Snow

Release day was a mess due to ghosts being severely overtuned and the camera barely tickling them even on the easiest difficulty. Koei Tecmo being able to release a seemingly hefty balance patch the next day points to them being aware of just how imbalanced combat was. However, on the other hand, the unforgiving balance at release is really in line with something that was said in an interview, about a "Team Ninja nightmare difficulty". So did they accidentally release a dev only build, did testers have no issue with the difficulty, were they actively working on balance due to complaints from people who were given keys a month ago and just forgot to make the post-nerf version the release one, or something else entirely? It just feels so odd.

Even with the balance patch, combat still felt like absolute ass. The mechanics are so different from previous installments that it didn't really feel like Fatal Frame to me. Chains are locked behind Shutter Chance which is locked behind a HP threshold which made combat feel clunky, especially when combined with the new focal points and focus system. Ghosts can become aggravated which greatly restores their health, adds damage reduction, they teleport more frequently, and their speed is increased. The only way to knock them out of aggravation was to reach their HP threshold, but a few ghosts I fought just didn't generate a new one since they were already almost dead when aggravation triggered. It genuinely felt like a glitch which the game has a weird amount of.

I wish I were exaggerating when I say I encountered a lot of glitches, but I'm not. Most of them were with Mayu. She'd spin in place, refuse to hide during the new stealth sections, and sometimes just disappear after hiding. I also can't tell if some things were glitches or just poorly implemented. While running, vanishing ghosts often spawned weirdly. I had them spawn either right on top of Mio or after I had already passed the spawn point. The times I had already passed the location, the filament wasn't exactly helpful as I had no sense of where a vanishing ghost was more often than not. This made vanishing ghosts really obnoxious to catch. The exposure filter was also really weird with hidden ghosts. There were a few where I could not get the circle to pop up no matter how I positioned.

Fatal Frame 2 Remake was advertised to have new side stories with additional lore. Apparently there's about 15 of them and I only encountered 5 or 6 on a fresh save. The side stories I did get didn't really introduce anything new, it's primarily just lore we've had since the ps2. The only ones with something new were Makabe's and maybe the children's as I can't recall if the kids playing had notes on either ps2 or wii. Even then, it was only a little extra. From the advertising, I believed the side stories would be entirely new content, not just a repackage of notes we always had.

The pacing of the side stories was overall okay, but there's a couple that stick out like a sore thumb. I tried to do Ryozo's earlier, when the old tree is first available, but couldn't. The children's I assume final part didn't unlock until the last chapter. With the newly added mood lighting combined with the intense, foreboding music that just screams, "this is it", having to go out of the way to do side content really broke the tension and ruined immersion. I honestly didn't even go to finish the children's story since all but 2 "stories" have ended in a fight. By this point, I was low on film with no way to restock and type-7 wasn't doing much for me even post-patch so I chose to save what I had for the last two battles since the combat never really clicked for me and I wasn't about to potentially go against 3 ghosts at once.

The new areas feel like wasted space. The Eikado Temple? It's just there for a side story. The island by the entrance to the Kurosawa House? Nothing is there. The field and additional town next to the storehouse? The added alleyway to the cemetery? They're actually utilized for the story weirdly enough. I think it would have been nice if at least Eikado Temple and the town had been utilized for additional story sections. They honestly could have redesigned the Kurosawa House to not have all the plot important stuff and moved it to the Eikado Temple and I wouldn't have even been mad. If the writing was good, I think a change like this would have made sense. As for the town, I would have loved if it was a little bigger and the twins explored it to see if they could find a way out. This would have added to the tension and the realization they're well and truly trapped.

The only thing I can actually definitively say I liked was the actual new scraps of lore they tossed in. They added a couple of notes to tie the world of 2 to the Fatal Frame universe. For example, one of the notes paired with a filter outright mentions shadow reading from 5. It really reads like if they make more games they want to ensure the lore is consistent to the best of their ability.

This post will obviously contain slight spoilers.

The Map

The setting is Lumiose City 5 years after XY, but 12 irl years. Lumiose City was a circular place with a tower in the middle. Obviously makes for an easy walk around in the 3DS era and we can come and go as we please so not too much detail ultimately needed to be there, but now it's our sole explorable map. As it was an already established location, they were kinda stuck on how to flesh it out. They could have changed the overall layout, but then it wouldn't be remotely recognizable. And it kinda isn't since they did add more locations and off-shoot pathways to flesh it out, but I digress.

So they ultimately built up.

While making the rooftops explorable isn't necessarily a bad thing, I feel like the map lacks readability due to it. It's not always clear how to get from Point A on the ground to Point B on the roof. Sometimes I can run around for like 10 minutes trying to find out where I'm supposed to climb up because not all holovators appear on the map and ladders just straight up aren't viewable at all. I don't get why there isn't a toggle to see ladders and holovators, especially ones you've found since they're sometimes in weird locations.

It also seems at times you have to break the game's own physics to get from point a to point b when there's a gap you have to get across? I don't know how else to explain it.

The Wild Zones & Catching Pokemon

While a nice concept, I feel like some wild zones are overtuned. Area 5 is your first real experience with Alpha Pokemon with the Houndoom and its Houndour lackeys. If you don't know what you're walking into, they might fuck you up. I also got overwhelmed in I believe it's Area 8 with the Alpha Krokorok while looking for a Gible, not realizing that if you trigger an Alpha pokemon then most everything near it gets aggro'd as well. Still don't know how that happened when I don't think I went anywhere near the Krokorok or its lackeys. Then there's Area 17 with the Pyroars. Why can these guys target me on the roof AFTER I've already snuck by them? They didn't see me so why can they suddenly see me? Unless we're saying the Alpha Mawile on the rooftops alerted them? Why is Earth Power allowed to have infinite range? Whoever developed Area 17 did not give it much, if any, thought.

There's also a few pokemon that if they see you they despawn. For example, in Area 16 there's apparently a Froakie. The couple times I actually stumbled into it, it's in the bushes near the fountain. First time I saw it, I was so confused because I just saw something blue fade away. Second time, after learning it was a Froakie by actually looking at the spawns in the map, it disappeared again. I never even saw its model on the map before it left both times. This happened with the Dratini near Le Nah on the rooftops too. Except, in that case, I don't think there was a way for it to actually have seen me before it flipped out and ran away since I did approach exclusively from behind while crouched. It feels like maybe the line of sight is potentially overtuned.

This also goes into the issues of lock on not being equal to the distance pokeballs can be thrown. You have to be basically right next to the pokemon you want to catch before the pokeball will connect, significantly closer than the maximum distance of the lock on. If you try throwing a ball the second you can lock on it just... never actually reaches. If you get a bit closer, it looks like it should reach, but it just doesn't. It doesn't feel balanced. I mean I guess it is since there's now a NPC that gives you "lost pokeballs", but mechanically I don't think it is, especially when you pair it with the weird line of sight pokemon who flee seem to have.

Battles

The game is balanced really strangely. The Rogue Megas feel weaker than they should be overall (there are a few megas that feel weirdly unfair) while the Promotion Matches are weirdly difficult, I started noticing this with Corbeau.

The Rogue Megas are, for the most part, very straight forward. But some aspects of their battles really highlight how bad the game's control scheme is. Sometimes the mega solely targets the player character, you cannot run/dodge and command your pokemon to attack. You have to choose one or the other, most probably just running around since the character's movement speed is significantly lowered when locked-on. This can really drag on the fight and make it feel like a chore.

The megas also aren't balanced well, with some being significantly harder/more annoying than others. I found the megas with continuous attacks or range more difficult than some late-game battles. Like I don't understand why Starmie who is very simplistic is late-game, but Bannette with some annoying stuff is pretty early.

Then there's the promotion battles. Around Corbeau, it begins to feel like you need to swap to a team with perfect (or near perfect) EVs and high (if not perfect) IVs. This felt confirmed to me when I battled Grisham. It took 5 of my pokemon to reach his 5th. We can argue that my team just doesn't have enough coverage, but pokemon's storyline fights have always been simple so I wasn't expecting this steep of a difficulty spike and if I'm around 10 levels ahead I shouldn't be having issues anyway because it's fucking pokemon. It also doesn't help that the battle system itself just feels... unresponsive at times.