Import Time! – Fatal Frame IV

When we tag a post with the title "Import Time!," well, basically it means you're not going to find it on shelves in North America. This could include European releases (such as Disaster: Day of Crisis) or Japan-only games. At the bottom of the review, you'll find a score. This score doesn't indicate the quality of the game (that's discussed in the review), only the ease of importing the game and how feasible it is to play when one potentially doesn't understand the language.

It's completely baffling to me that Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse hasn't made its way to North America yet. Sure, it's based on a somewhat niche Japanese horror videogame series that includes elements from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fatal Frame II is still to this day considered one of the scariest games of all time. Add to that the pedigree of people working on this game (a joint effort between Tecmo, Grasshopper Manufacture and Nintendo) and you likely have the best survival horror game on the Wii.

This is a game concerned with subtle, psychological terror rather than simply throwing loud noises at you. In fact, the game is pretty much silent for most of its playtime, really setting an incredibly unsettling mood. This is probably the game's greatest strength. I've never played a game with so much atmosphere. If you're not in the right frame of mind, the atmosphere of this game can get to be claustrophobic, almost oppressive. It's a feeling that stays with you for a long time after playing this game.

You play primarily as Ruka (with short detours playing as other characters), a girl who years earlier had gone with some childhood friends to the island of Rougetsu. Something traumatic happened there when they were children, and two of them (Midoka and Matsuki) have gone back to try to come to terms with the psychological damage that has informed their lives up to this point. When they arrive, though, they find the once-tourist-y area has been completely abandoned, left in disrepair and has a bit of a mystical air about it. Midoka goes missing, and Ruka has come to find her friend.

Scattered throughout this game are numerous references to ancient rituals specific to the island primarily having to do with ritual sacrifice and terrible events happening on the eve of a lunar eclipse. And, well, wouldn't you know… it looks like one is happening right now!

Luckily for you, though, you've stumbled across the work of a researcher who has developed a very specific type of camera called the Camera Obscura (this, of course, is the setup for all Fatal Frame games) that, when a picture is taken, will capture dead souls in it. Naturally, then, the game isn't afraid to throw eerie, J-Horror ghosts at you, and the only way to get rid of them is to plant your feet to the ground and take pictures of them. It's a game completely devoid of violence, yet is incredibly effective at conveying horror.

Gameplay then essentially boils down to a few things: exploring the ruins of Rougetsu island and making your way through in a very Metroid-y fashion, picking up items and improving the stats of the Camera Obscura, and switching to a first-person perspective to take pictures of your ghost targets. It's the same formula that people have seen from the first three Fatal Frame games, but I really feel like this game does something different, and I think that it boils down to decisions that I'm certain Suda51 must have made for the game. Namely, there are a few "idiosyncratic" design decisions that people honestly believe are the reason why this game hasn't been released internationally, but they absolutely fit into the whole of the game.

This seems to be a recurring theme in games that are survival horror or at least take inspiration from survival horror games, but Fatal Frame uses perfectly imperfect control to a greater degree even than the original Resident Evil or Fragile Dreams. Here's just a few of the somewhat strange control decisions. First, your character's "run" speed is basically still a crawl. I think this was a great decision, because being able to zip through the corridors would almost certainly destroy the wire-taut tension that the game goes to such great lengths to create. Same goes for the method for picking up items. It's intentionally slow and methodical, forcing you to hold down the A button while your character holds out her arm to pick up an item. Not only does it contribute to the creeping dread that the pacing really emphasizes, but every once in a while, a ghost will reach out and grab your arm, forcing you to shake them off quickly and retreat. This system emphasizes a kind of terror that the "pop out and scare you with zombies" school of design would almost certainly ignore. It doesn't end there. The flashlight controls are mapped to the tilt function of the Wii remote instead of the pointer, which gives the flashlight a floaty, imprecise feeling that really puts one on edge while simultaneously making the flashlight (and by extension the Wii remote) feel like part of your character's arm.

What Fatal Frame IV has shown me more than almost every other game that I completely disagree with the camp of people who believe that "perfect" controls should be in every game in an effort to emphasize the "fun" of playing videogames. Now, don't get me wrong: I didn't for a second have "fun" playing Fatal Frame IV. I found it to be a mentally exhausting workout of a game, one that I couldn't play for days simply from dread of the oppressive atmosphere of the game. It's a game that beats you down, that is mentally and emotionally taxing, yet completely compulsive. The controls are a big part of that, and the game would have seemed downright wrong with super-precise controls. One only needs to look at Resident Evil 5 to see where that kind of thinking will get you.

One has to wonder why someone would choose to play a game like this. I think it's the same reason that someone would read a Poe story back in the day – to be shocked and horrified, while simultaneously being given an insight into the human condition. This game does that, through physicalization, through atmosphere and through gameplay, and is ultimately a great success because of it. There are obviously some things I would change (relying on random "notes" scattered around to forward the psychological themes is a hoary videogame convention at this point, and the "point scores" that come up when you take pictures of ghosts is an unncessarily arcade-y thing in this decidedly un-arcade-y game), but it's still enormously effective. I never want to play it again, and I think that's the highest praise I can offer.

IMPORT TIME! NOTES

This is probably the easiest modern game I can think of to import. Not only is it readily available off of eBay or Play Asia, but a dedicated team of folks translated the entire game. All you need to run the translation is an SD card, and the translation patch streams in the English text even to legitimate copies of the game. The translation that these guys did is so good that it very well could have been an official translation if Nintendo of America wasn't so gunshy about releasing such a dark, offputting game to North Americans. Really, if you have any interest in survival horror and a Wii, this game is a no-brainer. It's easily one of the scariest games I've ever played, and not in a cheap, exploitative way either.

Importability: 9/10. The game is a little expensive, but well worth it for survival horror fans.