About damn time.

In the spirit of buying a game and letting it sit for two years before I beat it, I finished Fatal Frame 2 last night. The entire thing was a bit of a let-down, given how much I loved the original Fatal Frame. If you don't know, the series (and it's always a series) is a line of games where you play an absolutely adorable Japanese girl who is supposed to be 12 but could easily pass for 18, and you have a magic camera that can banish ghosts if you take their picture. In the original, you played a student who goes looking for her beloved teacher in a haunted Japanese mansion and becomes entangled in a whole mess with ghosts and antiquated sacrifice rituals. In Number 2, you play as Mio, a typical Japanese girl who has a thing for abandoning her sister, and occasionally as her twin Mayo, who get lost in the woods and land in a haunted Japanese village, which really just consists of four haunted Japanese houses, and the twins need escape before they become the subjects of another antiquated sacrifice ritual.

My main complaint about FF2 is the fact that it is, well, Japanese. It is Japanese to the point of being noticeably Japanese, as if a Japanese man was standing behind you right now with a baseball bat carved from a Japanese cherry tree and was about to beat you silly with it but don't turn around and look because that will really piss him off! For example, the storyline does not make sense to us Westerners unless you understand that a popular myth in Japan is that certain deaths, generally suicides, are doomed to repeat their deaths for all eternity as ghosts. That is never explained in FF2, even though it is the driving force and central idea behind the plot. Mio and Hellman's, I mean Mayo, are caught in the village's last day before an evil spirit was released and went Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the place. The game's Japanese-ness also shows through in the completely linear storyline. Not that FF1 wasn't linear, but there are these sequences when the twins become separated, where you play as Mayo, and you basically have to run her from one end of a hallway to another. During one I tried to go into another room and there was an invisible wall. I wonder why the developers even let you control her if there is only one possible thing to do? The game is so chock-full of pre-rendered sequences anyway, another two or three couldn't hurt. When the twins are together, it seems as though Mayo is possessed by the spirits and the will speak through her, but Mio doesn't seem to notice. You'll be running around with your sister behind you and she'll say, "The ritual... we were born for this purpose..." and there is no reaction from Mio whatsoever, as if Mayo just does this all the time, the freak. I could go on bashing the game for being so ethnic but there's plenty of other bad design areas at which to whack.

The movement is painfully slow. I don't want to jump to conclusions but it looks like the game drives home the stereotype of Japanese girls being small and mousy. Mio runs from bloodthirsty, disfigured angry spirits the same way one would casually prance through a field of daffodils. Which doesn't hurt combat much since, for as fucking slow as Mio is, the spirits are slower. The controls are workable, though switching between 3rd-person running around view and 1st-person take pictures of shit view takes some getting used to. It would have been better if the keys were customizable since in 3rd-person the cancel button is the same as the take a picture button in 1st-person. The camera angles seem designed to give the most atmospheric shots of the village and houses, which works beautifully if ignore the fact that a player is controlling a character. I do have to give the game that it's atmospheric, but it lacks the same claustrophobic, trapped feeling that the first one had. Why the twins couldn't leave the village is never explained except for the fact that there is another one of those invisible walls made of concentrated stupid at the exit. And while I'm on the topic if things the game forces you to do, there are these retarded sequences where certain doors will not open unless you capture the right spirit. It took me an hour to find one of said spirits because there is no indication of where the damn thing might have been hiding. Sorry, Japan. Sorry for not know where to look for something that's fucking invisible.

My final big complaint, game play wise, is the difficulty. The enemy spirits range from pathetic (ghosts in houses) to mildly annoying (ghosts of farmers) to totally fucking impossible. Standard ghosts have a predictable attack pattern of wander on up to you at 2 feet per hour then strike. The only break from this are the female ghosts who channel Ringu far too much in looks (black hair isn't scary anymore guys) and charge at you from across the room, or the farmer ghosts who hit you with sticks. Or, the ghosts of sticks? But at one point I was in basement when a priest ghost attacked. Not only did he randomly teleport every time I hit him, he shot flying skulls out of his staff and moved like one of the normal spirits hopped up on some spirit amphetamines. Of course, it wasn't that hard of a fight considering you trip over powerful ammo (film) and healing items, and even the crappy herbal medicine restores a minimum half of your health bar. There was an attempt to compensate for how easy it is to dispatch the spirits, by first making them all have tons of hit points so it takes ten shots to kill them, and also by making you fight the same ghosts two or three times in a row. Making enemies hard to kill based on their life bars is not good game design.

To round it all out, Fatal Frame 2 has some of the worst storytelling I've ever seen. Most of it is told in flashback, going between what once happened in the village to the history of the two sisters. Along the way you learn that the village has this ritual where one twin girl kills her sister in order to appease the gods, otherwise the gates to hell open. One of the sisters in the original village, Yae, runs off with the son of a scientist (anthropologist? reporter? It's never explained who this guy is but he's in the village studying it.) and as a result the ritual fails. Another point in where the Japanese-ness of the game shows is the heavy reliance of reincarnation as a plot point, which is also something that is not widely understood in Western mythos. Sisters Mio and Miracle Whip (sorry, last time, I promise) have the same soul as sisters Yae and Sae, therefore they are expected to complete the ritual. Nothing else keeps the two in the village besides sheer idiocy. There are characters who are introduced and never go anywhere, such as a white haired boy locked in a shed who occasionally gives advice and Dr. Aso, who made the magical camera that somehow just ended up in the village. In Fatal Frame 1, most of the story revolves around the camera, and in this, it is just there, pending explanation like every other god damn thing.

I'd say this game is reserved only for three kinds people: ones who like Japanese horror movies a little too much, golfers, and hardcore Fatal Frame fans. I do give FF2 that it is atmospheric and genuinely creepy, but too much time was put into the extras and not into the game itself. When you beat it on normal mode you get hard more, which is exactly the same as normal except you get some new lenses for your camera and the ghosts with too many hit points get more hit points. There's also a mission mode, which I have no intention of trying. If the game isn't fun to begin with, what makes you think it'll be fun otherwise? There are also the trademark extra costumes, which hammer the proverbial Japanese nail in the proverbial Japanese coffin of the proverbial fucking Japanese-ality of this game. Mio's costumes include a schoolgirls uniform, a maid outfit, and some skimpy bondage gear. She's twelve for fuck's sake! Add people with Japanese schoolgirl fetishes to the list of those who'd like this game.

One redeeming factor is that in the books that talk about the ritual, they replace certain words with "*" or "**". The writing quality for the game was pretty bad, so I just substituted some suggestive language for the "*"s.

The gate to hell is called the balls.
Gaze not upon the balls.
Eyes that glimpse the balls will be blinded by the balls.
Speak not of the balls.
The mouth which utters balls will be made speechless by the balls.
Listen not to the balls.
Those who heed the balls are turned heartless by the balls.

Yeah, I'm 5.