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Once you beat the game, you’ll unlock a harder difficulty, plus curious bonus missions where you play as Ayane from Dead or Alive. This isn’t a constant occurrence, but it’s common enough to annoy.
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In the last chapter, two of the characters have to walk through the exact same section back-to-back. On more than one occasion, you’ll go through an entire area as one character in one chapter and then retrace your steps almost exactly in another. But Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is often a little too fond of making you go back through the same areas.
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Areas are dark and eerie while packing a lot of atmosphere. The final boss has a super cheap grab that I couldn’t even figure out how to escape, which is annoying because you have to basically beat them four times to get the game’s good ending. Sometimes you’ll dodge an attack, but enemies will still grab you anyway. There are cheap moments, especially when fighting two or three enemies in extremely tight spaces. Picking up items carries a risk that a ghost hand will grab you, giving you almost no time to react. It also doesn’t help that characters take forever to pick up items or open doors. Truthfully, the game would be better in the first person. Movement is stiff and awkward, and the way the camera sticks to your character’s back while running feels bad to me. That isn’t to say there isn’t anything cumbersome about the gameplay, however. Plus, you’ll find more items in the field. The game autosaves and you always start a chapter with more healing items than you could feasibly use. It would have been great to control the camera with mouse movement, but it wasn’t included for whatever reason, which is a shame.įor the most part, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is easy. Console versions do get some motion controls, though. All the functionality has been mapped to buttons and it works just fine here. In the Wii U version, you had to use the gamepad to control the rotating camera, so there was a lot to it. Each chapter starts you with a default item set, so the things you collect don’t accrue as you play. Maiden of Black Water has five types of film to collect and buy for the two cameras available in the game, with the weakest being infinite use. Yuri and Miu (and Miku too, but you can’t play as her) have a special ability called “shadow reading” that allows them to see a person’s memories and feelings by touching them, which also comes into play. This is centered on cameras called camera obscura, which can see things that the naked eye misses. The game is primarily about fighting ghosts by taking pictures of them, which is going to be quite strange if you’re not familiar with previous entries. The game took me 15 hours to play through in total. Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has 14 main chapters, with a prologue and interlude.
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