Fatal Frame III: The Tormented (2005) pt. 1 of 4 - intro & synopsis

If you've yet to read my analyses for either the original Fatal Frame or its sequel, Crimson Butterfly, then I'd advise you to check those out before coming back. I didn't want to repeat myself too much for those following along, so certain things that I may harp on in one review, I'll generally only briefly allude to later on the line unless it really bears further repeating, though I admit it does come at the expense of those who wish to jump right in with their favorite entry. Sorry!

So it has come to this. We have finally made it to the third entry in this series, with only one more to go after this (until I move on to something else, at least; I’m aware there are more games after the fourth, but I'll honestly need a break after talking about Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.) I feel like I have rambled myself silly about all this by now, and it makes knowing what the hell to put here in the intro and beyond extremely difficult. I mean, it’s another Fatal Frame. While the actual contents of the narrative are (somewhat) original and the gameplay has had a number of tweaks and improvements that are worth discussing, what is there to say about the game’s background at this point? Makoto Shibata and Keisuke Kikuchi made another game based on their dreams, favorite films, personal anxieties, and “first-hand experiences” with the supernatural, only this time, everything is tinted blue instead of red!  

Otherwise, you’ll still be pointing a camera and snapping photos of ghosts in order to subdue them in between navigating a sprawling, utterly haunted environment and solving puzzles akin to the ones they put on the back of cereal boxes. In other news, bears still shit in the woods, and video game publishers still shit in the mouths of their player base and charge them eighty bucks for the privilege. What else is new?

And so without further ado, I’m just going to get into it. This time around, my summary of what’s going on in the plot is really, really going to stretch on, as this game is packed with narrative details that are nigh impossible to make sense of until you’ve played the game multiple times. I will try my best to get it all across while also having it read semi-fluidly, but to what degree I succeeded in this, I'm not sure.

Keep the Kleenex handy

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented opens in the immediate aftermath of a horrible car accident. Our protagonist, Rei Kurosawa, crawls out of the wreckage, mostly unscathed, only to discover that her lover and partner Yuu Asou (yes, that Asou) was not so lucky. Fast-forward sometime later, and Rei has still barely recovered from the tragedy, though she is at least working again. She even has Miku Hinasaki from the first Fatal Frame helping her out as something of a live-in personal assistant.  

The two of them are currently on assignment, snapping photos in a creepy dilapidated old mansion when suddenly, Rei catches sight of her dead fiance standing in the hallway ahead of her. She calls out to him and steps forward, only for everything around her to dissolve into someplace new and decidedly more sinister where it is always night and always snowing. Here, she catches multiple glimpses of spooky apparitions and is even attacked at one point by a crazy man-ghost swinging a hatchet, culminating in an encounter with a mysterious blue woman covered in tattoos, who very nearly touches Rei. 

Luckily, Rei snaps out of her reverie just in time, and is once again standing in an empty old mansion, holding her camera. Miku asks her if everything is okay, and Rei brushes it all off as some kind of daydream. That is until she has a chance to develop the photos she took, where it’s discovered that Yuu really was there in that old mansion. So could the dark, snowy place she briefly visited be real as well? 

Later that same night, after Rei goes to bed, she ends up returning to the appropriately-named Manor of Sleep, whereupon she decides to investigate a little more thoroughly. She’s led around the place by glimpses of her dearly-missed beau in the distance, and it isn’t long before she’s in possession of her very own Camera Obscura, Fatal Frame's signature weapon of exorcism. This is fortunate, as Rei is accosted by the spirits of a young girl and her mother soon after, who both appear to be searching for their father and husband respectively. They seem to believe Rei knows something about this, and so descend upon her, forcing her to defend herself. 

As our nightmare comes to a close, we’re introduced to another new character, a young woman who appears to be still-living, just like Rei, if just a hair more torn up about it. She sits holding herself, babbling under her breath something about wishing she had “died with everyone else,” completely ignoring Rei’s presence. 

Suddenly, something comes over the woman and she becomes frozen with terror, prompting our heroine to spin on her heels and come face to face with the mysterious blue tattooed woman yet again. Only this time, she manages to get her ghostly hands on Rei before she can awaken.  

And then... Rei is somewhere else, being pinned to the ground by a bunch of creepy little girls, first by nothing but their tiny hands, then by nails being driven into her hands and feet...

This prompts her to immediately awaken as a mysterious purple and blue bruise begins to spread from the spot where she was touched in her dream. Then, just as quickly as it came, it disappears, leaving behind no trace it ever existed. Weird. 

Miku, ever the nag, comes in unannounced and expresses worry that Rei keeps having such potent nightmares. Rei attempts to reassure her, but it’s clear that Miku doesn’t buy it.  

New friends, and a few old ones too

And I guess this is as good a place as any to elucidate the dynamic between these two women and poke fun at how absurd it all is. You see, Rei sits on her ass all day, barely getting out of the house to work and being very specific about what work she will take, yet somehow manages to earn not only a living wage, but a living wage for two, and that’s only if you consider leasing a massive two-story loft something that a person on a living wage could ever feasibly do. Sure, she’s hurting deeply on the inside, but this story is implied to take place a year later or possibly even more, and very few of us on planet Earth have the luxury to just take off for a whole year to recover, so she’s not exactly easy to sympathize with even if she didn’t come off like a spoiled brat during interactions and an aloof idiot during just about everything that unfolds as the story goes on. I feel for her, I really do: she lost her husband. But this is the Alien: Covenant problem all over again: we never saw him, we don’t know how great he is, or why Rei loves him so much. His presence isn't missed by us because we never even met the fucking guy. We’re just asked to fill in a lot of blanks ourselves, and by the standards of video game storytelling, I suppose that’s probably enough for most people, but not for me.

Maybe the reason all of this bothers me so much is because of the way this game treats Miku, previous Fatal Frame protagonist and memetic badass. Her role is something not unlike a live-in secretary, maid, and nanny rolled into one. Backstory that I never personally encountered in the game but have on good authority is in there someplace suggests that Yuu and Rei took her in as a posthumous favor to Mafuyu, but still: when you take into account all that she’s been through, it’s a long fall from capable protagonist who wins agains the forces of Hell in the first game to hired help that folds her boss’s underwear every morning and does her dishes every night.  

This dynamic duo, along with Rei’s cat Ruri (probably the most well-rounded character overall,) spend most days bumming around the house, conversing about the weather and the awful nightmares that Rei has been having lately, and just generally being as cryptic as they can get away with in every interaction with each other. It’s far from natural, I guess is what I’m trying to say. It’s a pretty miserable existence, and it’s no wonder Rei stays so upset all the time. 

Miku is no slouch herself in the brooding department, as even before later events cause drastic, worrying changes in her character, she spends a lot of time holed up in her room, itself decorated with a thousand little reminders of what she has lost, and a creepy ass doll whose hair slowly grows over the course of the game. Don’t get me wrong, the game makes it very clear that both characters are deeply wounded, and I’m sure it was written with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t really effectively bring across a sense of sorrow so much as it does a sense of drowsiness, itself a staple of Fatal Frame storytelling by this point. 

Still, the whole situation feels very… how do I put this… anime? Like, this feels straight out of Phoenix Wright: a Japanese schoolgirl, who has already saved the entire world once before, is now living with her rich, photographer friend in a roomy property where they while away the day sitting on the couch, watching TV, eating ice cream, and solving mysteries while pointedly not going bankrupt. I’m not saying any of this isn’t appealing in concept, but I just don’t think it works nor that its successes are all that intentional even at the best of times. 

Besides these two women, the cast quickly expands to three when we’re introduced, exclusively by post for now, to Kei Amakura. He is attempting to re-establish contact with his old buddy, Rei’s fiance Yuu, who he is clearly unaware has died in the interim, and so the situation is initially interesting as she communicates with her husband’s best friend by more or less pretending to be him. 

Kei is reaching out because he needs Yuu’s help and expertise on something he’s working on. He’s researching an urban legend, a curse of sorts, that he believes may be responsible for a mysterious new sickness that has confined his niece to her bed 24/7, more or less rendering her comatose. She spends more and more time sleeping, and whenever she awakens, she seems frightened by what she sees.

In the tradition of Fatal Frame characters, not only is Kei Amakura an amateur folklorist/anthropologist, but so was Yuu, and this was apparently more his wheelhouse, so Kei implores his friend to search his records and see if there's anything relevant there. So that’s exactly what Rei does. 

In her dead fiance’s room, she finds yet more correspondence between the two old friends, where fans of the franchise are in for something of a shock: Kei Amakura is actually the uncle of Mio Amakura from Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly! Ya… wait, what? So she survived that whole ordeal only to get taken down by yet another ancient curse? And I guess the Crimson Sacrifice ritual was all bullshit after all, because Mio is most certainly not one with her sister if she's laid up somewhere, near-comatose and ailing over the resulting trauma. But forget all that for now, because all that matters is we get to have copious amounts of fan service! Isn’t that just so wonderfully grand? 

So yeah, now she’s got the dreaded blue and purple tattoo spreading across her body just like Rei, though Mio is implied to be in a far more advanced state. We’ll leave alone the fact that such a tight, self-contained narrative is now being tainted with these filthy revisionist bollocks and focus for the moment on what happens next. 

Among Yuu’s old things, Rei actually manages to find a real-life Camera Obscura which Kei had mailed Yuu forever ago and has apparently never at any point politely requested back. When Rei examines it, she finds a roll of film still in it that actually contains all of the photos she took that previous night. In her dream, I might add. 

Naturally, Rei takes the photos into her darkroom (did I mention how enormous her apartment is?) and has them developed, whereupon she takes the photo of the mysterious weeping woman to Miku to see what she can figure out. I guess because Rei feels like curling up alongside the cat on the sofa rather than getting any work done today. And honestly, I may poke fun, but this is incredibly relatable to me. 

That night, when Rei goes to sleep, she ends up in the Manor of Sleep yet again, proving that this curse is real and most likely not going away on its own. While there, she encounters the weeping woman yet again, still babbling to herself about it “not being her fault” and all that. Initially, she seems every bit as unresponsive as before, until the minute Rei turns to leave her, whereupon she addresses Rei and asks to be woken up. Just then, the dream ends, and Rei is back in her apartment, where it’s morning yet again. For a moment, it certainly seems that her tattoo spreads just a bit further before it disappears like usual.  

At this point, the structure of Fatal Frame III: The Tormented should be clear. There’s the daytime portion, where you bum around the house, desperately searching for event flags to push the game forward. Usually, all you have to do is develop your dream photos and show them to her to move things along, but other times, you’re not quite so lucky and must pay attention to avoid becoming stuck and having to consult a guide.  

Then there’s the nighttime bit, where optional conversations and/or scares will present themselves if you take the time to re-explore everything. Once you’re done wasting time, however, it’s time to go to bed, whereupon the game becomes Fatal Frame again and you explore, solve puzzles, fight ghosts, yada yada yada. 

It’s Silent Hill 4: The Room, alright? What else do you want me to say? And don’t even try to tell me they’re ripping off A Nightmare on Elm Street either. I might have believed that were it not for the shameless way the next entry would attempt to rip off its contemporary Resident Evil 4, despite the fact that that game was an action game just as much as it was a horror game.

Now is not really the time to discuss it I suppose, but I also have to go ahead and throw it out there that if this summary seems boring as fuck so far, rest assured the whole game seems that way early on. In stark contrast to earlier entries, the first four hours or so of this game are painfully slow and weirdly unfocused, both in terms of plot and gameplay. It turns out: walking around a house, painstakingly interacting with each and every last environmental detail in the hopes of progressing things is not exactly riveting, and it takes a while before the spooks start to make it all worthwhile, but make it worthwhile they do. Sorry, I am just spoiling the hell out of my analysis, aren’t I? Back to the summary! 

"Sleep, priestess, lie in sleep..."

At the apartment, Miku tells Rei that she has managed to find out the identity of the weeping woman. Her name is Yoshino Takigawa, and she has been in the news very recently. You see, she was the sole survivor of a plane crash, but she went to sleep one night and, strangely enough, has never woken up. Currently, she’s enjoying a long stay at the hospital. So obviously, that’s Rei’s next stop. 

When Rei arrives, she finds Yoshino exactly as advertised. Suddenly, Rei notices a tattoo spreading across Yoshino’s face that spreads until it reaches her eyes, whereupon the woman suddenly awakens, the tattoos spread further, actually bleeding over into her eyes, and Rei turns to book it the hell out of there. 

She’s stopped in her tracks, however, by a husky voice emanating from Yoshino’s bed. Throwing caution to the wind, she spins on her heels only to find that the poor woman has vanished, leaving behind naught but a black soot mark where she once lay. Rei then flees the hospital in terror. 

Back at home, Miku asks Rei about her visit, and Rei simply ignores her. 

Later that night, when we inevitably return to the Manor of Sleep in our dreams, Yoshino is there, waiting for us. Only now, she’s different and quite dangerous. She attacks and Rei is forced to pacify her like any other ghost she has encountered thus far. It’s a little annoying that the first mini-boss the game throws at us has a weird puzzle element that will likely throw franchise newbies for a loop, but that’s neither here nor there. Once dealt with, she disappears with an inquiring “You’re not like me?” whereupon Rei abruptly awakens. 

Digging through Yuu's materials, we learn that Yoshino, just like Rei, was troubled by dreams of an identical-sounding snowy manor that came more and more often, lasting longer and longer each time. And now she's become permanently sown into the fabric of the Manor of Sleep, acting as one of many hostile spirits doomed to roam its eldritch architecture. And presumably, all of this has something to do with survivor’s guilt, as Yoshino and Rei definitely both had that in common. 

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the spreading tattoos cannot be seen by others, only by the affected party or people who can recognize such trauma. Invisible bruises that haunt those afflicted but which can’t be seen by others? Almost like mental scarring? How thematic. 

And with that, I think we'll take a break. This summary is so long that I simply must break it into two. Yes, I wish I could get to my actual analysis of the game much sooner, but things just haven't worked out that way. When next we talk, we'll learn more about the history behind the Manor of Sleep, the all-female Kuze clan that once resided there, and the events that led to the place being sealed up in a dream. I hope to see you then!

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