An immersive experience boasting genuine improvements over - while still being afflicted by - its predecessor.
The same can be said about Fatal Frame II: Fatal Frame II Crimson Butterfly accomplishes everything its predecessor was supposed to and failed to establish such as atmosphere and player empathy, yet the remnants of its predecessor's technical downfalls continue to linger.
The game starts off with the presence of two teenage girls in a forest, twins as a matter of fact by the names of Mio and Mayu Amakura. Because they're twins, they seem to inevitably like the same Japanese Gothic Lolita fashion even more so than Miku from the first game and even wear different, but otherwise similar outfits, but the differences between the two stand: Mio likes to wear those bland black leggings that are cut off at the ankles and has slightly shorter hair, while Mayu has better taste in her legging wear, has medium length hair and is permanently limp due to a childhood accident that broke one of her legs.
Anyway, the two spend their time reminiscing about a tiny abandoned village called All Gods Village which is set for eventual obliteration to make room for new housing and such. However, Mayu gets summoned away from her sister by a mysterious bright red butterfly and Mio sets after Mayu only to find her hours later standing in front of All Gods Village in which the two decide to explore so as to settle Mayu's strange sense of unease about it. Mio isn't the only uneasy one though as strange things start happening and eventually Mayu disappears in the village.
For the most part, it's pretty much a re-telling of the previous game with a different predicament, a different string of circumstances and different characters. You still need to ward off the souls of the invincible by taking pictures of them and upgrading your camera for different abilities and improve its strength, an emphasis that the last game was hard to emphasize on because no matter what film you picked up for it the damn thing was always weaker than a melty Clark Bar to an oncoming STV train.
In order to upgrade your camera you need to pick up little crystal orbs that you can somehow plunk into the camera and you in order to empower these orbs you need to earn a certain amount of Dino Points in order to... sorry, GHOST points in order to fill up each orb, thus empower whichever ability you want. Of course this gets rather tedious after awhile as every camera upgrade is a gamble and you can't remove any upgraded orbs. To be fair though, the upgrades are amazingly helpful, especially when you're stuck with weak film.
Which reminds me: unlike the last game, you've got a bounty of film and healing items at your disposal which makes fighting the nigh invincible b@stard ghosts easier to fight.
The audio logs are back for atmospheric moments, only instead of being tapes they're now crystals and other mineral jewelry that 100% of the cast wears (or wore, really) and you have to listen to them on a radio that allows you to listen to that person's thoughts or memories when they wore them. All of which doesn't make much sense to me being the pragmatic dick that I am, but it doesn't bother me because like the audio tapes the messages on the crystals are still creepy to listen to.
The atmosphere to this addition is definitely stronger than the last one: most of the atmospheric music is a little too subtle to hear, but it has its moments where it will be significantly audible. There are actually strange moments when you'll run into a subtly spooky sight or hear a strange noise like a whisper or a creak during the silence which is greatly effective during navigation. Unlike the last game, this one actually uses the potential of creepy ghost children effectively... while it's subtle, I have to say it was greatly creepy to encounter the ghost kids this time around.
Sadly, the sound department was totally phoned-in as most of the foot steps, camera snapping and door creaking you hear were taken almost directly from the last game with little variation.
As mentioned before, the game is continually crippled by the expectations of its predecessor such as the strange idea that teenage Japanese girls run slower and softer than a snail on a beachhead with just as much vulnerability of being swept with the tide. Thankfully, there's some logic applied to this unfair principle (thank god) as the permanently crippled Mayu limps along at speeds that make sense seeing how one of her legs will never reach a full stride again. Thankfully the old Fatal Frame running speed law doesn't apply to Mayu. MIO on other hand has to play by the book...
Now one could credibly argue that sister Mio runs naturally slow because she's gotten used to having her twin tag along seeing how she and her sister go together like birds to a feather, but the argument quickly loses credibility when you consider that throughout 80% of the game, the two remain separated by each other and Mio, when searching for her limp sister, runs at the same speed the unbearably slow Miku ran with the same unconvincing lack of urgency, especially when ghosts who've been practicing the routes in le Tour de France come in to play. Speak of the devil...
Your enemies are still the obnoxious, meaninglessly violent dorks they were before who use 90% of the backgrounds to their advantage and some of the ghosts are a little hard to take seriously especially when their quick zooming faces towards the camera only invoke hatred and irritation rather than fear. Thankfully for Fatal Frame 2 the ghosts are surprisingly well balanced.
For one thing, the cheapness of some enemies depends solely on certain ghosts like that obnoxious hanged woman who has one nanosecond of Fatal Frame shot to her who attacks you by ever so slowly leaning towards the character's breasts during which the ghost somehow is no longer vulnerable and out of range. Then there are those monks who seem to have the spiritual ability to launch flying skulls at you. There's also a ghost that crawls around on the floor that somehow has the ability to hurt you by molesting the heroine's ankles. Of course some of the ghosts who died scared, frightened or sad still raise my internal question-maker as to why they want to kill every living person they come across such as a little girl with a cat bell around her neck who screams at you and throttles your waist, but all of this is sort of answered in the plot and is more evident in the beginning than in the last game where the heroine's relevance to the plot seemed rather irrelevant until almost half way near the end.
Despite all these qualms however, the ghosts are easier to take seriously this time especially seeing how the voice acting has improved immensely. Just about the only moments of incredulous ghost voice acting is whenever you take photos of bloody, injured men who shout in pain as if you crept up from behind them.
One thing I liked about some the ghosts is that there are more understandably malevolent or scheming ghosts that know your character's been naughty and wish to punish them for a reason unlike the first game where a purple Raiden clone thought you were a Dead or Alive chick.
Plenty of ghosts demonstrate this such as the priests and scythe wielding villagers and some of the initially hostile blind guys, but my favorite has to be the puppet master who would actually use his puppets and dolls against you ("Here, you can play Judy and I'll be PUNCH!"). That and I have to admit that the ghosts this time around don't travel at the speed of light, so that's a definite plus!
Also, unlike its predecessor, Crimson Butterfly manages to tell a convincing enough story with the help of raising the player's sympathy: although Miku's story in the first game seemed tragic, it wasn't a good idea to have Miku display less emotion than an uncolored soda can supported by a voice actress who reflected the tin can's blandness.
Such can't be said about the Amakura twins however: the moments in which Mio is calling for Mayu actually sound worried and the voice actress stresses the appropriate concern required for the character. Plus when separate or together the twins display some fine emotional features beyond genuine fright like when Mio watches a creepy silhouette involving her sister and actually shows disgust. I wouldn't say Mayu on the other hand is apathetic in comparison, but given her disposition she is very convincing as an oddly stoic character and her story passed enough empathy for me to actually start feeling sorry for her half way through the game which is something I couldn't even do for the corpse-like Miku.
So all in all, I like Fatal Frame 2: it still has a lot of the things I hate about the first game, but to its credit said parts have been well rounded and are much more tolerable from the first play on and it certainly took itself seriously enough for me to see it all the way through to the end with a fabulous climax (though like the last one, sort of over-uses the color and visuals for an emotional effect other than instilling dread).
If you're skeptical of the Fatal Frame series or you try your best to be a non-conformist (like me), then at the very least try Fatal Frame 2 because you're missing out on something good... nothing perfect, certainly not worth spending thirty bucks on and maybe not owning, but try it at the very least.