#like its very fine to use a setting to explore semi analogous things

[lets-jam]

it's lazy writing...

[jmsebastian]

Project Zero 2: Wii Edition and the Remake Dilemma

I’m a firm believer that remakes are typically losing propositions. There are cases that buck this trend as there always are (Resident Evil comes to mind), but when it comes to games that can be considered landmark titles in their respective genres, or just superbly made games, the benefit of a remake is limited to its availability on new platforms. This is something a port could accomplish with significantly less risk of messing with the integrity and intent of the original creation. Sometimes, though, games are completely overhauled for one reason or another. Project Zero 2: Wii Edition falls into this category.

A remake of the 2003 PlayStation 2 and Xbox release, known in the US as Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, Project Zero 2: Wii Edition uses two basic templates from which it forms its mold. The first is the original game. Fatal Frame II was a pretty big step forward from its predecessor. It maintained the basic underpinnings of exploring haunted old buildings and fighting ghosts by taking pictures of them with a magic camera, but it added some significant and interesting changes. In Crimson Butterfly you don’t go through the whole house of horrors alone. Your twin sister often tags along as your AI companion. This means she can alert you to the location of ghosts, and can also become the target of their attacks. The mechanics of camera combat are tweaked as well, where your proximity to ghosts is used to scale your damage up more than the time multiplier used in the first game. Because of this, ghosts often have jittery animations that make getting close to them risky and capturing them with combo inducing fatal frames difficult. The explorable area is also expanded out to several sometimes connected buildings and the space between those buildings in a small village compared to the single mansion that made up the first game.

Wii Edition borrows Crimson Butterfly’s structural framework practically wholesale. The level design in almost unchanged, the combat parameters are pretty much the same, and your AI sister manages to get in your way just about as often. What’s different is everything else. Shedding the fixed camera angles so common in survival horror games, Project Zero 2 takes its presentation from its console release cousin, Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen. Released four years earlier in 2008, Tsukihami no Kamen completely shifted how the Fatal Frame games were presented to players and how players interacted with them. The camera went from fixed and set tracking to being pulled in over the player character’s shoulder. It became dynamic, the player could direct it with a certain amount of freedom to focus on what they wanted to in the environment. Motion control was also introduced to more accurately convey the feeling of aiming a flashlight and camera around. It was a complete break from what the series had been doing up until that point, and Project Zero 2: Wii Edition fully embraces these changes.

The mix of classic Fatal Frame level design with modern Fatal Frame camera angles and control schemes produces mixed results. For lack of a better term, the game is clumsy. This manifests itself in some interesting ways. First is the unoptimized menu navigation. As you explore the Lost Village, you come across a variety of objects that reveal lore. Most of these are paper documents of various types. Picking one up will open the article so you can read it. To close it, you first press B on the Wii remote to stop reading, then press A to close the text. This might not sound so bad, not adjusting the purpose of a single button to match player intent in context-sensitive ways makes quickly navigating the menu both confusing to learn and quite difficult to do quickly. While the backstory to the Fatal Frame games is interesting and worth taking the time to investigate, repeat playthroughs don’t always require that you read a seven-page journal entry again. The menu system actively works against playing quickly or efficiently. Considering how much time players have to spend in menus, missteps here can add up to some significant time loss.

Time lost to players doesn’t seem to have been a concern for Koei Tecmo when developing this game as it also features unskippable cutscenes. Wii Edition is not a game that is overwhelmed by its pre-rendered scenes, but they are frequent enough that they disrupt play in regular intervals. For first time players, they probably aren’t something you’d want to gloss over as they provide guidance on what to do next but they are far, far less important for those who have played the game before. Not being able to skip these scenes is especially odd considering the odds that many people playing the remake of Crimson Butterfly also played the original and are familiar with the story already. Forcing players to watch cutscenes always ends up feeling like the player is having control taken away from them, and it’s especially painful here due to the more general issues with player control.

Perhaps the easiest target with regard to player control is how it feels to move the player character around. Unfortunately, Mio and Mayu feel very slow. Slow movement on its own is not a problem, but the game does not feel balanced around the movement speed. A prime example is the sluggishness of the quick turn. What was a snappy animation that turned you around 180 degrees in Tsukihami no Kamen became a set piece of animation reorienting the character that feels as if it’s playing back in slow motion. The animation itself isn’t even particularly slow, but the built-in delay to the starting of that animation makes the whole thing feel unnaturally labored. It’s a much less useful technique because of this. Timing it right during combat becomes more a test of how well you anticipate a ghost’s actions rather than how quickly you can react, which is unfair to ask of players when ghosts spend so much of their time hidden from player view.

The slow movement might have been the result of the game taking place in such tight quarters, a problem created when spaces aren’t redesigned to match the other changes. The slow animations feel like a safeguard against players running themselves into walls constantly or rushing past something they were supposed to pay attention to. This is taken to an extreme in one particular room where the player can walk through a pair of hanging curtains. Going through them triggers an especially aggravating animation of Mio nervously pushing the curtain back before stepping forward. These animations are triggered by proximity to the curtain rather than the on-screen prompt to press A like in nearly every other interaction in the game. It’s a particularly bad moment. If you just to happen to be ambushed by a ghost while doing this, suddenly you can rush through the curtains at full running speed with no issue, demonstrating the arbitrary nature of Mio’s movement limitations. Unfortunately, the forced pace feels like it creates more problems than it solves. Players just have to suffer through everything taking a bit longer than it probably should, with backtracking or getting temporarily lost compounding the problem.

Getting ambushed here is about as dirty a trick as the game can play.

Combat also suffers some unexpected clunkiness. All Fatal Frame games are a bit clunky when it comes to wielding the Camera Obscura, though this has the express purpose of making the game both challenging and tapping into the fear of the player, who might perform the wrong action due to a panicked state. In Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen, the imprecise motion controls of the Wii were mitigated by the lock on mechanic. One could argue this made the game a bit too easy, but Project Zero 2 for Wii goes very far in the other direction. The lock on keeps your camera in the vicinity of your nearest target, and the player must adjust their aim within the lock by rolling the Wii remote to either side or pointing it up or down. Locking on happens quickly and is accompanied by a satisfying shink sound that provides the player with positive feedback. Hearing it, you get the sense that the hard part is over and now it’s just a matter of waiting for a fatal frame chance.

Really, your photo album efforts are just beginning as the ghosts can easily disappear out of your lock on, reducing your spirit energy levels back to nothing. What you’re supposed to do is lock on, then diligently follow along, making minute adjustments to the position of the Wii remote in order to keep the ghost centered in the viewfinder. This is no easy feat, especially if your Wii remote calibration is off or you have a less than ideal location for the sensor bar. The semi-automated lock on and precision aiming feel at odds with one another. Adding in the analog stick of the nunchuck on top of that for turning your character around and you have three methods of controlling the aim of the Camera Obscura, all of which just get in each other’s way. Its lack of complementary components is all the more surprising since it had worked so much better in the previous Wii effort. While Tsukihami no Kamen’s combat could certainly have used some fine tuning, Wii Edition reduced that complete package back down to its individual pieces without remembering how they were supposed to fit back together.

The game really forces you to upgrade as much as possible since your basic film does very little damage and getting fatal frame combos is quite difficult compared to the other games in the series.

A quirkier addition for combat scenarios is the blacking out of the screen during certain encounters. There you are, tracking a ghost as it glides around the room while you charge your spirit meter, when suddenly the room goes completely dark. You lose the ability of your filament to point you toward the ghost’s position right along with the ability to see anything. It’s supposed to add tension, maybe even give you a fright. The first time it happens, it gets close to accomplishing that. At the very least you’ll be surprised. That raising of the stakes fails to deliver once you figure out that the underhanded tactic of your spectral enemy goes away after a few seconds and in the meantime, you can just run around to avoid getting caught unaware. It’s a fun new trick to see once, but it doesn’t force the player to reassess their predicament or use new strategies to deal damage to ghosts. The same exact methods of evasion work just as well, you simply have to wait until the lights come back on to hurt your foe.

Since the game was released in PAL regions, it did receive localized voice acting in English. What might be a surprise to those of us in North America is that the dub was done with English voice actors, meaning it differs wildly from the original English language dub that was produced for North America and PAL regions. For those familiar with the original game, it’s quite off-putting to hear these new voices. For a game so rooted in being Japanese, non-Japanese voice acting always felt a little strange. To their credit, the actors who worked on Project Zero: Wii Edition did a fantastic job, and once you’ve become accustomed to it, I find that it often outshines the original English dub. Sadly, the English dub is the only one you can choose from despite its release in multiple European countries and featuring several language options for the subtitles and menus (I played the Italian release, complete with box art and manual, printed in Italian). The Japanese audio isn’t even available, which is a real shame, as it would have been nice to give the characters their presumed native language to give it that much more coherency. Of course, multi-language tracks were still uncommon in 2012, so you take what you can get.

Aside from getting an English dub, the greatest thing about the PAL release of Wii Edition is that it made the game available to a wider audience. If you only happen to have a North American Wii, however, you face the same kinds of problems trying to play this game as you do trying to play the fourth game. Without a PAL or Japanese console, you can’t simply pop a disc in and start playing. If you don’t want to invest in another console for a single game, then the easy answer is emulation. Wii emulation is in a very good state, so the game is easily playable on PC, though you are likely to get some audio stuttering and maybe a bit of slowdown. You can even get a USB sensor bar and pair your Wii remote with your computer to replicate the control scheme exactly. If you want to play on your North American console, you can also do that thanks to the robust homebrew community for the console. Bypassing the region lockout using sideloaded applications means you can play the game on actual hardware exactly as one would expect, and it works flawlessly. If you really want to, you can also track down an undubbed version of the game which features the original Japanese audio with the texts of the various PAL region languages.

With so many available options to play it, the question really becomes whether or not it’s worth playing. For anyone who loves Fatal Frame, the answer is easy enough. Yes. It’s interesting to see the game redesigned for a completely different perspective. It’s fun to hear the extremely different voice acting, and at its core, it’s very much the same type of game that all the games in the series are. You can’t really go wrong with it in that regard. For those who might be coming late to the series, I’d have to recommend the original over this version. Crimson Butterfly is readily available, can be played digitally in HD via the PlayStation 3, and simply holds up better as an overall package. If you love motion controls but only have room in your life for one Fatal Frame game to try, then you’re better off going with Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen. It’s more responsive animations, more appropriately designed locales, and tighter Camera Obscura mechanics make it the obvious choice. It also incorporates the Wii’s motion control gimmicks in interesting and surprising ways that truly enhance the experience, something Project Zero 2: Wii Edition curiously omits. For a remake, Wii Edition doesn’t make much of a case for itself being the definitive version. It acts more as a companion piece to the original, a super new game plus, almost. It’s one to come back to only once you’ve made your way through the rest of the series and still want more