Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask Director Makoto Shibata took to Xbox Wire to detail some of the real-life experiences with ghosts and the paranormal that helped shape the game. In particular, he noted how his own experiences at a hot spring hotel and sense of being caught directly influenced the gameplay. Shibata also noted that a mysterious voice that appeared while recording the game also stuck around.
First, Shibata noticed Rogetsu Hall in Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask he ended up drawing inspiration from seeing a strange man who then disappeared. This is your Xbox Wire story.
The true source of inspiration for Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask it’s from an experience I had that still gives me goosebumps. In the game, one of the places you will visit is Rogetsu Hall. This is actually based on an old Japanese style hot spring hotel owned by a relative of mine. We used to meet there as a family, and that night my family were the only guests in the hotel, so no one else was there. I woke up in the middle of the night, and as the interior of the hotel was only dimly lit by moonlight streaming through the window, the fantastic atmosphere enticed me to wander around a bit. That is, until I saw a man I didn’t recognize standing across the hall, staring out the window in the moonlight.
There should only be relatives around, but this man was definitely a stranger. As I slowly approached to see who it was, the man looked at me then quickly disappeared. With more curiosity than fear, I walked to where the man was standing. I looked out the window and saw the big moon. I stood there staring at the moon for a while until I realized I was now in the exact same pose as the man I had just seen. I began to wonder if this man was a spirit? Was it a vision from someone’s past? Or did I just have a vision of my future? I knew I wanted to capture a moment like this in-game.
In Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask, ghosts can sometimes grab characters when searching for objects, and director Shibata explained how his own paranormal experience also inspired him. He felt “stuck” working on Fatal Frame III: The Haunted. But, since he couldn’t be implemented in this entry, he was saved to become a mechanic in the fourth episode.
Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask it also has a unique system where the player is sometimes grabbed by a ghostly hand while searching for an item. It was actually based on a spiritual experience I had during the production of a previous game, Fatal Frame III: The Tormented. One night I was sleeping at home when I felt someone holding my hand. At first I thought it was an illusion since I was still in a fog of sleep, but the cold hand remained steady, slowly increasing its strength. “Hurts! Hurts!” I cried, finally feeling the cold hand move away before seeing it disappear into a wall. could have been there. There was a spirit behind the wall!
Shibata also explained how two things he heard also made their way into the game. For example, he explained how to hear a ghost sing in Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask it happened after listening to a similar type of “song” after sleeping after work.
For Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask, the original version of the game was not made in the Koei Tecmo studio, but in the Grasshopper Manufacture studio, so we never saw the boy’s spirit, but they had a ping pong table on which he was sleeping when we were working on it. I was playing late into the night, and every once in a while I would see a girl’s spirit running around the table, running slowly and silently. If he didn’t respond when he saw her, he would go to the window and sing a song. “Four, four, six…” Apparently he was singing numbers in verse form. I was never able to hear the ending clearly, but I thought it was a message they wanted me to include in the game, so I decided to include an event where a girl says numbers as if she sang them.
Finally, the director mentioned that no purification ritual was done before doing Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask. He claimed that as a result, some of the audio recordings captured featured a “voice” that was left behind and incorporated into the game.
In the Japanese game industry, it is customary to visit a shrine and perform a purification ceremony when starting work on a horror title. The purpose of the ceremony is to prevent any spiritual phenomena or disturbances during game development, but to Fatal Marco, we thought it best to let the spirits emerge, so we don’t usually do the smudging ceremony for games in this series. For this reason, some spiritual phenomena occurred during development and were directly reflected in the game, such as when we were recording sound and a mysterious voice was recorded in the background. We tried to remove it from the recording, but ended up giving up because no matter what we did, the voice kept showing up on the recording, so we left it in the game!
Fatal Frame: Lunar Eclipse Mask is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC via Steam.