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 1: Abduction as Seduction
Date: 2013-02-04 05:15 am (UTC)------------
Perhaps no ending of a Fatal Frame game is more controversial than the canon ending for Fatal Frame I. Certainly, there are sad endings and horrific endings, but none that seem to annoy fans as much as that particular one, mostly because of Mafuyu's choice.
Mafuyu's choice to remain with Kirie and spend eternity as a ghost guarding a hellgate can be exasperating for the player, who just spent several hours as little sister Miku trying to find him and get them both out of there. His canon explanation is that he couldn't leave Kirie to suffer alone, not after all he saw. The simple way to explain his actions is he's a naturally compassionate man who saw someone suffering, a stranger, and went to do something about it, the same way that he ends up in Himuro Mansion in the first place - to find Junsei Takamine and his team.
But there's a slightly more complex explanation for Mafuyu's motives, one that can work better than just simple compassion for a fellow human being, albeit one that died a century or two ago. And it all goes back to the beginning of the game, where he's run into a dead end and is heading towards the entrance, to follow the ghost he's just seen.
That's when Kirie partially abducts him, gives him a mental connection, and then leaves him to his own devices. He retains some focus on Mr. Takamine and his team, as evidenced by the note at the beginning of night 2, but as things go along, I think Kirie starts becoming more and more important to him. After Mr. Takamine is gone, Mafuyu really has no reason to be wandering about the manor; he could have stayed, despite Kirie screaming in his head, and waited for Miku to catch up to him. But he keeps going.
Some of this could be put down to his journalist or folklorist background, but not all of it. He's curious as well as compassionate, which is what drives him there in the first place. But I think he feels a connection to Kirie. We don't see everything he sees, none of his visions, except the early cutscenes. Kirie may well have shown him more of the time before she became an onryo, more than Miku sees in her cutscenes.
And even if he didn't while he was wandering about Himuro Mansion, he might have done so while he was trapped inside Kirie. When Miku defeats Kirie and purifies her, he seems startled, and not in the way that they've just ended up in the same time and can see each other. He seems almost deep in thought.
Kirie's choice to stay is what seems to spur him into motion. He is in love with her in such a way that he wants to be with her, forever. He wants to help her, he wants to be there with her. He likely knows he's going to die - probably has to die to be there with her. But it's what he chooses, ultimately, to stay with the being who had kidnapped him, because he can. Even if it's frustrating for the player, there is love in there, and possibly fate, and in some ways it even makes sense.
Meta 2: Amnesia
Date: 2013-02-11 02:54 am (UTC)Of the four games, only Fatal Frame IV touches directly on the subject of amnesia, through Getsuu syndrome. And yet, we see it during every single game, thanks to the ghosts not remembering certain things about their lives.
The most obvious examples are the ones that consistently mistake a living character for a dead one. Kirie thinks Mafuyu is her dead lover, despite knowing at the time of her death that he was dead. Kyouka chases after the player characters because she thinks they're all her lover Akito - who got killed by her mother because he wanted to take her away. The whole village in Fatal Frame 2 thinks that Mio and Mayu are Yae and Sae, though that's understandable given that they're partially possessed by said sisters during the game.
Some of the game hostiles are heartbreaking, especially the kids, when you realize that they don't know they're dead. There are three little kids in the second game that are specifically noted as not having realized that they've died. They're too busy playing hide and go seek, and you're it during one of their eternal games. Chitose of the same game also doesn't seem to have realized that she died, though it's more because she's extremely terrified the entire time you fight her. The three battles with the kids in Fatal Frame I are also with amused, playful kids, who happen to be unaware that they're sucking your life out when they touch you.
It's rare for ghosts to realize that they're dead, actually. Most of them seem to be repeating their last moments, from Yae's worry about her daughter and Blinded's search for somebody to help her, to the dollmaker in the second game, the Kuze Family Head in the third, and several of the doctors and nurses in the fourth. They don't seem to be aware that they're repeating their last bits of life, whether to ward off intruders, worry about their families, or just to seek help. The vanishing ghosts are as much so, pieces of people and their lives that are stuck wherever they are.
Choushiro in the fourth game is one of the amnesiac dead, though we don't find out about this until very late in his storyline. Because none of the playable characters interact with each other during the game (with the exception of encounters with Madoka), there's no indication that Choushiro has died long before we ever play him. Choushiro is very much an example of what it is like to be one of the ghosts who has forgotten their deaths. He investigates around, he chases Dr. Haibara, he tries to remember what's going on. Finally, his story takes him to the roof, where Dr. Haibara stabs him, and he falls and lands in the exact same place he appeared in his first chapter. He finally remembers he's dead, that he died years before, and that he's now repeated his last days at least once. When Ruka gets Sakuya to the point where someone has to put the restored mask on her, it's Choushiro's job to finish things off and put an end to things. He's been broken out of his amnesia, and it's time to move on.
But most of the Fatal Frame ghosts aren't that lucky. Most of them move to their final destination without having any clue that they've been repeating things over and over. Ruka's father seems to be somewhat aware in the end, and Kirie of course has a hellgate to guard, but the rest of the ghosts in the series move from amnesia to afterlife with nothing inbetween. Perhaps they're the lucky ones.
Meta 3: Angst
Date: 2013-02-20 02:15 am (UTC)Angst is defined as a "feeling of dread, anxiety, or anguish" according to dictionary.com. Between the player, the playable characters, and the ghosts themselves, there's plenty of angst to go around in the Fatal Frame games, which have to deal with things going wrong which resonate through the present in the form of repeating, tragic events.
On the player level, this angst is caused by the game itself. There are few narrated Let's Plays that don't involve cursing by the players, and part of it is the fact that this game makes you feel dread and anxiety when you're playing it. This is accomplished several ways, from the limited healing items (especially in the first three games, where you had to find them), to limited/weak film, to the fact that if you don't run all the time - and you can't in Fatal Frame 2 when Mayu is with you, or she complains - a random ghost is likely to show up at precisely the wrong moment when you're short on both or are on your way to a terrible ghost fight - see the 4player podcast clip where a Broken Neck suddenly appears when the player is trying to save, much to the player's vocal terror! And let's not even start with the canon endings for the first two games, where you will lose someone you love.
In addition, you're fighting in dark areas, it's almost always night (except for the daylight portions of Fatal Frame 3, which can get scary because the ghosts are invading your house), and you're often in scary, run-down areas. Some areas are scary because you have a limited amount of room or are otherwise restricted in movement. One example is the fish tank room in Fatal Frame 1 - it's not small, but it's extremely inconvenient to fight in due to its layout. There's a reason why people online cite it as one of the scariest rooms in the game, and why it reappears in the Himuro Mansion portion of Fatal Frame 3.
But at least the players can put the controller down and walk away from the game. The characters and the ghosts are trapped within. For each of them, there's the threat of becoming part of the scenery if they don't succeed - with the possible exception of Choushiro, who we find died before we're introduced to him and is therefore already part of the scenery. Miku in the first game has to run around, not only looking for her brother, but a way out of the mansion - she, like the rest of the characters, is stuck as soon as she steps inside. Likewise, Mio and Mayu cannot leave the Lost Village until the mystery is solved - the village is stuck in a kind of time loop. Miyako Sudo notes that she can't sleep, and surely there's no food - the place itself is slowly rotting to pieces. There's no escape from the Manor of Sleep except by waking up (and a lot of people don't do so one day). And of course, in the fourth game, while the players can leave the building, there's no boat off the island - even if they weren't too busy trying to solve the mystery of their pasts.
In fact, in all games except the first, a lot of the characters' actions are motivated by some form of angst. In the first, not so much, though Mafuyu feels that he should find what happened to Takamine and co and Miku is worried about her brother. In the second, Mio has to keep her injured sister alive - a sister who keeps wandering off and is possessed by an evil sacrifice. Likewise, the whole theme of the third game is about anxiety and anguish. Rei is filled with guilt and anguish about the death of her fiance Yuu, and Miku likewise about Mafuyu. Mio, who is seen but not played, is the same way about Mayu, and her uncle Kei is filled with anguish about Mio. And in the fourth, all of them are seeking to figure out what happened a particular day, in which they lost their memories – or in Choushiro's case, are trying to figure out what's going on.
The ghosts, too, are filled with their own form of angst, mostly anxiety or anguish. Since there are too many to list here, I'll mention a couple from the games, mostly the first three. In the first game, there's Blinded, who keeps wandering around because she was blinded in a cruel ceremony. She's lost, looking for someone to help her – her two phrases are "It's dark" and "There's nobody here", and while she's attacking you, "My eyes!". Likewise, Yae, the folklorist's wife, worries about her daughter's disappearance as you fight her. And Long Arms screams "Give back!" as he thinks you're responsible for taking his daughter away. In the second game, there's Chitose, who spends a lot of time during your fights saying "It's dark in here, Mutsuki! I don't like it!", Yoshtasu Kiryu, who isn't happy about the ceremony and having to lose a daughter, and Itsuki , who anguishes that he couldn't either complete his ceremony correctly or save Sae and Yae from theirs. In fact, probably the only hostile ghosts who aren't angsting are the trio of Osaka children who want to play hide and go seek with you, much like their Demon Tag playing counterparts in 1 (Clock Boy, Girl in Well, and Crawling Girl), who do know they're dead but happily will "play" with you to death. There are no happy ghosts in three, though several of the handmaidens will happily try to stake you to death – most of the rest of the ghosts are either worrying about Reika's sacrifice failing, such as the family head, or full of guilt and anguish about the people they lost, such as Yoshino Takigawa. There is one possible exception, Kyouka, who is much too busy waiting for the missing Akito to fall under the other two categories. Even Haibara You of the fourth game is worried about Choushiro catching him. And while you don't learn about the stories of some of the non-hostile (vanishing and hidden) ghosts until after the game, they have their own angst, their own worry, that is sometimes evident as you go through the story.
In fact, the "boss" ghosts, the main antagonists, also deserve mention here. Kirie's love was killed and then she was strangled to death, and she wants nothing more than revenge for her pain. Sae wants nothing more than her sister to come back and is upset over Itsuki's death. Seijiro Makabe, the Kusabi, was tortured to death in order to try to keep the world from ending, and now is stuck in a nonthinking revenge. Reika wants nothing more than her pain to end. Sakuya might be the one exception - but she was dying of a disease that was slowly robbing her of her memories and herself in life.
In other words, other than a few kids throughout the games, everybody in the game series has angst. After all, this is not a happy game series. The whole premise is that something goes terribly wrong and it's up to you, against all odds, to fix it. And even if you fix it, things might not end well for the character that you've become invested in over the last few hours. It's a game that's loved for the scares and the angst, and it delivers both well.
Meta 4: Alternate Universes
Date: 2013-02-20 06:51 am (UTC)--------
The term "alternate universe" has different meanings for different fans. The best way to define it is "things that happened differently that in turn affected other things, such as choosing the road less traveled". It can be as radical as a change in setup - for example, a universe where a canonically male character was born female or a character had a different sexual orientation - or as minor as someone being affected by a change of outfit. For example, the first Fatal Frame game would be different if Kirie had been in love with another girl, Miku had been the spitting image of the missing lover, and Mafuyu had been the one forced to chase Miku all over Himuro Mansion. An alternate universe, in essence, splits off from what the original storyline of the universe is supposed to be, through the choices of the writer or in this case the player.
In the games themselves, you do have choices that don't affect the ultimate ending. For example, outfit changes do nothing but affect how the character looks, not how the game plays out. It doesn't matter that Mio and Mayu have bikinis and bondage outfits because all of the other characters will react the same as if they were wearing their default outfits or kimonos. Because they're locked into their own miserable worlds, the other characters don't notice the main characters might be wearing something scandalous by their standards. Likewise, it really doesn't matter how you do certain things. Nothing will happen if you go the wrong way other than you might encounter a wandering ghost. If you're tasked to collect a certain set of something, such as keys, stones, or stone pinwheels, it doesn't really matter if you do one before another. Fighting a certain way might ensure that you're going to run out of supplies faster, but its only effect on the plot is that you might have to start the game over. Even a new game plus, which allows you to retain all the things you obtained on previous playthroughs, for the most part has no other effect than some extra supplies.
On the other hand, the first three games have canonical endings and at least one alternate ending, which could be seen as alternate universes. The first game has three; one, the canon and default one, where Mafuyu chooses to be with Kirie so that she doesn't spend eternity in despair, and two others, both where he chooses to leave with his sister Miku. The difference between the two alternate endings is that in the second one, Kirie is given comfort by the reappearance of her murdered lover, who has a chance to come back and be with her. Of these three endings, two end well for Miku, where she gets her brother back safely, and two for Kirie, where she isn't doomed to spend the rest of eternity alone. So, it's three paths, each caused by something different happening. In the first one, achieved by finishing the game at the easiest level, Kirie has the company of Mafuyu so things end well for her, but we know from the third game that Miku doesn't take it so well. In the second, Miku and probably Mafuyu are happy, or at least Mafuyu is alive - though possibly regretting abandoning Kirie, thus leading him to end up in the Manor of Sleep of the third game. In the third, achieved with the hardest difficulty setting, Miku is alive, Mafuyu is alive and hopefully happy, and Kirie is presumably happy with the company of her old love. Three different outcomes from the same general story, three different ways that the story can now go. These three major characters will now have different lives depending on how the story ended.
The PS2 and Xbox versions of the second game have a similar structure; the ending achieved on the easiest level is the canon one, where Mio is forced to strangle her sister to save herself and the village, and falls into despair as a result. The harder endings leave both siblings alive, but the second hardest ending has Mio sacrifice her sight, whereas the ending in the highest difficulty leaves them both alive and whole. As things get harder for the player, it makes things better for the character. There is more hope. The canon ending results in Mio almost dying in the third game's Manor of Sleep, whereas she has hope in the other two endings, and life gets better for her personally. The Mio who has her sight and her sister is going to be a very different person than the Mio who is now dependent on her sister or the Mio who had to kill her identical twin. There is a fourth ending, achievable at any level, where Mio makes a choice to abandon her sister to save herself, the first of the endings based on choice rather than difficulty level. It ends with the same result as the canon ending, where Mio is driven to despair, but for a different reason: she's basically abandoned her sister to die instead of killing Mayu herself.
For the third game, which is highly dependent on the canonical endings of the first two games, the idea of the second game's fourth ending - the player's choice - evolves in a new way. Harder difficulties enable you to buy more outfits, but they don't change the ending. Instead, there is a certain sidequest that can only be completed on a new game plus. This sidequest assures the continued survival of Kei, one of the playable characters in the game, and in turn, assures the survival of his niece, Mio. It's one of the times where what you do in the storyline, as compared to how masochistic the player feels in playing at harder difficulties, makes a difference in the ending. By choosing to find out more about the events between Kyouka and Akito, the player assures Kei's survival and therefore creates hope for both him and Mio. Interestingly enough, this is the canon ending, not the default one. In playing the game again and doing the sidequest, the player changes the ending to the canon one, instead of changing it from the canon one.
While the fourth game doesn't vary in its endings as much as the first three games - you find out what happens to a certain character in the hardest difficulty, and that's it - the remake of the second game brings back the player's choices of the original second game and the third game to create new endings. Successfully completing the game on a higher difficulty enables the player to buy more powerful things, but that's about it, just like the third game. These endings, these universes, depend on what you do in game to a much greater extent than in any other game. To get three of the endings, Mio must take Mayu to three different locations in a certain chapter. In two of the other three, the player has to make sure Mio does not take Mayu to those three locations. In addition, luck and skill play a part. So, in a sense, the endings depend on what the player chooses to do, both in game and in battle. Depending on the player's choices, Mio may still end up with the canon ending, despairing as she kills Mayu. She still may choose to abandon her sister, save her sister in a way that causes her to lose her sight, or get them both out safely. Or, depending on how things happen, she might end up being too late and dying by Mayu's side. There's even an ending where Mio saves her sister, and then Mayu kills her for not being willing to complete the ritual.
In some ways, completing these games is like reading a fairly limited "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, or playing a limited-choice visual novel like Katawa Shoujo. They provide a set number and variety of endings that do not change - or at least not until the next remake. But just like fan-created alternate universes, things happen differently here. Players create their own worlds in different ways, in ways set by the game developers, but they are still alternate universes. They are still, essentially, the road less traveled.
Meta 5: Bad Boy/Rebel
Date: 2013-02-25 01:27 am (UTC)The Fatal Frame universe is full of people doing bad things for what they consider to be good reasons. There's the Himuro family in the first game and the villagers of Minakami in the second, who sacrifice humans, the Kuze shrine maidens, who cause the pain and agony of the surrounding area to be inked on one (willing) sacrifice, and You Haibara, who does unethical experiments to save his sister, even getting to the point of kidnapping little girls to participate in a ceremony that might heal her.
But there are those who rebel against the whole thing, and make things worse. And the biggest offender is the character of Itsuki Tachibana of the second Fatal Frame game. When you meet Itsuki, he's trapped in a jail, the town storehouse. He wants what Mio wants, which is to save her sister and get the heck out of there. He's pretty much the only non-hostile ghost in the whole game that's not a vanishing or hidden ghost. And he provides clues to help Mio and the player get out of the terrifying experience.
As Mio and the player start unraveling clues, however, we learn more about his motivations, and his ultimate responsibility for Mio and Mayu being caught up in the situation.
We start getting clues as to Itsuki's feelings through his conversations with Mio. But it's when we get to chapter 4 that we find out what's going on; Butterfly Diary 3 is the first one that indicates that Itsuki is planning on getting Sae and Yae out of there. At the end of the chapter, we get a flashback of Itsuki getting Yae and Sae to run away from the village. Unfortunately, Sae falls over a ledge and is ultimately caught.
Other clues are present in the diaries as well. Ryozo Munakata's entries indicate that Itsuki intended to have him get Sae and Yae to safety - a fact that he didn't realize until he was already in the village and Itsuki was warning him to leave through Yae. He also notes that Itsuki has been terrified of the ceremony since they were both children, which might explain why Itsuki was so keen on not having Yae and Sae go through the ceremony.
In fact, Itsuki's own diaries, the Bound Diaries (or String-Bound Diaries, depending on which version of the game you play), state that he first intends to go through the ceremonies to save Sae and Yae from doing so, in the first diary. If that fails, he intends to go get them out of the village. He's dismayed that his friend Ryozo Munakata comes in response to his letter, per the third diary, because he knows that he'll be used as a Kusabi sacrifice. He makes no comment in his own diaries about Ryozo getting out of there, but he does indicate in his last entry, Diary V, that he's intending to escape and to get the crests so that Yae and Sae can escape.
So, his own motivation is to save Yae from having to kill her sister like he had to do with his brother. He wants to save her from the fate he's been scared about from childhood. His fear is so encompassing that he doesn't seem to consider what will happen if Yae and Sae's ceremony doesn't take place, or goes wrong. In his fear, he rebels and puts their welfare above everybody else's - including his nearly-blind sister Chitose's.
It's because he gets Yae to escape that Sae comes back, fueled by the Abyss' hate. Sae wanted to die by her sister's hand, per her diary entry, and the Abyss took the improper ceremony of hanging her alone, and her own desperation to see the ritual done correctly, to use her to destroy everything. Because Yae was gone, the village became trapped in its own time loop, Sae and Seijiro Makabe were resurrected as evil ghosts, and a lot of other people, such as Miyako Sudo, her boyfriend Masumi, and the Drowned Woman, got caught up in the village's curse. For want of a nail, Yae, everything fell apart. And Yae likely wouldn't have left if Itsuki hadn't gotten her to.
So, in rebelling, in trying to save Yae and Sae, Itsuki messed up everything. The whole thing that Mio and Mayu go through are all his fault. In some ways, in helping Mio get through some of the ordeals, he does help a little in remedying what he did. But he doesn't do it consciously. He's still trying to save Yae and Sae. He still doesn't realize what he did. He rebelled, and in a dark, terrible way, his entire village paid the price.
Meta 6: Blindness
Date: 2013-03-03 02:10 am (UTC)Of all the ghosts in the Fatal Frame, three ghosts/ghost types in the games are blind, and two others have the ability to tempoarily blind the protagonist during fights. These ghost fights are dealt with in slightly different ways for each ghost, which provides an interesting variation when playing the games. Interestingly enough, the only character in these games with bad sight that was born that way was Chitose Tachibana, but her sight is merely bad and has nothing much to do with her fighting ability, or lack thereof.
The prototype for the entire series is Blinded. She doesn't have a name, but we presume she's a Himuro family member, as she was chosen in a ritual at about age 7-8 to become the next Blinded maiden and pick out the next Rope Shrine Maiden. She's chosen at the same time as Kirie, and then left for ten years, until she is blinded in a cruel ceremony as an adult, as shown in her flashbacks. Understandably, she's not good at navigating around. However, in fights, she has extremely good hearing; the standard fighting advice given for her is "move as little as possible, only one or two steps after a Shutter Chance." She also has the uncanny ability to teleport right behind Miku, but despite this, she doesn't always notice that she has; it's quite possible to have her walk away after a teleport and not notice that Miku is right there.
To make things more challenging for players of the first game, the second game also has blind ghosts, but their tactics are different from Blinded's. The Mourners are the blind ghosts of the second game, mostly encountered in the underground passages below the village. They've been blinded so that they don't look into the abyss, and are mostly made up of criminals/undesirables. Unlike Blinded of the first game, these ghosts don't teleport by default, unless they have done a Dark Return (Deep Crimson Butterfly only). But they have very long reach and they're fond of charging in the direction they last knew you to be in. So, someone used to the tactics of fighting the first game's blinded ghost will get injured; you have to run far away in order to be safe, and woe betide you if you're trying to fight them in a tiny space!
The third game's ghosts are the Engravers, and they basically act like they're sighted. It really doesn't matter if you move or not for them, because they act more like sighted ghosts. Perhaps it's because of their origin; they willingly went through the blinding procedure for their art - they did it in order to work on the Tattooed Priestess - perhaps it's because the designers got tired of coding blind ghosts. They're mostly well-known for sneaking up in combat while the player/character is in Finder Mode, having inherited the ability from Blinded to teleport right behind. Unlike Blinded, they know fully where they are and use it to their advantage. Most guides state to drop Finder Mode whenever possible when dealing with these ghosts, for good reason. In most battles, you're constantly in Finder Mode; in this one, it's a really bad idea.
In addition to these games, there are two ghosts, one each in the first two games, that have the ability to cause blindness in the player/character. In each of these, even though being blinded has essentially the same game effect, dealing with the ghosts is different. In the first game, the blinding ghost is Junsei Takamine, the Boss for the first Night. When he loses about half his hit points, he starts screaming unless you as Miku shoot him with a Shutter Chance. He also has a nasty habit of jumping up and landing where you don't expect, and usually behind Miku. Worse, he will teleport right in front of where you're running, so you can't blindly run away.
Chitose in the second game, who Mio runs across three times, is a little easier. Mio's sight goes out when she cries a certain way, and likewise, only a Zero Shot (Shutter Chance) will stop her from doing that. Chitose's pattern is a little less predictable, however. She teleports a lot more than Takamine, but she's less likely to hit Mio. With her, running is an option; half the time she's crying or feeling her way around, and her attacks are mostly random - like Blinded, she rushes in when she can see you, but she can't see you too well.
Each of these five different ghosts - or sets of ghosts - you fight a little bit differently. Some are blind themselves, some of them blind you. But each provides a different challenge to you, the player, and the characters you play as, and that's the strength of the games.
Meta 7: Girls
Date: 2013-03-09 04:13 am (UTC)Girls, or the lack of sexism in the Fatal Frame games. 511 words.
One of the things I like best about the Fatal Frame games is that some of the most memorable characters are female. Of the ten playable characters - temporary or otherwise - there are only three men. This may be because of the sexist assumption that using women as protagonists, especially young ones, are vulnerable and therefore help heighten the tension the game feels. This is a common choice in horror/survival horror games, for the same reason as horror movies tend to have the villains stereotypically go after women - the weaker sex.
For a female gamer, however, this makes these games more attractive. Video game makers tend to create games with male protagonists, or presume the default "you" is male - even the game "Zombies Run", which has a fairly sizable female audience, refers to the player with male pronouns at least once. So there's a good female audience for the Fatal Frame games, like many other survival horror games, because the girls represent us, the player.
The most interesting thing is that there's very little sexism in the Fatal Frame games themselves in their universe. All the protagonists are able to fight ghosts, whether they're male or female. The women are strong-willed, especially the antagonists, who all managed to come back and let out their anger on the people who hurt them. Likewise, there are no real gender differences among the ghosts; Lord Himuro from the first game might be scary, but so is Yashuu Kuze from the third, and they're both family heads. It doesn't matter whether you're being attacked by Ryozo or Yae Munakata, the husband and wife from the first game - they're still both hard to fight. The ghosts only care if the protagonist is alive, not what organs they have.
Even in the universes, some things are equal. Sure, the rituals for the first, third, and fourth games involve girls, but the Crimson Sacrifice ritual just involves twins - and boys are just as eligible as girls.
The games aren't completely free of problematic, sexist elements. Some of the outfits for Mio and Mayu can get uncomfortably skimpy, including the default ones, especially when you consider they're fifteen year olds. The other female protagonists have outfits that can be fairly on the light side, considering that they're running about in haunted, cold areas. There's also the infamous game mechanic in the third game where Kei is the only one who can push things out of the way, as well as jump between fairly close roofs.
Coming from fandoms where male characters are dominant, I find it refreshing that this is a place where women can be the focus. For me, it's more what the characters do than what they wear. I tend to write male characters in fanfic, because for me they're the more interesting, but Fatal Frame is slowly changing that because there are so many interesting girls to write about. It's full of girls who live, who angst, who heal, and who are equal to the guys. And that's important to me.
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.