One rather noticeable thing about the first Fatal Frame is that its localization... has issues, at least from my perspective. It’s immediately evident, whether it’s how every single voice actor sounds like they’ve overdosed on cold medicine and really could be doing more important things right now, or the subtle grammar errors — tense, plural conflicts, that thing thing in optical illusions where the last word of one line is repeated as the first word of the next line except that here, here, apparently, it's done completely unknowingly. A friend informed me before I started playing that I’d absolutely need a walkthrough, and while at first I chalked that up to general survival horror esotericness, soon upon starting the game I happened to stumble across a puzzle that was… completely untranslated. I was meant to press four out of ten buttons, on a circular structure, with an epitaph telling me to look at a note I’d collected which had a bunch of numbers highlighted in red. Presuming, maybe, that this was some sort of clock (albeit, one which used specific kanji for the numbers I’d never seen before) I tried to input the numbers roughly where they’d be on a Western clock, only for that to be incorrect. I decided that maybe this was why I was meant to have a walkthrough, looked the answer up, only to find that… I was correct. It was a clock. The buttons on the interface did represent numbers. I just happened to lack the cultural context to know that this specific clock… ran anticlockwise. Something that might have been much easier to figure out had any of the elements of the puzzle itself been translated.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.
You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.
I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.
What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.
However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.
(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)
I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.
At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.
You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.
I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.
What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.
However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.
(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)
I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.
At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.
1 Comment
In chapter 1 there is a note which shows you what each kanji on the clock stands for
CharIsPrettyCool
5 months ago