Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake

There’s something about a good survival horror game that just hits different. Some of my favourite gaming memories are attending midnight releases for a bunch of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games and playing them long into the night. My friends and I would pile into a buddy’s house and pass the controller between us every 30 minutes or so, feeding off each other’s nervousness as the tension built, before cackling at whoever succumbed to the inevitable jump scare. Never owning a PS2 myself, I missed out on the Fatal Frame series, so I was excited to hear that Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo had teamed up for a remake of cult favourite, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – on Switch 2 no less! 

The game tells the story of twin sisters, Mio and Mayu, who accidentally stumble into a forsaken village that’s long been erased from the maps. Cursed to live in a nightmare, the girls find themselves pursued by vengeful spirits in a land where the sun never rises, and where they must investigate the grisly history of the village and face their deepest fears to get out alive. Frighteningly, you’re separated from your sister, Mayu, as you’re exploring the village, meaning you’ll have to save her before you can even consider escaping the deadly township.

Right off the bat, I was impressed with what Team Ninja had put on the table visually. In the opening scenes, Mio and Mayu looked polished and realistic in a way that the OG Switch would never have been able to handle, and the feeling only continued as I moved into the gameplay proper. You’ll stumble upon a few rendering issues later on (with items popping up out of sync with the rest of the environment), but if you’re the kind of person who lets that spoil your experience, I’d argue that you’re gaming on entirely the wrong machine in the first place.

---

---

The setting for the game, Minakami Village, is excellent. Set amongst a traditional Japanese village that’s dotted with creaky old homes, abandoned shrines and bleak streets shrouded in oppressive darkness, you’re put on edge very right from the word ‘go’. The map feels relatively open, even early on, and while it obviously doesn’t match the scale, exploring Minakami Village feels similar to creeping through Resident Evil: Village for the first time. 

Each level (or chapter) takes place inside a single building in Minakami Village, and Mio must navigate the dusty interior in search of her missing sister and clues to breaking the village’s evil spell. The buildings you explore are often houses belonging to one of the villagers who have long since passed away and become a vengeful spirit, guarding the secrets of the town and their part in its grisly history, even beyond after their life was extinguished. As Mio, you’re forced to creep from room to room, piecing together clues about the spirit’s life and death before a tense face off where only one of you will leave.

Unfortunately, while the levels look great, they’re made unnaturally mazy and illogical through cheap tricks that make exploration feel like a chore. Levels are littered with doors that are ‘held closed by supernatural forces’, until becoming mysteriously unlocked a little while later on (usually once you’ve done a suitable amount of Scooby Doo shenanigans with the local ghostie). It’s a lazy and unimaginative way to hinder a player’s momentum, and it makes it feel like you’re just drifting along with the story, instead of actively driving it forwards.

Perhaps the most sad thing about the levels is how flat they all feel – not in a spatial sense, but the atmospheric one. Despite the presentation of these dusty old homes, littered with occult motifs and spooky little dolls, Crimson Butterfly fails to imprint a sense of horror on the player beyond the most surface level. Sure, there are a few jump scares -some of which are pretty well designed- but you’re never left with a sense of dread about what might be around the next corner. 

I think the lack of fear factor stems from a number of sources: the lack of meaningful soundtrack, overpowered save points, and the slow, tedious combat. 

To address each item in turn, I think the soundtrack may be the most forgivable of the three. Basically, there is very little in the way of music used to set the scene as you explore Minakami Village. Team Ninja instead decided to let you hear the sounds of the environment, in the hopes that the sense of realism brings with it an oppressive, isolated atmosphere. But sadly, as anyone who’s ever watching a horror movie with the sound down will know, almost all of the tension in a scene is built up by the music. It works for the first hour or so, but then quickly falls off, mainly because the stakes of encounters just feel a little off…

In most survival horror games, save points offer a welcome sigh of relief – they’re a moment of reprieve from the chaos unfolding outside and allow you to take stock of your situation before striking out into the grim world again. By saving your game, you’ve given yourself options – you can use your health items now, knowing that you’ll always restart from a good position, or live more dangerously, knowing that if you do die, at least you won’t have lost a lot of progress… Unfortunately, Crimson Butterfly removes this element of agency from the player, as you’re fully healed at every save point and are given the opportunity to purchase health items using your ‘Spirit Points’, which are earned by snapping pictures of enemies. This feels like an overadjustment to offset your underpowered weaponry (see below), and makes it really difficult to feel afraid of what might be coming, since you can always just backtrack a couple of rooms in order to overcome just about any setback.

And finally, I need to address the combat, which is just… bleh. 

Team Ninja have decided to make combat encounters sparse, and as such, enemies need to have some staying power. Gameplay-wise, this converts into having a few ghosts that take absolutely ages to kill, which quickly become tedious due to their complete lack of variety. Sure, many of the enemies look different – there’s angry torch-wielding villagers, spooky hooded priests and freaky drowned women, but none of them offer unique attack styles or weaknesses, making nothing stand out as uniquely threatening or memorable.

Despite making use of the various film (ammo) types that offer different strengths, the bog standard baddie takes a fair few pics to defeat. Early on in the experience, I actually double checked the tutorial details because I had convinced myself that I wasn’t doing the combat correctly, since every single fight took so long! 

Add to that the need to get enemies centred in the frame and in focus to do meaningful damage, and the fact that reloading the camera between photos takes FOR-EV-ER, you’re unable to kill an enemy in one barrage. Instead, you find yourself taking a couple of snaps, running to the opposite corner of the room to get set again, snapping a couple of pics, running away again… and so on. It’s slow, repetitive and devoid of any satisfaction whatsoever. And that’s overlooking the fact that enemies can become ‘aggravated’, which effectively raises their defenses and allows them to recover a bunch of health midway through the fight, elongating the encounter far beyond an enjoyable level. 

Despite impressive new visuals and some genuinely dark plot hooks, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake struggles to make any real atmospheric impact. This is a remake that boasts a fantastic setting, filled with haunting environments and flavourful enemies, but suffers from a lack of tension building and from tedious, unrewarding combat. The mazy J-horror storyline teases a bleak ending that it bravely delivers, but despite this, the overall experience feels like waiting for an out of focus photograph to develop – it’s achingly slow and ultimately, pretty disappointing.

---

Thanks for taking the time to read our review, If you’d like to support us further, please consider buying us a coffee!