Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008) pt. 1 of 4 - intro & synopsis

For those of you who haven't read my analyses for the original Fatal Frame, its iconic sequel, or the conclusion to the trilogy, I'd advise you to check those out first as I tried hard not to repeat the same praises and criticisms in each analysis.

Oh man, I could just about cry right now. No, I don’t mean because after fifteen years Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is finally getting a North American release on March 8th of this year. Actually, it’s because I played this, along with the rest of these games, last year. I’ve since learned from my mistakes, but after writing up these analyses and shoring up videos and screenshots to go along with them, I find myself getting dangerously close to becoming burnt out on the series and possibly blogging in general. How naive I was when I began this little pet project versus where I am now. Some might say this is the real reason for all my nit-picky complaints about Fatal Frame III’s messy narrative, but those people would only be partly correct. And if those nitpicks got on your nerves last time around, you ain't seen nothing yet.

My point is that Fatal Frame IV will be the last game in this series we'll be covering for a while. There is still Maiden of Blackwater to tackle further on down the line, but I’d like to take a break after this entry and see if anyone actually reads it. Anywho…

For years, Fatal Frame IV has been a giant question mark for fans who aren’t into emulation or running homebrew software on their old Wii’s. It was never released in the US, and the popularly-accepted reason why has changed again and again so much over the years that the truth has likely been lost to time. Some say a number of small bugs irked daddy Nintendo (oh yeah, Nintendo publishes now. A lot of bullshit happened in terms of organization in between the last game and this one,) which they demanded that Tecmo fix, leading to a standoff between the two companies when Tecmo refused. Others just assume its lack of western localization is mostly for the same reasons many other beloved games from the same era (like Xenoblade Chronicles, for example) weren’t brought over: Nintendo, it seems, moves in mysterious ways. 

Either way, this has led to a lot of mystery and hype surrounding it for those who have never been able to play it. Add into that mix the fact that none other than Suda51 and his company Grasshopper Manufacturer are attached to the project, and you have a recipe for something that has haunted many in the fandom with its potential brilliance for a decade-and-a-half, myself included. So, I made the decision to finally give it a whirl, downloading the fan-made translation, and buying one of those USB ‘Dolphinbars’ that can connects OG Wiimotes and Nunchucks to a home PC. To my shock, everything worked pretty much perfectly from the outset, and my excitement at finally being able to play this ‘lost’ game was palpable.

Fast forward to just a few weeks after finishing up my outline for this analysis, and Tecmo announces a historic port for all major platforms. It couldn’t help but feel like some kind of sign. Yes, any potential complaints from me based on this fan translation will be easy to dismiss with “Well, the official translation should fix this,” but I’ll still be able to get in on the ground floor before everyone and their brother jumps on the bandwagon, which is a giant plus for me. So, without further ado, is Fatal Frame IV a cult classic, something deserving of being rescued from obscurity, or should it have just stayed there? The answer may shock you (sorry.)

The five of us are dying

Our story opens with a pair of teenage girls breaking and entering into what seems to be an abandoned hospital, armed only with flashlights and their wits. One of the girls, the meek and mild Madoka Tsukimori, gets cold feet and wants to leave, but the other girl, Misaki Asou (yep, that Asou. Again,) basically tells her to shut up and follow her lead. Their back-and-forth fills us in: they apparently have a history with this place, having returned because two of their close friends are dead, friends who also had a history with this place, and our two heroines believe they may be next. How did the friends die? Oh, well, they were found with their faces contorted into grotesque configurations, while displaying no sign of external injuries. So far, so Ringu, but hey: it’s pretty creepy.

Madoka briefly gets lost in thought, teasing us with fractured memories (which are really just previews of FMV’s to come, in hindsight) before coming to and realizing that that bossy bitch Misaki has apparently disappeared, leaving the poor girl to fend for herself. So much for leading the way. 

Despite her reservations, Madoka ventures forth on her own to look for her disappeared friend, unarmed and unaware of what she’s up against, though it isn’t long before a major threat reveals itself: the whole building is crawling with spooky ghosts. Oh, and every once in a while, a loudspeaker abruptly switches on playing a melody that causes Madoka to lose her shit. So needless to say, our heroine probably should have just waited outside for Misaki once she disappeared, but it’s too late to back out now!

Just as it seems that Madoka is one step away from becoming a ghost herself, she manages to find a Camera Obscura and along with it a Fatal Frame staple: a hastily written explanation for why it’s here in the first place. You see, it’s a prototype, and this story, despite no real visual evidence of such, apparently takes place long before the other games in the series. Alright, whatever you say.

With that obligatory piece of lore established, Madoka now has a weapon. And not a moment too soon either, as a nearby ghost picks this exact moment to lunge forward, frightening Madoka into snapping a photo of it. This stuns the specter and seems to cause it great pain, making it clear what our heroine must do if she wishes to leave this place alive...

So, by now you know the drill: it’s time for some of Fatal Frame’s signature rhythmic FPS combat. The Wii controls do limit things a bit, so much so that the developers decided to just give the player an easy lock-on button that takes all the work of aiming out of the equation, but it’s still solid. Madoka makes easy work of the ghost, but decides right then and there that, Misaki or no Misaki, she is getting the hell out of here. 

Unfortunately for her, the ghost from earlier immediately corners her in a nearby room, along with a number of its spectral buds, in a scene that fades to black in a way that really seems to imply that she’s dead. Holy crap. I’ll give it to them, taking Call of Duty IV's best idea and putting it in a spooky horror game is fairly effective, as now it feels like anyone can die at any time. We’ll see how this ends up working out as the game goes along, but for now, they’ve got me invested for sure. The only niggle I have here is that, from the perspective of a hypothetical newcomer to the series at least, doesn’t this whole sequence of events inadvertently establish that the Camera Obscura doesn’t work all that well, or is it just me? I mean, the very same ghost that Madoka defeated came back ten seconds later, along with a crowd of others, and took her out effortlessly, but I digress...

“We have to go back, Kate!”

None of that matters now, because we’re now being introduced to our real protagonist, Ruka Minazuki. She sets up the theme of the game perfectly with her opening monologue: “The thing that no one remembers will eventually become things that never existed, right?”

You see, she’s returning to the place where she grew up, Rougetsu Island, in the hopes of sparking old memories, as she has forever been haunted by an inability to remember the face of her long-dead father. This is apparently due to some kind of traumatic kidnapping from her past that resulted in the loss of many of her earliest memories. 

She explains that she and four other girls were taken by shadowy figures and placed somewhere deep underground, and by the time they were found by the police, they had experienced a significant lapse in memory that only seemed to spread in the aftermath. The only thing Ruka or the other girls could ever remember from this event was a single melody. Could this be what Madoka was hearing over the loudspeaker that caused her to freak out?

Speaking of Madoka, Ruka confirms here that she and Misaki were among the other girls who were taken, along with the two whose deaths seem to have incited the plot (Marie and Tomoe, the ones with the twisted-up faces.) Despite everything Ruka had said earlier about coming for the purpose of sparking memories of her father, she now seems to suggest that that may be a bonus more than anything, as she’s also heard that Madoka and Misaki were planning on returning themselves and so she’s now tagging along right behind them. Oookay. Sure. Bottom line: we now have our cast of characters, their relationships with one another, and the driving premise all established. But what exactly is killing these young girls off, and what does it have to do with their missing memories?

It isn’t long before we get some kind of vague idea. You see, Rougetsu Island’s reputation proceeds it as “the island closest to the underworld,” and fittingly for a place with such a title, its long, bloody, and bloody complicated history seems to mark it out as someplace cursed. 

To the islanders, the moon is considered a religious object, with lunar eclipses in particular afforded special reverence and significance. This fixation makes itself most obviously in Rougetsu’s famous kagura (dance) ritual that they perform once every ten years, which involves dancing, ceremonial masks, and communing with the dead, all having something to do with the moon. Not much to go on yet, but it is nice to be dealing with a Fatal Frame game where the big ritual they perform every so often isn’t supposed to kill anyone. 

Despite this, tragedy seems to surround it nonetheless. I hope you guys are paying good attention because clarifications that don’t seem important now will become extremely confusing if they’re not hammered in early, alright? So listen up: long ago, there was an infamous disaster that occurred involving the kagura. We don’t get many details, but whatever happened was not pretty, and precipitated a total change in the islanders’ attitudes towards it. From then on, they would perform a toned-down, tamer version of the ceremony with dummy masks in order to keep such a thing from ever happening again.

However, there was a different tragedy that struck sometime right around the time Ruka and her four friends were kidnapped and lost their memories: a ship from the mainland was dropping off supplies to Rougetsu, only to discover when they arrived that everyone on the island was dead, their faces twisted in agony. Luckily, when all this went down, the five rescued girls had already left the island behind and so were spared whatever unholy thing killed all the others, but now it seems to have finally caught up to them. Does all that make sense? Great!

After wandering around and catching up on the history of Rougetsu, Ruka finds the discarded Camera Obscura and begins following Madoka’s trail, which is helpfully littered with, get this, diary entries. As in despite the fact that we were in control of her the entire time and never once saw her stop and take out a pen and paper, she was totally writing notes the whole time, up until the exact moment she became a spooky ghost no less. Either that, or she was writing journal entries as a ghost. Either is fairly silly, but in the interest of fairness, isn't exactly unprecedented in this series. 

We eventually catch up with the poor girl in the library and have to put her out of her misery. The good news is that she goes down pretty easy; the bad news is that when Ruka catches a glimpse of herself just after dealing the final blow, she notices her face distorting unnaturally in the very same way that Madoka’s was. Time, it seems, is running out for our protagonist.

The persistence of memory

Oh, look: if it isn’t Missus “Just do what I say and you’ll be fine.” And she’s now a playable character. Cards on the table: I’m not saying I want her to die, I’m just saying that Madoka would probably still be alive if it wasn’t for her, and so it’s really only fair at this point.

We're taken back to the moment the two of them originally got separated, only now from Misaki’s point of view, where we see more or less the same events play out, only now Misaki is left behind by Madoka after being struck with visions of things to come. Nice try to band-aid over things, Tecmo, but Misaki was still the one who assured Madoka that everything was cool and pressured her into continuing in the first place. Team Madoka forever <3

The big thing that’s important to note here is that during Misaki’s visions, she sees something different: images of a young girl about Misaki’s age, only garbed in all black with matching hair. This will become very important as we spend more time with Misaki, but for now, the more pressing revelation is that Misaki already has a Camera Obscura of her own. Remember how I said that her last name was Asou? Well, wouldn’t you know it? She had access to the man’s work, being of his lineage, and apparently decided to take one of his prototypes along for good measure. It’s apparently a happy accident that there was also already a Camera Obscura here that Asou left on the island long ago for Ruka to use, but then that’s also pretty typical for the series.

If all of this extremely “lateral” storytelling does any good at all, it’s that we do at least get some more background on Rougetsu and its beliefs and customs: remember I mentioned the use of masks during their famous kagura? Well, there is one mask in particular that strikes fear into the heart of any islander who hears its name uttered: the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. Of the two calamities we’ve had described to us, the most distant one apparently occurred the last time the Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was used, and while we don’t get details, it’s easy to assume that whatever resulted was pretty bad considering even mentioning it afterward was considered extremely taboo.

As Misaki slowly explores the dilapidated hospital, ostensibly looking for the already-dead Madoka, she comes across no end of evidence that something very wrong was going on there. We hear rumors of doctors abusing patients, and patients abusing the poor nurses who tried to care for them. The most violent and sadistic patient is a young girl named Ayako who, for one reason or another, is given free rein under Dr. Shigeto Haibara’s orders to cause all the havoc she desires. 

We also hear talk of something referred to as ‘budding’ or ‘blooming,’ a condition that many of the patients suffer from that manifests itself when they look at themselves in mirrors, often accompanied by memory loss. Just what the hell were these people being treated for, anyway?

But the most shocking revelation is two-fold: remember the kidnapping that the whole plot revolves around? Where Misaki, Madoka, Ruka, Marie, and Tomoe were kidnapped and the trauma of the experience caused gaps in their memory and precipitated them leaving Rougetsu Island for good? (If not, I'm not judging.) Well, it turns out they were discovered by police in the basement of this very building. And as odd as that seems, it has nothing on the next point: the five kidnapped girls were actually inpatients at Rougetsu Hall at the time they were kidnapped. 

Around this time, we find a note to Madoka from her mother which assures the poor girl that her heritage as a Tsukimori will protect her whenever she is in danger, as it indicates favor with the moon. The irony is so thick one wonders if it's supposed to be darkly humorous. But forget about that for now because when we enter the infamous Ayako’s room, we’re attacked from above the moment an introductory cutscene ends; better hope you have either enough health to survive the initial hit or healing supplies to heal yourself beforehand on a retry, because otherwise? You’re totally boned. 

Once Ayako has been temporarily pacified, Misaki runs into the mysterious Girl in Black that she saw earlier in her ‘visions,’ whereupon we see a flashback that indicates that the two of them were once very close, shown sharing a bed and acting almost exactly like twin sisters, despite the fact that Misaki does not remember her.

When next we speak, we’ll finish up summarizing the non-spoilery stuff: you’ll find out more about what’s ailing these girls and the events that led to the calamity which wiped out everyone on Rougetsu Island. I hope to see you there!