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« on: April 03, 2026, 08:15:04 PM »
I don't think I'm going to be able to fulfill the requirements of the scenario, but what the hell. Let's talk about the latest Fatal Frame 2 remake.
I beat the game last month, but I'm currently working my way back through it completing all the newly-added Side Stories and endings, which I mostly accomplished last night. I just have 1 last ending and a ton of point grinding/Specter hunter to complete before I'm done with the game. Problem is, that last ending? It's tucked away behind beating the game on the highest difficulty mode, which I'm going to want to fully upgrade my camera for beforehand.
I own the Wii remake, but I never got around to playing it. From everything I've heard, this remake is more a remaster of that Wii version with additional content than its own game. You can certainly see that with the annoying "slowly reach down to grab an item so a ghost hand can randomly grab you" mechanic, which all the Nintendo-era Fatal Frame games have.
In general, this is a engaging enough remake of a good game, but it feels like with every good thing they added there had to be an incredibly annoying or stupid element to counterbalance it. The camera has 4 different filters now for combat variety, but 1 is objectively better than the other 3 so you'll exclusively see the world in purple vision if you're paying attention.
The game contains side quests now to flesh out the minor storylines in the background, but many of them can only be done in the final chapter and they all come down to running back through areas you've already explored getting jumped by the same 2-3 wraiths every other minute. And so many of those side quests are practically pixel hunts, where you can only progress by photographing particular areas at a particular time with a particular camera filter. You can and probably WILL spend literal hours running in circles in the dark trying to figure out what the game wants you to do. The game WILL hint you towards what filter you should be using, but only if you're standing in the right area with the camera raised to begin with. Unfortunately, while it's nice to have these side stories, they don't really add anything to the story that wasn't already pretty clear from just progressing through the main story.
Combat was always the most unique aspect of the Fatal Frame games, but it's never been particularly good in any of the games I've played. Wraiths like to teleport around, move through walls, and disappear at random. The camera has a lock-on feature for ghost faces that I don't remember being in the original version that is very helpful, but wraiths can easily break that lock-on. And fighting child wraiths is an exercise in frustration in every Fatal Frame game. New to this remake is that ghosts will frequently jump scare the player during combat to basically completely wipe out the willplayer gauge, which is annoying. But by far the most annoying new aspect to combat is that wraiths will often go into a rage state, where they regain their health; gain damage reduction; and often gain new attacks. You can only break this state by damaging a wraith past the stagger line on their health bar, which is aggravating when the wraith has a defense buff AND health regen during this state. Even a few of the bosses do this.
The game features a fairly decent collectible tracker, outside of nothing but a list of specters if you're hunting those. Those are those "blink and you'll miss them" ghost appearances. If you want to collect them all...good luck.
Fatal Frame 2 was an exceptionally easy game in its original incarnation, and the remake isn't that much harder...but it sure as **** is more tedious when you're just trying to explore for a side story; you keep getting jumped by the same annoying damage sponge wraiths; AND those wraiths will almost always go rage mode when you're halfway through defeating them. You CAN run from them to a point, but wraiths have pretty long aggro range and the environments are DESIGNED to snake the player around small environments.
On a weird note, the post-game has both chapter select and New Game +. However, if you use Chapter Select, the world you load into is the same map you originally cleared, including taking into account all items you already collected. That means if you want to go for the additional endings and side stories post-game, you're going to find yourself running out of good film really quickly. The optimal strategy is...bizarrely...to send your character into New Game+ to reset the item placements, save at the first lantern you can reach, and then send THAT save into Chapter Select so you can explore the end of the game immediately with all the items in the game uncollected. Just such a...weird design choice.
Overall, I'm disappointed with most of the new things Team Ninja added to the game, but at the end of the day it's still Fatal Frame 2. The atmosphere is as fantastic and the story as fucked up as ever. It's still easily the best game in the series. I just wish what was added was more thoughtful and more substantive.
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