Virtual 100 – Game 26
Man, I had such high hopes for this one. The only Fatal Frame game I have ever played was Fatal Frame II Crimson Butterfly, and I played that one on the PS2 way back when it came out. I’m not one that scares easily; I grew up on 80’s horror. But that game genuinely creeped me out at the time. I remember it clearly, because at that time the only other game that had given me goosebumps was Silent Hill. So to say it left an impression would be an understatement.
I didn’t really play any of the other ones after that. Fatal Frame III flew in under the radar, and I guess the other ones never released outside of Japan? I’m not sure, because if it wasn’t in a magazine I probably didn’t know about it— the internet was still kind of a fledgling thing at that time (IGN was still N64.com and was still actually good).
So I was actually kind of excited and surprised when they announced both Maiden of Black Water and Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for re-release on modern consoles. I wasn’t so excited about the price. Eventually though, I picked them up on sale, both for about half off, and they sat quietly in my backlog until I had the energy to get around to them.
Well that time has come, and I dug into Maiden of Black Water, mistakenly thinking it was the prequel of sorts to Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. I got that part wrong, but in hindsight I think it was probably for the better. Mask of the Lunar Eclipse has to be better, right? Because I just played through Black Water, and it was pretty fuckin’ bad.
And it’s such a bummer, because I love the concept. The combat in the Fatal Frame series has always had such a unique twist to it. But in Black Water, something is just… off. The combat is slow and clunky. The ghosts always seem to attack in the most cluttered rooms. Trying to navigate in first person while squeezed into a hallway or in a room with clutter everywhere can be pretty damn irritating.
On top of that, the game gives you a run-down of all the mechanics at the very beginning of the game, and I really fuckin’ hate when games do that, because I know damn well I’m not going to remember it all. Especially if I leave and come back to the game some time later. So I played through the majority of the game knowing full well that I wasn’t utilizing all the camera’s features to the best of their ability. That’s partially my fault, but at the same time the camera attacks are so vague in their effectiveness, I never knew if what I was doing was actually helpful. The “Crush” lens never really seemed to do any more damage than a regular attack, for example. Or the stun that never seemed to stun. It all just resulted in me constantly running back and forth and spamming the shutter button to wittle away at the ghost’s health bar. The later I got into the game, the only difficulty increase was that they threw more ghosts at you at once, or the single ones just got spongier. Needless to say, I got really tired of it really quick.
This probably wouldn’t have been as big of a deal if the environment was able to keep my attention. But the setup of Black Water is extremely repetitive, and makes for probably one of the most tiring gameplay loops and extremely stupid protagonists I’ve played in a horror game in a long time.
Most horror games have a simple premise; Protagonist tries to escape a horrible situation. The main goal is to survive and escape. These idiots survive, escape, then go right back to the same place they survived and escaped, only to have to survive and escape again. Nobody in their right mind would go back to someplace they almost died again, and they definitely wouldn’t do it multiple times. I get it— one of the supernatural characterstics of this haunted mountain resort is that it compels people to go there to die. They are almost in a trance, stumbling along like zombies while they imagine they’re doing something else. But that’s not what these morons are doing. They are escaping by the skin of their teeth, witnessing all manners of horrible things, only to wake up the next night and be like, “Well, time to go back to the awful place I just escaped and look for this thing I totally don’t need, but want just because.”
This also results in re-treading the same areas over and over again. And then having to escape said areas, over and over again. At one point I wanted to just not escape. Just let them die. Fuck ‘em.
The creep factor in these games rely heavily on the unknown. It’s the sense of discovering a new creepy place and exploring its secrets that keeps this type of game interesting. Capcom knows this, as the Resident Evil series has been doing it for decades. Capcom learned with the original RE games that after a while, people knew the mansion or police station by heart and could run through the entire thing; They knew what zombies they could skip, they knew where the licker was gonna jump out from, etc. So in the later games they relied very little on backtracking, always keeping the progress moving forward.
Black Water is an older game, but it’s new enough that they should have known this. The second time you go through an area, you’re like, “okay I know what’s in here.” The fourth and fifth time you go through, you’re just wishing you could skip the entire thing. It’s not scary. It’s not interesting. It’s not fun. Each subsequent visit to the haunted mountain pushes the protagonists a little bit further to the summit, where the climactic ending awaits… eventually. Once I reached the lake at the top of the mountain, I thought I was in for the final battle— only for the game to tread on for FOUR MORE CHAPTERS. That’s four more times going up the mountain, four more times escaping the mountain.
The town itself, the one that they escape to, is at the base of the mountain. Like, how about, I dunno, getting the fuck out of Dodge? Instead they lay around like dipshits, waiting for something to come for them. Which of course it does, because they’re like, a mile away. How about going to the next town over? Or hell, leave Japan. Surely the ghost isn’t going put someone in a trance, make them drive to the airport, buy a plane ticket, go through customs, etc. The entire setup for this game relies on the stupidest protagonists on the planet being the stupidest protagonists on the planet. I didn’t care if I got the worst ending for all of the characters, because quite frankly, they all fucking deserved it. Good riddance.
At least Koei Tecmo, being their ever-loving selves, gave me the option to put both of the girls in bikini outfits with wet t-shirts, because honestly it was the only thing that kept me interested. Does that make me shallow? Probably. Don’t care.
The graphics in this game aren’t great, but they’re good enough. I realize it’s a port of an older game that I think released on the PS Vita or the Wii U, so that’s fine. It’s not that the game looked bad, and the locations are somewhat intriguing at first. But after you keep visiting the same areas repeatedly, you really start getting the feeling that the devs were cutting corners and padding the game time. One trip through the entire mountain could probably be wrapped up in a few hours, but they had to push it to ten or fifteen. And it was just a bit too much.
The final chapter— sorry, final drop— was probably the biggest slog of all, as the perspective switches between the three protagonists as they each, for whatever reason, have to travel all the way up the mountain. That meant taking each of them through mountain paths, fighting all the things for the umpteenth time. For a game that was already getting quite repetitive and tedious, this was final straw— sorry, final drop— that almost broke me. But I forced myself to grind through with the help of a football game in the background.
Despite not caring if I got one ending or the other, I think I accidentally saved them all. At the end of the game, the curse was lifted by Yuri, Ren came back home to his little tomboy chick, and Miu (I think?) saved her mom who is also the same age as her. The story in this game was confusing at best. The resolutions play out in flashbacks and dream sequences and hallucinations and honestly it was difficult to keep straight. I felt like I had a grasp on the story for the most part, but I’m terrible with names in my own language, so trying to keep track of who’s who when everyone is named Miku and Miu and Yui and Yuri and Hinosaka and Kurosawa, when they were referring to one person or another, unless they were actually showing the character, I would have to stop and try to remember just who they were talking about. The other thing was that I could swear they explained the same stuff over and over. If you read the diaries and books you pick up, you have a pretty good grasp of what the purpose of the shrine maidens was and the weddings and all that, but toward the end of the game, Ren is supposed to be putting the pieces together, and he’s explaining it aloud as if it’s some kind of revelation. And you’re like ‘yeah I know. I’ve known this for like, half the game.’
As I said before, I think Maiden of Black Water was the last one they made, and I’m really hoping this was the cash grab and that Lunar Eclipse is more of a passion project, with better locations and a sense of progression that doesn’t have me pulling my hair out. This game was lazy as all hell. The constant re-use of the same environments, the same ghosts, and forcing the player to not only traverse up the mountain to do XYZ, but also “escape” back down again after, all just made the game a chore to play. I really, really hope Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is better. I guess we’ll find out in time. I can’t see myself diving right into that one just yet, though. I need a break from the Camera Obscura for a bit.
