The Elocutioner Reviews: Fatal Frame - The Maiden Of Black Water (Demo)
So I downloaded the demo for Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water tonight and I absolutely had a blast playing it! I just really wish I had my camera ready so that I could have done a "lets play" of this demo on my first play through, but alas, cameras cost money... And I bet I will be wishing for one even more now that I've played the newest Fatal Frame!
Reason being, in case you haven't played Fatal Frame before, the whole game centers around the use of the Camera Obscura, a special camera which is able to not only pick up the supernatural, but actually do damage to the malevolent ghosts whose pictures are taken. I think this could be a play on the old superstition that people used to believe when the camera was first invented, that if you had your picture taken it would actually steal your soul.
This guy seems to think so...
Anyway, I won't get too into the previous games here because there is just so much to be said about them that it would take all day, but I will say that this game is vastly improved from it's predecessors. Maiden of Black Water does away with the tank controls in favor of a third person viewpoint. I still found it a little hard to turn around sometimes, but I could easily see myself getting used to it in time.
Also, if you played the previous Fatal Frame games, you probably remember the constant fear that you could actually run out of film entirely for your camera, leaving you defenseless and at the mercy of the ghosts and possibly even making it impossible to proceed. In MoBW I was happy to discover that you actually have an infinite amount of the most basic kind of film available, so no matter what you will have some film, even if it's crappy film that makes the most basic enemy seem hard.
To say more about the new camera mechanics, instead of having a clunky first person viewpoint controlled by your joysticks, you now use the WiiU game pad as the Camera Obscura! I found this to be an amazing improvement, probably the one good thing left over from "Spirit Camera." In MoBW you are now able to control a 360 degree view while using your camera, just by moving the WiiU controller around!
When I played I sat in a spinning office chair and, while I'm sure I looked pretty silly, I had a blast spinning around in circles while fighting ghosts. I did notice a small bug though, if you use your camera for too long without pressing the X button and returning to the regular third person view point, your camera view will sometimes get stuck in an awkward position, (like somehow ending up upside down) and it will make it nearly impossible to right yourself and continue moving. This is easily fixed though, by just rapidly tapping X twice to go out of camera mode and then back in to continue the fight.
The storyline is also very much improved from the previous games, while the demo doesn't have vast amounts of storyline for you to pick through, there is definitely enough to see that this game plays almost like watching a movie, rather than the slower paced games of the past. MoBW is played in 14 chapters, which makes it linear, while the previous games were more open and you were usually able to go backwards to finish puzzles and pick up items. Which brings me to another point, I didn't see a single puzzle in the demo. Did I miss them? Honestly no, I didn't because the last Fatal Frame that I really spent tons of time on was the first game, and in that one the puzzles seemed to be almost impossible to complete without being able to read Japanese, and since I can't, I ended up being frustrated often. There still may be a few puzzles in the full game, but if there are I do get the feeling that they will probably be more universal than in previous games.
And that brings me to the last topic I really want to cover, graphics!
Which, by the way, are spectacular! It's moments like these when I am actually happy I bought the newest game consoles. The ghosts you fight are still kind of a blurry mess a lot of the time, but the ghosts you see out of battle really make up for it ten fold! Also, the environments don't loose a bit of the fear factor by being easy to see, in my opinion the levels you travel through in MoBW are every bit as scary as the ones you saw on the PlayStation 2... Only now you can actually see where you're going! The lips don't exactly move with the voice overs, but what do you expect really when you buy a game which has been translated into a language it wasn't originally intended for?
My Opinon Of Fatal Frame: Maiden Of Black Water
I'm sure you are probably expecting this answer after the explanation I gave above, but I absolutely LOVE FF MoBW and would reccomend it to any horror gaming fan! The full version is actually out now, and I'm going to get it ASAP so I can see the other 12 chapters not included in the demo.
Maybe when I finally get my camera my first let's play will be of this game! What do you think?
