taken some time off for resting after a year of hard work in 2020, plus some necessary
red tape and a lot of preparation work in January, the first taste of my new increased efforts I
intend to share with you this month already – after this video today, the next release, covering the freezing-cold Ukrainian
survival horror shooter Cryostasis is scheduled for just a week
after this video comes out! And because I’m able to finally work
together with more talent on the regular, I’m firmly aiming to release a good deal more videos
in 2021 compared to the years past. I’m excited for this year, really am! This wouldn’t be possible without the undying
support of my viewers and, as I mentioned, the financial crowdfunding support
of those who pitch in on Patreon. If you’d like to join the community
and support my work as well, then please follow this link and contribute for a
monthly donation within your personal comfort levels. It really makes all the
difference in the world. Thank you so much for considering. My special gratitude
thank-you-for-your-immortal-support-shoutout this time goes out to these
wonderful people: Thank you to Ian Rhodes Swallowtailnights Kevin H. Yang Sophie Poulsen Chris-chan Shannon Blue Kellie Michelle Russell Corey Marr Andrew Hines Chuck Taylor Lex Reckless Nineball9606 Alex Papow Dr Hayley-Isabella Cawley Norbert Gerard Matynka Jin Hansson Matt Gretton Starina Abrahamsen David Zelenak Hunter Crawford & Margarete Strawn Max Macula Pablo Arcelus Laird Wackyla Terri Collins PookaPrincess Malym Agustin Ortega Thwagum Raul Blanco Nekot The Brave Wobbles and Bean the Wonder Ducks Quentin Prod'homme David Southpaw Catherine Escobar Chriszy Lorenz E. Buben Tighe McCandless Refkins Cordelia Crescendo Caspar Rahm Billy Lott Christine Kennan Ward Isabella Stoner FaultyGear Boris Bügling Federico Rocha giselle almonte Dana Rosa RoninKrom aka daniel242172 Hoang Vu Until next time, ta ta!
