Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Scaring the piss out of yourself has never been so much fun.
Published: November 18, 2005
As I mentioned before, the camera’s ability to combat ghosts is tied directly into the spirit power of the person wielding it. This plays a major factor in the game’s biggest diversion from past titles in that it lets you play as three different characters (though everything pretty much stays central to Rei’s story). Miku, Rei’s assistant (and heroine from the first game) and Kei, uncle to the second game’s Mio, take up the other two chunks of the game.
Miku kicks ass with the camera, while Kei is nearly useless, but beyond their exorcising proficiency, they can both get into areas Rei can’t (crawling into tight spots that are the freakiest in the game and moving heavy objects, respectively). Their involvement in the story also helps round out the storylines of the previous games, closing some holes while still leaving enough dangling for another inevitable sequel.
But while there are subtle tweaks to the outlaying parts of the game, the core is more or less unchanged, requiring that you make repeated trips through areas you’ve been to before as more and more of the house is unlocked. There’s a healthy amount of retracing your steps, but Tecmo was smart enough to at least leave the puzzles fairly logical and straightforward, which makes it easier to concentrate on staying alive between keys and doors.
That’s not to say the game isn’t without parts that will get you hung up. Because it shifts regularly from the nightmare world to the real world (with the latter slowly succumbing to the former in subtle ways as the game goes on), there’s a lot of doing things when awake that unlock more stuff in the sleeping world, usually involving developing pictures or finding facts. The former manages to keep the tension up and leads to some nice scares, but the waking world is meant to be a respite from the constant fear of the House of Sleep, even though that starts to break down.
A massive portion of the creep factor comes from the visuals. The stark contrast between the waking world and the run down, house-that-time-forgot helps, but the game manages a great amount of texture detail too. This, combined with some perfectly placed camera angles, female characters (both good and bad) that are a pleasure to watch thanks to ample detail and great animations, and liberal use of pre-rendered cutscenes, the game just looks solid.
The audio is a little sketchier. The voices can sound oddly echoy and muted, and the performances themselves are a little bland. They aren’t bad, per se, and there are just as many ghosts that utter completely blood curdling lines as they reach for you, but they feel almost forcibly scaled back from the rest of the game. The sound effects, moody music and aural cues, though are so good that I’m getting goosebumps right just thinking about parts of the game where they all fill in line perfectly.
This is the first time in a while that I’ve finished a review in under 1000 words, but there just isn’t all that much that needs to be said about FFIII. It will absolutely scare the ever living crap out of you, and it does is consistently, intelligently and never resorts to cheap in-your-face scares. In fact, the sense of dread and foreboding that the game does instill is almost always done with a minimum of attention to the ghosts, and instead lets your eyes seek out the scares and your brain make them far worse before you ever see the real thing.
Personally, I could care less that the game hasn’t evolved too much. Getting into the third game, it’s starting to feel a bit too familiar, but at least through this little trilogy, what’s here is certainly good enough to get things by. If you’re a fan of getting genuinely creeped out, this is an absolute must-have.
