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jmsebastian · 6 years

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Middle Child Syndrome: Fatal Frame III

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented sits in a weird place among the entries in the classic horror series. After the novelty of the first game and the refinements of the second, The Tormented starts to retread some very familiar territory. There are more old, abandoned and haunted mansions, more hostile ghosts that need exorcizing, and the same Camera Obscura with which you take pictures to solve puzzles and rid said haunted mansions of the undead. The general idea of the game is identical to its predecessors. If you’ve played through the entire series, you know that there is a familiar sense of core elements and a consistent quality that invites comparisons to the NES line of Mega Man games. As such it’s easy to overlook the game as just another sequel that does more of the same. Done and done.

That would really be selling the game short, though. While not nearly as celebrated as Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, or as controversial a release as The Maiden of Black Water, The Tormented veers off the beaten path in surprising ways. Sure, you spend the majority of your time doing the exact same things you do in every Fatal Frame game, but the story has a more personal side to it. It also isn’t all haunted house all the time. There are things to do outside of playing paparazzi to the angry spirits of people who met untimely and gruesome ends. There are characters that you can interact with, and loads of quiet time.

I haven’t talked at great length about the story of the other Fatal Frame games for a couple of reasons. First, they are all set up as mysteries. Going into a lot of detail about them would diminish the rewarding sense of discovery you get when you uncover more journal entries or newspaper clippings that allow you to fit the timeline of the story’s events together. Second, the stories being told were never all that satisfying to me. Learning exactly how the ancient ritual that keeps the spirits of hell away got botched for the third or fourth time loses a bit of its luster. There’s nothing wrong with that framework, and you have to expect it to some degree with a series that is self-referential and takes place in some semblance of a timeline. Still, the possibilities to go beyond the failed ritual scenario have been surprisingly unexplored. Fatal Frame III makes a valiant attempt.

In The Tormented, you follow Rei Kurosawa in the aftermath of the loss of her fiance, Yuu Asou. Rei bears the responsibility of Yuu’s death, as she feels it was her inattentive driving that caused the accident he was killed in. Having survived the accident, Rei suffers from tremendous guilt. That is a heavy stage to set and contrasts wildly with the previous setups of “my brother is lost and I think he might be in this creepy mansion” as seen in the original game, and “we were running through the woods and now we’re in some creepy, abandoned village that appeared out of nowhere”. The themes in the series have always leaned very hard into dark and disturbing territory. Who could forget the slightly hinted at taboo relationship between twins Mio and Mayu from Crimson Butterfly, or the horrifically unethical medical experiments performed on mental patients in Mask of the Lunar Eclipse? Where the series had previously begun its games with big, open-ended mysteries, III was the first to begin its story with such a specific focus on the details that ground both the lead into the plot and the character whose the lens the player will be experiencing the plot through.

Rei’s grief and guilt are the emotional frameworks upon which The Tormented is built. That subtitle essentially gives the theme of the game (and the entire series, for that matter) away right off the bat. It’s one thing to have an interesting story framework, though. It’s another to elevate that story through the integration of its themes into something the player can take part in. To that end, Fatal Frame III is comprised of two distinct phases. There’s the dream phase, where Rei (and occasionally other characters) explores The Manor of Sleep and uncovers information about various ghosts she encounters while there. This is also where the player does all of their ghost hunting with the Camera Obscura.

There’s also the waking phase. This phase is set in Rei’s home, which she shares with Miku Hinasaki. Miku is the protagonist of the first Fatal Frame and she works for Rei as an assistant. While awake, the player can develop certain pictures taken while in the dream state in her home’s dark room. Those photos can then be given to Miku to investigate the characters or events revealed in the film. The other main component of waking up is simply to take a breather from the harrowing experiences of investigating the mansion while eluding the tattooed woman hell-bent on tracking Rei down. Having structured quiet time makes the difference between the emotional highs and lows of the game more pronounced and even. The house, taking the role of refuge, completely recontextualizes the nature of the mansion exploration as set forth in the previous entries in the series. Where before the game’s protagonists were forced deeper and deeper into exploration in an effort to find what they were looking for or free themselves, Rei gets to act more like a spelunker. She explores the same horrifying locations and situations as the characters in the other games, but she does so with a rope (somewhat) firmly tied back to reality.

The cyclical nature of sleeping and waking is then twisted over time. The safe haven of Rei’s home, which included having Rei’s health restored and her film replenished, begins to feel less safe over time, especially as night falls. Apparitions tucked away in corners can be seen flickering in and out of existence, the constant rainfall outside acts as somewhat of a psychological barrier to leaving the house. It’s as though Rei’s dreams are forcing their way into her consciousness slowly over the course of the game, which is a more oppressively sinister emotional path to walk for both Rei and the player. What was once a welcomed relief erodes into more uncertainty, cementing the effects of the trauma that Rei undergoes.

The subtlety of Rei’s descent into the trappings of guilt is propped up in some unexpected ways. There are the aforementioned hauntings in Rei’s home introduced over time, but there are more subtle touches that magnify the effects of her emotional deterioration. Elements as omnipresent as the UI seem oddly understated compared to the games it’s sandwiched between. Compare how busy the viewfinder is of a mildly upgraded camera is in Fatal Frame II and a similarly upgraded camera in III.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented

The highlighting around the reticle, which indicates the charge of your spirit power, is so subtle that upon picking this game back up again, I completely missed it for the better part of my first fight. I’m not exactly sure why the Camera Obscura has such a minimalist representation when the trend in the rest of the series was to amplify its feedback to 11. It’s not even like it fits in with the rest of the UI features, which saw more shortcut buttons and menu options than previously provided. It certainly seems that breaking immersion wasn’t particularly on the list of worries, so the only options left seem to be that the developers just wanted to give the player more screen real estate with which to frame the ghosts they would be taking pictures of, or they felt that toning down the flashing lights and alarm bells would keep the mood somber, preventing it from clashing horribly with the tone of the narrative. It could be both at the same time. Whether intentional or accidental, Tecmo completely nailed it.

Being the third installment of a series means there were plenty of opportunities to adjust and fine tune features that might have been underdeveloped in previous games. There is still some redundancy in how the player takes pictures, for example, being able to use either the R1 or X buttons, but that’s much better than the three possible buttons used in the previous title. A big improvement was getting rid of having two camera viewfinder control options active at the same time. Fatal Frame and Fatal Frame II allowed for movement of the Camera Obscura’s viewfinder with both the analog stick and directional pad, an odd choice considering the PlayStation 2 had integrated analog control built in from the beginning. The Tormented fixes that, leaving control simply with the left analog stick. By doing this, they freed up the D-pad to be used for swapping film types during combat without forcing the player into a series of menus, which would take them out of the action and ruin the pacing.

Fatal Frame III is full of these small improvements. The system menu options were moved from the Start button to Select, which allowed for the game menu options to be moved from Triangle to Start, which then allowed the Camera Obscura to be raised or lowered with Triangle instead of Circle, putting it much closer to R1, which is used as the shutter button. The map, a huge time saving and confusion busting tool, was moved to the L2 button, which went completely unused in previous entries. One of the best improvements involved implementing an older constraint from the first game that had been “corrected” for the sequel.

Film in Fatal Frame is finite. If the player does a poor job managing their film either in combat or when taking pictures of wandering ghosts or other things of interest, they can either run out completely (admittedly difficult to do as there is more than enough scattered around the mansion), or more worryingly, run low or out of the most rare and powerful film types because their damage capacities weren’t maximized. The team at Tecmo realized that there was a real possibility that players could put themselves into an unwinnable situation, and to make sure that couldn’t happen in the sequel, they introduced a type of film that was infinite. Its capture power was very weak to compensate for having an unending supply, but it was a nice safeguard against both running out of film completely and also against being forced to use more powerful film when it wasn’t really necessary.

Fatal Frame III rides the line between these two extremes. All film types have a limited supply, like in the original game. Two of those types, Type-7 and Type-14, refill to a set amount when Rei wakes up from her dream hours. This accomplishes the goal of heightening the tension of each dream by forcing players to be conscious of how much film they’re using and for what, and also provides an extra dose of relief once players reach the end of a dream segment. There’s an additional benefit to aiding players in mentally pacing the game, as they can form a pretty good idea of about how far into a segment they are based on how much film they’ve consumed, assuming they haven’t gone above and beyond in exploration and searched out every possible film drop possible. The mixing of old and new series ideas demonstrates the importance of looking at the games in a franchise holistically, as there can be great ideas tucked away in entries that can easily get overlooked in the rush to keep things fresh.

Unfortunately, refinements don’t really make for huge selling points, which may be part of the reason why the game is underrepresented when it comes to the series as a whole. It looks the best and typically plays the best of the PS2 games, but not because it made any huge design overhauls. It simply examined what it was that players most often spent their time doing in Fatal Frame and made those features more logical and accessible. It’s as if the Camera Obscura viewfinder’s visual design was a representation of the elegance that this game was going for.

For all that it gets right, Fatal Frame III does, of course, have flaws. Those flaws largely derive from the expectation that players of the game are familiar with the series. Aside from relying upon up the stories of previous games, it also borrows much of its level design from them as well. Revisiting levels familiar to seasoned veterans of a series can be a nice surprise. The Tormented takes this idea to its logical conclusion and basically creates a new game using the locations of the previous two games. The Manor of Sleep, for all intents and purposes, is a combination of Crimson Butterfly’s Lost Village, and Fatal Frame’s Himuro Mansion. There’s really nothing wrong with this in principle, but Tecmo’s reliance on familiar architecture allowed them to slip a little with regard to guiding the player along the right path. Far too often it feels as though players need to rely on past experiences with the games in order to figure out where to go because Fatal Frame III doesn’t really bother to give them adequate clues. This is an intermittent problem. The first quarter of the game is fine, and there’s even one section when controlling Miku where the player has to rely on audio cues to figure out where to go which works extremely well. There are other sections, however, such as Hour VI, where guidance is a little less straightforward. You don’t really take any pictures revealing other locations, there aren’t spirits walking about to point your way, you just have to wander around a bit until you stumble upon the place you’re supposed to be. It’s clunky and does a great disservice to the sections that are well planned out.

The difficulty of the game is another issue that normally wouldn’t be worth mentioning except that it’s tied to the lack of context clues seen in previous games. During Hour VII, Miku ventures into a crawl space beneath the house in order to reach a previously inaccessible area. This area of the map is set up beautifully by way of Rei commenting earlier in the game on her inability to pass through it if the player inspects the opening while in control of her. There’s also a later section where a ghost can be seen hanging out, her body contorted in an off-putting way. When it’s time for Miku to crawl through this space, the player is ready for something. With a set up that good, it’s a shame that the payoff is so weak. What the player finds is an incredibly difficult enemy to fight. While crawling, the game forces you into first-person mode, whether you have the camera raised or not. This limited view makes the ghost, who crawls around on all fours with the frantic pace of cockroach, very difficult to locate quickly. Her attacks are swift, as well. She approaches the player abruptly before pausing ever so slightly and ringing the neck of Miku.

Her spider-like ceiling walk is especially frightening.

It’s obvious there is something wrong with this encounter based on how little damage this ghost does to you upon each attack. If you fail to get a shutter chance on her (and you will), she hangs on to you for a long time. During that time, she drains a minuscule amount of life compared to even the weakest of enemies in other parts of the game. With such little health at risk, it suggests that players are not really meant to engage with this ghost at all, which makes one wonder why they bothered putting her in the game in the first place. After getting strangled weakly for the third or fourth time, I figured I’d just keep on crawling so I could get to my destination, which worked out perfectly. My constant movement made it so the ghost could no longer land hits on me, and she was unable to follow me out of the crawl space.

To say this whole section was a disappointment is an understatement. Because the situation is treacherous, it seems that Tecmo just couldn’t resist putting an enemy here, which would be fine if that enemy had animations that the player could deal with more comfortably. It doesn’t. To compensate for how difficult the timing is for landing shots in her, they simply made her incredibly weak, which takes away all tension from the situation. Players can fail time and time again on this fight without real risk of dying, so the overall scare factor drops to nothing. The animations no longer frighten once seen repeated fifty times. A better option would have probably been to have some clue that a ghost is nearby, but never actually reveal her. Having the player go into a confined space was already enough to ramp up the tension, so much so that actually executing on that tension made for the least scary scenario possible.

Another reason why this particular ghost encounter sticks out is that it occurs roughly halfway through the game. The halfway mark is where the game starts to falter a bit. Where it hits the pavement is in the sheer number of ghost hostile ghost encounters. There are tons. On top of the scripted fights, which must be completed to progress, ghosts can randomly pop up all over the place, even in areas once thought safe. There’s an element of surprise here that serves to undermine whatever sense of security a player might have developed when going through certain areas of the Manor of Sleep, but it becomes overkill almost immediately. Sometimes two ghosts can show up back to back, other times you might fight one, move on, then have the same ghost reappear during a backtrack to a different part of the mansion.

Having repeat ghosts already feels unsatisfying because it eliminates any sense of accomplishment the player had when taking them out the first time. The point of the Camera Obscura is to exorcize spirits, and if it isn’t actually accomplishing that, then the integrity of the narrative completely falls apart. The other major side effect of this is fatigue. The Fatal Frame games are not easy. Exploring takes time, the puzzles, though not mind melting, take a bit of thought or planning to complete. Throwing in fights every other room is daunting, reduces the impact of those encounters, and gives the player incentive to avoid them at all costs. This takes away opportunities to get points to level up the camera and additional abilities, crucial elements of the game that must be done in order to combat the spikes in difficulty. It’s a shame when games appear to actively discourage players from participating in the mechanics that make up the core of the experience, and The Tormented is quite guilty of this in several chapters.

The middle section of the game is also where the training wheels come off with regard to figuring out where to go, not something that makes a great deal of sense considering the amount of backtracking the players are required to put up with. Traveling back and forth between the same rooms dozens of times requires some guidance so that players don’t begin to wander about aimlessly. It’s inevitable that a player is going to run into some blocked doors or impassable spaces, but it doesn’t take hitting too many of these in a row before the adventure starts to fall flat and the feeling of frustration dominates the experience. As a general rule, leading the player on is something Fatal Frame III does really well. There’s a night where Miku’s destinations are signaled by the sound of singing. Locating the sound becomes the game, and it’s an interesting way to provide the player with the solution of where to go without simply jotting down the right room on the map. The uneven application of these unique guidance tricks makes the game feel longer than it is, and horror games are particularly damaged by wearing out their welcome.

Having a bit of a slump in the pacing is an issue, but can certainly be overlooked when viewing the game as a whole. What can’t be ignored is how Tecmo treats its main protagonist, Rei. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the developers responsible for the Dead or Alive series would have some issues regarding representations of women. Sadly, the Fatal Frame series is not free of this problem. With the protagonist of The Tormented being an adult woman, Tecmo was able to overtly sexualize her in a way that feels a lot more familiar to fans of Western horror movies (not to mention sexualization of the main antagonist, who goes bare-breasted throughout the game). Sure, you could read incestuous undertones into the relationship between twins Mayu and Mio from Fatal Frame II, but that served to make the characters more enigmatic and eerie, a reasonable thing to do for a horror game. The fanservice content that did exist was reserved for bonus content and was entirely optional. This is not so with Rei. Even jiggle physics make it into the game, if subtle. Rei’s breasts don’t heave or sway like Mai Shiranui when she runs or quick turns, but there is a distinct butt bounce that is noticeable when she runs. It can be hard to see as it requires the camera being placed close to Rei in an area where she would be moving away from the player’s view, but it’s definitely there, and it’s difficult to justify a reason for its existence. It ended up distracting me quite a lot once I’d noticed it. Maybe that doesn’t say something so flattering about me, but one has to wonder what the intent was with including it, as it seems animated too well to be accidental.

To further Re’s unfortunate portrayal, we get a scene of Rei taking a shower in a half-hearted attempt to convey her difficult time coping. It’s a bit difficult to empathize with her situation, though, when the scene is served with a very generous side of boob. It’s jarring because Rei is just an average woman who’s lost the person she loves most and feels immense guilt about it. She isn’t action star Aya Brea from Parasite Eve running around shooting mutated monsters with a shotgun. Trying to mix in a bit of sex appeal here just doesn’t sit well. The shower trope is repeated later on to more mixed results.

This scene is more Nightmare on Elm Street than Fatal Frame.

This mixed messaging doesn’t hurt the narrative to an irreparable degree, but it certainly does the game no favors, and when your main problem as a game is that you are easily overlooked, it’s this kind of objectification of its characters that makes passing the game by not feel like such a bad thing.

The biggest regret of the game is that its most dramatic moment, the showdown with the Tattooed Woman, has a fatal flaw. That flaw is an instant fail state. One hit deaths feel bad in pretty much every game, but for Fatal Frame, they are especially cheap. The series has these littered throughout, and normally they are easy enough to avoid. Maybe you get caught once, but after that, it’s a good lesson learned. Fatal Frame III decided it would make half of the final boss fight subject to them with a healthy dose of randomness to make the medicine go down. The fight begins normally, with the Tattooed Woman becoming hostile while also becoming vulnerable to your camera. Intermittently, however, she will transform the scene so that it takes on the black and white film grain look that’s been peppered throughout other Hours. During this time, the Woman appears in a random location and you must run from her until things go back to normal. The randomness of her appearance and her ceaseless pursuit of your character make avoiding her challenging, and sometimes, literally impossible. If you get touched, you die. Death at this stage is especially punishing because the player must quit out to the game’s main menu in order to reload their last save. If the last possible save point, the trek back to the boss room isn’t especially far, but it’s enough that the time going back for another try after a death caused without fault from the player really adds up. This is a horrible choice for any boss, let alone the final one.

For this fight alone, it’s hard to blame anyone who honestly hates this game. It’s so bad that it is hard to remember anything else about the game as you fight back the tears of frustration. Of the three games, The Tormented easily feels like the most difficult for me, and poor design decisions like this are a big reason why. It would be one thing if the difficulty had some semblance of fairness to it. Maybe the Tattooed Woman’s moveset could be especially varied or challenging. Maybe she would have a fairly simple moveset but hit very hard in order to punish impatient players with jumpy trigger fingers. Taking control away from players is great for instilling fear, but it’s equally good at instilling rage, which is really all this boss fight accomplishes. What’s amazing is that even upgrading my camera as much as possible and using Type Zero film exclusively, which is the most powerful in the game, I still died numerous times simply because I couldn’t turn around fast enough to avoid some grabby hands.

With all games, you have to weigh the good with the bad. Fatal Frame III’s lows are certainly low due to their feeling of cheapness with regard to eliciting thrills or titillation. Those lows, however, far from sink the game to the level that its reputation seems to have sunk it. Maybe the quick development of these games simply led to oversaturation. Half of the entire series was released in about a three year period, which is remarkable. With that, you’re going to see a lot of corners being cut. The Tormented lacked originality in its locations and ghosts, but it more than made up for those shortcomings through its unique use of those existing assets. From a lore perspective, it’s also crucial, as it expands on the original game’s story and incorporates elements from the second to create a cohesive fictional universe for the fans who really crave that kind of thing. Fatal Frame and Fatal Frame II are more complete games because they have the third game to connect all the dots, even if they didn’t really need to be connected in the first place.

The series would change drastically with its next iteration, moving away from the fixed camera, adopting a whole new control scheme, and abandoning the characters that had established it as one of the premier horror titles. Given that it never made it out of Japan, it’s hard to see those radical departures as being completely successful. The Tormented, then, sits in the kind of limbo that the player strives to make their way out of. It’s the point between staying true to what works and reinventing the wheel. What risks it took were overshadowed by where it played it safe, not unlike what happened to Capcom’s Resident Evil 3. There are far worse fates than good, if not spectacular. If you choose to play Fatal Frame III for yourself, you’ll come across plenty of them.

#fatal frame #fatal frame 2 #fatal frame 3 #project zero #mask of the lunar eclipse #koei tecmo #playstation 2

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