Ju-on on the Wii is as you would expect, a game based on the J-horror movie Ju-on, or better known in the US, “The Grudge.” Not sure why both the original Japanese title and its English translation made it into the game title. I guess they wanted to make sure everyone knew what it was. Anyway, it’s a first person “haunted house simulator” divided up into five short episodes making it a pretty damn short game. In each episode, you take on the role of a different person, (all in the same family being tormented by Ju-on,) who has to solve simple puzzles in an environment where the lights don’t work even though the elevator does. Meanwhile, creepy phenomena happen around you.
Sometimes you’ll have a face to face encounter with the grudge. Typically when this happens, it takes the form of a quick time event with arrows prompting you to wave the wiimote different directions. If you fail a single prompt, you die and have to start over from the begining of the episode. There’s also ones where you hide and have to keep the wiimote cursor within a shrinking/moving ring. The most difficult QTE’s are always toward the end of the episode which is just great in a one shot no checkpoints game when the complicated deadly thing is at the end. Oh boy, I know that the more times I have to go through a gauntlet of the same exact scripted events that I’ve already seen, the more scary and entertaining it gets.
When I first started this game, I automatically connected the nunchuck, expecting to be using the joystick for moving but no. The only thing you use is the wiimote, waving it around to steer, (aim the flashlight,) and the directional pad to move. Goody, directional pad in a 3D game. My fave. It works okay. Not great. Still doesn’t have shit on a conventional controller with dual sticks and you’ll still occasionally find yourself spinning around and looking at the floor for no apparent reason. The character walks excruciatingly slow. I guess this is to control the pacing of the episodes but it’s so annoying. Sometimes a noise will happen or something presumably appears out of my field of vision with a sting and I’ll just keep plodding along like nothing happened because it’s too much of a pain in the ass to turn around and look. It’ll probably be gone by then anyway. 
At the end of a chapter, or when you die, you get a rating of how you did. There are two meters, the fear meter and the sissy meter. The completely optional objective is to keep them as low as possible. I don’t think you get anything for doing good but the game berates you if you do bad. This is an interesting idea. Too bad the way it’s implemented makes it completely dumbfuck inaccurate. The sissy meter as far as I can discern just measures time spent in the episode. I guess the idea is that a sissy goes through a haunted house slowly. But in practice in the game it mostly means that if you explore or get stuck for a while, it translates to you’re a sissy. That’s not even taking into account how incredibly slow your character moves to begin with. I like exploring. I want to be able to see all of the scares and find all of the secret items. Was that not more or less the point of it all? If that means a jaded horrorphile like me is a sissy, then fine. The scare meter has to do with your reactions to quick time events. I don’t panic during these. I’m always as accurate to the best of my ability, unaffected by anything happening on screen unless it’s visually interfering with the prompts. I do it quickly and precisely but with exaggerated gestures. I do this because there is a lot of prompts on screen and/or I don’t have faith in the functionality of the wiimote. If I appear panicky, it’s because I don’t want to do the level over again, you know, just like in every single other QTE that exists regardless of horror elements. So the game gives you a low score for taking too long when they made your character walk super slow and it gives you a low score when you flail around with a controller that is designed to be used by flailing around. Fucking brilliant, guys! The scientific community needs to be alerted of this new method of fear analysis! We’re on the cusp of a fucking paradigm shift here!
Oh and nice mirrored/reused textures too you lazy bastards.
I did get a good score once. It works like this: knowing exactly where to go and what to do essentially gives you a low sissy score. Being apathetic toward failure and death during QTE’s gives you a low scare score. If that sounds like the perfect storm of fun, this is the game for you.
Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.
Ironically this is actually one of the least scary "scary games" I've ever played. It has the potential but I think the mechanics and the presentation kind of kill it. It's very linear almost to the point of being on-rails, (if you could go back and forth on the rails. But I guess if you were really trying to simulate a haunted house, it would be linear.) The events are all scripted and you know which ones can kill you and which ones can't. Any deadly encounters are all settled on reactionary time instead of your combat or escape abilities. There is no sense of increased vulnerability like there is with a life gauge or dwindling supplies... unless you count batteries but that's much to simplistic.
Finding batteries around in the levels is necessary to progress. Think of it as life support. If you run out, you die. Typically the hardest thing is finding that second battery in the short time you get before your first one runs out. After that it’s usually not an issue if you keep your eyes open.
Episode four is the hardest. It has you play as a security guard at a mannequin research facility where scientists are making strides in the field of creepy mannequin placement in dark buildings. The power got shut off by something weird on the security monitor. You’re supposed to go to the breaker room and switch it back on but you can’t get in without the three number door code which you have to find in three pieces scattered around the building. Why the hell do I not just know the code? If one person in the building is going to know the code for the door, it’s the damn security guard. I was also disappointed that I wasn’t able to put in the code manually. If you have two out of three numbers and you know the order, you can easily guess the third by trial and error… if you can do it manually. The final QTE is just nuts and I failed it several times. Even after I passed it, I still wasn’t sure how I did it because it was not an effort of the conscious mind. Something else took over.
Everyone dies at the end of their episode but you are required to pass the final QTE just so you can live another five seconds and accomplish nothing further. Why do I have to start over if I die? What is the ultimate difference if I die now versus five seconds from now? Or hell, why not just die at the beginning of the stage? Then you should get a game over screen and the next episode is unlocked. Nothing matters. It makes no difference except maybe in the final episode.
In order to unlock episode five, (the final episode,) you must collect all of the torn pieces to all of the secret paper documents scattered throughout the levels. What did I say before? I want to collect all of the pieces? Well not now that I have to do it to finish the game. Now it’s tedious and boring.
I got stuck on episode five during the cat event. (Think Neo dodging bullets from agents but instead of shooting bullets, they’re throwing cats.) I couldn’t figure out the final gesture so I kept failing it. For the longest time, I thought it was just up but it’s actually thrust as in thrust the controller at the screen. Oh, sorry. I was confused because the arrow wasn’t three-dimensionally pointing through the screen. My first question is why is the arrow placed near the top of the screen where up always goes instead of in the middle where it could carve out it’s own niche? My second question is why don’t you establish what the gestures are before hand so that people can recognize them on screen? Up to this point in the game, I had gotten by with just the four movements on a two dimensional plane, up, down, left and right and those didn’t need explanations but when you pull this shit out of thin air, it’s confusing. It makes no sense to introduce two new gestures at the very end of the game.
Anyone else think Grudge Girl looks cute, like in some of the parts where she just grabs your arm? No? Okay…
It’s hard not to compare Ju-on to Calling since they have many similarities. I can say without a doubt though that Ju-on succeeds in being better than Calling. That’s not saying much since Calling holds the distinction of being the worst game I’ve ever played released on a major console. Ju-on can beat Calling simply by virtue of being a shorter game.
