Maiden of Black Water is probably my least favorite of the five main Fatal Frame titles. The exposition is, as always, great. The mysterious Mt. Mikami easily wins the beauty contest among Fatal Frame locations. Like all of the series' settings, there's a healthy dose of forbidden Shinto rituals and ghostly shenanigans that keep things going, and it's all as compelling and enjoyable as it's ever been.

Reliquaries? Creepy. Ghost marriages? Creepy. But a bunch of forgettable, one-dimensional female characters who are either suicidal or uncomfortably obsessed with the men in their lives? Not creepy, and definitely not good. I really hated what they did with most of the characters in this, similar to how I felt about Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. Yuri's character design is great, and while she's pretty mute and uninteresting throughout most of the game, her relationship with Hisoka and her internal struggle about being alone resonate most with the game's central themes. Miu is confident, mostly competent, and has the most understandable motives, but her story is a dead end, much like Misaki in the previous game. Ren is a cool Hideo Kojima lookalike who's terrible at his job and who has weird sexual chemistry with a 17-year-old girl that calls him sensei. That girl, Rui, falls in love with Ren after constantly cleaning up after him and putting by herself in danger to protect him. The less said about another female character—a woman who is hopelessly obsessed with her dead family member, to the point that she marries and fucks his ghost and births a magic incest baby—the better.

If you can put the disappointing characterizations aside, at least the camera shootin' is fun! The game is far too easy, but the combat has never been better. Handheld mode on the Switch is a particularly tasty treat, as it plays (to my knowledge) closer to the original Wii U version—it feels like you're actually manipulating the camera to get all enemies into your crosshairs. Changing Shutter Chance attacks into spatial puzzles is clever, and it helps distinguish them from Fatal Frame attacks. Fatal Frames are easier to pull off in this installment, because even though they still have the time and precision-based components, you mostly just have to keep smashing the shoot button while pointing at enemies, keeping all their weak spots in frame. It all feels very slick, but the game would be better served by more thoughtfully designed enemies, a higher level of default difficulty, and a greater scarcity of resources.

Overall, although this is probably the weakest of the entries I've played, Maiden of Black Water was still good enough to pull me through until the end. There were things I really liked about it, and you can't really accuse it of being too similar to previous installments. I do hope this isn't the final game in the series, though, because this is somewhat of a whimper to go out on.

Mask of the Lunar Eclipse follows in its predecessor's footsteps by focusing on another narrative split between multiple characters, all of whom are investigating a haunted location with their own motivations. It doesn't really improve on the weaker aspects of those elements, but the game mechanics here are snappier and more refined than they've ever been. I also really like the new search system, which requires you to use your camera to look around the room for hidden items. I don't even mind the ghost hands, which force you to stay on your toes even when you're just picking up an item.

Unfortunately, I would argue that the story here has worse pacing and less of an impact when compared to The Tormented. Rei's tale of learning to cope after losing a loved one is much more resonant than Ruka's story about memories and how they're preserved through music. Whereas The Tormented directly involves its characters all the way up until the conclusion, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse's resolutions for all characters except Ruka feel like an afterthought. This is probably the easiest Fatal Frame installment to recommend to a newcomer from the titles I've played thus far, but that's not because of the game's story—it's for the cool ghost battles and streamlined gameplay.