Fatal Frame: Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse director Makoto Shibata talks about his inspirations to story characters and mechanics in a new developer commentary, revealing that many of these iconic elements are based upon his real life experiences with ghosts and dreams.
The events of the main story are set on the fictional Rougetsu Island (Hazy Moon Island), with a luxurious hall called Rougetsu Sanatorium acting as the main setting for these events. When the heroine Ruka Minazuki explores this mansion, the players can have her reach her hand out in a peculiar way to explore various furniture and devices, and according to the director, this gimmick was inspired by a real-life ghost that grabbed his hand once in a hurtful manner.
This experience apparently lingered in the director's mind, as he says he added it as a cutscene in Fatal Frame III: The Tormented, but here he implemented the experience as a main concept throughout the game. As for the hostile female spirit dressed in black, she is entirely based on Mr. Miyamoto, a person who often appears in the director's dreams.
He is someone who walks around with a bandaged person in his wheelchair, and the bandaged person often appears dead with maggots crawling all over them. Also, sometimes it appears without Mr Miyamoto beside it, and all of this carries a huge parallel to the female spirit's concept in-game.
Fatal Frame: Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse Spoiler Warning
The lady in black is composed of two people: The intensive care patient Kageri Sendou and a doll – named Watashi/I or me – made in the likeness of her deceased twin sister, Kaoru Sendou, which she likes to push around in a wheelchair and walk alongside it around the courtyard of the hospital to which she was admitted. Mr. Miyamoto – the director's dream ghost – was also mentioned to say "don't touch me" to the director when he tried getting closer to the wheelchair in his dream, and when Ruka tries to get closer to the doll in Fatal Frame, Kaoru appears and says the same thing.
The director also adds that because sound is an important component of Fatal Frame, he added more gimmicks that could produce sounds in this version, such as nurse calls, music boxes, pianos, and radios; not just the telephone like the older version. He also has Ruka remembering her past through playing the piano because he believes sound and memory are connected, and that everyone has an experience of remembering something forgotten through music.
Fatal Frame: Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse, originally a Japanese Wii-exclusive game, is now getting localized and released on March 9 this year on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.