Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008) pt. 3 of 4 - analysis & criticism

Welcome back! When last we talked, we were just getting caught up with everything in the plot barring spoilers, and so you know what that means: it’s time to talk criticism! Opinionated shit. 

Now, given that the game is due to receive its first North American release soon, I’d imagine many Fatal Frame fans out there are probably waiting with bated breath, so excited to finally play the one that got away. Hell, I was one of them just before I finally caved and shelled out for the Dolphinbar, and so I feel like I’m well within my rights to share with you guys my opinion on the quality of the game, even if I’m fairly certain I’ll be in the minority.

Wait! Don’t click away yet! I promise, despite all my snarky asides and jokes during the summary sections of this analysis, that I went into Fatal Frame IV genuinely excited. It’s a new standalone narrative (take that Fatal Frame III!) and Suda51 worked on it for Christ’s sake. Even though I already knew that the series hit a widely-derided rough patch in time for Maiden of Black Water, the very next entry after this one, there was no reason for me to assume that that drop in quality had begun with this entry, even if it was the first Nintendo-produced one. When I fired up my emulator and saw that everything was working, I was ecstatic; and when we see quick cuts of images of distorted, grotesque faces during the opening cutscene, I was instantly won over. Nowhere in my mind did I ever consider the possibility that Fatal Frame IV could be anything other than a significant entry into this venerable series...

But just set that thought aside for right now. I guess we better start with the one thing I have nothing but good things to say about, and that’s the presentation. It’s a huge bummer that fixed camera angles have gone the way of the dodo, replaced by an uninspired behind-the-back camera cribbed directly from the then-popular Resident Evil 4 (a campy action/horror hybrid, I’ll remind you,) but at least everything looks nice and sharp. Character models look great, even if the costuming is getting pretty ridiculous and a little too festish-y in a way that previous entries haven’t been. FMV’s often have a grainy look and choppy movement that makes them even creepier. The Japanese voice acting doesn’t make me cringe the way some of the English voice work in the previous game did, and the sound design is generally killer, doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to making things unsettling. Sure, there are lots of places where a lack of polish becomes evident (weird, seemingly unfinished cutscenes and scares, audio that goes out of sync during important cutscenes) but the visuals are probably the most impressive aspect of the game. I will say that the repetitive nature of the environments combined with the heavy-handed aesthetic does mean that things tend to look a little samey across the board (until you make it to some of the more interesting environments nearer the end) but hey: they got something right.

Unfortunately, that’s about all the unqualified praise I can give. Fatal Frame IV, to me, represents the beginning of a new era for the series, and one that has probably turned me off to them for good. Port or no port, fan translation or official, the core of this experience is flawed, and it pales in comparison to even the previous entry, itself far from perfect.

Bad moon rising

First, there’s the narrative. Now, as I just mentioned, Fatal Frame IV didn’t have to do very much to top the previous game’s yarn. Overwritten, repetitive, and generally lost in its own sprawl, its worst sin was deciding to attempt to build some kind of wider series chronology in addition to telling yet another story of a poor young woman who is sacrificed only to come back as a vengeful specter. All Fatal Frame IV had to do was pare things down a bit and maybe even try something new. To its credit, its turn into mad science is fairly unprecedented for the series, but as for trimming the fat, Fatal Frame IV is nothing but fat. And who do you reckon the antagonist is this time around? Because if you guessed “young woman who is sacrificed but comes back as a vengeful specter,” you’d be totally correct!

And to think, it begins with such a solid premise. The fear of memories fading to the point where you can’t remember the faces of dead loved ones is one that is all too familiar, and the idea of one’s identity being tied up in their memories is interesting and could have made for an interesting Fatal Frame narrative. Unfortunately, all of that is really just a way to get you invested early on, before the story forgets all about it and goes on autopilot for the rest of the experience.

Repetition is nothing new for this series, in gameplay terms or narrative ones. Each one (besides, I’d say, the second) has used the previous game as a jumping-off point to attempt to one-up it, which I believe is a big reason the stories have grown more dense and meandering as time has gone on. Mask of the Lunar Eclipse officially takes that too far, however, not only repeating beats from prior stories - sometimes without comment, sometimes accompanied by a wink and a nudge that does nothing to help matters - but also harping on its own skeletal story beats until it feels like you’re being pulled into some kind of singularity of bad writing and corporate obligation.

Breadcrumbs are one thing, but holy shit: once we’re ten hours in, you can cool it with pummeling me with one pointless scrap after another. It’s all endless clarification that we just don’t need; worthless details stacked up until you can’t tell the forest for the trees. We get it! Nurses are being abused by patients, doctors are abusing patients, there’s a ritual involving masks that can bring back the dead, and Ruka and her friends were kidnapped that one time: they just keep banging on and on about it, and yet it still doesn’t make sense! I didn't even think such a thing was possible. Rather than attempting to design their narrative in such a way that it effortlessly tracks as you’re playing, they instead keep hounding you with exposition that only confuses matters further. It’s too dense, it’s too haphazard. It’s so frustrating that even explaining just why it's so bad is difficult. 

From the outside, Fatal Frame IV appears to tell a traditional horror story, with a beginning, middle, and ending, but in reality, it feels like a kernel of a story that someone sat on for a decade and just kept adding things to until it became this jumble of half-realized ideas that sprawls in every direction. A random patient with no importance to the story must have a complete biography written out and shoved in our faces over and over again, yet when it comes to simple questions like “Which one of the three brunette women that we keep encountering is actually our antagonist?” the game suddenly becomes tight-lipped, almost as though it had no idea it would be extremely fucking confusing.

At its core, this is a story about our antagonist and her journey from nobody to nightmare, which simply isn’t served by all this background detail. When your story seems too thin on the ground, the solution isn’t just to write twenty smaller stories into the fabric of it; it’s to start over again with a different story altogether, maybe one that’s a little more original while you’re at it.

This could just about pass for a greatest hits of the series, for crying out loud. There's Kageri and the living doll, Misaki and the friend she’s chasing, both of whom are often heard in flashbacks to repeat “Let’s… always be together,” a patient declaring “I don’t want to see anymore,” someone lying in a comatose state whose awakening means doom, and a quest motivated by mourning. Hell, there’s more, but they’d probably be considered spoilers. Let’s just say, the reason the ritual fails this time around is for similar reasons as usual, and the ending is just about identical to prior entries. Even the ideas contributed by Suda51 are just recycled ones from his previous, much better games! Recycling and stretching your content to fit into a ten-hour game might be understandable, less so when your ideas are cribbed from something better.

Less is more

Speaking of sprawling and making no goddamn sense, I think my frustration with the experience of playing this game and summarizing is starting to get to me a bit and making my thoughts ramble even more than usual. So in the interest of clarity, I'll calm down a bit and attempt to explain what I mean by "narrative design" a moment ago. This, I believe, is key to dispelling comments from passionate fans who will assure themselves that the official translation might magically fix everything when it arrives. 

There’s nothing wrong with a complex narrative. The problem comes, I feel, when you have an actually quite simple narrative, and you try and beef it up artificially. For example, almost nothing of the drama between patients, staff, and mad doctors in the game really clarifies or explains anything. There’s no interesting thematic relevance to the core idea (Ruka’s arc) nor much clarification that genuinely helps our understanding of the story. Sure, it occasionally does, but not nearly often enough. For example, my summary of the game was nearly complete by the time I reached the seventh chapter of the game, meaning that most of the rest of the experience felt like endless recapping in preparation for an ending that didn’t rely on any of it. You could argue these bits contribute small moments of isolated, out-of-context horror, but that’s not really the best way to approach writing a story. "Oh, my basic idea isn’t scary enough, let me write a bunch of terminally-ill children into the backstory that we can harp on whenever things seem to be at a standstill."

But beyond that, it’s all just confusing! Take the opening: we’re immediately told that once upon a time, some horrible incident happened that killed everyone on Rougetsu Island. However, things become seriously confused when we get further clarification that there’s actually been two incidents; one in the immediate past and one in the ancient past. Not hard to grasp when put that way, sure, but that’s not how it's presented in-game. No, we just keep hearing references to a failed ritual and a “calamity” and it's entirely up to the player to realize when conflicts and contradictions arise that there are actually two distinct incidents in the backstory that resulted in much the same thing. Again, may not sound like much, but when you’re a new player trying to get a grasp on the stakes so that you can get invested, this kind of half-assed and supremely unsexy storytelling doesn’t help matters one bit.

Sure, you can rewrite a few things here or there to straighten this out, come the time of the new localization, but what about all the other places where undisciplined and unserious writing makes the story feel like something typed up by a self-published teenager? And as I’ve already pointed out, how would that fix the sense of deja vu that every individual element of the narrative invokes? No matter how you slice it, this is a far cry from something like Crimson Butterfly: a very personal story that felt like a nightmare playing out before your very eyes, with no less than three interesting endings to boot!

The times they are a-changin'

Now, giving that a rest for a minute, the obvious question would be “Well, does it at least play well?” On the one hand, this is pretty much the Fatal Frame you all know and love. You walk around in third person, and when ghosts show up to attack, your view switches to first person as you raise your viewfinder. In order to facilitate this on the Wii, the decision was made to give you a lock-on button that essentially takes fine aiming out of the equation. This could be seen as a huge step back for some, but I actually didn’t totally mind it. It allows you to focus on what makes the combat unique: rhythm, and it makes a couple of dreadful boss fights toward the end of the game less frustrating than they would have been otherwise.

The most annoying thing about the Wii controls, however, is the decision to account for the tilt of the controller, namely to determine how far up or down your character is looking. What this ultimately means is that the player will be required to keep their wrist pointed at a specific angle for most of the game’s rather long runtime, though it becomes second nature soon enough. Looking down at the floor to pick things up is made more annoying than it should have been because of this, but it’s hardly worth getting bent out of shape over.

Not like the claustrophobic behind-the-back camera, collectible dolls hidden in the environment, a shopkeeper who sells you healing items and ammo, and numerous setpieces where you must survive against a large wave of enemies, some of which will suddenly mutate into a stronger version of themselves in the heat of battle, at any rate; Now pardon me if I'm jumping to wild, unfounded conclusions here, but does this not feel just a tiny bit like an attempt to copy Resident Evil 4? Additionally, in order to facilitate battles that are larger than is typical for the series, the developers decided to add a new weapon into the mix: a magical flashlight that couldn’t have possibly felt any more vestigial and poorly conceived than it does here. All the rhythm of normal combat is replaced by a limp and unsatisfying system where you just hold and release, hold and release the A button again and again until you run out of ammo, whereupon you’re expected to run around in circles for a while, leading enemies on a merry chase, until your ammo replenishes and you can finish the job. Oh, and did I mention you can take photos with your flashlight, which is never explained anywhere in-game? (You must switch to the correct “ammo” type in order to accomplish this.) Needless to say, Fatal Frame IV isn’t the action game Resident Evil 4 was and it shows.

From here to infinity

Now if you’ve read all of my previous three analyses on the series and thus statistically don’t exist, then you might be surprised that until now I’ve neglected to mention anything about long scavenger hunts or cryptic hide-and-seek bits. The thing is, progression this time around is quite different from previous games. Here, the name of the game is key hunting, and a somewhat-improved map is a big part of it. In prior games, the in-game map lacked useful information and a lack of direction meant that leaving and coming back a few days later could result in becoming helplessly stuck. Here, the map is much more detailed, and whenever you find a locked door, it becomes marked permanently until you find the key, at which point a short cutscene will play showing you the route back to whichever locked door it opens. A little patronizing, but hey: it’s something. It still has nothing on Silent Hill, which would have given you all the appropriate tools to figure it out yourself and then let you have at it, but I guess every game can’t be Silent Hill aka perfect. Also, there are several occasions where the game forgets to do any of this; an early moment where you must find a ceremonial mask and put it back where it belongs forgoes marking the pedestal it’s meant to sit on springs to mind, but at least an attempt to simplify things was made.

The issue is that it becomes so blatantly an exercise in following the dangling carrot on a stick that everything begins to blur together. The repetitive-looking and shockingly small playable area doesn’t help one bit, as you’ll be seeing the same hallway featured in the opening all the way up until the very end, nor do the structure that sees each character constantly retracing the steps of previous ones. Throw the repetitive story into the mix and it feels like if you were to unglaze your eyes and look closer that you’d spiral into utter madness or be stricken blind like the Hellish Abyss in Crimson Butterfly. I won’t even start on the game’s puzzles, as all the most notable ones come after the spoiler break, but suffice to say that one puzzle in chapter nine is the worst puzzle I’ve yet come across in a video game, and I almost put the game down for good once I spent about an hour trying and failing to progress past it.

The last thing I’d like to shine a spotlight on as far as gameplay goes is this game’s new upgrade system. Instead of gaining points from handling combat especially well, you instead find gems in the environment that function as currency to upgrade your offensive capabilities. There are two varieties of gems that can be used for either upgrading your camera or your character. Simple, right? I mean, sure, you’re kind of erasing a reason to go out of your way to excel at combat (you can use points you earn through combat to buy odds and ends from the shopkeeper in Fatal Frame IV, but you end up with so many points after a while that you sort of run out of things to buy) but it’s still no reason to harp. The big issue that I see with it is… well, in the third game, where you had multiple characters to upgrade, you could only upgrade a character with points that that specific character had earned. So if Kei wasn’t worth a damn at killing ghosts, he wouldn’t have very many points to spend on upgrades. Here, gems are shared between characters, which means I could find a ton of them with Ruka, spend them all on Misaki, and then find myself boned towards the end of the game when Misaki is benched and Ruka has piddly damage output with which she’s expected to defeat the final boss.

We just disagree

But finally, is Mask of the Lunar Eclipse scary? It is, after all, a horror game, and a horror game that’s messy in most aspects but ultimately scary (looking at you, Fatal Frame III) would be totally worth it for plenty of starved survival horror fans out there. By contrast, a horror game that excels in most things but which isn’t scary probably isn’t going to hack it with most discerning horror fanatics.

Fatal Frame IV unquestionably belongs in the second category. It replaces its prior folk horror direction for one that feels more like standard J-horror: Koji Suzuki meets Akira meets a seventh grader with an inflated confidence in their abilities, and it’s not an appealing blend for me. An early reliance on intense jump scares seems promising, but it doesn’t take long for their frequency to become exhausting. Once that happens, Fatal Frame IV loses me in the same way that something like Doom 3 loses me with its repetitive jumpscares, only in that case, there’s still plenty of fun to be had killing demons with big guns once you're grown bored of the horror. Here, you’re left with nothing. If the story, gameplay, and scares are all a shadow of their former selves, what exactly am I supposed to be getting out of this? Sure, the presentation is decent, if generally quite unpolished, but they have a long way to go before they could ever make up for what the experience lacks overall. 

Many people will likely wonder who exactly is to blame for Mask of the Lunar Eclipse's fatal shortcomings. Was it all Nintendo’s fault? Tecmo’s? Or is it perhaps that Suda51, ever the auteur, pushed it too far in a new direction? The truth is impossible to pin down in any one direction, except that we already know from Fatal Frame III’s similarly chaotic and dense narrative that everything wrong here as far as narrative goes was foreshadowed then. The thing is, Fatal Frame III was still a great survival horror game. The same, I’m afraid, can’t be said for Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.

When we reconvene next time (all two of you who are still reading despite my negativity) we’ll move into spoiler territory and close the book on this sad chapter of Fatal Frame’s history.

[continued here]