Remakes simply shouldn’t be 1:1 faithful to their original unless the original’s production values were so lacking that merely having better graphics is enough to make the game more palatable. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE could have focused solely on improving the original’s presentation and controls, but it goes farther, adding extra content and new mechanics. Unfortunately, these new mechanics only make the game worse, as they’re almost as frustrating as they are needless, tarnishing a game that could have easily superseded its predecessors while still not outright ruining what made the original so good.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE is actually the second remake of Fatal Frame II, which was first remade for the Wii in the late 00s (although this wasn’t released in North America). The game tells the story of two twins, Mio and Mayu, as they’re called to a haunted village that they both decide to willingly check out. The game doesn’t make it super clear as to why they decide to do this, nor do the twins have anything in the way of personalities, but this is typical for Fatal Frame. Still, the backstory and lore drops are as good as ever and learning about the village and its damned ritual is both creepy and fascinating.
Despite being a remake, the camera combat has been retooled with the intention of making it more tense and challenging. Early entries in the series could be frustrating and many of those issues remain here, despite being less bothersome in the fourth and fifth games. Namely, it’s easy to miss a shot even if you took it when all the icons were onscreen because the ghost moved after you pressed the button, which is an annoyance that dates back to the very first game. But Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE is eager to pile more on.
One of the more notable of these additions is a willpower meter. It functions as stamina, which depletes when you dodge or run while in combat. It’s also what governs your special abilities, such as pushing ghosts back or slowing them down for a time. If you run out of willpower, you can still run and dodge, but you can’t use special abilities unless it refills. However, if an enemy attack lands while it’s empty, Mio gets knocked down, which is when ghosts use the series’ famous grab attack. Only, here, you have to take a picture of the ghost’s face to get them to let go.
It’s a neat idea on paper, but it makes things incredibly frustrating. It can be a crapshoot to actually be able to take a picture of a ghost’s face in this scenario since, just like in regular combat, the ghosts move around a ton. It’s easy to die solely because of this, but Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE really wants to force you into these scenarios. They’re artificially induced in this way by having ghosts be able to completely deplete your willpower with a single attack that they can use in one of two ways.
More annoying is that oftentimes ghosts will jumpscare you when you open a door, meaning that you’ll often be in fights with zero willpower. You can technically dodge out of the door opening animation to stop this from happening, but the window is incredibly narrow and you absolutely need to know that the ghost is there in order to even have a chance at this. It’s an incredibly cheap, obnoxious thing that annoyed the everloving hell out of me. Ghosts also have a regular attack that can completely drain your stamina as well. These simply feel like an arbitrary, lazy way of making ghosts more dangerous and it greatly damaged the combat for me.
Willpower doesn’t regenerate by itself during combat either. You’ll get a bit back for landing shots on ghosts, but you need to equip certain charms to actually get much this way. So much of the willpower mechanic directly makes the game more tedious to play that I really wish it hadn’t been included at all. On top of how most types of film (which you’ll find all over the place and use as ammo) are excruciatingly slow to reload, Crimson Butterfly REMAKE has some of the most irritating combat in the franchise. Slow reloads are another way of increasing tension, sure, but considering how weak your shots can be without upgrades and how incredibly fast enemies often are, it all just adds up to a mountain of annoyances.
That’s not all Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE does to make combat frustrating, though. Another new feature is that ghosts can become aggravated, at which point they turn red and regenerate health. It also makes them considerably more dangerous and increases their defense. You can knock them out of it by repeatedly taking pictures of them, but oftentimes a ghost becoming aggravated simply means you’re going to die. This goes double when you’re fighting multiple ghosts and one or more get aggravated. This is supposed to happen when ghosts are low on health, but I often had it happen at the start of fights. This was a horrible decision that makes the game much more of a chore to play.
The general gist of the actual game structure is that you have free rein of the village, although many locations will be locked off until you progress the story. This either means finding a key or using one of the game’s filters to open the way forward, such as removing blood with one filter via a charge move (that’s also very useful for combat) or taking special pictures of hidden objects in the environment. The filters do seem somewhat perfunctory, though, even if they can be useful in combat. But they use up so much willpower that you’ll typically only be able to use them once or twice per fight anyway.
Enemies can also be a pain in the ass regardless of willpower or if they become aggravated. They teleport around wildly and can be stupidly hard to hit because of it. Even using a mouse, I often found myself needing to use the target lock, as I often felt like I was taking pictures of dead Dragon Ball characters due to the speed at which they move. This is compounded in small rooms where there’s not much room to maneuver, especially against multiple foes. This series is way, way too old to still be having these problems, and adding intentionally limiting mechanics instead of fixing outstanding issues was a baffling choice.
If you can believe it, there’s one more horrible feature that makes things worse. At certain points, you’ll come across an enemy that you can’t fight. If the enemy catches you, you die instantly. They’re not organic stealth sections with interesting, challenging AI, either. Instead, the screen turns black and white and you need to run into very specific hiding spots and wait for the ghosts to pass by. When this happens, it becomes incredibly hard to see, so you’ll be stumbling nearly blindly in the dark trying to find these obvious, conspicuous hiding places that don’t even make sense in the game’s world. It’s almost like the dev made a list of unnecessary additions solely to make the game worse.
You’ll often be guided forward by a butterfly and there’s always an objective that the game clearly highlights, so thisremake feels much more handholdy than it used to. Granted, the game’s progression is mostly pretty satisfying, save for when it just blatantly wastes your time. One section sees Mayu getting locked in a room, so Mio needs to hunt down the key. It requires you to basically backtrack to an earlier area just to reach a small new location inside of it, grab the key, and then walk all the way back to where you were. When you get back, Mayu isn’t even in the room.
While this sort of game design might have flown back in the early 00s, it’s insipid here. The game isn’t shy about making you do things like this either. The game world isn’t large, so this is all in place to make it take longer, boredom be damned. The worst version of this is the game’s new side stories. These task you with going back to an area you’ve already explored to find the one thing in the entire place that you’re meant to take a picture of. This is a giant pain in larger areas, as you need to comb them to find these. This game doesn’t have the feature other games included that tells you when something’s nearby on-screen at all times, so you’ll need to bring your camera up.
These side stories do reward you with context via notes written by characters, which is nice, plus they give you new charms. But the game throws way more charms at you than you could feasibly make use of, which can make the reward for doing these feel poor. Plus searching places you’ve already scoured is simply boring. A couple of side stories task you with going back to one specific building, but this one respawns ghosts at a ridiculous rate, meaning that going in to try and track down the side stories means that you can massively cut into your ammo reserves. Since you can only buy more ammo once you beat the game, this means that it can be better to wait instead of exploring organically.
You’ll find prayer beads all over the world in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE, which can upgrade your camera and its filters. The game gives you so many that I honestly had no use for them 75% of the way through, since I mostly stuck with the strongest filter. The others just don’t feel useful at all. The upgrades that let you carry more ammo are nice, plus the one that adds more nodes to your camera is one of the best upgrades in the game, as it lets you do more damage and hit enemies that aren’t in the center of your viewfinder.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE will likely take at least 15 hours depending on how much extra exploring and sidequesting you do, so there’s a good amount of value here. Plus, there are multiple endings (and the game still mostly refuses to convey the unlock criteria for these). You unlock a New Game+ option, as well as a chapter select that allows you to keep most things that aren’t purely plot-related, but most players will have their fill of the world by this time, especially since they’ve repeatedly pored over the areas looking for the one thing they’re supposed to interact with.
The PC version of the game is mostly quite good and, visually, this is hands-down the best the series has ever looked. The game seems to run decently, but the framerate is stated to be locked at 60 fps. Weirdly, without capping the game at 60 with an outside program, it appears to run uncapped, which made my GPU sound like it was trying to take off. But attempting to cap the game at a framerate above 60 leaves it unlocked. I had my fps using the Steam fps counter often go up into the 300s too. This is very strange and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. At least the mouse controls are pretty terrific for once.
I have a lot of problems with Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE, but I still enjoyed certain aspects of it since it’s still a Fatal Frame game through and through. However, its reliance on cheap, arbitrary nonsense in regard to combat and its blatant padding and repetition were more irksome than I would have liked. In an attempt to make the game more “challenging” and add more content, the experience has just been left more frustrating than the original was, regardless of how much better controlling the camera feels.
Remakes simply shouldn’t be 1:1 faithful to their original unless the original’s production values were so lacking that merely having better graphics is enough to make the game more palatable. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE could have focused solely on improving the original’s presentation and controls, but it goes farther, adding extra content and new mechanics. Unfortunately, these new mechanics only make the game worse, as they’re almost as frustrating as they are needless, tarnishing a game that could have easily superseded its predecessors while still not outright ruining what made the original so good.
Remakes simply shouldn’t be 1:1 faithful to their original unless the original’s production values were so lacking that merely having better graphics is enough to make the game more palatable. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE could have focused solely on improving the original’s presentation and controls, but it goes farther, adding extra content and new mechanics. Unfortunately, these new mechanics only make the game worse, as they’re almost as frustrating as they are needless, tarnishing a game that could have easily superseded its predecessors while still not outright ruining what made the original so good.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE is actually the second remake of Fatal Frame II, which was first remade for the Wii in the late 00s (although this wasn’t released in North America). The game tells the story of two twins, Mio and Mayu, as they’re called to a haunted village that they both decide to willingly check out. The game doesn’t make it super clear as to why they decide to do this, nor do the twins have anything in the way of personalities, but this is typical for Fatal Frame. Still, the backstory and lore drops are as good as ever and learning about the village and its damned ritual is both creepy and fascinating.
Despite being a remake, the camera combat has been retooled with the intention of making it more tense and challenging. Early entries in the series could be frustrating and many of those issues remain here, despite being less bothersome in the fourth and fifth games. Namely, it’s easy to miss a shot even if you took it when all the icons were onscreen because the ghost moved after you pressed the button, which is an annoyance that dates back to the very first game. But Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE is eager to pile more on.
One of the more notable of these additions is a willpower meter. It functions as stamina, which depletes when you dodge or run while in combat. It’s also what governs your special abilities, such as pushing ghosts back or slowing them down for a time. If you run out of willpower, you can still run and dodge, but you can’t use special abilities unless it refills. However, if an enemy attack lands while it’s empty, Mio gets knocked down, which is when ghosts use the series’ famous grab attack. Only, here, you have to take a picture of the ghost’s face to get them to let go.
It’s a neat idea on paper, but it makes things incredibly frustrating. It can be a crapshoot to actually be able to take a picture of a ghost’s face in this scenario since, just like in regular combat, the ghosts move around a ton. It’s easy to die solely because of this, but Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE really wants to force you into these scenarios. They’re artificially induced in this way by having ghosts be able to completely deplete your willpower with a single attack that they can use in one of two ways.
More annoying is that oftentimes ghosts will jumpscare you when you open a door, meaning that you’ll often be in fights with zero willpower. You can technically dodge out of the door opening animation to stop this from happening, but the window is incredibly narrow and you absolutely need to know that the ghost is there in order to even have a chance at this. It’s an incredibly cheap, obnoxious thing that annoyed the everloving hell out of me. Ghosts also have a regular attack that can completely drain your stamina as well. These simply feel like an arbitrary, lazy way of making ghosts more dangerous and it greatly damaged the combat for me.
Willpower doesn’t regenerate by itself during combat either. You’ll get a bit back for landing shots on ghosts, but you need to equip certain charms to actually get much this way. So much of the willpower mechanic directly makes the game more tedious to play that I really wish it hadn’t been included at all. On top of how most types of film (which you’ll find all over the place and use as ammo) are excruciatingly slow to reload, Crimson Butterfly REMAKE has some of the most irritating combat in the franchise. Slow reloads are another way of increasing tension, sure, but considering how weak your shots can be without upgrades and how incredibly fast enemies often are, it all just adds up to a mountain of annoyances.
That’s not all Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE does to make combat frustrating, though. Another new feature is that ghosts can become aggravated, at which point they turn red and regenerate health. It also makes them considerably more dangerous and increases their defense. You can knock them out of it by repeatedly taking pictures of them, but oftentimes a ghost becoming aggravated simply means you’re going to die. This goes double when you’re fighting multiple ghosts and one or more get aggravated. This is supposed to happen when ghosts are low on health, but I often had it happen at the start of fights. This was a horrible decision that makes the game much more of a chore to play.
The general gist of the actual game structure is that you have free rein of the village, although many locations will be locked off until you progress the story. This either means finding a key or using one of the game’s filters to open the way forward, such as removing blood with one filter via a charge move (that’s also very useful for combat) or taking special pictures of hidden objects in the environment. The filters do seem somewhat perfunctory, though, even if they can be useful in combat. But they use up so much willpower that you’ll typically only be able to use them once or twice per fight anyway.
Enemies can also be a pain in the ass regardless of willpower or if they become aggravated. They teleport around wildly and can be stupidly hard to hit because of it. Even using a mouse, I often found myself needing to use the target lock, as I often felt like I was taking pictures of dead Dragon Ball characters due to the speed at which they move. This is compounded in small rooms where there’s not much room to maneuver, especially against multiple foes. This series is way, way too old to still be having these problems, and adding intentionally limiting mechanics instead of fixing outstanding issues was a baffling choice.
If you can believe it, there’s one more horrible feature that makes things worse. At certain points, you’ll come across an enemy that you can’t fight. If the enemy catches you, you die instantly. They’re not organic stealth sections with interesting, challenging AI, either. Instead, the screen turns black and white and you need to run into very specific hiding spots and wait for the ghosts to pass by. When this happens, it becomes incredibly hard to see, so you’ll be stumbling nearly blindly in the dark trying to find these obvious, conspicuous hiding places that don’t even make sense in the game’s world. It’s almost like the dev made a list of unnecessary additions solely to make the game worse.
You’ll often be guided forward by a butterfly and there’s always an objective that the game clearly highlights, so thisremake feels much more handholdy than it used to. Granted, the game’s progression is mostly pretty satisfying, save for when it just blatantly wastes your time. One section sees Mayu getting locked in a room, so Mio needs to hunt down the key. It requires you to basically backtrack to an earlier area just to reach a small new location inside of it, grab the key, and then walk all the way back to where you were. When you get back, Mayu isn’t even in the room.
While this sort of game design might have flown back in the early 00s, it’s insipid here. The game isn’t shy about making you do things like this either. The game world isn’t large, so this is all in place to make it take longer, boredom be damned. The worst version of this is the game’s new side stories. These task you with going back to an area you’ve already explored to find the one thing in the entire place that you’re meant to take a picture of. This is a giant pain in larger areas, as you need to comb them to find these. This game doesn’t have the feature other games included that tells you when something’s nearby on-screen at all times, so you’ll need to bring your camera up.
These side stories do reward you with context via notes written by characters, which is nice, plus they give you new charms. But the game throws way more charms at you than you could feasibly make use of, which can make the reward for doing these feel poor. Plus searching places you’ve already scoured is simply boring. A couple of side stories task you with going back to one specific building, but this one respawns ghosts at a ridiculous rate, meaning that going in to try and track down the side stories means that you can massively cut into your ammo reserves. Since you can only buy more ammo once you beat the game, this means that it can be better to wait instead of exploring organically.
You’ll find prayer beads all over the world in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE, which can upgrade your camera and its filters. The game gives you so many that I honestly had no use for them 75% of the way through, since I mostly stuck with the strongest filter. The others just don’t feel useful at all. The upgrades that let you carry more ammo are nice, plus the one that adds more nodes to your camera is one of the best upgrades in the game, as it lets you do more damage and hit enemies that aren’t in the center of your viewfinder.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE will likely take at least 15 hours depending on how much extra exploring and sidequesting you do, so there’s a good amount of value here. Plus, there are multiple endings (and the game still mostly refuses to convey the unlock criteria for these). You unlock a New Game+ option, as well as a chapter select that allows you to keep most things that aren’t purely plot-related, but most players will have their fill of the world by this time, especially since they’ve repeatedly pored over the areas looking for the one thing they’re supposed to interact with.
The PC version of the game is mostly quite good and, visually, this is hands-down the best the series has ever looked. The game seems to run decently, but the framerate is stated to be locked at 60 fps. Weirdly, without capping the game at 60 with an outside program, it appears to run uncapped, which made my GPU sound like it was trying to take off. But attempting to cap the game at a framerate above 60 leaves it unlocked. I had my fps using the Steam fps counter often go up into the 300s too. This is very strange and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. At least the mouse controls are pretty terrific for once.
I have a lot of problems with Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly REMAKE, but I still enjoyed certain aspects of it since it’s still a Fatal Frame game through and through. However, its reliance on cheap, arbitrary nonsense in regard to combat and its blatant padding and repetition were more irksome than I would have liked. In an attempt to make the game more “challenging” and add more content, the experience has just been left more frustrating than the original was, regardless of how much better controlling the camera feels.
by Andrew Farrell
