Some time ago I wrote a journal article about why I thought survival horror as we knew it was on the decline. Though I enjoyed Resident Evil 4, it worried me that the genre I so loved was about to disappear. A couple months later games like Obscure pulled me back from the brink and confirmed that survival horror, at least in some respect, was still alive and well.
After playing Fatal Frame 3 I'm wondering if I should've been careful of what I wished for.
I remember a story my ex-roommate related to me about his purchase of Fatal Frame 1. At his local gameshop there was a Korean lady who was quite fond of him. Noting his predilection towards games of the "scary" variety, she held up Fatal Frame and screeched in quite the triumphant way "Itsa like a Pokemon! You take a picture!" My roommate, thus befuddled, could not but buy the game. It wasn't until his walk home that he realized the game that Jane, Korean lady, was referring to was the delightful photographic romp: Pokemon Snap!
Well that didn't inspire a lot of hope in us, but we were fortunate enough in that, aside from the ability to take pictures, Pokmeon Snap had very little to do with Fatal Frame. Indeed... I don't recall any Pokemon game with the ability to make me PEE MY PANTS IN TERROR. There are enough jump scares and tense moments to keep the average survival horror gamer interested. While the story of (constantly out of breath) Miku trying to track down her lost brother wasn't all that complex or interesting, it was a good enough excuse to play through once and execute some ethereal baddies. Bad story can be par for the course. Nobody's comparing Resident Evil 3 to the Geoffrey Chaucer, after all.
During Fatal Frame 2 I was on break from college. It was a happy time, and since I hadn't quenched my survival horror appetite in a few months (the release of Silent Hill 3 had long passed) I was only too ready to delve into another abandoned village and another human sacrifice. Fatal Frame 2 expanded on the core concepts of the first game and added exciting things like combo shots to the mix. The gameplay felt a lot less clunky and the story was a lot more refined. In Fatal Frame 2 you're constantly kept out of your element; brief moments as the crippled twin Mayu keep you on your toes, and our heroine Mio is constantly contacted by a spirit that may have its own agenda. It reused the stupid 'human sacrifice' angle, sure, but the game was about a heck of a lot more than the "I'm a jilted lover! Wah!!" scenario that its prequel and sequel cry about so profusely.
The most recent iteration in the series arrived on the scene with little fanfare. Admittedly I'm less fastidious about keeping up with gaming news than I once was, but it wasn't until I saw it hanging off the shelf in January, three months past its prime, that I even remembered FF3 existed. I don't believe I've ever let a quarter of a year lapse between the release and my purchase of a survival horror game. Maybe from the start the game was under a bad sign, but it's not like buying it was ever in question. I have such fond memories about the previous game -- mostly stemming from its killer ending -- and I'm an easy sell when "the scariness" is concerned.
Even in my first few minutes of playing I imagined myself hurtling through a chrono-tunnel back to the very dawn of the era of survival horror. As I whirled in the psychedelic corridor, surrounded by various timepieces and discarded Resident Evil 2 N64 cartridges, a startling revelation came upon me:
Fatal Frame 3 is the SAME DANG GAME as the previous two.
Seriously, how many villages in Japan practiced ritual sacrifice? If you're to take Tecmo's word on the matter it's basically all of them. I could excuse them doing that thing twice, but in Fatal Frame's case the third time is most certainly NOT the charm.
From the first moments of my character's awakening a sense of numbness sunk into my very core. Rei, our standard Japanese female horror protagonist (that means she acts and talks like she's on valium), finds herself in yet -another- decrepit mansion in yet -another- decrepit village which no doubt hosts -another- underground sacrificial chamber carved out of the very rock of hell itself. Sound familiar? It's like a town couldn't be built in ancient Japan without killing a twelve year old girl and blinding a whole bunch of maids.
Fatal Frame 3 blows you away with its "sameness". I guess the creators thought throwing in two more characters, Kei and Miku, was enough of an excuse to avoid anything more than a minor overhaul to the game mechanics or storyline. Rei's and Kei's camera mechanics function almost exactly like Mio's from the previous game and Miku, heroine of Fatal Frame 1, fares only slightly better.
Kei is given the throwaway ability of being able to hide from ghosts. The problem with this power, if it even deserves such a dubious title, is that you're completely immobile while you're hiding and the ghost is still free as a bird. The net result of your stealth attempt is sitting there waiting for them to stumble into you in their random wanderings. Even at the parts where the game tries to force you to hide it's better to just bulldoze your way through the ghost and get on with your business.
Miku, who is just as slack-jawed and gaspy as she was in the first game, gets the lion's share of the special abilities. While Rei and Kei are mired in their Fatal Frame 2 gameplay mechanics Miku gets a slow ability with a useful duration (as opposed to Rei's crappier-than-crap 'four seconds if you're lucky' version) AND the ability to double her camera's power at the press of a button. Miku's stages are so easy that you can literally kill her last boss before it even notices you. On the other hand, powering up Kei's camera doesn't even seem to DO anything.
But in the end it doesn't really matter. Miku's ridiculously overpowered weapon is like using a buzzsaw on a cut of filet mignon, that is to say: it wasn't that tough to begin with. Even Kei, whose camera at the end of the game is still worse than Rei's at the beginning, will have no problem slaying his spectral adversaries unless you go out of your way trying to get "last second" shots on the ghosts for extra bonus points.
Aside from cutesy new names like "Crush" for powers that are essentially just upgrades of Fatal Frame 2 powers like "Blast" (also still in the game) there's basically nothing new beyond Miku's skillset. Plus recycling powers like Blast while putting in supercharged versions (Crush) seems exceedingly poor form to me. Do we really need -three- powers that knock a ghost away? Rei gets the astoundingly useless "Flash" ability and Kei has been launched so far back in time that his camera somehow manages to be -more- ancient than the camera in Fatal Frame 1. The ghosts take a similar bent. Don't expect to be wowed when you're attacked yet again by murderous family leaders, blinded women, and preteen handmaidens. Hey, where have I seen you guys before...?
Oh yeah, FATAL FRAME ONE AND TWO.
All the same mechanics are there. Shoot a ghost just before it grabs you, extra points. Line up your shot perfectly in the center, extra points. Slow a ghost then shoot it, extra points. This is all old hat to anyone who's played the previous games, and I'm not expecting a revolution here, but at least Resident Evil had the good grace to include a new gun or two. There's very little to distinguish the 'point and shoot' gameplay of Fatal Frame 3 from Fatal Frame 1, and practically nothing that makes it stand out against Fatal Frame 2. Forgive me for being choosy, but after five years of staring at the same low detail ghost models through a first person view I'm starting to hunger for a bit of change.
The rest of the equation, the story, isn't anything to shout about either. Japanese ghost stories aren't generally scary anyway, and this one can't even muster up the poignant atmosphere that made Fatal Frame 2 good. If you've seen Ringu, or Ju-On (or their American remakes), or even played a previous Fatal Frame, then you know what to expect from every scare. There's going to be dramatic humming music in the cut-scene as the heroine reaches for a drawer or to open a cupboard and then ALL OF A SUDDEN GHOST(!!), cut to the heroine as her eyes go wide and she gives a waifish gasp, end scene. This is the Japanese idea of horror, and it's lame. It was lame in Fatal Frame 1 too, I know, but it was at least halfway novel there... after five years it just doesn't seem so new anymore and the whole "human sacrifice" angle is starting to get a little old.
The only REALLY new element of Fatal Frame 3 is that the entire game takes place inside the dreams of the main characters, but it's poorly accomplished and really serves to weaken the feeling of dread rather than amp it up. Between every "night" you're given a five or ten minute respite inside the fortified walls of Rei's (absolutely enormous) home. Not only that, but you're allowed to leave the 'dream world' at any time via predetermined exits and replenish your stock of healing items and film. If you take advantage of this it makes an easy game even easier and goes just another inch further in breaking the half-assed immersion this game works on you. Aside from a few brief appearances by ghost feet behind a curtain or a spirit wandering down a hallway there's really nothing to distinguish Rei's "house of terror" from any other Japanese domicile, other than the fact that it's ten times as large as any Japanese home ever could be.
Apparently setting it in the character's dreams is also a good excuse for wholesale reuse of areas from the game's prequels. As if it weren't obvious enough already that the creators were cribbing from themselves. What it doesn't steal from previous games it might as well just rip whole-hog from the Japanese horror community. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Rei only has a certain number of nights to 'solve the case' or she's dead.
The problem with Fatal Frame 3 isn't that it's a bad game, it's that the creative staff went out of their way to slam the various good parts of the first two games together and just prayed that a playable game would come out of it. Well they made a bearable survival horror experience, which I know can be tough in this day and age, but it's hardly something to turn your head. If you're just in it to kill some ghosts then Fatal Frame 3 is the only new game in town, but if you actually want to be scared/touched you might as well just break out the second one and pretend it's your first time.
If this is where survival horror is going then I say let it die. I remember jumping at the 'closet scene' of the first Fatal Frame, I remember lighting a cigarette and letting the credits roll in silence after the second one was over. I have plenty of good memories of Fatal Frame and I don't need them regurgitated back to me in some camouflaged 'best of' collection.
Filled under: