Post by Imperial Khador on Jan 7, 2016 0:07:20 GMT
I sat down this past week with some friends I don't see very often to play through some of "Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water". This was a nice bit of nostalgia, as we played through Fatal Frame 1-3 together years ago, and always had a blast.
Alternating players, we made it through 9 chapters of the game, and hopefully we'll be able to meet again in a few months to complete it. I thought I'd post up some thoughts.
First off, the game is gorgeous. More so that with any of the previous entries, we stopped ourselves just to admire the environments, which seemed hauntingly beautiful, as well as contributing to an excellent sense of dread. As always, small audio queues were great at adding to these feelings.
After playing Spirit Camera on the 3DS, I really liked the idea of using the Wii U Gamepad as a camera. Although I felt that Spirit Camera was flawed, I really felt that it worked well as the Camera Obscura.
Black Water continues with this. The gamepad is used both as the camera, and can either mirror what is on the television most of the time, or used as a real-time map. We mostly used the mapping function, as it saved having to constantly pause to check where we were, which I found was the case in all of the earlier games.
With Spirit Camera, I would often stand to move in 360 degrees with the 3DS. Although you could do so with Black Water, I found that would have been awkward in a room full of people. Thankfully, you can also adjust the camera with the right analog stick. I found that I'd often use the analog for getting into the general vicinity of a shot, and then use the gamepad motion controls for fine adjustment. (I found this very similar to the way I would use the slingshot and bow in the 3DS versions of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask).
The end result with the gamepad is that although I still found ghost encounters sufficiently scary, I was more confident in engaging multiple ghosts at once. We found that when switching between players, some changes in the controls were warranted. Some of us preferred inverted vertical controls for example, and others preferred to turn down the sensitivity of the gamepad's movements. All in all though, after the initial adjustment, I quite liked the controls.
There are two versions of the Camera Obscura in the game, both upgraded separately, and this helps keep things interesting. Once more, after Mask of the Lunar Eclipse had switched to finding gems to upgrade the camera, Black Water returns to using points for this purpose, which is something I welcome.
Now for some general plot thoughts:
In general, I'd say we enjoyed the plot. Characters in Fatal Frame games are always a bit thin, but that tends to be the case with the horror genre.
There are some nice callbacks to series continuity, with one of the playable characters being the daughter of Miku Hinasaki from Fatal Frame 1 and 3.
The main haunted location in the game is a a mountain where people are called to commit suicide, and it serves as a creepy location. However, the characters aren't trapped there such as they are in earlier iterations. They return home between missions, and many of the chapters involve finding and locating the same people who have wandered off to the mountain again.
One could really ask "well, why don't you just stop going to the mountain", but clearly some of these folks are semi-possessed. So, even though there is an in-game reason, it can seem silly that characters are repeatedly putting themselves in danger. I don't think it detracts from the game much though.
So based on an incomplete playthrough, I'd certainly recommend the game to anyone who has enjoyed Fatal Frame previously. Hopefully I'll get Mask of the Lunar Eclipse finished before I next meet up with my friends to complete Maiden of Black Water.
Edit as of Sept 1st: So, I finally had a chance to get together with my friends a few weeks ago and play through the last few chapters of the this game.
I found that the last chapters kept up the tension of the earlier sections, and ghost encounters continued to be engaging and bit terrifying. Plot-wise, as with all the Fatal Frame games, there were multiple possible endings. I found the endings we received for the various characters made sense, and were satisfying. We checked out some of the alternates on Youtube as well, and generally agreed that they also worked well for what the characters experienced.
Story-wise, there was one weak point that I think is common to several Fatal Frames. Usually there is some dark ritual preventing a catastrophe of some sort. In this case, the terrible acts performed on the maidens known as Pillars prevents the corrupting black water from reaching out beyond the mountain. If the various 'good' endings take place, the characters are saved, but a running theme is that suicidal, psychically-sensitive people are being drawn to the mountain to replace the lat of the degrading Pillars. Presumably, if you save everyone, the barrier on the mountain will fall, and the black water will seep out. This didn't really seem to be addressed in the 'good' ending, which I found frustrating.
Alternating players, we made it through 9 chapters of the game, and hopefully we'll be able to meet again in a few months to complete it. I thought I'd post up some thoughts.
First off, the game is gorgeous. More so that with any of the previous entries, we stopped ourselves just to admire the environments, which seemed hauntingly beautiful, as well as contributing to an excellent sense of dread. As always, small audio queues were great at adding to these feelings.
After playing Spirit Camera on the 3DS, I really liked the idea of using the Wii U Gamepad as a camera. Although I felt that Spirit Camera was flawed, I really felt that it worked well as the Camera Obscura.
Black Water continues with this. The gamepad is used both as the camera, and can either mirror what is on the television most of the time, or used as a real-time map. We mostly used the mapping function, as it saved having to constantly pause to check where we were, which I found was the case in all of the earlier games.
With Spirit Camera, I would often stand to move in 360 degrees with the 3DS. Although you could do so with Black Water, I found that would have been awkward in a room full of people. Thankfully, you can also adjust the camera with the right analog stick. I found that I'd often use the analog for getting into the general vicinity of a shot, and then use the gamepad motion controls for fine adjustment. (I found this very similar to the way I would use the slingshot and bow in the 3DS versions of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask).
The end result with the gamepad is that although I still found ghost encounters sufficiently scary, I was more confident in engaging multiple ghosts at once. We found that when switching between players, some changes in the controls were warranted. Some of us preferred inverted vertical controls for example, and others preferred to turn down the sensitivity of the gamepad's movements. All in all though, after the initial adjustment, I quite liked the controls.
There are two versions of the Camera Obscura in the game, both upgraded separately, and this helps keep things interesting. Once more, after Mask of the Lunar Eclipse had switched to finding gems to upgrade the camera, Black Water returns to using points for this purpose, which is something I welcome.
Now for some general plot thoughts:
In general, I'd say we enjoyed the plot. Characters in Fatal Frame games are always a bit thin, but that tends to be the case with the horror genre.
There are some nice callbacks to series continuity, with one of the playable characters being the daughter of Miku Hinasaki from Fatal Frame 1 and 3.
The main haunted location in the game is a a mountain where people are called to commit suicide, and it serves as a creepy location. However, the characters aren't trapped there such as they are in earlier iterations. They return home between missions, and many of the chapters involve finding and locating the same people who have wandered off to the mountain again.
One could really ask "well, why don't you just stop going to the mountain", but clearly some of these folks are semi-possessed. So, even though there is an in-game reason, it can seem silly that characters are repeatedly putting themselves in danger. I don't think it detracts from the game much though.
So based on an incomplete playthrough, I'd certainly recommend the game to anyone who has enjoyed Fatal Frame previously. Hopefully I'll get Mask of the Lunar Eclipse finished before I next meet up with my friends to complete Maiden of Black Water.
Edit as of Sept 1st: So, I finally had a chance to get together with my friends a few weeks ago and play through the last few chapters of the this game.
I found that the last chapters kept up the tension of the earlier sections, and ghost encounters continued to be engaging and bit terrifying. Plot-wise, as with all the Fatal Frame games, there were multiple possible endings. I found the endings we received for the various characters made sense, and were satisfying. We checked out some of the alternates on Youtube as well, and generally agreed that they also worked well for what the characters experienced.
Story-wise, there was one weak point that I think is common to several Fatal Frames. Usually there is some dark ritual preventing a catastrophe of some sort. In this case, the terrible acts performed on the maidens known as Pillars prevents the corrupting black water from reaching out beyond the mountain. If the various 'good' endings take place, the characters are saved, but a running theme is that suicidal, psychically-sensitive people are being drawn to the mountain to replace the lat of the degrading Pillars. Presumably, if you save everyone, the barrier on the mountain will fall, and the black water will seep out. This didn't really seem to be addressed in the 'good' ending, which I found frustrating.
