#fatal frame 2

HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT. AM I DREAMING!?!? THIS IS REAL?????? oh my god. OH MY GOOOOOOOOOD. 12 year old me is pissing their pants rn. Never did I ever think I would get Fatal Frame merch as long as I lived. And now Kotobukiya is making my dreams come trueeeee.

Pros:

The graphics are beautiful, and I just loved looking at the game. Mio and Mayu looked great, as did the abandoned, haunted village in the moonlight. I loved the added bit with the sky turning crimson during the last chapter of the game, too

I liked that some small side areas were added to the village, which made it feel more fleshed out

The hand-holding feature was cute and helpful

I generally liked the side quests; some had you backtracking a little too much, as the main story has you revisit most spots in the village, but I liked getting more diary entries from some of these characters, especially Itsuki

I kind of liked the change to Chitose's fight, and the different camera filters were neat

I liked the Kusabi chasing Mio more in this game

Like I said, the cutscenes are totally the same. If you liked the original cutscenes, you'll like these, too

I was sooo glad to hear "Chou" by Tsukiko Amano play at the end, just like in the original. It's a beautiful song that really helps the ending hit hard

I played with Japanese voices and the voice acting sounded pretty good to me

Cons:

The beginning is very tutorial-heavy

I wish you got the charm bag in your first playthrough and it wasn't locked to New Game+, so you could equip more than one charm at a time

The combat isn't great. I think you get used to it as the game goes on, but it felt pretty frustrating at times, and the camera takes forever to recharge (I upgraded it, too). I played the game after it was patched, as well

I felt like the film types were changed? Type-90 film felt really nuked, to the point where type-61 was the only decent type in terms of power, but it was really slow

I haaaaated the aggravated wraiths. I felt like that feature was an unnecessary addition to game that made combat even more frustrating

You get discouraged from doing side quests with the amount of ghosts they throw at you. I understand that you'd want some enemies there, but after a while, you might give up on a path because you want to save your film and feel like it isn't worth it

The game wasn't scary to me. To be fair, I wasn't scared by the original game, but a lot of people considered the original to be one of the scariest games around at the time; I feel like this should've been at least a little scary lol. It still has really cool horror themes and atmosphere, but it's not nearly as scary as other modern horror remakes like Silent Hill 2 Remake or Resident Evil 2 Remake

I said the story is pretty much exactly the same, which is a pro and a con, because I feel like the game kind of beats you over the head with what's going to happen, and I kind of wish they'd altered notes and dialogue to make it a bit more subtle. Relatedly, I wish Mio and Mayu had more personality instead of being stand-ins for Yae and Sae. Once again, this is a problem with the original, and they clearly wanted to make a faithful remake instead of a re-imagining like RE4 Remake

Bernadetta and Marianne as the Fatal Frame sisters!