It's really hard for me to say anything positive about Fatal Frame 2 Remake. What did it really do aside from bringing it to modern consoles with mechanics that go completely against the design philosophy this franchise has always had about facing the horror up close and personal?
Release day was a mess due to ghosts being severely overtuned and the camera barely tickling them even on the easiest difficulty. Koei Tecmo being able to release a seemingly hefty balance patch the next day points to them being aware of just how imbalanced combat was. However, on the other hand, the unforgiving balance at release is really in line with something that was said in an interview, about a "Team Ninja nightmare difficulty". So did they accidentally release a dev only build, did testers have no issue with the difficulty, were they actively working on balance due to complaints from people who were given keys a month ago and just forgot to make the post-nerf version the release one, or something else entirely? It just feels so odd.
Even with the balance patch, combat still felt like absolute ass. The mechanics are so different from previous installments that it didn't really feel like Fatal Frame to me. Chains are locked behind Shutter Chance which is locked behind a HP threshold which made combat feel clunky, especially when combined with the new focal points and focus system. Ghosts can become aggravated which greatly restores their health, adds damage reduction, they teleport more frequently, and their speed is increased. The only way to knock them out of aggravation was to reach their HP threshold, but a few ghosts I fought just didn't generate a new one since they were already almost dead when aggravation triggered. It genuinely felt like a glitch which the game has a weird amount of.
I wish I were exaggerating when I say I encountered a lot of glitches, but I'm not. Most of them were with Mayu. She'd spin in place, refuse to hide during the new stealth sections, and sometimes just disappear after hiding. I also can't tell if some things were glitches or just poorly implemented. While running, vanishing ghosts often spawned weirdly. I had them spawn either right on top of Mio or after I had already passed the spawn point. The times I had already passed the location, the filament wasn't exactly helpful as I had no sense of where a vanishing ghost was more often than not. This made vanishing ghosts really obnoxious to catch. The exposure filter was also really weird with hidden ghosts. There were a few where I could not get the circle to pop up no matter how I positioned.
Fatal Frame 2 Remake was advertised to have new side stories with additional lore. Apparently there's about 15 of them and I only encountered 5 or 6 on a fresh save. The side stories I did get didn't really introduce anything new, it's primarily just lore we've had since the ps2. The only ones with something new were Makabe's and maybe the children's as I can't recall if the kids playing had notes on either ps2 or wii. Even then, it was only a little extra. From the advertising, I believed the side stories would be entirely new content, not just a repackage of notes we always had.
The pacing of the side stories was overall okay, but there's a couple that stick out like a sore thumb. I tried to do Ryozo's earlier, when the old tree is first available, but couldn't. The children's I assume final part didn't unlock until the last chapter. With the newly added mood lighting combined with the intense, foreboding music that just screams, "this is it", having to go out of the way to do side content really broke the tension and ruined immersion. I honestly didn't even go to finish the children's story since all but 2 "stories" have ended in a fight. By this point, I was low on film with no way to restock and type-7 wasn't doing much for me even post-patch so I chose to save what I had for the last two battles since the combat never really clicked for me and I wasn't about to potentially go against 3 ghosts at once.
The new areas feel like wasted space. The Eikado Temple? It's just there for a side story. The island by the entrance to the Kurosawa House? Nothing is there. The field and additional town next to the storehouse? The added alleyway to the cemetery? They're actually utilized for the story weirdly enough. I think it would have been nice if at least Eikado Temple and the town had been utilized for additional story sections. They honestly could have redesigned the Kurosawa House to not have all the plot important stuff and moved it to the Eikado Temple and I wouldn't have even been mad. If the writing was good, I think a change like this would have made sense. As for the town, I would have loved if it was a little bigger and the twins explored it to see if they could find a way out. This would have added to the tension and the realization they're well and truly trapped.
The only thing I can actually definitively say I liked was the actual new scraps of lore they tossed in. They added a couple of notes to tie the world of 2 to the Fatal Frame universe. For example, one of the notes paired with a filter outright mentions shadow reading from 5. It really reads like if they make more games they want to ensure the lore is consistent to the best of their ability.
Overall, it just kinda feels like they remade Fatal Frame 2 for no real reason? With how little was actually added and just how bad some of the decisions were, I think a remaster of the Wii remake would have been perfectly fine.
