Developed and Published by: Tecmo | Played: 5/07/03

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Great job at creating a suspenseful, frightening ambiance in which to immerse the player. The fuzzy black and white effect, the creepy music, the slow and crooked-moving camera angles, the creeking floorboards, and the slowness with which you walk are all contributing factors.

Using a camera to capture ghosts. Interesting idea. A camera that captures souls. It has a very symbolic meaning.

The animation morphing thing is an interesting graphic technique and makes the ghosts look much scarier.

The game intrigues the player to continue playing to uncover the mystery of just what is going on inside this mansion, and the story behind the horrific ancient Shinto rituals, and just what happened to your big brother and the other people who were in the mansion.

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Using a camera to capture ghosts with it's mystical energy? Is there a company that makes mystical ghost-capturing cameras? And they also make different types of exorcismal film? It's an interesting idea but it seems kind of strange. In other survival horror games, you fought zombies and freaks with revolvers, machine guns and grenade launchers, whereas here you're left with a mystical camera, which isn't as much fun.

You spend a lot of time reading text which is bad. Especially when the text discribes how to play the game. Controls should always be intuitive.

The gameplay simply isn't fun. Not only is it a strange concept - capturing ghosts with a mystical camera that uses exorcismal film - but fighting enemies simply lacks an addictive free flow element. One thing that really gets annoying too is when you've got the thing almost charged up to make a critical blow, and then the ghost attacks you one split second before you can hit him leaving no room for error correction.

The characters don't ever talk or say anything. All this weird freaky stuff is happening and the main character never wonders what's going on or gets freaked out. There is basically no character development at all, which means that there is almost no story also. This game is just about investigating and exploring. That's it. That's all. Nothing more.