Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2008) pt. 2 of 4 - synopsis, continued

Welcome back! Last time, we summarized everything from the opening of the game until its fourth chapter. This time, we're not stopping until we hit spoilers.

Chapter Four opens with a bizarre introduction to the newest addition to our roster: hardboiled detective Choushiro Kirishima. The first we see of him, he's lying sprawled on the grass just outside Haibara Hospital with his notebooks and other work documents lying in a pile just a few paces from the entrance. Huh. That sure is strange. Strange and extremely convenient… What? No, no, of course I'm not implying anything. Let's just move on already! Christ.

We soon learn that detective Kirishima is actually the man who once located the five missing (read: kidnapped) girls in the basement of either the hospital or the sanatorium or both many years ago. He’s here because he’s been contacted by a dying Sayaka - Ruka’s mother - who informs him that Ruka is going back to Rougetsu Island and begs him to follow her there and bring her back home safely. And so, armed with a mystical flashlight (more on that later) and a spiral-bound notebook, Choushiro takes off to find Ruka, looking for an explanation for Marie and Tomoe’s horrific deaths, and most importantly, evidence implicating You Haibara - son of Dr. Shigeto Haibara - as the mastermind behind it all. You see, Choushiro just knows he has something to do with all this, both all those years ago when the girls first disappeared and presently as well. As for how he got here and why he was lying on the ground, though, we get no explanation or even acknowledgment of such.

There’s no time to harp, however, because the moment our grizzled hero enters the condemned building, he’s swarmed by a dozen or so ghosts and is forced to wield his flashlight in order to pacify them en masse. I’ll leave discussion of this HIGHLY UNIQUE AND INTERESTING ADDITION TO THE SERIES until we’re in analysis territory.

The specters dealt with, detective Kirishima sets his eyes on using the elevator to get down into the basement, deciding immediately his best bet is to retrace his steps from the day he originally located Ruka. He’s one hundred percent sure this is the correct mode of action, and has no interest in explaining himself to us, in what’s becoming a theme of sorts for his character. The only problem with this plan is that the power is out, meaning the elevator isn’t going anywhere currently. And so without hesitation, Choushiro sets out to get it working again.

Mr. Moonlight

I guess now is as good a time as any to address the elephant in the room: Suda51’s fingerprints are all over this narrative. For those of us who have hungrily devoured all of his early work and beyond, stop me if any of this sounds familiar: a fictional illness that causes memory loss, fucked-up hallucinations, and breaks from established identity and which corresponds and reacts to the moon and its cycles; one being investigated by a super cool secret agent character no less. I mean, it’s certainly different for the Fatal Frame series, but they’re ultimately just borrowed and recycled ideas from Suda’s previous games. It’s one thing to hide your first car or a number you have an infinity for in every film you make,  but to base every story you write around a very specific series of themes and images every single time? It’s a bit much, and kind of starts to make you wonder just how great all those “classics” of his really were all along… until you revisit them at any rate. By the standards of something like Killer7, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is minor Suda, very minor even.

But on the topic of the suspiciously familiar affliction that haunts the cast of our story, we’ve finally got an official name for it in-game and it’s… underwhelming: Lunar Sedata Syndrome, they call it. I know this is the kind of thing they’ll probably fix in the official translation so I won’t harp on it much, but suffice to say that I find the name a bit awkward. 

Anywho, we also get a bit more information concerning it: chiefly that it’s entirely unique to Rougetsu island, and almost always fatal. It turns out that ‘budding’ is a stage of the illness, with ‘blooming’ being the final and most feared stage. Furthermore, we’re told that if a patient begins blooming, they can cause others to begin to bloom instantly simply by meeting their gaze (this is referred to in-game as ‘resonance.’) The patient abuse we’ve heard murmurs of is now revealed to be the result of classic mad science: secret experiments are being carried out on them in the hopes of discovering a cure. Didn’t think you’d be getting all this science fiction shlock in your Fatal Frame, now did you? 

So we’ve got an elaborate ceremonial dance that allows for communion with the spirits of the diseased, a strange endemic illness that plagues the inhabitants of Rougetsu Island, and a mad doctor bent on curing it by performing inhumane experiments on dying children, all of which somehow led to the island becoming deserted and full of spooky ghosts. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, five girls were kidnapped by an unknown perpetrator and later discovered in the basement of Haibara Hospital, alive, well, and decked out in ceremonial attire.

According to Choushiro, those from the island always return on the day of the kagura ritual (performed every ten years, remember) which he takes to mean that You Haibara has to be here at this very moment because today is the anniversary of the final kagura. I like how he’s supposed to be on a rescue mission, yet all he cares about is bringing You Haibara to justice out of some kind of blind hatred but that’s the police for you. 

But shelve that for now because it’s around this time that it becomes highly likely that unsuspecting players will run into this game’s infamous “game-breaking glitch.” This is purported to be why Nintendo never localized the game, although I have a hard time believing that. At one point you’ll receive an “encrypted memo,” and if you don’t make a B-line straight for the place you need to input the codes it contains, there’s a very good chance you’ll walk into the wrong room and your game will freeze. I don’t really consider this a game-breaking glitch because all it takes is online help and the reloading of your latest save to fix it, but if you didn’t know that this was a known problem, you might assume something was wrong with your copy and give up. This is made even less important considering it’s a given that the upcoming port will fix this, but I felt it worth pointing out anyway.

Alright, so we finally make it to Dr. Shigeto Haibara’s office (he’s got a secret private elevator, you see) and discover another important kernel of backstory. Remember how there was once - long ago, back before any of our characters were around - that big calamity that precipitated a new, softened kagura in order to avoid ever having such a disaster strike again? Well, it turns out that Dr. Haibara has actually been practicing the original ritual in secret for years now, all while working professionally to attempt to stop the spread of Moonlight Syndrome in his position as head of Haibara Hospital. The original, taboo ritual is referred to as the “Ceremony of Passage” and the only thing that really separates it from the phony ritual is that the real thing uses genuine ceremonial masks that are said to have incredible power and which can seriously affect the brain of whoever wears it.

After digging through Haibara’s correspondence to his satisfaction, Choushiro steps into the private elevator behind a nearby bookcase and descends into the depths of the building. When he steps out, he’s in a giant earthly cavern with moonlight spilling in from somewhere above. This is where he found the five missing girls all those years ago and surprise: they’re nowhere to be found this time.

Waning…

Alright, so this is the point where Mask of the Lunar Eclipse’s story has kind of already played its hand and things stall for a while. Each successive chapter will feature one character retracing the steps of another from the previous chapter until your head begins to spin.

Here, Ruka is plagued by the spirits of dead patients while learning more about the experiments that went on while she was a patient here, specifically musical therapy. Remember the speakers that make all our characters freak out when they hear them? Well, that was musical therapy. This was supposedly in service of helping patients regain their memories. The piece of music that’s played is referred to as the “lunar melody,” and is a permanent fixture of the authentic Ceremony of Passage.

So after having a stroll around the hospital courtyard and fighting off a psychopathic patient named Kageri (or “Black Woman” as the translation refers to her; crucially not the same as the “Girl in Black” that features prominently in Misaki’s chapters,) we finally encounter the main antagonist of Fatal Frame IV: the invincible spirit of a woman in constant bloom, who in series tradition causes the screen to turn greyscale as she advances slowly toward the player, indicating to them that they ought to flee rather than fight.

Having escaped with her life and stumbled upon a key to her old room at Rougetsu Hall, Ruka decides that is where she must go. She tell us that her recall is getting sharper, just in time for the screen to fade to black.

The next chapter, which revolves around Misaki, is even slimmer. The only thing worth noting is that it fixates on the five kidnapped girls and the fact that they were also being treated for Moonlight Syndrome, which begs the question: were they cured, then? I mean, they’re obviously all alright now. Well, besides Marie, Tomoe, and poor Madoka, but you know what I mean. From what we see in hospital files, the five of them were in pretty dire condition just before they were kidnapped, so how exactly did they manage to last ten years after the fact?

Oh and Misaki’s friend? The girl clad in all black? Her name is Miya. This is nice to know since we’ve already got another chick running around being referred to as “Black Women,” not to mention a nameless antagonist with, wait for it, black hair, dark clothes (rendered in greyscale,) and no face. To say it can lead to confusion is an understatement, and I would know because I spent most of my time with the game mixing up the three of them liberally.

Paint it black

So, remember how when we last left Ruka she was standing just outside the door to her old room, assuring us that we’d finally get some answers next time we met? Well, that was all a big fat lie all along apparently, because the key we have doesn’t actually work. Son of a bitch!

While chasing this dangling carrot on a stick, we run across mad painter Magaki’s room (he’s a fellow impatient, you see) which is in total disarray. On the floor, a massive painting of a woman in red sporting a distorted, indistinct face lies. She sure looks a lot like the woman that attacked us in the courtyard earlier… No, the other one.

Digging around in Magaki’s room a little longer produces the real key to Ruka’s room, meaning we can finally get to the bottom of things. Only, when we arrive and step into it, there’s not much contained within that’s all that exciting. The most promising lead turns out to be a little music box in the corner, which Ruka means to use as a way to jog her memory of the lunar melody itself. This, she believes, will bring back her memories if played on the piano in her room… for some reason. At any rate, this idea fails because the music box is, wait for it, missing a single cog that will need to be located and replaced before there’s any hope of it functioning again. Great.

Fast-forwarding to the point where we make it back with cog in hand and follow Ruka’s instructions, it turns out it works like a charm and Ruka becomes instantly transported back to her childhood home. I hope you’re ready, because this is officially the point where the game begins to feel like Fatal Frame again, as it takes place in a rural Japanese home as opposed to a cold, clinical environment straight out of The Evil Within. Don’t get used to it though; it’s only a brief flashback.

Here, Ruka encounters her father, who had become absorbed in his work as Rougetsu’s only mask craftsman to a degree that seems unhealthy. When Ruka calls to him, he stops and begins to turn… just in time for the memory to end. Could Ruka’s father have been involved in Haibara’s secret Ceremony of Passage?

It’s beginning to become clear that Ruka, along with the four other girls her age, were escorted willingly to the moonlit cavern beneath Haibara Hospital in order to take part in the Ceremony of Passage. They were to play the part of the kanades, basically backup dancers, led by the Utsuwa, an older woman wearing a ceremonial mask who carries the weight of the dead that join in. To this end, Ruka remembers a handsome young man in a suit and tie placing a mask on her face and telling someone named Sakuya that “it is finished.” Hmm… It’s around this time that we also begin to hear whispers of a comatose patient somewhere in Haibara Hospital that the staff are utterly terrified of; they apparently live in suffocating fear of what would happen if she ever were to wake up…

Before closing out the chapter, Ruka decides that she must make the same pilgrimage as Choushiro and head for the hospital basement. When she arrives, there’s no sign of him anywhere…

And with that, we’re getting dangerously near spoiler territory. Next time around, we’ll discuss what I think of what we’ve discussed so far before throwing up a spoiler warning and tackling the ending. Stay tuned!

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