Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly is a new journey into fear, with the terrifying themes and feel that made the first fatal Frame such a hit! When Mio and her sister Mayu return to their old hometown, they follow a strangely glowing crimson butterfly deep into the forest. There, they discover an abandoned village that hides an ancient, horrifying secret.

Brand new setting with more wide-open exploration -- more possibilities for fear and terror

All-new storyline and different game mechanics as you try and capture the ghosts who stalk the forests

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Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly starts off simply. Two young twin girls, Mio and Mayu, are talking to each other in the sun. We see flashbacks of a horrible accident that Mio has about the past. Supposedly her sister, Mayu, was chasing after her and fell down a hill, injuring her knee. Mio starts to apologize to Mayu, when all of a sudden she notices Mayu is nowhere in sight. She looks for her and sees she's wandering off into the woods. Mio calls after her, but she doesn't stop, or answer. Mayu keeps walking, and suddenly it's pitchblack. Mio finally catches up to Mayu and they come to a small village. A village that they can't leave. Ever.

Muahahaha!!!

Just joking. Seriously though, this game is super creepy. I can't play it by myself, I find my heart racing and don't want to open another door. Who knows, maybe I'm lame, but ghosts creep me out.

If you're not familiar with the gameplay, your weapon is a "Camera Obscura," which shows things that normally can't be seen with the human eye. This means ghosts and any other kind of unnatural apparition. You then take pictures of these ghosts and it acts as an "exorciser." The storyline is great and full of surprises. The graphics are beautiful and the lighting is amazing. Definitely pick up this game if you love horror movies or survival horror games.

31 of 34 found the following review helpful:

Actually physically terrifying!!!Jun 14, 2004
By Review Lover "ReviewLover"
WOW.

That is all.

WOW.

No, seriously, folks, nothing at all could have prepared me for the beauty and artistry and downright good old-fashioned terror that I experienced while playing 'Fatal Frame 2'. It's a magnificent, magnificent game and really deserving of prize place on your games top shelf.

Let's get this straight before we discuss anything else. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does Horror like the Japanese. Ringu. Dark Water. Silent Hill. All Night Long. Forbidden Siren. Sweet Home. The list goes on and on until you're left in your own sitting room, jumping at shadows, shuddering as the hairs move on the back of your neck, and stifling screams at the sound of those tiny finger-cymbals clashing. Theirs is a real mastery of the Genre, and the Americans and Europeans can only pray that some day, our own efforts measure up to scratch - compare "The Blair Witch project" to "Ringu", or the "Alone in the Dark" series of games to "Silent Hill", and I promise you, we'll all be found wanting.

Anyway, getting back to the review at hand. You play the part of Mio, a para-psychic girl who, along with her deeply psychic sister Mayu, get lost and trapped in All God's Village, a deserted town in the middle of a forest, some days before the sinister 'Crimson Butterfly Ritual' is to take place. Mayu, intermittently under the control of the spirits that haunt All God's, disappears, and Mio must find her and stop the mysterious 'Sacrifice' before it's too late.

Firstly, what's new?

Well, as with any competent sequel, there is an overall feel of things being 'tighter' - presentation, graphics, and in-game explanations of things are all much more accessible and beautiful now than they were before - and the game feels a lot more professionally done than the still-excellent original.

Sound is a huge improvement - not even in the Silent Hill series has sound been employed to make such a huge difference in the tension and atmosphere - and the manual is most definitely to be believed when it tells you 'This game is best played through headphones'. Try it in a dark room. Trust me :-)

The controls are excellent, the Camera Obscura (your weapon) is now far less complicated to use and a lot more satisfying to have as your primary weapon. The inclusion of the 'Spirit Radio' may seem a little overdone, but it's a nice touch nevertheless.

What really marks 'Fatal Frame 2' out as a Standard-Bearing game is the sense of real, palpable terror it inspires. The ghosts are horrific in their simplicity and all feels very much like classic Japanese horrors like 'Ringu' and 'Dark Water'. The innocence of the girls and some of the spirits' human personalities is drawn in stark contrast to the violent and shocking methods by which they attack. The game is also full of wonderful aural and visual vignettes, adding more atmosphere than I can say.

An excellent title, current King of Survival Horror (and I've got through 'The Suffering' and 'Siren' in the last two months) and a definite must-have, I can't rave about this game enough.

Get it now.

Wow!

22 of 23 found the following review helpful:

Great game, Great storyNov 26, 2004
By Justin Lee
When I first played the game, I didn't think it was that scary (compared to the first), so I put it away for a while. More recently, after finishing SILENT HILL 4 and got a kick for scary games, I picked up this game again and was determined to finish it.

Many will disagree with me when I say that it's scarier than SILENT HILL. I guess I've always been more spooked by ghosts (you know, things I can imagine running into) instead of abstract cone-headed creatures (although the monsters in SH4 were a lot less abstract, but I digress).

I don't think FATAL FRAME 2 has anything to do with the earlier game as far as plot goes. The only connection is the Camera Obscura. Mio and Mayu are twins that are caught up in an ancient ritual of twin sacrifice that had previously wiped out the village. As you play the game, Mayu (you control Mio) gets possessed by a former spirit (Sae) who tries to lead her towards the upcoming ritual that must be made to restore the village. The story unfolds to explain what really happened to the village.

The plot was great. The only downside is that it uses the same cliche of "demonic ritual", which is so common in games these days (e.g. SIREN, SILENT HILL, FATAL FRAME, etc.) But the game tells a story that actually makes a lot more sense to me than many of the SILENT HILL or SIREN games.

The graphics are good, too. Like with the first one, it gets spookier as you advance. Unexpected things start to happen, and there were moments that sent chills down my back and I had to turn the game off (I was playing alone, in the dark, at night).

I would highly recommend this game. It's really entertaining and really scary.

9 of 9 found the following review helpful:

Deadly GoodJan 20, 2004
By Matthew Warner
Mio and Mayu are twin sisters visiting an old childhood hideaway in Japan. Soon to be lost underwater with the building of a dam, they've come to take a last walk around the quiet forest trail where they played as children. It's also the location of the accident that left Mayu with both a physical and emotional scar; chasing her sister, Mayu tumbled off the path and severely injured her leg, giving her a permanent limp, and a phobia of being abandoned by her twin.

As Mio sits reflecting on her past, and wondering about that day, Mayu wanders off, following an oddly colored butterfly into the forest. When Mio realizes her sister is no longer with her, she runs to catch up, passing an odd stone marker as she heads deeper into the forest.

Without warning, the afternoon sky suddenly turns to night and an odd light shows in the distance. Finally catching up to her sister, Mio looks down the path towards a small, seemingly abandoned village...

So starts Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. The most recent entry into the Survival Horror genre, this game is designed from the ground up to scare the player silly, like any good ghost story, and it largely succeeds. To clarify something right up front, however, this game is just that: A GHOST story. This instantly sets it apart from both the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series of games, to which Fatal Frame is most commonly compared.

As a veteran of both Silent Hill and Resident Evil, in addition to Fatal Frame, I'm pleasantly surprised that not only do the three series each have a different approach on how to scare the player, but all three work very well in their own way. Fatal Frame is sort of the middle child of the three; it's not as shock-horror as Resident Evil, but isn't nearly as disturbing (imagery wise) as Silent Hill. I mean, which is more disturbing?: The ghost of a broken-necked woman grinning at you, or a bizarre cross between a lamprey, a skinned corpse, and a twitching pile of psychosis grinding the face off a dead security guard?

Basically, this translates directly into how scary the game actually is. If you're fairly new to the genre (or easily scared) then Fatal Frame will probably do it for you. If you're like me and have been to Silent Hill and back, it's more of a coin toss; is it the events leading up to an enemy attack, or the attack itself that scares you more? While the atmosphere in Fatal Frame is exceedingly well done and very cohesive, it lacks the threat level present in Silent Hill, or even Resident Evil. Video game vets will pretty quickly adjust to the game's combat engine of picture-taking (which, in practice, isn't nearly as stupid as it sounds and makes more sense as a means of fighting ghosts than, say, shooting them). While the ghosts in the game are certainly creepy, most of them don't attack the player, and the game lets you know which do and which don't right off the bat. This doesn't make it any less creepy when a dead 7-year old girl pops out of a wall next to you and laughs, but the fact that she can't actually do any damage to the player negates some of the fear factor, at least for me. Were this Silent Hill or Resident Evil, you can bet that dead kid would be trying to take your head off before you knew what hit you, and it's that fact alone that adds to much of the tension to a game (again, at least for me). The build-up to an enemy is that much more effective when you know that the payoff could be fatal.

Still, this was a stylistic choice for the game, and while it's potentially not as frightening in the long run, it does make for an excellent storytelling device, which brings me to the game's strongest point: The story is top-notch, which is unusual for the cliché-ridden Survival Horror dealie. In Fatal Frame, there's no hunting for the Spade Key to unlock a door in a Police Station. You won't find any crests to open hidden doors, and you won't be killing demons with a handgun. For once, the puzzles present actually make a good amount of sense and blend seamlessly into the story, which is such an amazing feat in it's own right that it can sell the game right there. Survival Horror done coherently!

On top of that, you won't be fending off the same five enemies over and over. The ghosts in the game have their own stories attached, and they overlap as the game unfolds. If the promise of scares isn't enough to propel you forward, the compelling narrative is. What starts out as seemingly random ghost encounters quickly forms into several narratives the player can uncover, and they're all interesting enough to be rewarding.

Tie all this together with absolutely breathtaking graphics, a superb translation and voice cast, and a particularly well done soundtrack and you have a package that's good enough to have you playing through it several times over and still want more. It's a new take on Survival Horror, and while it's different, it's still excellent all around.

This game shouldn't be missed.

9 of 10 found the following review helpful:

Haunting. Disgusting. Beautiful. Play it, it'll make sense.Oct 15, 2004
By Avery "Cantankerous"
I'm one of those gamers that has to play a game the entire way through before I can get to anything else. Wash the car? Wait, I'm almost done with this level... Take out the trash? Not yet, wait until I get a game over or something... Clean the dishes? Go to work? Graduate from college? I'll get to all that once I find the master sword, get off my back!!

But even with as passionate as I tend to be about my gaming career, I was not prepared for the Fatal Frame series testing my willpower as much as it did.

It got to the point where I'd think of other things I needed to do before I'd play Fatal Frame 2. I had come to understand that advancing the stories in these games are what largely put an end to your nightmares, so that's why I found it so crucial to beat them; it was for my sanity's sake. And yet, the images were so extremely eerie, and the story so twisted and complex, that I didn't want to have to torture myself by playing it. I found myself attempting to avoid the game at all costs, while at the same time being helplessly drawn to it and hungering for more, morbidly curious to see how much more messed up the plot would get. I wouldn't be at all surprised if other gamers admitted to having similar experiences with it. "Play at your own risk" is a warning that has never been more applicable.

I should also mention that there's PHENOMENAL replay value once you do beat it, as the Normal mode ending is not one that is likely to fully satisfy your average player. That's not to say that all your hard work is for nothing when you play through it for the first time, but the Normal mode ending is not one likely to leave you with a very "up" feeling. You'll have to go back into the game and play it again on Hard mode to unlock a different, better ending, and, if you're brave enough, you can play through it again under Nightmare mode to get the "true" ending, which friends tell me is the most satisfying of all (I haven't mustered the courage yet to try Nightmare mode, so I'll have to take their word for it). Did I mention that each time you win the game, different costumes for the two main characters, different promo videos from before Fatal Frame 2's release, and different functions to your camera are added? That may not seem like much, but trust me, you'll be thankful you can make your camera that much stronger after having to fight these ghosts. With as terrifying as the phantoms are, though, surprisingly, the most chilling and nerve-wracking moments are when nothing is attacking you, just because of the suspense involved. This game packs so much atmosphere, it could make the surface of Venus breathable.

The story's much like the first Fatal Frame, but I don't want to delve into too many details and ruin the gameplay for you. Ultimately, however, I'd say that the first game was scarier than its sequel, considering that in the first Fatal Frame, you were locked in a haunted house all by yourself as opposed to roaming an entire haunted village with your sister (who sticks by your side all of, er, 40% of the time), which upped the claustrophobia factor significantly. But while the second game lacks the feeling of complete vulnerability and the creepiness of its predecessor, it makes up for its minor flaws with its story, which is ten times more interesting than in the first game. It doesn't matter if you play them in sequence, though. The horror is just as effective if you play the series backwards than if you were to play it forward.

But really, do play at your own risk. Paranoia and insomnia are overrated.

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