Review: Fatal Frame II - Crimson Butterfly REMAKE

I'm not a big fan of horror games. I had some difficulty progressing through Dead Space and Memento. Those games got on my nerves and prevented me from advancing as far as I would’ve liked in the story. But, in the case of the Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly remake, the characters' charisma and the plot involving the mysteries of Minakami village gave me the courage to go further.

The Fatal Frame franchise has always been one of the most captivating for its unique elements that blend Asian supernatural legends with beautiful and fragile characters facing psychological terror and a growing atmosphere of fear that makes you think twice before pressing the camera button, even knowing you need to do so to advance in the game.

Now, if you're thinking about playing this game, whether as an entry point to the franchise (as was my case) or if you're thinking about revisiting the franchise, we're going to talk about Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly and, if you have any questions, leave a comment.

To provide some context, the idea of ​​"photographing spirits" comes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the trend of "spiritual photography", when mediums and others curious about the world of the dead used old, rustic cameras to take pictures of old houses or cemeteries and develop photographs with "something" unusual there. Faces, shadows, or people who weren't there were seen in the photos.

This idea was quite popular in the US and Europe, but generally, these were just camera tricks, double exposure techniques, or even hoaxes, which included something abnormal in a completely ordinary photo. Nowadays, with modern cameras and even cell phone cameras with advanced technology, photos of spirits have simply disappeared (just like photos of UFOs).

In Japan, the popular belief is that, somehow, the world of the living and the dead aren’t completely separate, making it possible to see or feel spirits or ghosts, the "yūrei", in places charged with very intense spiritual energy. This energy is linked to the people who lived or died in those places with some kind of very strong feeling, such as anger, sadness, or envy. Here, this kind of thing is commonly called an "obsessive spirit".

Fatal Frame mixed the two concepts: the spiritual energy linked to a place or object with the spiritual photography of the West. From this came the game's "Camera Obscura", a camera charged with spiritual energy that can record and reveal obsessive ghosts trapped somewhere.

Somehow, you, a high school girl named Mio Amakura, and your sister, Mayo, are lost in a strange forest, reminiscing about when you were little and the accident that happened to Mayo. It's quite clear, though not confirmed at first, that Mayo died in that accident. Pointing a flashlight at her or using the Camera Obscura's flash causes her to react with great fear, implying that she, like the rest of the spirits you encounter throughout the game, doesn't like light very much.

While chatting by a stream, Mayo starts following strange red butterflies, and Mio chases after her until they both get lost among the trees. Walking together, they arrive at the lost village of Minakami. They decide to go there to ask how to get out of that place, and the activity in a house catches their attention. Entering the house to investigate and perhaps find someone who can help, Mio finds the Camera Obscura and sees disconnected images and flashes of what happened in that village. Then, with no other options, they’ll have to find out what happened to those people if they want to get out of there. And so the story begins.

The tense atmosphere of the game begins directly with the choice of characters. Mio is much more fragile and vulnerable than the protagonist of the previous game, Miku Hinasaki. And, as if that weren't enough, Mio also has an injured leg and is limping.

So you have the responsibility of guiding not one, but two children against a horde of spirits armed only with a camera. It's possible to feel, both in their voices and actions, how having to hold her sister's hand to keep moving forward reinforces just how vulnerable they are.

It's not like, for example, Resident Evil 4, where Ashley still had some autonomy and struggled to escape attackers, while you controlled Leon, with his wide arms and varied arsenal of weapons against creatures made of flesh and blood that, one way or another, you could still punch, push, and shoot.

Here you control a fragile girl and have to protect another limping girl, using a camera to defend yourself. It's not possible to punch, push, or kick, but they can grab, scratch, or injure you. The balance is completely unequal!

The village of Minakami isn't just a pretty or well-made setting either; it functions almost like a character, directly influencing how you play, how you move, and even how you react to things around you, creating a constant tension that doesn't depend on enemies appearing all the time to work.

The way the game uses light and shadow is one of its most striking aspects, because it doesn't overdo the lighting and uses very limited light sources, such as flashlights, candles, or small points of light, creating a contrast that isn’t only aesthetic but also influences gameplay, since you’re never completely sure what’s in front of you.

Darkness is part of the gameplay, because it makes you think twice before moving forward and keeps you constantly on alert, expecting something to emerge.

Sound also greatly contributes to this process, because the game doesn't use music all the time to tell you when something is going to happen, preferring to work with silence and ambient noises, such as footsteps, creaks, and objects falling in the background, which leave that constant feeling that something is wrong, even when nothing is actually happening.

This combination makes the horror work in a more psychological way, without relying so much on direct jumpscares, and manages to keep the player uncomfortable for much longer.

One of the main problems with this game begins when it tries to translate the tension created by the atmosphere and the feeling of vulnerability of Mio and Mayo into action. This is especially true in combat, which remains a very interesting idea, but doesn't work as well as it should in practice.

The idea of ​​using the camera as a weapon is still very good, because it forces you to look directly at the enemy and wait for the right moment to attack, creating that sense of risk, since the closer you get, the more damage you cause, but also the more dangerous it becomes. However, after a while, this starts to get tiresome.

The fights last longer than they should, and what is tense at the beginning starts to become repetitive. The first time a spirit appears works very well, but after you understand how the system works, the impact diminishes considerably.

And when the game throws several enemies at the same time, the situation worsens, because instead of becoming more tense, it becomes more confusing. You spend more time trying to control the camera and understand what's happening than actually reacting to the danger, and end up suffering unfair damage.

Another problem is when the enemies become more aggressive, because this isn't always well explained. Some of them tend to become more aggressive and angry when you are fighting and attacking them, as if they were getting mad because they couldn't catch their "prey" as easily as they wanted.

However, sometimes this "mood swing" happens out of nowhere, or more than once in the same fight, and it gives the feeling that the game is being a little unfair. This ends up being a hindrance because you don't always understand what you did wrong, and then the difficulty seems more random than truly challenging.

Furthermore, the game also complicates the camera system unnecessarily, offering various lens options, upgrades, and combinations, which may seem interesting, but in practice, only makes everything more confusing.

The problem isn't having options, but rather the game's failure to properly explain what each one does. You end up choosing things without knowing exactly if they’ll help or not, which detracts from the feeling of control. With tutorials that also don't help as much as they should, the system ends up seeming more complicated than it actually is, especially at the beginning.

There's also, in the case of the PC version (which is the one I played), a problem with the controls. The game seems designed to be played with a controller, but at the same time, the options and shortcuts that appear on the screen mirror the keys on your keyboard. So you don't know whether to play with a controller, the keyboard, or both.

Is it possible to configure and adjust this in the Options menu? Yes. But still, it could be easier and more intuitive, like in all the other games where, if you connect the controller, it automatically recognizes the joystick as the default and ignores the keyboard keys.

The lack of Portuguese language support is also a negative point. There's French, German, and two types of Chinese (traditional and simplified). It wouldn't cost much to put the text in Portuguese, would it? Even if it were just Portuguese from Portugal! Is it possible that the Fatal Frame franchise isn't very popular here and they thought it wasn't worth investing in?

Pros:

• Extremely immersive atmosphere

• Constant psychological terror

• Very well-constructed setting

Cons:

• Slow and repetitive combat

• Unclear mechanics

• Frequently broken rhythm

Even with these problems, the remake brings some new things that help to add more variety to the game. Mechanics like crouching, hiding, and even avoiding some confrontations help to break the repetition a bit and give the player more options. Exploration also improves, with more areas and more things to find, which helps to make the village more interesting and reinforces the feeling that this place has a history.

If you're a newcomer to the Fatal Frame franchise, playing Crimson Butterfly as your first game doesn't seem like a bad decision, because, personally, I didn't feel the need to know or understand the first game to follow the story here. Of course, Fatal Frame I was originally released in 2001; so the franchise is already well known to gamers, and those who wanted to find out the story already know everything there’s to know. But even so, without having played the first one, it's possible to play the second one without any problems.

If you want to revisit the game, you can see that it seems to have gained a modern skin over the skeleton of the old game. Perhaps because they’re stylized and not realistic characters, it's noticeable that Mio has slightly strange facial proportions, but with hyper-realistic graphics and textures on top of what looks like a PS2 game. You'll still get some good scares and see that the spirits are much more frightening in high resolution.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake is a game that gets a lot right in what has always been the franchise's strong point, which is the atmosphere and the way it builds terror, but it stumbles precisely when it needs to transform that into gameplay that holds up from beginning to end.

It's not a comfortable game, nor does it try to be, but it could be much more consistent if some of its mechanics, especially the combat, were better developed. Even so, it's still a memorable experience, which may even be irritating at times, but one that you'll hardly forget after finishing.