Why I am upset:show/hide
I liked Fatal Frame 2 very much. I haven't played much of Fatal Frame 3 but from what I have played so far it looks like it might be even better! The plot premise for the fourth game in the series sounds very interesting:
You can find the trailer on Youtube. Just look for Fatal Frame 4.
10 years ago, five girls were captured and held hostage by a criminal in a mysterious house on Rougetsu Island, located south of Honshu. They were eventually rescued by Chōshiro Kirishima, a detective pursuing the criminal. Several years after the incident, two of the girls, Marie Shinomiya and Tomoe Nanamura, died mysteriously. The three remaining girls, Ruka Minatsuki, Misaki Asō and Madoka Tsukimori, all now 17 years old, return to the island to recover their lost memories and find out more about their kidnapping. Chōshiro follows the girls at the request of Ruka's mother, Sayaka Minatsuki.
You can find the trailer on Youtube. Just look for Fatal Frame 4.
Why I think Nintendo is making a mistake: show/hide
You are Mr. Smith. You invent a video game home console whose control is essentially a motion-sensing IR remote control. If you point it towards the television, it detects (within a fixed radius) where you are pointing and matches it to a position shown onscreen. If you move the controller in 3-dimensional space, it detects this too (within a fixed range of accelerations). But even if the console could do nothing more than sense infrared light emitted from the remote control, that would be enough to declare your console a primary candidate for point-and-click adventure titles.
Some memorable examples of point-and-click adventure games include half of LucasArts' old library of games (like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), Yu Suzuki's ambitious Shenmue, and newer games like the Nintendo DS's Professor Layton and the Curious Village by Level-5 or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney by Capcom. Indeed, there is a lot of overlap between the potential for how DS games operate and how Wii games could operate: both have a pointer (the DS a stylus, the Wii an IR remote) and both have a sensor (the DS a touchscreen, the Wii an IR receiver). The player moves his pointer in physical space and the in-game cursor moves in virtual space in a similar fashion, allowing him to, for example, move his "hand" from a vase to a chest-of-drawers or from the center of the screen to a curious piece of paper in the corner of one of the game's rooms. The player then clicks (on the DS by applying pressure or double-tapping, and on the Wii by pressing either A or B, depending) and the player's game character then interacts with whatever item the cursor was hovering over at that time. Fairly simple.
What is Fatal Frame? It is a point-and-click ghost story. Pretty simple. With the PS2 controller, you make the player walk around onscreen using one of the two analog sticks. In 3PS mode you move her arm holding the flashlight with the other analog stick, and in FPS mode you move the direction her head is pointing (and her outstretched arms are holding the magic camera which has the power to exorcise ghosts) using that same stick. Fairly simple. Replace Stick #1 with the nunchuk. Replace Stick #2 with the Wiimote. Case closed. It's fairly obvious.
Some memorable examples of point-and-click adventure games include half of LucasArts' old library of games (like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), Yu Suzuki's ambitious Shenmue, and newer games like the Nintendo DS's Professor Layton and the Curious Village by Level-5 or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney by Capcom. Indeed, there is a lot of overlap between the potential for how DS games operate and how Wii games could operate: both have a pointer (the DS a stylus, the Wii an IR remote) and both have a sensor (the DS a touchscreen, the Wii an IR receiver). The player moves his pointer in physical space and the in-game cursor moves in virtual space in a similar fashion, allowing him to, for example, move his "hand" from a vase to a chest-of-drawers or from the center of the screen to a curious piece of paper in the corner of one of the game's rooms. The player then clicks (on the DS by applying pressure or double-tapping, and on the Wii by pressing either A or B, depending) and the player's game character then interacts with whatever item the cursor was hovering over at that time. Fairly simple.
What is Fatal Frame? It is a point-and-click ghost story. Pretty simple. With the PS2 controller, you make the player walk around onscreen using one of the two analog sticks. In 3PS mode you move her arm holding the flashlight with the other analog stick, and in FPS mode you move the direction her head is pointing (and her outstretched arms are holding the magic camera which has the power to exorcise ghosts) using that same stick. Fairly simple. Replace Stick #1 with the nunchuk. Replace Stick #2 with the Wiimote. Case closed. It's fairly obvious.
Why Nintendo is not bringing it to the USA, probably: show/hide
The game sold 75,000 units in Japan. This makes it the most popular Fatal Frame game to date in Japan, but the number is rather paltry. By comparison, Shenmue II sold little over 50,000 units worldwide, and the Fatal Frame series has always proven to be exponentially more popular in Japan than in the North American and European markets. Nintendo, no doubt spoiled by their "it prints money!" success with the Nintendo Wii and DS, is probably not impressed by the 75,000 sales figure and has decided it isn't worth their time, effort, and money to bring the game to foreign markets.
Matters are not helped by the poor Japanese reception. While 75,000 units were sold, this was largely in response to the popularity of the previous titles in the series and the intriguing story premise for the new game. However, Japanese video game professional critics and amateur critics alike published criticism after criticism after criticism of the game. What did they criticize? The story? No. The graphics? No. What they criticized was, oddly enough, the controls. They said the controls were awful. And because of this, it ruined the game experience, and they all scored the game fairly low. This probably contributed to killing the game's chances for a stateside release, since it'd be suicide to release a known-to-be-broken game to the US market and it'd be more trouble than it's worth to Nintendo (apparently) to ask Tecmo to re-design the game's control setup.
Matters are not helped by the poor Japanese reception. While 75,000 units were sold, this was largely in response to the popularity of the previous titles in the series and the intriguing story premise for the new game. However, Japanese video game professional critics and amateur critics alike published criticism after criticism after criticism of the game. What did they criticize? The story? No. The graphics? No. What they criticized was, oddly enough, the controls. They said the controls were awful. And because of this, it ruined the game experience, and they all scored the game fairly low. This probably contributed to killing the game's chances for a stateside release, since it'd be suicide to release a known-to-be-broken game to the US market and it'd be more trouble than it's worth to Nintendo (apparently) to ask Tecmo to re-design the game's control setup.
Why the game's controls sucked, maybe: show/hide
I honestly have no idea how Tecmo could have botched something so simple, but I do know what they did and what they did does indeed sound terrible. What did I propose earlier, do you remember? I suggested that the nunchuk's analog stick would be used to make the player move. And I suggested that moving the Wiimote's IR beam of light should have the effect of making the player's flashlight arm (3PS) or field of vision + camera (FPS) move accordingly.
But this is not what Tecmo did. Instead, Tecmo designed the game so that you move the character by use of the Wiimote's accelerometer. In other words, you have to swerve the Wiimote to the right in order to make her rotate to the right. Once you do, you maintain position and she will slowly pivot rightwards until the Wiimote detects an opposite acceleration in the reverse direction, at which point she stops rotating. This is somewhat similar to the controls for Metroid Prime 3. And just like Metroid Prime 3, it really sucks to do things this way. But unlike Metroid Prime 3, which was designed to make it so that you never had to worry about baddies or their weapons assaulting you from behind so quickly that you would take critical damage before you could even rotate 180°, the same was not true for Fatal Frame 4. Like previous games in the franchise, FF4 had ghosts disappear and reappear at random positions along the 360° grid (relative to the player). This requires you to locate the ghost, pull out your camera, take an exorcising snapshot, put away your camera, swivel around to the next position where you think the ghost is, and repeat. The time it takes to do this on the PS2 or Xbox is about 2-4 seconds. The time it would take on the Wii, I imagine, would be in excess of 5 seconds. Because of this, it means that the ghosts have ample time to reappear behind you and run through you (which is their means of attacking you), draining you of 20% to 30% of your life per hit. Very, very frustrating, I imagine. :\ This is probably why the Japanese fans who got the game disliked it so much. :\
What did Tecmo do with the Wii nunchuk, you might be wondering? Well, in their stupidity, they decided that the nunchuk's analog stick -- and not the Wiimote's IR sensor -- would be the best tool for moving the player's flashlight (3PS) and camera (FPS). This means that they used the imprecise analog stick for the movement which requires most precision (aiming at and photographing ghosts) while they used the precise Wiimote controller for the movement requiring the least precision (gross rotational movements to the left or to the right).
Why I'm really quite upset, though: show/hide
For reasons I don't understand, neither company is willing to tell the full truth. While it is unclear who the main antagonist is in the relationship, it would appear to unfortunately be Tecmo themselves and not Nintendo as was first believed. Here is what we know:
Nintendo insists that they are not the publisher for Fatal Frame 4 in the NA/EU market. They say, "Go ask Tecmo."
Tecmo insisted that Nintendo was the international publisher for the game and pointed out that Nintendo had been the one to publish the game in Japan. They later accused Nintendo of "holding on to the publishing rights while refusing to use them," meaning that no 3rd-party publisher would be allowed to come forth and publish the game for the Wii in North America or Europe.
For reasons that aren't clear to me, Nintendo has not accused Tecmo of lying. However, reading between the lines they seem to be suggesting that Tecmo made an assumption (sans contract) that Nintendo would publish the game everywhere. Nintendo might have been happy to do so if the game sold better, but seeing as it didn't they opted not to. They told Tecmo, "If you want to publish it, go for it. But we won't." Tecmo, agreeing that the game wasn't worth publishing internationally but not wanting to alienate themselves from their fanbase, fibbed and accused Nintendo of blocking the publication of the game via the contract. "They have the right to publish it in NA and are choosing not to!" screamed Tecmo. But Nintendo has suggested, without bringing forth concrete evidence (for whatever reason), that this is a lie: the contract does NOT obligate Nintendo to publish the game outside of Japan, or even inside Japan for that matter. Nintendo simply offered to do so for Japan and is not offering the same deal for North America or Europe.
I think the reality is that Tecmo would rather work harder on a new game than spend time re-engineering an old game which already has a bad international reputation thanks to the Japanese launch. Considering all the time that is required to translate the text, and considering that Tecmo typically insists on providing English voice overs for their games' audio (and that involves further expenses for publisher, i.e. them if Nintendo refuses to do it), it's just not worth it.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! :(
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