Thoughts on: Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE

After getting the slightly updated late ports of the fifth and fourth entries in the Fatal Frame franchise, it feels a bit odd to then get a full on remake of the second title. I mean, it clearly made sense for Koei Tecmo – they saw the current popularity of remakes, they saw how Konami remade “the hottest one” of the Silent Hill series and decided to follow suit. And it’s not like they didn’t do it before – Fatal Frame II has already been remade once with the Wii release of the game (also known as Deep Crimson Butterfly) and this new remake does inherit some of the elements from that earlier remake… But people seem to be buying it up and requesting more remakes, instead of re-releases or remasters, because, I guess, they secretly hate the original games and don’t want to play them.

Ugh. I’m going off on a tangent here. Point is, we have a second remake of the most popular entry in the Fatal Frame series. And it does a lot of things right, but also many things wrong. It’s kind of a mess that I couldn’t enjoy, despite really wanting to.

Fatal Frame games, if you’re not familiar, are best known for being “games where you fight ghosts with a camera”. They started out as a more or less typical classic survival horror titles, as far as the genre pillars go, but starting with Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the fourth entry, almost entirely transitioned into being more linear and story-driven experiences, while still keeping lots of elements of survival horror. The focus in the series has always been on very creepy atmosphere, relatively slow pace and rather complex puzzles. Combat has never been complex, because it could make the experience too taxing and detract from the horror aspect, but it had interesting systems introduced since the first game and further explored and evolved with later entries. The idea with the combat was always about feeling vulnerable and directly exposed (because you switch to first person camera) to the horror of ghosts you’re fighting, as you would deal more damage if you get close and wait for them to attack, but that would also put you into more danger and require you to look at the super creepy visuals for said ghosts up close.

The first three original games were also using the cinematic semi-fixed camera angles (they could pan and move with the character). And also had a very curious “one-button run” approach, which was retained for the fourth and fifth entries, where unlike other survival horror titles, the run button wasn’t just a modifier for movement, but would actually continuously move the character. So you could hold one button to run and then “steer” the character left or right. Starting with the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the camera was moved to over the shoulder view and also new mechanics, like ghosts trying to grab you as you pick up items, were added as additional scares. The Wii remake of Fatal Frame II was specifically based on the mechanics and camera of Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, though it also added a highly criticized mechanic, where ghosts could get a second health bar and become even harder when you defeat them once. This technically existed in Lunar Eclipse, but was not notable enough to be frustrating, but in Deep Crimson Butterfly people really disliked it.

So of course Koei Tecmo brought the mechanic back for Crimson Butterfly REMAKE and made it even worse. No, really, at launch people were absolutely baffled at the fact that you’d have introduction fights last for super long, not just because of reasons I will detail below, but also because the ghost would suddenly get angry and rapidly regenerate all health back. So the studio quickly and stealthily patched the game to drastically change the balance of the game, which is how I completed it. Though, the game is still full of similarly bizarre ideas.

What is Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE? Narratively, this is still the same game that follows the exact same story beats as the original. However, the game world has been expanded to include a lot more of the village areas, that were only implied in the original title. Some of the story elements that were part of the required path got separated into side-stories (but gameplay-wise, you still cover most of the same ground, side stories add more gameplay). New endings have been added, as before only available in the New Game+ playthroughs. Mission mode, however, is absent, as is the “Haunted House mode” from the Wii version – replayability here is focused fully on just replaying the game, trying out harder difficulties and getting new endings. The main playing camera is over the shoulder, but with a much more comfortable position than in the Wii version, and the controls now fully remove the “one button run”, at least in the modern control scheme. And then, everything related to combat and Camera Obscura, is just wildly different…

Camera Obscura now behaves in a way that is quite different from any other entry in the series. The basics are the same – aim to go into first person view and look around, you can slowly move and have to take pictures of ghosts and stuff in the environment to fight and solve puzzles. But everything else is really overcomplicated and confusing. There are four “filters” now, all of which handle the old special shots that you would install as lenses. And the idea behind them is cool – one allows to take pictures of things you know are “changed” somehow and restore the correct reality. Another allows you to “dispel” the bindings of blood (the classic “held by powerful force” locks from other entries). So they should feel like metroidvania tools, but they don’t, because the progression is still linear and you can’t do anything meaningful out of order. And in practical terms, in combat, they don’t help as much as I feel like they’re supposed to.

Mainly because, for whatever reason, every shot now takes ages to reload and deals pathetic damage, no matter what you do. Until you invest in damage dealing and reload speed of the camera with upgrade orbs, at which point the damage becomes acceptable, but reload speed never does. Using higher damage film types is a pain, because it takes half a minute to reload a shot. No, really, that long. Which, in turn, makes most fights exceedingly tedious. It doesn’t help that film types got completely mixed up to the point, where even in-game descriptions still describe them in terms of how they used to work in all other games, but not in this one. If you’re confused as to why Type-60 film takes forever to reload and you can carry very little of it – it’s because now it’s, for some reason, more damaging than Type-90. Koei Tecmo, you had a simple system – number go higher, damage goes higher (except for Type-00, of course, but that’s Zero). Why change it up and not clearly explain it inside the game itself?

As a result of these changes, every single combat encounter in the game, until you dump a lot of points into damage, is just a chore. Everything is sluggish, slow, boring, limited, convoluted. I never felt spooked by a ghost encounter, as I did in every other Fatal Frame game, I just felt “ugh, you again”. They also tried to balance this combat out by placing a lot more save points and making it so save points heal you for free, but that’s not helping making the encounters less uninteresting. And then they’ve decided to update the few escape sequences from the original game into full-on stealth mechanics with hiding from enemies, and one-hit kill type enemies stalking you in certain areas…

I feel like they started with a good idea here. Turning the Camera Obscura into a metroidvania-like upgradable tool with “abilities” sounds great for classic survival horror design, where you can re-explore lots of areas. But it’s barely utilized like that and the execution is lacking. Trying to update the combat, without inventing the “rotate the frame” gimmick of Maiden, which people didn’t like, is also cool. But in reality, they didn’t make it more tense, resource scarce and scary, they made it tedious and unfun. And even expanding the area and adding side-quests – cool idea, but it’s execution is handled by the overcomplicated Camera and tedious combat, so it’s not that great.

If I sound frustrated with Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE, it’s because I was. I was extremely happy to finish the game and have zero desire to get other endings. Granted, unlike many, I wasn’t as much of a fan of the original either and would rather “Mafuyu!” through the original. But I did enjoy what I played of the original a lot more than of the remake, despite many genuinely awesome things the remake does. But, it does contain the whole story and the atmosphere of the original Fatal Frame II, it does improve some elements of the game, it does look very good, while retaining a lot of the style of the original… It’s a cool remake in many ways, they just overdid it and decided to change things that didn’t need to change. I’d love to see the original PS2 version of the game remastered and released, if the remake cannot be updated to play as the original did. And I also hope that alongside developing a new title in the franchise, that hopefully learns on the mistakes of this game, they do release the first and the third games as well. Just, don’t remake them or anything, please.