Given Nintendo’s penchant for family-friendly gaming, the Switch doesn’t seem like a great fit for a series often celebrated as one of the scariest of the PlayStation 2 era. That said, the Fatal Frame games actually have a bit of a reputation on Nintendo hardware, and with series producer Keisuke Kikuchi recently announcing his interest in reviving the franchise, it seems that a new installment may be making its way to the Big N’s console/handheld hybrid.
“Yeah, I do want to make a Fatal Frame on Switch,” Kikuchi said in a recent interview with Nintendo Everything. “I think it’d be a ton of fun to play with the console in handheld mode and moving it all around.”
Interestingly enough, the series has already experimented with gameplay features similar to what Kikuchi suggested; 2015’s Fatal Frame: Maiden of Blackwater, the most recent entry in a lineage that has spanned over a decade and a half at this point, heavily emphasized the Wii U’s gamepad and asked players to take in-game pictures and fend off phantoms by appropriately angling the device. It’s not hard to imagine something similar working on the Switch, though it sounds decidedly less engaging outside of handheld mode.
Unfortunately, the Fatal Frame series has essentially been on hiatus for the last four years, and Keisuke is currently busy with the production of a new Fairy Tail RPG, a video game adaptation of a manga slated to release on Switch sometime in 2020. Assuming that development on the new Fatal Frame project won’t begin until after that game’s release, it seems likely that Switch owners won’t be able to play a new installment for quite some time.
Though often unfavorably compared to the survival horror titan Silent Hill, the Fatal Frame games have developed a cult following over the years thanks to their unique concepts and utterly haunting gameplay. Horror fans who missed out on the original two games on the PS2 owe it to themselves to dust off their old consoles and give them a shot. Physical copies of the game haven’t ballooned to outrageous collector-inflated prices yet, and the games can still be ordered through major retail stores, but the franchise’s lack of an eShop presence suggests that they won’t stay cheap forever.
With that in mind, it may be time for Koei Tecmo to remaster the franchise for modern Nintendo hardware. The success of rebooted retro titles of late seems to indicate that nostalgic fans are more eager than ever to relive the late 90s and early 2000s, and we’re fairly confident that a remastered bundle of the first two PS2 games would go over pretty well.
That said, re-releasing these games shouldn’t stand in the way of a new title, and, if the series producer wants to build an entirely new experience with the Switch in mind, we would rather he focus on that. Regardless, it’s good to know that there’s still life left in the Fatal Frame franchise—a definite sigh of relief for those irrevocably spurned by the recent drubbing of the Silent Hill property.
Source: NintendoEverything