As was speculated several months ago due to the orange box around the game’s listing on Nintendo’s website, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has been officially confirmed as an eShop exclusive in North America. This news comes as a bit of a letdown to fans who have been salivating over the recently announced limited edition physical bundle coming to Europe.
The silver lining for fans of the franchise is that this new Fatal Frame will be hitting the Wii U eShop Oct. 22, an entire week before it drops in PAL regions, for $49.99. Just make sure you’ve got the space to download it, as the game takes up a whopping 15.9GB, meaning even those with the 32GB Deluxe Wii U will likely need external storage to hold the game. Luckily you can get a 1TB external hard drive for an extremely affordable $70 over at Amazon, which should take care of all your future Wii U downloading needs until the end of the console’s life.
The most important thing to take away from this is that we’re actually getting Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water in some form, which is a small miracle in and of itself considering that less than a year ago Koei Tecmo told worldwide audiences that the game would only see a Japanese release. If you’re not quite sold on the game, you can download it for free and play nearly to the end of chapter 2 before having to purchase it in full.