Wii U's Fatal Frame unveiled, petrifies Japan in September
The next Fatal Frame comes to Wii U in Japan on September 27, more than six years after the series' last fully-fledged entry. Nintendo and developer Koei Tecmo presented the first snapshot of the new horror game in a livestream this morning, revealing its Japanese title as Zero: Nuregarasu no Miku.
Siliconera translates that as Fatal Frame: The Black-Haired Shrine Maiden, while Gematsu goes with The Raven-Haired Shrine Maiden. Either way, it's about a woman with dark hair, she's got a camera, and we still don't know if it's headed West or not. After all, Fatal Frame 4 only came to Japan, so localization doesn't seem too likely.
Like a lot of Japanese horror, water is a prominent theme in Zero: Nuregarasu no Miku. The game's mountain setting, Hikamiyama, is a wet place full of damp locations, and in J-horror terms that makes it the perfect dwelling for ghosts. As Gematsu reports, Hikamiyama is where people who choose to die go. There, during the witching hour, they leave the world of the living and move across to the plane of the dead.
The game's protagonist is Yuuri Kozukata, the "raven-haired shrine maiden" who has the ability to see souls who've been taken to the spirit plane, and even bring them back to the world of the living. After receiving a request to find a particular lost soul, Kozukata heads to the mountain, where it turns out everything's lovely and there are definitely no terrifying ghosts about. Perhaps.
Luckliy, she has her camera to hand, or in the player's case the GamePad. Gematsu says players can use the tablet like a camera but augmented to show things you can't normally see on screen, like - you guessed it - ghostly things. Siliconera adds it can also be used to fight off enemies in some way, but exactly how isn't clear.
If this all has you hankering for a Western release, don't give up hope. The Fatal Frame 2 remake on Wii may have not hit North American shores, but it did arrive in Australia and Europe. And while it was a spinoff and not a main Fatal Frame entry, Tecmo Koei's Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir on 3DS did come to both Europe and North America in 2012.
[Image: 4Gamer]
