Fatal Frame meta for Fandom_Level, level 1
Feb. 3rd, 2013 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseI'm doing five levels (40 metas) for Fandom_Level. I figured it would be a change from writing fic.
Here are the metas I'm using to clear level 1. Note that these are all spoilery for the games.
1: Abduction as Seduction, or an alternate view of Mafuyu's motivations at the end of Fatal Frame I.
2: Amnesia, or the awareness of ghosts in the games.
3: Angst, which pretty much describes the whole game for players, characters, and ghosts.
4: Alternate Universes, which ponders how the various game endings can be thought of as semi-canonical alternate universes.
5: Bad Boys, or why Itsuki's good idea to rebel ultimately caused everything to go wrong.
6: Blindness, or tactics of the blind and blinding ghosts of the game.
7: Girls, or a discussion on International Womens' day of why I like the Fatal Frame games.
8: Blood, and how it's used to great effect in the games.
Also, thank you to the people who maintain the wiki at "Beyond the Camera's Lens", which I've found very useful for checking my facts.
Here are the metas I'm using to clear level 1. Note that these are all spoilery for the games.
1: Abduction as Seduction, or an alternate view of Mafuyu's motivations at the end of Fatal Frame I.
2: Amnesia, or the awareness of ghosts in the games.
3: Angst, which pretty much describes the whole game for players, characters, and ghosts.
4: Alternate Universes, which ponders how the various game endings can be thought of as semi-canonical alternate universes.
5: Bad Boys, or why Itsuki's good idea to rebel ultimately caused everything to go wrong.
6: Blindness, or tactics of the blind and blinding ghosts of the game.
7: Girls, or a discussion on International Womens' day of why I like the Fatal Frame games.
8: Blood, and how it's used to great effect in the games.
Also, thank you to the people who maintain the wiki at "Beyond the Camera's Lens", which I've found very useful for checking my facts.
Meta 8: Blood
Date: 2013-03-09 04:17 am (UTC)The Fatal Frame games use tension to scare their players. After all, a ghost might pop up at any time, and they, unlike you, are not stopped by such piddly things as walls. Their way of killing the protagonist involves sucking the life out of the unlucky person, not by blood and gore. And of course, once you discover the backstories, everything that's happened becomes more and more horrifying.
In each of the games, there's some blood, but it's not a splatterfest. That way, when blood does show up, it tends to be important to either the plot or heightening the tension. For example, Blinded's blinding is part of the first game's storyline, thus her gory appearance. The blood on the porch of the Cherry Atrium early in the game seems to have no purpose other than to spook the player. Likewise, blood is used as a way to lead the protagonist and the player to Lord Himuro to get the master's seal needed to get into the Moon Well. There might be blood dripping in the Fish Tank Room, there might not be, but there's also the suggestion of it, making a spooky place even worse.
Likewise, there's almost no blood in Fatal Frame II. Which is understandable, given that most of the villagers died because of the curse. However, there's the famous scene where Sae is standing among a pile of bloody corpses in the Great Hall, the Kusabi appearing at her side, with the bloody corpses reaching towards Mio. Sae is laughing madly, which with her bloody appearance, is terrifying. It also gives the user a clue that neither Sae nor the Kusabi are to be trifled with, which is not surprising, as they both can one hit kill the protagonist. The second scene with blood in the game, where Seijiro Makabe is being turned into the Kusabi, makes the first scene even more horrifying. He's being slowly tortured to death in order to make a proper sacrifice, and there are cuts all over him - cuts that echo what he later does as the Kusabi to the corpses in the Great Hall scene, and also the damage to Limbo Man and Limbo Woman.
In Fatal Frame III, the scenery and ghosts are likewise relatively bloodless. The one great exception is when you're trying to find the shrine carpenters (Men in White) in one quest, where blood appears to tell you where to go. It's understandable as this is a dream version of the shrine, and therefore the ghosts from the actual shrine are going to remember it as it was, not covered in blood. On the other hand, there is the Preserve Room (the renamed Fish Tank room in the dream version of Himuro Mansion), which seems to have inherited the suspicious drip from the first game, and there's the bloody handprints on Rei's mirror in the real world, one of the most terrifying examples of the ghosts crossing over to Rei's clean, not so scary world.
In the fourth game, there is almost no blood, but again, it's not needed. The whole thing is set in a hospital where unethical experiments took place. It's abandoned, falling apart, and there are corpses. It's the perfect setting for a horror movie involving zombies. Despite the fact that the actual event that caused the whole island to be abandoned was entirely bloodless - Sakuya just caused people to die where they stood - her brother's desperate experiments to cure Getsyuu Syndrome makes the place just as scary without it.
The Fatal Frame games are good games for someone who wants their horror without much blood. The knowledge of what has happened, and the tension of always having to worry about ghosts provides many of the scares in the game. While blood is a part of the storyline, it's not there just for the sake of being there. The blood heightens the scariness by its sparseness, and the sparseness makes the blood important when it shows up. All in all, it works well, making the games just a bit scarier.