Good
- more save points
- the story is again fed in nice little bits, hinting and adding to the mysterious plot
- the controls feel much smoother. Flat land to staircase transition feels fluent. The camera angle transitions are better
- the hand on the shoulder scary part.
- using sister as bait, then getting zero shot. Gameplay strategy. Having twin around and her having unlimited health is helpful.
- character size 2 environments ratio is very imbalanced. This isn't a bad thing. The character is just really small, which gives me a lot of space to run from ghosts, which makes the battles very easy. Most of the ghosts were quite slow, and took a long time to reach me. It was still challenging to get zero shots, but never did I fear the risk of dying.
- the images for each area in the map help a lot
- glad I got to use the abilities this time around. First fatal frame didn't offer enough points for me to try much of them out, plus the limitation of the spirit orbs. I like FF2's ability design much more.
- hearing voices of the dead through the radio added to the creepiness
- enemies start picking up difficulty in chap 5
- those sequences with the red butterflies on the backdrop of grainy black and white film style was Aerie
- the children ghost fight was creepy, gave me goosebumps.
- when I put the camera on mayu when she was trapped in the cell and it showed a circle over her, that was an indirect confirmation that she was a ghost. This was a clever way of telling the player
- random objects move when navigating some areas, giving me a mini jump scare. Like doll falling off shelf after finding doll design plan
- limiting stone mirror is a good idea
- a lot of scary ghosts, like jumping woman, the ring, children. The lights out fights against the twins was scary too.
- ending was sad.
Bad
- there's a lot of health items. Maybe too much.
- majority of the ghosts are too passive. 90% of the fight I'm just standing in front of the ghost and waiting for zero shot. Maybe only had to move a few times. There was no risk of dying which took away a lot of the tension. Even if a battle were to go south I'd have more than enough healing items, to live ten times over. Sometimes the ghosts attack animation we're 10 times slower and their movements, which gave me ridiculous amount of time to just run out of the way. All of this made me feel like I was just running from 1 location to the next going through the plot, rather than being scared for of the next encounter. The survival horror element in fatal frame 2 is definitely weaker than fatal frame 1.
- I do miss the character accumulation when targeting a ghost in ff1 which they took out on ff2
- sequencing issue: after sister gets trapped I was told to go to Osaka house, but I searched the place top to bottom and found nothing. Turns out I had to talk to the white hair boy first before the pinwheel puzzle was triggered. This made no sense, since the protagonist already knows to go to the Osaka house and did examine the altar
- although the twin ghosts were creepy to fight, they also felt a little unfair, since there was no way to discern which twin was the one that could take damage and which one couldn't. This made each fight a 50-50 chance of getting it right. They should have given even just a tiny indication which was the real twin
- still no film swapping shortcut
- chasing red kimono girl was too long. It transitioned from being scary to being annoying.
- Some of the houses felt like a maze. So many rooms and hallways. It didn't help that they almost all look identical. It became hard to remember where certain things were, meaning I had to constantly bring up the map from the menu, which was annoying. A mini map in the corner would have helped a lot.