After finishing Fatal Frame 2 : Crimson Butterfly : Director’s Cut at the Normal difficulty, I had two endings unlocked in the game’s gallery mode, with two endings still locked.

Since the normal mode ending is a little depressing – gosh, it’s a Japanese horror game, who would have thought? – I decided to do something that I have never done before with a game.

Play through it, again, on Hard.

I didn’t quite know what to expect – other than, well, it was going to be harder, I assumed.

This turned out to be the case, but not quite in the way I expected.

See, as you go through the game, you have one weapon available to you to use against the undead: A special camera.  As you fight ghosts, you are scored based on the quality of the pictures you take, and you can use the points that you get from this to purchase upgrades for the camera.

In hard mode, not only are the ghosts you fight tougher than the ghosts in normal mode, but there are fewer of them.

I didn’t expect that part.  I expected rampaging hordes of the undead.

After I thought about it, I realized that it makes perfect sense and is a much better way of balancing the difficulty than just throwing more ghosts at the player.  If they had taken the “hard = more fights” approach, it would have been a more action-oriented game, which just wouldn’t have made sense.

It also helped to maintain a little bit of tension – having seen all the gotchas the first time around, they didn’t make me jump as high on the second pass, but walking through rooms thinking to myself “OK, I got jumped here before… am I going to get attacked again this time?” kept the tension level up.

End result was: Playing the game again, on hard, was actually pretty fun.  It was also considerably faster – I played through the first time without using spoilers, so I spent a lot of time backtracking trying to find the next thing I was supposed to do.

Then I finished it, and found that you get the same ending as playing on normal mode, and that’s when I admitted defeat and ran to youtube to see the #3 and #4 endings.  There ARE two modes above “Hard” – “Nightmare” and “Fatal” – and I am just not man enough to try them.