It also doesn’t help that characters take forever to pick up items or open doors. Truthfully, the game would be better in the first person. Movement is stiff and awkward, and the way the camera sticks to your character’s back while running feels bad to me. That isn’t to say there isn’t anything cumbersome about the gameplay, however. Plus, you’ll find more items in the field. The game autosaves and you always start a chapter with more healing items than you could feasibly use. It’s honestly a ton of fun.įor the most part, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is easy. Finally, you can press a button to dodge out of the way when an enemy attacks. If you take a picture of a ghost while it’s attacking, you get a fatal frame, which lets you rapidly take damaging photos without having to reload for as long as the time bonus lasts. These objects are fragments that tend to temporarily splinter off of ghosts as you take pictures. But the real damage comes from getting five objects in a shot which leads to a shutter chance. A normal photo does damage and you have to wait for it to reload. It would have been great to control the camera with mouse movement, but it wasn’t included for whatever reason, which is a shame.Īs for combat, the way it works is that you do more damage depending on your distance from ghosts and if you’re centered on weak spots. Console versions do get some motion controls, though. All the functionality has been mapped to buttons and it works just fine here. In the Wii U version, you had to use the gamepad to control the rotating camera, so there was a lot to it. Each chapter starts you with a default item set, so the things you collect don’t accrue as you play. Maiden of Black Water has five types of film to collect and buy for the two cameras available in the game, with the weakest being infinite use. Yuri and Miu (and Miku too, but you can’t play as her) have a special ability called “shadow reading” that allows them to see a person’s memories and feelings by touching them, which also comes into play. This is centered on cameras called camera obscura, which can see things that the naked eye misses. The game is primarily about fighting ghosts by taking pictures of them, which is going to be quite strange if you’re not familiar with previous entries. The game took me 15 hours to play through in total. The ending even made me tear a bit.įatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has 14 main chapters, with a prologue and interlude. Each character has multiple endings and I enjoyed piecing the plot threads together from beginning to end. Other playable characters include Hisoka’s associate Ren, and Miu Hinasaki, the adopted daughter of the first game’s protagonist, Miku. Hisoka has a habit of rescuing women in need, so when women vanished to become sacrifices, she stepped into action. The story principally concerns a young woman named Yuri who’s looking for her friend and savior, Hisoka, after she vanishes. People in the area are going missing, compelled by the ghosts to become pillars and sacrificial ghost grooms. Shrine maidens were put in a state between life and death in boxes called reliquaries that allow them to function as pillars to keep the black water at bay.īut something is wrong. Hikami is a spiritual bulwark against another realm and it’s the only thing holding back black water from flooding into our world and posing an existential threat. The cast is barely characterized and almost never talks to each other, but the lore and concept are decidedly dark and ominous. The PC port has a major issue that will affect anyone with a monitor that’s over 60 hz and there’s no mouse support for camera movement, but I like this game a hell of a lot all the same and I’m glad it’s finally getting to leave the Wii U.įatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water got some flak for its story, but I think it’s kind of fascinating. Thankfully, both it and the series proper are getting another chance to shine with this “remaster,” which is really more of a straight port. As the Wii U only sold about 13 million consoles, the game didn’t sell well. Territories outside of Japan got the game a little over a year later. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water first released on the Wii U back in 2014 in Japan. The Fatal Frame games were always awesome, but we didn’t even get the fourth game or remake of the second one here at all. Koei Tecmo is continuing their dive into re-releasing games from defunct series.
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