Fatal Frame III: The Tormented (2005) pt. 3 of 4 - analysis & criticism

In pts. 1 and 2, we summarized everything up to the point of spoilers, and you know what that means: it's now finally time to get opinionated.

After that last summary, I’m pretty sure most of you have checked out, right? I might as well carry on as though I’ve been marooned on an island somewhere and I’ve got to keep talking just to keep my sanity, but I can’t help but wonder who is actually reading this. Huge Fatal Frame fans? Well, probably not, thanks to all my snarky asides and goofs on this earnest but often silly horror game, but what do you want from me? I made the stupid, stupid decision to cover them this way, in this much detail, and now I’ve got to stick with it. If I didn’t play around a bit and pick on the game while recounting its dense and lengthy narrative, literally no one would ever read it except as some kind of sleep aid. What? No, I’m not feeling insecure. Why do you ask?

But enough stalling, it's time to jump into analysis, and it could not have come any faster. Because I was so mean in the last part, I guess I’ll start with the positives of this new ‘epic’ take on Fatal Frame narratives.

Well, first off, this is far more of a traditional J-horror story than is usual for the series. While the folk horror elements are still here, they’ve been swallowed up in the stuff of postmodern ghost stories like Ringu or Kairo (Pulse.) Here, our characters don’t journey to some haunted place, the haunting comes to them and invades their initially cozy upscale home. 

And not only does it come to them, but it comes to them in their sleep. Very A Nightmare on Elm Street insofar as its clearly copying off of another game's homework and so, intentionally or not, carried over the very same Wes Craven influence that that game had (Sorry, I promise I won't keep harping on this.) Can’t say it isn’t a good fit though. These games have always been dreamlike, surreal, and even directly inspired by Makoto Shibata's dreams, so why not have most of the game take place in a series of nightmares?

This reaches its zenith once the game has firmly established its structure of bumming around during the day time and carrying on the ‘investigation’ during the night, juuust before it starts to subvert it by blurring the lines between what is a dream and what isn’t in order to disorient and frighten the player. The bit in the attic I mentioned in the last part springs to mind as a particularly effective example of this. So at least it’s not taking ideas from other games without understanding why they worked so well.

Like the previous game in this series, Fatal Frame III has a highly thematic sort of story, where everything is tied together by this persistent thread of mourning and loss. It’s no coincidence then, that the warm hues of Crimson Butterfly have now been replaced by various shades of blue, and there's usually rain or snow falling at all times, even if you can only hear it. Without getting into things I don’t like so much, let’s just say that the core of this story, that kind of real pain experienced every day by regular people, is solid and could have been put to great use.

And continuing the arc established in the last game, Fatal Frame III is probably the most twisted and disturbing yarn in the whole series. We haven’t quite touched on this yet (I know, we’ve only summarized for roughly six thousand words already) but while the resident clan of this game are technically justified in their customs, considering what happens when their precious ritual fails, they’re far less pious and selfless than usual. The Kuze clan actually adopt an orphan to sacrifice this time around, as opposed to offering their own children, and the handmaidens, young girls who carry out the ritual, seem to get an almost sexual satisfaction from the completion of their violent duties.

Speaking of the Impaling Ritual, this particular variant is especially surreal and horrifying. While it is true that it suffers from the same problem most of the story does, where attempting to outdo previous games threatens to take things a little too far, at least it’s still nightmarish in an irrational way that I find charming.

But to expound a little on what I just said about ‘trying to outdo previous games and taking things too far,' this is the first Fatal Frame narrative where things did not really come together in the end for me and I found myself left feeling quite cold. Oh, by the way, we’re moving into negatives now. Yeah, I know, I didn’t have much nice to say, but don’t worry, I’m going to bring it all back full circle in just a bit. Hold your horses.

First, the bad news.

Yes, in my extremely humble opinion (don't kill me please,) the story this time around is just too much. It comes off as very insecure, and let me tell ya: if there's one thing I know, it's insecurity. What should have been the core of this tale, Rei’s story of loss, mourning, and eventual recovery, is downplayed in favor of recycling old ideas with the details swapped around and straight-up recapping and remixing the stories of previous games in some misguided attempt to make a sprawling conclusion to the trilogy. Instead, what they've got is one of the most overstuffed and difficult-to-follow narratives in all of survival horror, ditto the franchise it belongs to. Endless notes overexplain every single little aspect of the story, and yet, it still makes no fucking sense!

You will need to play this game all the way through at least twice to have even a solid grasp of the details. Hell, if you don’t do some serious research on the wiki just after finishing it, there’s a good chance your brain will ball the whole experience up and toss it right in the can. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with a complex story where various threads interact with one another, but that’s not what this is: this is one decent idea for a curse-type horror story, with the lore of the two previous games in the franchise poorly grafted onto it, before various B-plots involving the lost souls that make up the bulk of the Tattoo Curse’s victims are then added into that already-dense mix, and it just becomes impossible to find an emotional foothold anywhere. It comes across as someone’s baby: an idea they just kept adding and adding to without ever considering whether the things they were adding jived with the initial concept whatsoever.

And as hard as it is to wrap your head around, that still doesn’t mean that the end result of multiple playthroughs and tireless wiki reading makes it any good. So much of it has already been done by the two previous games, and much better, while none of the individual stories here really have much of a conclusion or payoff, nor do they strengthen the junk around it by their inclusion. It’s all smoke and mirrors, as Rei’s story isn’t serviced by any of it. Her story does at least get a decent payoff, but that’s kind of all there is to it: an okay setup dealing with mourning, an okay ending dealing with same, and everything in between is almost entirely unrelated. Sure, some of it is thematically related, but not enough of it to make it all feel like one giant intertwined tale.

The developers must have realized this could be an issue though, as they’ve thoughtfully included a notebook to help players keep track of all the various threads. Thing is, this helps exactly zero, as the tons and tons of topics that get filled out as the game progresses have little to nothing to do with anything else in the story. It’s so easy to get caught up on analyzing and understanding every little detail included there that you, like the scenario writers, start to miss the forest for the trees at a certain point, only realizing after the game is over that none of it ever really came together in way that felt satisfying.

But about this game's attempts to mix the lore of both previous games into this ‘new' narrative, held together by a very loose theme of loss and mourning: in short, this is the first Fatal Frame game that can’t really stand on its own narratively. If you played this without playing the previous games, congratulations! I'm sure you'll love the fact that the game spends so much time recapping the events of the previous games, but for dedicated scholars of Fatal Frame, especially those who play them in rapid succession, it can't help but feel kind of like a kick in the stomach. Besides, hardcore fans are also far more likely to realize that the story of the mysterious tattooed lady at the center of things is just Kirie’s story from the first game again with every other word changed. 

This kind of recontextualizing of previous stories is something I never care for, even in other mediums, but here it’s especially silly. This closed circle of a handful of characters just keep having run-ins with the supernatural, and it just comes off as childish and silly. If I was Mio, I would feel like the unluckiest gil in the world to be still dealing with a supernatural curse immediately after surviving everything that happened in the second game. I mean, forget getting struck by lightning twice.

Even worse, it attempts to cheapen all three endings from Crimson Butterfly, making the one where Mio sacrifices her older sister absolutely canon. This would be fine except… well, she’s laid up in a bed somewhere and entirely unresponsive. Wasn’t she supposed to become one with her sister following their ritual? So was all that bullshit all along or what?

And besides, let’s look at our new characters and their relation to one another. There’s Rei, a total charisma vacuum, who has no character other than “She’s sad and she’s the protagonist. What?” There’s Kei, Mio’s uncle, who exists for no other reason than to enable the story to have both a connection to the second game and a higher body count. What is the nature of their relationship with one another? Well, they swap research occasionally, mostly by post. Aren’t Rei and Miku good friends, at least? Well, not really; they live together but they’re barely speaking seeing as both of them are heavily afflicted with the tattoo curse, and thus are presently experiencing a period of intense mourning. Well, there’s got to be some kind of interesting dynamic here, right? Well, there’s Rei's cat, Ruri, who wanders around the apartment and can be seen napping quite often, usually as some no doubt horribly effective scare is firing off nearby. She’s probably my favorite character, if I’m honest. 

So, if Fatal Frame II was manically depressed, III comes across as something closer to clinically depressed. This is another thing it has in common with wonderful film Kairo I referenced earlier. Everybody is upset and scared shitless by this whole ghost invasion thing, but they’re also too sleepy to really get up and do anything about it. Relatable. This is probably helped by the sparse and spotty voice acting, not to mention the, let’s be charitable, distant characters.

The writing and the narrative overall is just not a major strength of this entry, and though it truly pains me to say so, as I know for a fact a lot of perfectly nice people just love this game, it's simply the cold hard truth as far as I see it. Fatal Frame III contains basically everything I don't like to see in sequels: a deluge of fan service and references to previous games, a story that feels more like a Mad Libs-style re-do of a previous entry rather than an all-new creation, and repeated attempts to outdo previous games which results in an overlong, overstuffed story.

Tecmo by way of Bethesda.

Presentation-wise, you’d think Fatal Frame III would have an easy win over previous entries, and for the most part you’d be right. This is no huge graphical leap forward the way Fatal Frame II was compared to its predecessor, but it's still a clear improvement in just about every way. The visuals are so much more detailed, especially hostile enemy spirits, who all animate with incredible fluidity. I especially like the terrifying faces that they all make as they get nearer to the player, meaning the images the player snaps of them during combat are generally quite chilling. Various different areas of the Manor of Sleep all look more visually distinct than is the norm for this series, which is always nice when you’re working with Fatal Frame’s infamously vague in-game map. This is also the very last time this series would use fixed camera angles, and boy do they look great here. It almost makes you wonder what on Earth they were thinking come Fatal Frame IV, but I digress. There is some emulator weirdness that wasn’t present in Crimson Butterfly, mostly a few subtly flickering textures in one or two specific areas, but it’s not too distracting. And the sound design is as strong as ever, relying almost entirely on atonal noise, high-pitched whining, metallic scraping, and the howls of understandably upset hostile spirits bearing down on you. 

Still, though, there are issues. One nitpick I have is that, like many games of this era, the HUD disappears whenever the player isn’t in combat, which has the knock-on effect of its appearance spoiling the presence of a nearby ghost. Not a huge deal, but certainly worth pointing out. 

What is kind of a huge deal is that this game, probably thanks to its sprawling length, is incredibly rough around the edges. Fatal Frame has never before been a series I would consider ‘janky,’ but that all changes here.

Whole lines are missing, like in Kei’s phonecall where a loaded silence between the two somehow magically tips Kei off that his friend is dead and he never skips a beat. Then there are all the repeating lines of dialogue that play (“It’s raining again.” and “Oh, I’m sorry, I blanked out for a second.”) even when you’re interacting with a character in order to progress the story. And how about the ghostly crank phone calls you keep getting again and again that all play the exact same “LET ME OUT!!! LET ME OUT!!!” clip. Sometimes, this clip even plays while you’re on the phone with someone who is most certainly not a ghost.

A lot of these issues are due to the game’s desire to have as little voice acting as possible. I’m sure wrangling these people together and getting them to record lines is terribly aggravating and cost-prohibitive (not that voice actors make much for their work) when the group of underpaid coders you have working twenty hours a day keep rearranging and changing things every time you turn around, but come on guys. That loaded silence I just mentioned literally feels like someone forgot to record one of Rei’s lines and so they figured the character interactions were already awkward enough that players just wouldn’t notice that they missed it. Needless to say, all this jank does not help sell these wooden, uncharismatic characters to me nor their ill-defined relationships. 

Oh, and while I'm complaining, why does Rei look so dopey? Even for this series, her expressions or lack thereof often lead to much jovial laughter that I’m fairly sure was unintentional. This just further contributes to the idea that she’s the least-magnetic protagonist I may have ever seen. Sure, Henry Townshend was a half-awake dope in Silent Hill 4: The Room, but everything surrounding him was great. Unlike the writers of this game, the writers of Silent Hill 4 knew that giving Henry too much of a backstory and motivation would just distract from the core story the game was trying to tell; a story that had little to do with Henry at all.

Getting sick of all this negativity? Look, I understand. I promise if you just hang with me for a little bit longer, we’ll move on to something a bit more positive, alright? Because Fatal Frame III certainly has plenty to recommend it even despite its multitude of issues.

Third verse, same as the first.

Gameplay-wise, Fatal Frame III is complicated. The opening four hours or so, usually the best part of prior entries, is tough to push through. We’re introduced to the day-night structure, our underwritten, uninteresting characters and their dynamic with one another, and combat with hostile ghosts in the most painfully slow way imaginable. Towards the end of this chunk, we even get our first mini-boss encounter. Not only is this a puzzle boss of sorts, which would likely frustrate new players, but she’s also encountered again almost immediately after. As repetitive as these games often are, this is taking things a  bit too far. Not to mention, what the fuck happened to the controls? Bringing up the viewfinder has been moved over to… the triangle button? And bringing up the map has been moved to… christ, the left trigger button? Well, surely this can be changed in the Settings menu, right? Right?!

Otherwise, nighttime excursions into the heart of the Manor of Sleep are classic Fatal Frame. Everything starts out aggressively linear with a limited area of play, gradually opening up more and more of the environment until the final hours of the game sees you carrying out fetch quests that span the entire massive complex multiple times over. And just like with previous entries, this is made far more difficult than it should be thanks to a not-particularly-useful in-game map that doesn’t indicate nearly as much as it should. If only these games would go ahead and rip off Silent Hill’s map instead of nothing but its general scenarios and themes from game to game, but I digress.

But yes, fetch quests. If you’re still here after two games of this crap, then you must have seen it coming. Besides the whole “camera revealing secrets in the environment” gimmick, drawn-out fetch quests are just about the closest thing to a signature mechanic for this series. They’re more numerous and involved here than in any previous game, although at least here it was easy to view ghostly hints as often as I needed. And while visiting those damn Doll Altar rooms again and again got very old by the game’s end, it is worth noting that I never got completely stuck the way I did during Fatal Frame II’s “hide-and-seek” bit.

Besides, the Manor of Sleep boasts what I consider to be the best design and layout of any of the previous games’ environments, going for something right in between the original Fatal Frame’s small, interconnected mansion and Fatal Frame II’s series of tiny, sometimes interconnected homes, and coming dangerously close to feeling like a true puzzle box ala Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion or Raccoon City Police Department. The little themed offshoots, based on Himuro Mansion and All God’s Village, do help to inject a little variety and make things interesting, while strong visual design makes navigation easier than ever before. Everything looks distinct, and so it’s much easier to remember where that damn puzzle contraption was compared to prior games.

Otherwise, Fatal Frame II’s style of limiting many of the game’s ghosts to their own specific areas has been thrown out, resulting in ghosts appearing whereever they like and adding a bit more surprise to proceedings, though the variety of spirits faced seems incredibly low for such a lengthy game. Speaking of which, Fatal Frame III is far more padded than it really ought to have been. Looking back over everything, for all the things in the story that are only hinted at, there are still multiple chapters where fuck-all relating to the story is ever uncovered, and all that really happens is we run around for a bit and then Rei wakes up. This is most blatant in the ‘recap’ chapters that I've already complained about.

The now-obligatory stealth chapter, where the player is stripped of their ability to fight back against hostile spirits and is thus forced to flee whenever they show up, is also done extremely poorly here compared to a similar chapter in Crimson Butterfly. There, Mio dropped her Camera Obscura after being ambushed, and so we just had to keep sprinting from room to room, trying to keep ahead of Sae’s vengeful spirit as she gave chase. Here, we’re given a new character (Kei, my least favorite) who has no means of defending himself but does possess the ability to crouch slightly and thus become invisible to nearby ghosts. I mean, sometimes. Actually, it doesn't work all that well. And it means that instead of sprinting away from incoming ghosts and trying to put distance between them and you, Kei must instead try and hide whenever a ghost walks in on him. This leads a whole chapter of crouching down and waiting for ghostly patrols to pass, which is not an improvement. And in case you’re thinking this is some kind of genuine mechanic, like a whole character who can do nothing but stealth around ghosts, keep in mind that after his introductory chapter, Kei ends up getting his own Camera Obscura anyway and spends the rest of the game acting like any other character, only with a weaker damage output than the rest of the roster. Needless to say, none of this is game design that I would ever venture to call ‘sexy.’

And the good news?

But that general patchiness is not exactly anything I’d call new to the series. If you’re followed either the franchise and/or my analyses of it so far, you’ll be familiar enough by this point with these sorts of minor gripes. How about the big picture, huh? What’s my real opinion on Fatal Frame III as an example of survival horror during its golden age?

Well, I gotta tell you, that despite a slooow start and tangled mess of a narrative, Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is, at least from a game design point of view, probably the best entry in the whole damn series. And besides, who needs a killer narrative when there’s the narrative being written as the player experiences what the game has to offer, which is actually very considered and often quite hair-raising.

The pacing of the game, scares, hostile encounters, story reveals, etc, is incredibly surefooted this time around. Somewhere smack in the middle of the experience, after many initial frustrated, half-committed hours, I found myself suddenly becoming quite engrossed in the game, in a way I daresay felt like a series peak. This became especially evident, however, when the scares, both in Rei’s apartment and in the Manor of Sleep segments, began really firing on all cylinders.

This is easily the scariest entry by quite a margin, whether in terms of immersion, effective and intelligently-paced jump scares, or just plain ole absurdly, violently grotesque storytelling. The added length (this game clocks in at fifteen hours or so for a first playthrough) ends up being a huge boon to the game, allowing everything more room to breathe. The developers, meanwhile, make wonderful use of it all, scaring the player juuust often enough to both avoid exhaustion and give them time to relax before the next spooky set-piece. It’s a very tight, competent loop of horror.

The stuff in Rei’s apartment hits especially hard. I guess it must be the juxtaposition of these horrific apparitions from centuries ago against the more familiar spotless modern apartment they're invading. Yes, this was true of Silent Hill 4 as well, but at least they put that already solid idea to good use here. There’s a particularly award-winning moment somewhere right around the time the game starts to get really good, where a pair of bare feet appear in a place they shouldn’t, announced by the screen getting all static-y as you exit your bedroom, and boy is it chilling. Ditto the previously-mentioned moment where Rei is jumped by something in the attic, only to wake up and realize she had been dreaming the whole time.

As I said only a moment ago, the hostile ghosts this time around are particularly unpleasant to look at, with nightmare faces aplenty that just get worse and worse as they close in on the player and this goes a long way towards making them even more unpleasant than usual to fight. They often even exploit the change in view that accompanies raising your camera, most notably in fights with Engravers where they can teleport behind the player and wrap their arms around your field of vision if you're not paying attention. It's as unpleasant to experience as it sounds, and I love it.

A few moments are so outrageously frightening, in fact, that they may actually cross the line for some. The lady with the freakishly long arms who ambushes you in the ducts springs to mind, for that sequence also takes place in first person, and boy howdy do they exploit that for all that it's worth. It feels a little cheap, sure, but after such a subtle, classy lead up to it, it’s undeniably startling.

So yes, while the narrative may be a bit too dense for its own good, and several aspects of Fatal Frame III's game design could be accused of spinning their wheels, it still adds up to an incredible example of survival horror, provided players can forgive its egregiously slow first third.

Next time we speak, we’re going to be moving into spoiler territory, discussing the ending of the story and other things we couldn’t here, before summarizing all my thoughts and moving on to the next game. Until next time!

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