Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (NS2) - Review

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly stands as one of the most beloved games in the Fatal Frame franchise, to the point that this is actually the second remake of it. After originally releasing in 2003 on the PlayStation 2, there was a 2012 remake on the Nintendo Wii, and now in 2026 we've seen a second remake. As someone who never played either previous version, but is a fan of the other Fatal Frame titles I've played, I've been curious to see what Crimson Butterfly had to offer for a long time; now I've finally gotten my answer.

  

The narrative kicks off immediately with twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura spending time in a forest they once visited as children, before mysteriously finding themselves spirited away to a ghostly setting of perpetual night where the sun never rises. The atmosphere and location is as good as ever, taking place in the small and run-down Minakami Village, nestled deep in the Japanese countryside, with more than enough creepy vibes and ghostly presences to constantly keep you second-guessing how far you're willing to delve deeper into the darkness.

  

  

Not only is the setting a perfect fit for evoking spooky sensations, but it's masterfully crafted as well. The art direction feels perfect for conveying just how scary something as mundane as a countryside village can become, simply by being somewhat broken down and perpetually covered by the veil of night, and although the graphics might not be the absolute top-of-the-line, they are more than adequate enough to bring the art to life. As is commonplace for Fatal Frame's developers Koei Tecmo, the modeling is stellar, and even playing on the Nintendo Switch 2, which is likely to be a somewhat inferior version visually to the others, I definitely felt the visuals were appropriate for a current game, even if not necessarily AAA standard.

  

Players take control of Mio, the younger sister, and as her older twin sister Mayu's behavior becomes increasingly strange, Mio gradually gets lured deeper into uncovering the mystery of Minakami Village. Once the entire village's strange obsession with twins becomes apparent, it's suddenly all too clear that Mio and Mayu suddenly finding themselves in this eerie place is anything but a coincidence.

  

  

While Mio and Mayu's narrative is largely told through cutscenes and game progression, there are a wealth of optional logs and notes you can find which detail the experiences of other people from various eras who have also found themselves in this disturbing place, which both shed light on Minakami Village itself and also explore the mental effect it can have on the different outsiders unfortunate enough to find themselves lost in the area. Finding these was one of my favorite parts of the game, and as you progress you'll be able to unlock new sidequests which are often tied to characters you've read about, with these quests often shedding light on what fate ultimately befell those lost souls. 

  

One drawback about these side-narratives is that, because they're often quite intriguing, they end up taking a lot of space away from Mio and Mayu's own story. And, to be honest, I found myself more invested in the stories of these long-gone specters of the past than I did in the still-present sisters' current predicament. Fatal Fury II: Crimson Butterfly very much thrusts you directly into being lost in Minakami Village and, while this feels like a strong point from a gameplay and atmosphere standpoint, it ends up shortchanging any narrative connection to Mio and Mayu, and to be honest progressing through the game doesn't really do much to rectify this. If I were to make a direct comparison to the fourth game in the franchise - Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse - the narrative, while still mysterious, felt much more compelling there, and I was genuinely interested in seeing what came next for our protagonists. In Crimson Butterfly, however, I ended up feeling as if Maio and Mayu were the least interesting part of it.

  

A core element of horror games is to make you feel somewhat limited and weak when facing threats, and Fatal Frame has always done this quite well by having your only weapon to ward off evil spirits being the franchise's iconic Camera Obscura, an old camera with which you snap photographs of enemy ghosts to defeat them. However, one annoying aspect is that your enemies can enter an aggravated state, and while this is something you can knock them out of with the right timing, the game doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining it. Even if you do knock them out, the enemies tend to feel like they take too long to kill, something that is further exacerbated by the long reload times of the Camera Obscura. 

  

  

There are special rolls of films you can obtain, essentially stronger ammo, but even with this equipped some fights feel incredibly tedious. At a certain point I found myself wanting to avoid enemies all-together, and not for the common horror game reasons (that you want to conserve ammo, or you're afraid of dying), but rather because the combat itself just felt so incredibly tedious that I didn't even want to deal with it anymore. 

  

If the combat were the main drawback of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake I'd probably have ended up giving it a higher score than I'm ending on, but perhaps the most frustrating aspect when playing through it is the absolutely jarring experience of the game holding your hand to an exceptional degree for the first half of the game, despite it seeming fairly straightforward that I should be going to the places I hadn't yet explored, to then shift in the complete opposite direction once I had actually been to most locations at least once, whereupon it instead stopped giving me any guidance at all and left me lost for extended periods of times more than once.

  

Minakami Village isn't a particularly big place, but there are houses with up to thirty different small rooms, which can get fairly puzzling to navigate. There was a specific sequence in the game where I found myself lost in one of these houses, checked every room I possibly could and came up completely empty, and then it turned out that a hallway which I had passed through at least five times needed to be entered from one specific door rather than the other four which led to it or else the story wouldn't progress, which quite frankly pulled me completely out of the game's atmosphere and into pure frustration instead.

  

  

Overall, I found more to like than dislike with Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake, but there are some very clear flaws in this one as well. I think it's probably a very satisfying game to replay, especially considering the multiple endings available, some of which require you to complete the game multiple times. If you're the type of player who likes to do repeated runs of a game, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake probably earns itself considerably higher value, not only because you'll have more play time put into it, but also because the types of frustrations I outlined above won't matter much once you know on your own where to go and when. However, for someone like me, who only replays games if they really manage to wow me, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake ended up being a largely pleasant experience which was interrupted several times by general frustration. I'd still recommend it to any fan of the horror game genre, but I'd honestly recommend Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse much more warmly.