![]() The basic film is unlimited, but weak, while stronger variants are limited. What Maiden of Black Water doesn’t do quite so well is signposting where exactly ghosts and items are, with the hinting arrow system a little too vague for my liking.īack to the Camera Obscura, and it throws a bit of variety in there with different types of film and lenses to combat apparitions that offer unique problems to the protagonists. Slow doesn’t have to mean easy, and Fatal Frame has long understood that. Given how claustrophobic some of these encounters can be, taking place in rotted waterlogged corridors, confined rooftops, and enclosed forests, it adds an unnerving edge to what would otherwise be fairly pedestrian combat. It’s often tempting to chip away at a ghost from a safe distance, but they have a nasty habit of vanishing temporarily before reappearing somewhere else. Hitting the ‘fatal frame’ (the ghost’s weak spot) breaks off spectral fragments of that ghost, and when lined up together in a single shot, does massive amounts of damage. The key is patience in lining up and focusing shots to maximize damage to the ghosts or even knock them back when they try to get a little too fresh. Luckily the ghosts aren’t all that fast most of the time, and the rest of the time there’s a handy dodge button to avoid the more sprightly of those entities. It’s not as simple as just firing multiple snapshots off like a photojournalistic machine gun, each shot requires time for the camera to load the next strip of film before another snap cam be taken. The camera is Fatal Frame’s unique selling point, a tool as much as a weapon, as it uncovers secrets, finds guiding ‘shades’ to light the correct path, causes previously lost items to rematerialize, catalogs otherwise harmless spirits, and of course, busts the nastier ghosts via their weakness exposure (which is coincidentally a weakness of gaming writers). In any given stage, the action takes place from a third-person perspective when exploring the environment, and switches to first-person when battling specters with the Camera Obscura. It’s not immediately clear when each character’s story is happening in relation to the others, and that doesn’t always feel like an intentional choice. Rounding out the trio is another of Yuri’s friends the author Ren Hojo, who is also out searching for Yuri. There’s Miu Hanasaki, daughter of series stalwart Miku Hanasaki goes to the mountain to help her friend, and fellow protagonist Yuri Kozukata, who has a special gift to bring people back from the shadow world. The game is split into stages, each focusing on a portion of one person’s story. At the center of it is a cursed shrine maiden, who repeatedly appears to torment the protagonists as they investigate the various disturbances on the mountain. An ancient evil known as the Black Water is corrupting the mountain, causing people to go missing… or worse. This particular story sees three protagonists caught up in the mysteries and tragedies of the fictional Hikami Mountain, a notoriously haunted locale. It actually turns Maiden of Black Water into a more traditional Fatal Frame game, which has mixed results. All the same, a good effort has been made to hide the game’s origins and make it playable without the need for a second screen. The key change to the original version of the game was in how it incorporated the Wii U’s tablet screen, and that’s of course now, not the case. Explore haunted locales and vanquish ghosts with the use of a magic camera. Maiden of Black Water utilizes the standard box of Fatal Frame tricks. So perhaps time and refinements to the game will shed new light on it. Does this snapshot of the Fatal Frame series’ recent past look sharp or has it faded?Īfter spending seven years confined to the Wii U, Maiden of Black Water remains the swansong entry in the underappreciated Japanese horror game series, and it wasn’t seen as a particularly triumphant finale either. The Camera Obscura returns with an upgrade thanks to a multi-platform remaster of Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |