No one moves faster, no one boasts a more powerful camera, no one is physically stronger: there’s nothing.
Unlike The Tormented’s multiple characters that each have something unique about their game play, there’s nothing special about Ruka, Misaki, Madoka, or Kirishima. Well, that and Detective Kirishima is a man. It’s a flashlight that functions (somehow) as a camera and you wield it when you play as Detective Kirishima.Ĭoncerning each character that you play as, the Spirit Light is the only difference. You have your trusty Camera Obscura and a new weapon called the Spirit Light. The game is fetch-quest based with random encounters and jump scares strewn throughout the location.
Playing through the bulk of the story as three different protagonists: Ruka (the main playable character), Misaki, and Detective Kirishima, and a small introduction chapter as Madoka, you move through the haunted sanatorium on Rougetsu Island. The answer to everything lies within the sanatorium but is it possible to survive long enough to find it? The hostile spirits of the inhabitants roam and a strange disease called Luna Sedata Syndrome, that revolves around the moon, is still being spread. But something is seriously wrong on the island. When Misaki and Madoka don’t return, Ruka, the last of the kidnapped girls, goes in search of them and her own lost memories.
Under mysterious circumstances two of the five have died, prompting two to go to their childhood home to investigate. Fully grown now, each of the five women have absolutely no memory of their childhoods before the kidnapping besides the lingering trace of a certain melody. The five girls that were kidnapped were rescued by a detective named Choushiro Kirishima and they and their families were moved off island. Sounds an awful lot like a horrific sacrificial ritual failed, doesn’t it? We all know what this means, right? A mysterious incident occurred and none of its inhabitants were left alive. Shortly after a kidnapping that took five young girls underground for a ceremonial Kagura dance, Rougetsu Island is abandoned. Thanks to Wii hackers and Fatal Frame fans there’s been patches and subtitle translations that are nothing short of a pain in the ass to get, but the hassle of hacking gets your hands on a game that otherwise you couldn’t get, so it’s worth it yeah? Let’s find out, shall we? Okay, okay, as much as I’d love to go off on a Nintendo vs non-Nintendo developers tangent, we’re here to talk about Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.
Don’t you just love when Nintendo gets their hands on a beloved franchise and then screws it up the butt because they have no idea how to deal with third party developers?
Not that anyone in North America or Europe who might have been looking forward to that would get to play it since all releases besides Japan’s were cancelled. But then, suddenly, there was hope again as we began to hear tell of the Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse! Finally, a new Fatal Frame game! But, what’s this? Tecmo isn’t the developer… Nintendo is the publisher… and it’s a Wii game… it’s a motion controlled horror survival game… oh joy. Some were losing hope that another one would ever exist. It’s been three years since Fatal Frame has released a new game.