Fatal Frame (2001) pt. 2 of 3 - analysis & criticism

 

When last we spoke, we had just about finished summarizing the plot of the game up to the point of spoilers, and are now ready to dive into analysis and criticism. If you've not read pt. 1 yet, check it out here.

Despite a myriad of little niggling issues and an overall overstuffed quality, I generally find the narrative of this game quite charming. No, it’s not quite as strong as Fatal Frame II’s narrative, but it’s also much simpler and more potent than whatever the hell Fatal Frame III’s tangled mess of plot was getting at. It’s chock full of motifs that would go on to become staples of the series: a fixation on ropes, strangulation, creepy dolls, feudal Japanese houses in the country, sibling relationships, Hellgates run over, and of course, elaborate ceremony and ritual as metaphor for everyday struggles. We’ll go a bit deeper into the subtext of the game once we get into spoiler territory, but for now, let’s just say: pretty interesting stuff.

Something strange about this game that must have (ironically) scared off many potential horror fans is the game’s rating: T for teen. This would make most people quite reasonably assume that this meant the game was toned down compared to the later, M-rated installments that would follow it. But I’ll be honest: I don’t know how they managed a ’t’ rating for this game. Not only does it tell a very violent, gruesome tale, but it’s also not shy about throwing blood around. Sure, we don’t always see the eye gougings and quartering of limbs that are implied in the story, but you do usually see the aftermath, and the agony that would accompany such an injury is not softened one bit. 

So yes, this game is every bit as disturbing as the prior games in the franchise, not to mention more than a little startling when the mood strikes. But it’s not all jump scares and torture porn either; there are lots of chilling moments that work only because they’re so subtle. The ghostly sobbing encountered in the otherwise-dead-silent storeroom under the stairs, blood trails subtly appearing in a familiar area upon a revisit, or a child’s striped ball rolling across the floor in front of you when you were so sure you were all alone… It’s all very effective, and for many people, myself included, that’s probably enough. A horror game can live or die on its spooks, and this game has plenty of those at least, even if its story is a little clumsy here or there or its repetitive gameplay gets on my nerves.

The atmosphere here is thick and quite oppressive. There’s very little traditional video game score, with the soundtrack relying entirely on atonal noise and ghostly ambiance in every place besides the ending, which features another Fatal Frame staple: a pop tune that sucks all of the horror out of the game the moment it begins playing, though at least employed here a bit more tastefully than in later examples. A less intentional but no less effective touch is the horrendous voice acting that makes everyone in the plot sound like the scary robotic weatherman that interrupts radio and TV broadcasts whenever inclement weather is on its way. Hell, the background static and slivers of ghostly interference give it that vibe as well; perhaps that’s why I get an instinctive knot in my stomach whenever I listen to the game’s many cassette tapes.

The drowsiness inherent in the voice acting also contributes to a general dreamy vibe. It all feels like manically depressed horror on ambien, which is thanks to a combination of odd touches like that and director Shibata’s inspiration for the game’s scenario deriving mostly from his actual dreams. Well, all of that, plus the story’s eventual turn towards abusive foster parents, locked-away orphan princesses, and other bedtime story cliches just in time for the final leg of the plot, but forget I said anything because we’re still not there yet. 

I will say the game’s po-faced seriousness and the somewhat overwrought (though effective) horror can seem a bit silly when viewed next to books and films that tackle similar subject matter, but I generally found the effect charming.

A more serious problem the game has, at least story-wise, is that it started a trend in this series that has haunted it to this very day, and that’s having an unnecessarily convoluted backstory that requires at least two playthroughs to make total sense of. And when I say two times, I mean consecutive ones as well. By the standards of later games, the plot here can seem quite simple, but as information is reliably doled out in memo after memo, it can become quite hard to keep track of it all. 

There are multiple generations of victim spirits wandering Himuro Mansion, and making sense of who belongs to what timeline and how it all connects is far more work than it really needed to be. This combined with a dedication to writing every hostile ghost into the backstory means it can be hard to see the forest through the trees at times. But ultimately, the plot ends in such a simplistic way, I question if all of that convolution was really necessary and whether it resulted entirely from insecurity on the part of the scenario writers. I mean, it is a video game, and you’ve gotta find something extra to pad out the game long enough to make it ten hours, but as this has become a bigger issue with each new Fatal Frame game, I find it at least worth pointing out.

So to sum all this blabbering up, I think the story is charming. At times positively Lynchian and subtly postmodern, what with its using the framework of folk horror to explore very human issues, it’s also quite frightening. And really, what more can you ask for? Sure, it’s a bit dense when it all ultimately boils down to a rather simple Razpunzel tale, but I guess they tried their best, and I’m sure some fans love the fact that they need to play it at least twice through to grasp all the little details of the narrative.

Other than its moody sound design, Fatal Frame's presentation is fairly muted, if still no less effective. Sure, it had a way to go before being up to the level of Crimson Butterfly, but what’s here is still great stuff. A little rough around the edges, sure, but generally quite good. The translation is much more awkward than later Fatal Frame games, the graphics blurry regardless of the internal resolution it’s viewed at, and the design and animation of the various spirits you encounter sort of simplistic and uninspired. The general washed-out look of the game, alongside the muted, repetitive environments you explore doesn’t help matters either. On the bright side, it generally works very well with PCSX2, allowing players to play the game in true 16:9 with a modern high resolution to boot. It’s not perfect, as a late-game bug requires a strange workaround to even be able to finish the damn thing on an emulator, but considering this lasted all of five minutes in an eight-ish hour game, I’d say my overall impression is that those who aren’t in possession of an old PS2 or Xbox have no reason to fear playing on PCSX2, and even those that do can save themselves a lot of headache by playing it this way as well.

But all this talking about the narrative and presentation may have you wondering: well, how does it play? Well, here’s the thing: it’s a Fatal Frame game... scratch that, it’s a survival horror game, and those have historically not had the most enjoyable gameplay. Generally, it’s because the creators of the game have no idea how to program satisfying combat nor possess any desire to do such a thing, but there can be no denying that in many such games, the clumsy, unreliable combat adds a genuine sense of dread to proceedings that just works. That's hardly any kind of excuse for their reliance on backtracking to complete rudimentary item puzzles on the other hand, but I tended to never care much about satisfying any of them were to play as long as the story took me somewhere interesting, and I imagine I was and am not alone in this. 

But even by those standards, this game is a mixed bag. Yes, the first four hours are pretty incredible, as you’re constantly being introduced to something new, be it new ghosts, new locations, or even new gameplay concepts to help hold your attention. And coming from the sequel, I was surprised at how often this game funneled the player where it wanted them to go by locking off irrelevant areas, considering how often its first sequel let the player freely wander around an entire rural whole village from near enough the outset, to the detriment of many a curious player that would prefer not have their time completely wasted.

But all of this is soon revealed to be little more than a beautiful dream. First off, the first four hours are great, yes, but almost as soon as you hit the halfway mark, everything begins to repeat itself mercilessly. And since they’ve shown you basically every hostile ghost by that point, in just about every major environment the game has to offer to boot, the second half of the game ends up becoming a real slog. This is not helped by the previously mentioned progression in this game, where everything is especially transparent, and your character keeps getting knocked out and having to reexplore the entire mansion with each new chapter. And what I said about the game funneling you a bit more than I expected to make things easier on the player? Well, needless to say, that doesn’t last long, and before you know it, you have an entire mansion to explore from top to bottom every time you get stuck. This is not helped by the game’s abysmal in-game map, which doesn’t indicate locked doors, obstructed paths, or anything useful, necessitating lots of wasted trips to previous locations you couldn’t quite place the details of. Considering Silent Hill came out before this game and had a wonderful map with everything you could ever ask for, I can’t help but see this as kind of a significant issue, especially considering its status as a survival horror game, a genre based mostly around navigation of treacherous environments.

No, apparently Fatal Frame was more influenced by Resident Evil, which would, in theory, help explain the game’s stubborn insistence on utilizing one big environment that you explore again and again and slowly progress through. Here’s the thing though: this doesn’t feel like Resident Evil at all. Resident Evil was incredibly well-designed, and managed to make its small mansion environment feel fresh by constantly throwing curveballs: new scares and occaisonally entirely new types of enemies would appear in familiar locations to take you by surprise, forcing a change in approach just as you were getting comfortable with the mechanics of the game. And it was satisfying that every piece of the game had a corresponding solution that could be found somewhere else in the Spencer Mansion. Everything had its place. The whole thing felt like one big puzzle box, much like its predecessor Alone in the Dark. 

Fatal Frame, conversely, does not feel like a puzzle box. More like a skinner box. The experience of playing this game moment-to-moment is shamelessly akin to having a carrot dangled in front of your face for hours at a time: go here, take a picture, go there, solve a miniature puzzle, snap photos of a few ghosts, repeat. It’s very monkey-see, monkey-do, and while that’s true of every video game when you strip away all the dressing, it feels especially naked here. One wonders why they didn’t go with a more Silent Hill-influenced linear approach, with a few different environments to explore, especially given Fatal Frame’s similar focus on narrative. When it really comes down to it, however, I can’t help but feel, and this becomes a stronger feeling as the series goes on, that the only reason they went in this direction is to save a bunch of money and recycle the fuck out of some content.

All the endless backtracking, even in a genre where that’s the standard, soon becomes irritating, not helped by things I mentioned earlier like the appallingly bad in-game map and the game’s insistence on repopulating rooms you explored last chapter with new items so that you have to reexplore Every. Single. Room. Every. Single. Chapter! This too would eventually become a series staple, but not as big a staple as the game’s final fetch quest, something that feels pulled straight out of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker; all progress is completely halted just before the climax, so that we can reexplore the entire mansion again from top-to-bottom and attempt to locate four headless priests that have been scattered around like easter eggs for us to find. Ugh, that has got to be my least favorite cliche in video games. If this is the best you can do, I'll just take my ending and go, if it's all the same to you, Fatal Frame.

The puzzles that you must complete throughout the game are all over the place, though that's certainly not unique to this entry. Sliding block puzzles? Check. Weird puzzle based on an old Japanese nursery rhyme that gives you three attempts and then just solves itself in case you have no idea what on Earth it’s on about? Check. Puzzles where you have to intuit how to translate Sanskrit numerals into Arabic ones, with no help from the game whatsoever? You bet. I called it a grab bag much earlier in the review, and I stand by that assessment.

The combat in these games is rhymic and intelligently designed, which does offer at least some comfort, though it’s certainly not as strong as it would be in the sequel. Not to mention, and this could be an emulator thing for all I know, the combat seems a bit… frantic? this time around. There were a few ghosts that I just could not get a handle on, eventually having to resort to rapidly taking potshots at them to keep them stunned and unable to dive-bomb me from offscreen while doing minuscule damage. I also blame this at least partly on the rougher animation for the spirits compared to later games as it's much harder to read here. The end result is much tougher than is usual for the series, and combined with far too few checkpoints in its final stretch, it can all become quite frustrating. Overall, though, Fatal Frame’s combat remains a major strength, and it stands out as one thing that the series has always gotten right, more or less, from entry to entry. And I mean, give 'em a break: this was their first attempt, and still they got far more right than they got wrong.

I’m coming up to the end of this part of the review, but I’ll finish us out with a little diatribe of mine concerning tank controls. You see, when most gamers refer to tank controls, they’re not actually referring to tank controls. They're referring to the controls from something like the original Devil May Cry, where the camera angles are fixed, but the movement is entirely 3D, meaning that you push the analog stick in the direction you want to move, and this is key, according to the screen. This is the standard in most games, but in games with fixed cameras, this sucks. Real tank controls, where what direction you push the analog stick had more to do with where your character was facing than anything, allowed for much more precise and cinematic-looking gameplay in games with fixed camera angles once one got used to it. However, like most things that require a bit of effort on the part of the player, this was something that was eventually bred out of horror games completely, and to their detriment, in my humble opinion.

I would rather have the crappy 3D controls and fixed camera angles, though, then to have the fixed camera angles gotten rid of entirely, but it's still a bummer that Fatal Frame falls hard on the "right" side of history by being an early adopter of this bastardized system of control. The guesswork and ambiguity of the system leads to the character getting stuck between two camera angles just often enough to cause annoyance, even if the game didn't have instant death chase sequences where even one mistake is punishable by death, which it does. It just bothers me because tank controls didn't have this problem. Forward was always forward, no matter what the camera was doing. Once you were able to wrap your mind around it and think in terms of direction relative to the character, which sounds a hundred times more complicated than it really is, it was an invention borne out of necessity and you could appreciate the precision it offers. But it was different and gamers apparently didn't like different. And so nowadays, even when old games that had tank controls are remastered and re-released, they always make the new default option this same DMC-style hybrid 3D movement crap and I hate it.

But that's about all the nitpicking I can stand. For now, at least. When we next speak, we’ll finally be moving into spoiler territory and summarizing all my points thus far before we move on to Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. Stay tuned!

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