Baud Attitude

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.

OK, I have to cut Tecmo a little bit of slack now about that fight in Fatal Frame II.

More spoilers for the game follow.  You are warned.

After a few attempts on my own, I went looking for FAQs, and found about half-a-dozen, mostly for the PS2 version.

Every one of them commented on the fact that the last boss – the last boss on “normal” difficulty, anyway – could kill you in one hit and so on and so forth, but each and every one of them seemed to think that the fight was kind of a throwaway, that just getting to the boss was much harder than the boss itself.

Now, I pride myself on one thing: I don’t go to a FAQ for minor setbacks.

I may take games and set them to “easy”, but at least I try things for myself several times before giving up.

This means that, by the time I have to go to a FAQ about something in a game, I’ve usually gotten to the “nasty difficult bit” that EVERYONE has trouble with.

See also: “Meat Circus”.

This fight didn’t match my typical pattern.  It was, apparently, EASY.

I was very confused

Then I saw something that was almost an offhand comment in one of the six FAQs:

“shoot the boss in the head”

This made the lights come on.

See, I have the habit, and I’m not sure where I picked it up, but in FPS games, I aim for center-of-mass.

So, I went back for another go, and forced myself to aim just a little higher than I normally would, and, uh, won on my next try.  It wasn’t even a fight.

So, yeah, it’s easy.  That is, it’s easy once you know that, no matter how good your timing is,  the boss can’t be killed by shooting it in the chest.

I’m tempted to give the game another go and see if the same tactic makes a difference with other ghosts; it’s possible that I made the game a lot harder than it actually needed to be.

Follow-up to the above follow-up: I’m going to at least give Fatal Frame II a chance in hard mode, especially since, upon beating it for the first time, I unlocked these for the girls:

Pardon the poor quality screen shot.

Fatal Frame II : Now Even More Relevant to My Interests.

I’ve tried to speak in general terms here, but the following is a wee bit of a spoiler for the final fight in Fatal Frame II, so you might not want to read on if you’re like me and still have games from 2004 you haven’t played through and are trying for the first time.

OK, if you’re still with me.

Dear Tecmo Developers:

When designing a game where the main character picks up, over the course of the game, lots and lots of healing items and occasional items that will miraculously step in and revive the character in the event of their untimely death:

Do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy whose touch is a one-hit kill, which kills you even if you DO have one of the rare items whose sole purpose is to restore you to the land of the living.

Furthermore, after designing a game in which combat is deliberately slow paced and consists of dodging attacks while waiting for the correct opening, do not wait until the last boss to introduce an enemy who regenerates unless constantly attacked, especially not when the only way the player can attack is by provoking the boss into attacking and then trying to riposte incoming, invariably fatal, attacks.

Lastly, if you’re going to do both of those, don’t put the last save point so far away from the last boss fight that every death and retry involves 3.5 minutes, at a dead run, of navigating a rather nondescript corridor so you can get back for another attempt.

To be fair, thank you for two small concessions to sanity you have made:
1) Thank you for letting me fight everything up until just before the last boss fight, then go back and save.  Not having to go through a bunch of small fights every time is very appreciated.

2) Thank you also for making the penultimate cutscene skippable.  That in itself is probably the only thing keeping me banging my head against this particular wall instead of just going to Youtube for the ending and calling it good.