That’s just one example of the agonisingly glacial pace of Lunar Eclipse. Instead of focusing on suggestive outfits and a Photo Mode, I’d rather more work went into making this 'remaster' look and feel better. Lunar Eclipse relies heavily on you ambling around a spooky sanatorium, waving your torch around to reveal little ‘shinies’ to interact with, but the devs have failed to adapt the intuitive pointiness of the Wiimote to either the analog stick of a gamepad, or even a mouse, which has a weird latency and is slow to move even at high sensitivity. I assume Koei Tecmo are working their way backwards in re-releasing these games because the more recent ones are somehow more palatable to modern audiences, but that fallacy unravels when you consider that Black Water and Lunar Eclipse were designed for the gimmicks of the Nintendo Wii U and Wii, respectively. They only really have strength in numbers, exploiting the fact that you move around with the grace of a fishing trawler to swarm you. Thankfully, the ghosts are no less oafish than you, with attacks so slow that you can basically run straight through them as they start their attack, then quickly turn around and Fatal Frame them while they’re still attacking thin air. In and of itself, the combat system is great fun, but as soon as you’re out of that first-person view and trying to dodge or reposition yourself, things start to feel very cumbersome. While the two girls you play as use the Camera Obscura, the detective Choshiro Kirishima uses a magical torch that makes combat a little faster and more action-oriented. The audio cues and the way you can chain your shots together feels super tactile and satisfying, and it deftly builds suspense by rewarding you for daring to let the ghosts get as close as possible.Įach character has their own set of upgrades for the camera, which include the improvement of basic stats like power and camera recharge time, as well as powerful abilities that use the ‘Spirit Energy’ you accrue in battle. The closer a ghost gets to you, the more damage you do, with the highest damage being reserved for ‘Fatal Frame’ shots, which you need to snap just as the ghost is about to grab you. In combat, you look through the lens of the camera in a first-person perspective, and ‘charge up’ your shots by keeping your focus on the approaching ghosts. You fight vengeful ‘wraiths’ using the Camera Obscura, a spirit camera capable of not only snapping but banishing spirits. Quite simply, Mask of The Lunar Eclipse fails to put the series’ best foot forward to a modern audience.īut let’s start with that combat, one of the game’s strongest points. But it’s constantly battling against awful controls, painfully slow pace (not in the artful ‘slow burn’ kind of way), and an utter excess of spectral encounters that are about as persistent and scary as a janky ghost train at an 80s fairground. One of the most novel combat systems in a horror game in the form of photographing ghosts to death (or giving them the nudge beyond death and into the afterlife proper)? Check. It has the right elements for sure: a creepy ‘J-curse’ story charting three amnesiac characters as they return to an abandoned sanatorium island where a disastrous folk ritual took place? Check. RELATED: 10 Best PS2 Horror Games, Ranked The re-release of the 2007 Wii game Mask of The Lunar Eclipse (or Fatal Frame 4) follows on from the 2021 re-release of Maiden of Black Water (aka Fatal Frame 5), presumably to get a feel for whether there’s interest in giving the series a proper revival.Īs someone who sees the original trilogy as some of the most giddily scary games ever released, I’d love to see that happen, so it torments me to say that Mask of the Lunar Eclipse really doesn’t showcase the series at its very best. In recent years however, Koei Tecmo has been giving the venerable horror series an oddly ordered cross-platform renaissance. The thing is, my devotion is based on the excellent PlayStation 2 trilogy released between 20, and as someone who never owned a Wii or Wii U, I missed out on the Nintendo-exclusive later entries. I’m a devotee to the Church of Fatal Frame (or Project Zero, as it was oddly called in Europe, because–I dunno–Europeans don’t like that sweet, sweet alliteration?).
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