Fatal Frame III: The Tormented

"In some ways better than it's predecessors, in other ways worse"

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented is the third (Big shocker there, right?) in the Fatal Frame series where this time, instead of being trapped in a house or a village, you'll find your way into the supernatural through your dreams.

Game Play:
You play primarily as Rei Kurosowa (No relation, apparently to Sae or Yae), a photographer who lost her fiance, Yuu, through her careless driving one rainy night. One day she goes to a local haunted mansion to take pictures (I hadn't the foggiest idea why) and surprise, surprise, see's Yuu. She follows him in a daydream like state and while exploring the mansion looking for him, a woman with a blue tattoo covering her whole body touches Rei on the shoulder. The tattoo then transfers itself onto Rei.

From then on you go back to the Manor of Sleep every night, thus meaning in the day, you're in a real modern house with no ghost's and a wide screen TV. This game, as all of the Fatal Frame's before it, takes place in the 1980's, though it seems they didn't put much effort to make it seem like that decade since everything seems quite modern. Things like how they dress and did they even make wide screen TV's in the 80's? But hey, sure, let's say it's the 80's. Anyways, during the day after you wake up from exploring the mansion you can develop photo's that you took in your sleep and have Miku (yep, same Miku from the first Fatal Frame) research them for you. Miku has practically become Rei's slave since she came to live with her and Yuu (Mafuyu was friend's with Yuu and had apparently asked Yuu to take care of his little sister, Miku if anything ever happened to him) since she cooks and cleans and does everything for Rei. Poor little Miku...

Anyways, as I've mentioned before, at night you return to the Manor of Sleep and there you'll run into ghosts which you battle with a camera. To do this, you go into camera mode and wait for the reticule to turn red (that means they're about to attack you) or for the camera to charge up and take a shot. This game is using the first Fatal Frame's camera style, you know, the wait and wait for it to charge kind. As opposed to the second Fatal Frame's camera, which didn't charge at all and to do any real damage required you to wait for a red reticule. This game uses a sort of hybrid of the spirit's from the last two game's. They're not incredibly slow now, but they don't rush you like a crazy person. Now they just teleport across the room constantly, but they attack a bit slow, so it's not all that difficult once you get the hang of it.

But one thing that really bothered me with this game is the controls. They're incredibly laggy and unresponsive. I can't tell you how many times I ended up taking damage since my character wouldn't raise the camera when I hit the button. Your character doesn't even stop running when you tell them to. The reaction speed on everything is off by just a bit and can make thing's a tad frustrating. I haven't experienced this before in any other Fatal Frame game. I was even wondering if it may be a problem with my controller, but it works just fine on other games. Some character's (as hinted at in the opening of this review, you can play as other character's as you progress) like Kei (another friend of Yuu's who happened to become victim to the mansion by looking for his niece Mio from the previous Fatal Frame, Crimson Butterfly) has practically no laggy controls, but Rei and Miku's are pretty bad. So I don't know what's up with that.

This game also suffers from Crimson Butterfly's terrible camera views. The kind that are never in a good place and change every four ****ing seconds, leaving you disoriented. Except I think in ways, this game got even worse camera angles than Crimson Butterfly since they change so often. And it's never a good change, either. It's a complete 180 degree turn or so every few feet you take, always being in the worst part of the room possible. I don't know about you, but I don't like not being able to tell where I'm going because my character is behind this huge damn rack of kimono's and the camera refuses to co-operate, while it's on the opposite side of the room. Very frustrating since you have to deal with this for the whole game.

Graphics:
A big step up from the original Fatal Frame, and a small difference between this and Crimson Butterfly. There aren't all that many cut scene's in this game, as opposed to it's predecessors, but most of them opt to use the in game graphics engine, which looks pretty good. The one's that don't use the in game engine really aren't a huge difference, but do look significantly better.

The houses look good. Especially Rei's house, which looks really nice and modern (whether this game is set in the 80's or not). The characters themselves look good, Rei sure does dress modern, but who am I to judge? Miku looks as cute as ever, but those of you who played the original Fatal Frame will see she looks quite different since they opted to use the un-Americanized version of her that we didn't see in the first Fatal Frame (however, they did use the regular Miku in the cut scene's of the original). Whereas Kei looks like a metro. Seriously. No way this dude is from the 80's.

Sound:
I would really hate to see the creator's idea of annoying music. What in the hell were they thinking? Imagine just walking around playing, and hearing this screechy, annoying, high pitched background music. I really can't describe how annoying or bad it is, you have to hear it to believe it. They found this creepy apparently, where as I found it to be migraine inducing. I put this game on mute until I reach a cut scene. The only good music is at the end where the song is once again sung by Amano Tsukiko.

The voice acting isn't bad, but what cheap ass recording equipment were they using? All their voices sound echo-y, no matter the location. Rei's voice is annoying, there really isn't anything wrong with it, but it annoyed me personally. Whoever did the acting wasn't bad, though. Miku's voice sounds a lot like Dawn Star's voice from Jade Empire, so I checked it out and it apparently wasn't the same actress that did the voice. Could've fooled me. However, I personally don't feel that voice fit Miku's personality very well. Her voice actress from the first Fatal Frame worked better, despite it being breathy and not the best acted. It just...fit. The five or so times you hear Kei speak through the whole game sound alright. I don't think the voice fit's him, though. The voice acting on the spirit's you'll encounter sound bad. Like the first Fatal Frame bad. The emotion is all wrong or not there at all in some cases.

Should you buy this game?
If you were a fan of the past games in this series, I don't see why you wouldn't enjoy this. It's not so different of a transition like Fatal Frame was to it's sequel Crimson Butterfly, but not so alike to either of the past games. It does end up making for a unique, if not sometimes quite slow moving, experience. As for replay value, you'll find a lot. Between all the different difficulty modes to beat it in to unlock more costumes, ending's and camera functions, as well as a mission mode. This game is easily the longest of the series, since it took me about 11 hours on my first play through. This is my second favorite in the series (the first one being my favorite) since it really did seem to try to take all of the good of the previous games and roll it into one. Storyline wise, I feel the original was best and that made it my favorite over this one by just a mere margin, but for once a Fatal Frame game gives closure at the end. I would recommend this to any survival horror fan.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/13/06