FATAL FRAME / PROJECT ZERO: Maiden of Black Water

Another classic survival horror that will keep you on your toes . Be careful though as this game requires that you will get very close to ghost after ghost , so it can be quite stressful , especially if you play at night .

This review is more of the game itself than of the remaster.
TL;DR: the remaster is great, no performance issues, a few quality of life changes. Original version had only 40 entries in the Ghost List; a staple of the series. Even the first Fatal Frame had over 100 ghosts, so 40 was a castration of a neat concept. Thankfully, the remaster increased it to 209.
Now onto Maiden of Black Water itself. Despite everything I rant about here, this is still a great game. The worst in the franchise, but this series has no bad games... maybe with the exception of that spin off nobody remembers.
Touches upon the most serious topics (next to FF3's survivor's guilt) of loneliness, depression and suicide, and does it fairly well. The issue is the tone deaf fanservice.
Nearly all female characters, including the protagonist, have large to very large breasts with exaggerated jiggle physics. What's worse, even some of the frigging ghosts have them. I kid you not: the prologue starts with a stereotypical Japanese ghost slowly emerging from the water... only to reveal a pair of massive milkers. It's like an intro to a Ghostbusters p*rn parody. How am I supposed to feel? Scared? Aroused? Both? Scaroused? You can try explaining with some mumbo jumbo about arousal and fear, sex and death, all being different sides of the same coin, all being animalistic feelings and urges and so on and so forth, but we know why it's here. Let's not bullsh*t ourselves.
I'm all for fanservice, as long as it's optional. Have an unlockable costume for the protagonist which magically increases her sweater puppies by 5 cup sizes while wearing a micro bikini, I don't care, just let me choose. How am I supposed to focus on the atmosphere and fear you obviously want me to feel when almost every time the protagonist does something, her meat mountains jump around as if they had their own orbit?
Aside from fanservice, the story is scatterbrained. There is a completely pointless side story which could have been cut and the game would be better for it. It involves a legacy character and their daughter. The plot is poor. In fact, it's so poor that it's borderline character assassination and it retroactively cheapens one of the best endings in the series. Instead of focusing on that they should have fleshed out the main antagonist more. You get to know any significant details about Ouse only in the last hour or so. Furthermore, one of the playable characters, Ren, also has a story which doesn't touch upon the primary plot enough.
The main story on the other hand is overexplained almost to a comedic degree. About halfway through MoBW you'll start noticing that all the notes you come across are constantly rephrasing the same information. What's funnier is that in the second to last chapter, all of that info is not only found in notes yet again, but the mentioned Ren also narrates it to you. You're being treated like a handicapped five year old.
Episodic structure seems like they wanted to divide it into more digestible chunks as if it were mobile game. It conflicts with entire premise of a survival horror and makes it too game-y. It does make replaying it more convenient, at least.
The primary scoring system is built not around damage done, but number of hits. This means that for S+ on Nightmare you have to slowly chip away at ghost health with the weakest film. It's so incredibly tedious and annoying that I won't be doing this kind of run in this game ever again.
No puzzles whatsoever.
Ghost Hands are still here and they are even more irritating than in FF4.
No Mission Mode, but there's Ayane's Story instead. In case you didn't know, Ayane is a big-boobed corset-wearing purple-haired red-eyed ninja from Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive. Ayane's Story was added, because the developer of Fatal Frame and the director of Dead or Alive are friends, and the second one asked if they could add Ayane to FF. They agreed. So we got a 30 minute side story, with half baked stealth mechanics, and very low difficulty that somehow manages to be cheap at the same time by dropping ghosts literally on top of you.
On the other hand Maiden of Black Water has some absolutely fantastic ideas and changes:
The Fatal Glance ability which allows you to see the final moments of a ghost when they were still alive; all of the scenes are gruesome, creepy, and chilling. I love this kind of sh*t.
The water theme permeating the entire game: from the story, atmosphere, through the gameplay, and even the interface. Nearly constant rain, flooded buildings, and you start feeling as if you're soaking wet and cold like the characters you're controlling. The constant droning sound when you're wet does eventually become annoying, though.
Refined combat. Amazing mechanic with Spirit Fragments that finally fixes the series' Achilles heel that being group fights. Turning the camera in Z-Axis adds more depth, despite being an obvious leftover from the WiiU version. MoBW even allows you to cleverly finish most enemies early. Unfortunately, this mechanic is not taught by the game for some reason and you have to discover it yourself, or through a guide.
More difficult ghosts now either change their tactics based on your behavior, switch stances, or both.
Brilliant flavor/lore details like locking on specific ghosts during combat changes the sound landscape and in some cases allows you to hear their thoughts.
Shadow Reading lore wise and Phantom Exposé gameplay wise, though the second one is a bit undercooked.
The two surveillance chapters are divisive among fans, but I like them.
A wide variety of locations. Around a half of Maiden of Black Water is spent outside, in a dark forest, which is a first in the series. Second half is among modern buildings, and old shrines which are more typical for Fatal Frame.
Maiden of Black Water is divisive among fans for a reason, but as I mentioned in the beginning, it's still a really good game.

My first ever Fatal Frame game! So as a fan of survival horror games, Fatal Frame was a series I had always heard about but never got a chance to play. I remember watching my friend's dad play it once back on the PS2 but never got to play it myself until this game. Oddly it seems like Koei Tecmo is remastering the series in reverse as this is obviously the 5th game and they remastered the 4th one afterwards, so hopefully they get to first 3 games lol But each game, is pretty much its own stand alone story, so I felt comfortable starting here. But what did I think?
Starting off with the combat which was a very unique experience for me. In most survival horror your weapons are usually guns or melee weapons but in the Fatal Frame series you use the camera obscura to take pictures of the ghosts in order to do damage to them. And if you time it right you can get either a Fatal Frame shot or a shutter chance shot for extra damage. This is punctuated by the different types of film you get that act as your ammo, dealing with various different amounts of damage and taking faster or quicker to load. You also get different lenses that have different effects based on when you do a special shot. My personal favorite was the one that would freeze ghosts in place until you shot at them again which even works on the bosses. My only complaint with combat is just the amount of health enemies and bosses have (especially the final boss!) as they take as many photos as an instagram model to go down.
I also really enjoyed the story for this game as it was pretty emotional by the end of it. The characters can come off as wooden when you first start playing as they don’t emote very much or even say that much in the cutscenes but I grew more attached to them as I played. Much of this requires you to read the various notes and diary entries in the levels to figure out what is going on with this mountain and to know what the characters are feeling. But once you do, it's quite a rich story and as someone who isn’t as familiar with Japanese culture, it was interesting to read all the lore. Also the cinematography in the cutscenes was very good with me taking a few screenshots during them. Adding to that,I also loved how when you defeat the ghosts if you touch them in time, you get a cutscene to see how they died originally and it was very cool and quite haunting.
Now onto my negatives which are really 3 things. Firstly, as you explore the levels your character will get wet due to the rain, with water being a big theme of the story. But once you get drenched in water your character is more susceptible to being grabbed by a ghost hand each time you want to pick up a diary entry or some resources on the ground. This got really annoying, as it doesn’t do as much damage to you and then you're stuck watching the animation of your character trying to escape the SCARY GHOST HAND WHOOOOOOOOOOOO! You can mitigate this by using a resource that dries yourself off, but it gets really annoying after a while. Secondly, this game recycles the same levels a lot throughout the chapters. Sometimes, you will often have to travel through old areas to get to a new level, but sometimes it's just the same levels for the whole chapter and it also gets frustrating after a while. You can’t tell me there aren't other areas on this damn mountain.
Lastly, the final boss was a complete nightmare to fight and not in a scary way, more in a frustrating way. They just have so much health that it's ridiculous and I burned through my resources fighting them really quickly. There’s also some very specific timing you have to do in order to beat them completely and it ties into what ending you get for the main character, Yuri which is also great.
In conclusion, despite my frustrations I still really enjoyed this game! Obviously this is the only Fatal Frame game I’ve played so I can’t compare it to the others, but it's a good start for me. I look forward to playing the 4th game now.

Maiden of Black Water is a solid horror game. It's both scary and challenging especially when you want to discover the whole story and earn achievements. Location (Mt. Hikami) and history of the rituals are terrifying too.
Some people complain about controls but for me it's a feature that makes you feel like the characters are paralyzed by fear. The only downside this game has is that I've been afraid to look through the camera lens lately.
Po... po... po...
Did you hear that?

This game is incredible! The only thing to keep in mind is: **don’t play it on a keyboard.** If you bought it on PC, make sure to connect a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, or Xbox controller. Playing with just a keyboard is super difficult, and I left a bad review because of that. Now that I’m using an Xbox controller, it’s absolutely amazing!

So good. A lot of people complain about this, which I can understand why. I had changed the keys so that i could do it well (on PC) and it was very good. I also would ask things on reddit that i didn't quite understand. You should definitley buy it. (It isn't overall that scary but definitley quite abit of scares)

Pretty scary with an interesting story. If you like horror games, you should definitely get this. I'd love for them to bring the third game to Steam.