It's been a trying time for us, the survival horror fans. You know what I mean. I remember a couple years ago, you could barely turn around without running into two or three Resident Evils, not to mention six clones by whomever and two games based entirely on the concept of making survival horror even MORE frustrating by including bulky and awkward lightgun mechanics into the control scheme.

But it's not like that right now. It's been almost a year and a half since the last 'true' Resident Evil game, and it's going to be longer still. Other pickings are pretty slim - aside from Fatal Frame 2, the only other big name (hell, the only other PERIOD) in survival horror to come out in the past year was Silent Hill 3, and that was in August. You can expect that four months later, I was banking every last hope I had on Fatal Frame 2 popping up and blowing my mind in a way that the first one did.

Sisters? Lovers? You're in control!

The original Fatal Frame had the mysterious power to turn a group of four grown men into screaming children at the slightest appearance of any charred-faced denizen of some tortured Japanese afterlife. I remember well the "tape recorder" scene, which I'm pretty sure has been toned down for the Xbox port. I recall that thing screaming at us and, what's more, I recall us screaming right back, I might just be a huge baby though. That's a possibility. With such knowledge and the hopes of a nation resting in the very cockles of my heart, I decided that the inaugural weeks of December would be filled with the cacophony of cries that can only come from a group of men alone, in the dark, playing video games. Who in their right mind would argue with me? Also, with one specific friend back from college, I knew to expect a certain measure of 'Pause the game when she gets hit, you can totally see her panties!'

But that's a story for another time.

Fatal Frame 2 is the tale of two sisters, with all the weird lesbian pseudo-incest one might expect from Japan (and this ad). Mio and Mayu, who spend surprisingly little time practicing kissing on each other, inadvertently stumble upon an abandoned city during a late afternoon walk through their favorite wood. The city is, and I know this comes as a shock, haunted by the ghosts of a certain calamity that occurred "X" years ago, during the failure of "X" ritual that seems unbearably cruel, but is required to preserve the human race (or at least a group of random Japanese villagers).

This is something I like to see, very much. Fatal Frame 2 has no connection with its prequel, save for some of its themes. Sure, camera's still there, there's another crazy ghost girl on the loose causing trouble, but it takes the series in a totally different direction than the former, while still retaining the key concepts involved.

Best... allegory... ever.

Fatal Frame 2 is, in so many words, much more a subdued tale than the former. It entails less jump moments and less ghosts wandering around chanting about ropes and wondering where their eyes went. In fact, the ghosts themselves have had a total makeover now. Whereas in Fatal Frame 1 the ghosts seemed almost random, with only light attention to some sort of theme, the ghosts in Fatal Frame 2 have bonded together into almost a perfectly cohesive whole. In the first game, the blinded woman was one of the rare few non-boss ghosts that actually fit in with the story as a whole. In Fatal Frame 2 you'll encounter over and over ghosts with obvious significance to the plot at large. Mio, who gets the lion's share of the story, spends a non-insignificant amount of time fending off trios of villagers searching for the lost maidens of some ritual past. An hour or two in the game you start running into the flensed ghosts of a failed ritual. This is much more effective than "Here's a girl with a broken back. Why is it broken? WHO KNOWS! Why does the other girl crawl around on the floor, you ask? WE SO CRAZY ANNA JAPANESE WE NO KNOW WHAT WE DOING." Assuming this is the same team as the first, it's the same director anyway, they've really gotten themselves together. Shibata, no longer a first timer, has likely spent a lot less of his precious yen on sake and those "Japanese geishas", because what we're given here is a cleaner, more concise Fatal Frame.

Mio and Mayu's objective, as it always is, is to get themselves out of Dodge before, you know, cowboys come get them. This is not say there are any cowboy in Fatal Frame 2, ditto for the cowboy ghosts, which is unfortunate, but it still manages to plug along without missing a beat, despite this rather egregious omission.

The sisters are soon split up, as you could've guessed, leaving Mio mostly alone and fending for herself. Sure, there's a ghost that helps her out on occassion, but we like to disregard those. They have a nasty tendency of turning evil on a whim, when the script demands for dramatic boss battles.

Mio's journey through All God's Village is, for the most part, a quiet one. The scares of Fatal Frame 2 are definitely on par with its predecessor, but it's a somber game overall. The color palette used in the game makes Fatal Frame 1 look like a neon sign in a red light district. There are points in the game where you'll notice, with surprise, that it actually ISN'T monochrome. "Hah! Fooled you!" the game exclaims. The ghosts are given similar treatment with a more wispy, etheral appearance. The top scorer in the realm of artistic design though, is the brief segments played through the eyes of the lamed Mayu. She limps along in a static-y world of grey and black, punctuated only by the extreme reds of blood trails and the eponymous crimson butterflies. It's awesome.

Dear diary: Today was so totally fun, I...

Sound follows a similar theme. Sure, when a ghost is up in your face something is blaring at you. All things considered, though, all the sound effects have been taken down a notch. This is especially true in with the "SHUNK-SHUNK-SHUNK" sound of the camera charging from Fatal Frame 1. It's been replaced with a more impatient, warbling electronic hum. I didn't particularly care for that. As is to be expected in a game about Japanese mythology, there's also about six dozen different types of chimes you'll learn to recognize and identify at will by the end of the game. No surprise there.

But I know what you're all looking for here. The camera. Well, it's... better, despite now being referred to as the "Camera Obscura". The basic machinations remain the same, but there's about a hundred new features to try out and play around with. The most notable is that you aren't limited in the use of your special powers by a set amount of consumable items. Fatal Frame was severely restricted by that, at least for me anyway. But I'm weird like that and I ended up saving all those stupid stones for the last boss, for whom I didn't need to use them anyway! Piss me off guys, piss me off. Spirit stones, still in the game, are now used to govern the abilities you'll be able to upgrade on your camera, which is a fair trade I think. People of the survival horror genre are used to squirreling away things like spirit stones. I trust that any experienced gamer out there will understand the mechanics of the upgrade system without sparing even a glance at the instructions. I mean, come on, it's survival horror. They didn't exactly reinvent the wheel. No, they were too busy making egregious terminology errors. I might've only taken one Physics class, but *I* know what a "Camera Obscura" is. Apparently the creators (or possibly localizers) of Fatal Frame are not so scientifically inclined. Yes, I would love to defeat my enemies using only BOX WITH A HOLE IN IT. Congratulations!

Forget that. Storywise, I'd almost say this game and Fatal Frame 1 are an almost perfect analogy to Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill. Both have excellent subject matter, but Fatal Frame 2 gives you the ability to defile your underpants while taking in what would otherwise be an entirely normal abandoned town. The morals of the two games (Fatal Frame and the sequel) are similar, but the methods used to come to these conclusions could not be any more different. The ending to Fatal Frame 2, while aesthetically the same idea as the first game, is probably one of the best I've seen in a video game ever and the "crimson butterflies" result in one of the more evocative uses of symbolism in the media of video gaming, maybe the best ever. If I was a lesser man, I would've cried at the ending. As it is, I managed to constrain myself to shrieking in terror at the appearance of tiny doll children hungry for my virgin blood. Seems like a fair trade to me, but your mileage may vary.

I'll conclude it with this: Hey Japan, I've got a moral for you. STOP DIGGING UP GIANT HOLES IN THE GROUND WITH EVIL SPIRITS IN THEM AND MAYBE YOU WON'T HAVE TO KILL YOUR FREAKIN' BABIES ANYMORE.