Parasite Eve Series Retrospective | An Exhaustive History and Review

it's often pretty easy to feel pessimistic about the current state of the video game industry between predatory monetization ever increasing prices and ever decreasing creativity that world that was once dominated by Innovation and Imagination can feel like it's slipping away we've swapped out memorable experiences for hyper engagement and for an old dog like me you can sometimes look around and barely recognize the hobby you fell in love with this depressing landscape means it's all the more surprising that emits the endless live service failures and copycat Trend chasing a deeply unfashionable relic of the 1990s has come roaring back into popularity the survival horror genre is currently experiencing a monstrous Revival after almost two decades in the wilderness and is arguably in a golden age dominating headlines a wash with critical Acclaim and drawing in millions for its creators what makes this all the more impressive is that this revival is happening in both the world of independent and AAA development and for every smaller sleeper hit like signalis tormented souls or dark wood there's a big budget companion in Resident Evil 2 the Callisto protocol or Dead Space we clearly can't get enough of exploring dark hallways and managing inventories so it should come as no surprise that every single publisher with a once great survival horror IP is looking to get back into the action in the past 12 months we've seen the announcement of a Silent Hill 2 remake trailers for an all-new Alan weight game the release of another Resident Evil remake and even the return of alone in the dark given the industry's current obsession with high quality remakes these modern horror resurrections are a clear Union of everything that's currently fashionable creating a rare mixture that manages to satisfy developer publisher and consumer in one Fell Swoop is this clear path to success that makes those series that haven't returned all the more curious as Studios that are usually happy to chase modern Trends seem content to leave money on the table and fans confused by the silence today we're going to explore one of the iconic sleeping Giants of this genre a franchise that on the surface looks like the perfect candidate for a modern Revival but upon closer inspection masks some of the most bizarre franchise building the video game industry has ever seen it's a mash of mediums genres and narratives equal parts cinematic Blockbuster spine tingling horror and experimental RPG a true artifact of a world before live services and monetization symbol of a time when video games were authentic imaginative and above all else strange this is a lengthy Parasite Eve retrospective and it's time to awaken from our uneasy dreams as we're going to discover in this video Parasite Eve isn't exactly a traditional franchise and so it should come as no surprise that our Twisted Journey Begins not with the release of a video game but with the publication of a novel In 1995 a Young author called hideaki Sena had his first book picked up by the publishing wing of karakawa Corporation and much to the surprise of both parties it quickly began to gain traction becoming the talk of bookstores and reading clubs across Japan this surprise here was called Parasite Eve a 300-page science fiction Thriller that shocked conservative Japanese audiences with a blend of Twisted body horror captivating mystery and real-life scientific theory you see senna's writing was deeply influenced by his time working as a pharmacologist and the core concept of his book explores the very real theory of symbiogenesis without getting too deep into the complexities of genetic biology it's a scientific theory that the modern cells which make up most living creatures evolve from a union of ancient bacteria and microscopic organisms this symbiotic relationship would eventually turn into the nuclear-based cells that you recognize from your science classes with the bacteria becoming the energy producing mitochondria that power all life now despite the complex science that influenced it the idea behind parasite Eve's narrative is simple what if that benevolent cellular Union was parasitic and what if the mitochondria had malevolent intent for their human hosts the novel begins with the death of a young woman called Kiyomi nagashima who crashes her car in mysterious circumstances her husband a biological scientist called toshiaki finds himself unable to accept this cruel twist and begins experimenting on cultivated cells from her body dreaming that this work will be able to bring her back to life while toshiaki slowly descends into madness kiyomi's organs are donated to a local hospital where her kidneys end up in Marico as I a schoolgirl in desperate need of a transplant at first her condition improves but very quickly her doctors and father begin to notice that all is not well maraco frequently complains of a burning pain in her abdomen and eventually begins having chronic panic attacks convinced that there's something growing inside of her it's Horror in the classic sense of the genre combining Shelley's Frankenstein and Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers both disgusting us at the terrible things that can happen inside of our bodies while also exploring that Gothic fear of life beyond death now as the book progresses Senna Blends these archetypal influences into a surprisingly fresh form by heavily relying on that scientific background One Night in toshiaki's laboratory he discovers that the cells from body have become sentient and form a being called Eve that takes on his dead wife's image now the character of Eve is once again rooted in the real world as mitochondrial eve was the name that scientists gave to the theoretical common ancestor that all humans can trace their genetic ancestry to is supposedly an East African woman who lived 200 000 years ago and of course the name Eve refers to the biblical character who birthed the first humans in senna's story Eve is the combined consciousness of all mitochondria who have been influencing Humanity from behind the cellular curtain they guided our transformation from Primeval Apes into higher beings and here we find them ready to emerge from the shadows and announce their existence Eve had influenced kyomi into crashing her car influenced toshiaki to experiment on her body and forced Marico to accept her kidney the master plan is to unite all three of these characters and to create the ultimate mitochondrial entity a creature that can change its genetic code at will allowing it to supplant Humanity as the dominant species now this crazed Revelation leads to a pretty exciting final 100 Pages Eve is rampaging through the university and Hospital causing the mitochondria in those who oppose her to set their hosts Ablaze and forcibly birthing the ultimate being who is unsurprisingly a horrific monster things of course resolve in a flash of tragedy and good fortune as Eve's plan falls apart thanks to a critical error while genes are passed on through maternal mitochondria they still require those of the father and without them her ultimate being is born imperfect and dies screaming in confusion comforted only by toshiaki who sacrifices himself to contain its terrible power for Japanese audiences this was horror unlike anything they'd seen before and the book was awarded the first ever Japan horror novel award recognizing its popularity with both critics and Casual readers Cena quickly became a household name with some magazine even calling him Japan's answer to Stephen King and within just a year he had media companies hounding him to sign away the rights to create other interpretations of Parasite Eve now before we take a look at those inevitable adaptations we need to quickly address the legacy of Parasite Eve the novel because despite this shining reception time has actually been rather cruel to hideaki sena's breakout work while it was hugely influential in kick-starting a new wave of dark Japanese storytelling it never really interested Publishers in the west and it would take the surprise success of the 1998 film adaptation of the ring for American and European audiences to really start to understand this unique style of horror now unfortunately while this caused a surge of interest in the ghostly Aesthetics of The Grudge dark Waters and the comics of junji Ito Cena's hardcore scientific theory ended up missing the bow amazingly Parasite Eve was untranslated until 2005 and when it was finally released the pros which had terrified stiff 90s Japanese audiences was rather lost on a market that had been raised on King Barker Lovecraft and Poe the novel currently sits at around a three out of five on Goodreads and considering the number of very positive reviews from Hardcore fans of the video games that score is misleadingly generous the key issue is that Cena's writing style is very cold and really lacks the human touch that makes horror feel so real and so terrifying large portions of the book concern themselves with densely detailed accounts of surgical operations or cell experiments while this does make the science fiction ideas very believable it's impossible to not feel like it's pulling you away from its other more interesting elements with almost 200 pages of tough non-fiction style writing to get through before the payoff it's a surprisingly hard read and one that Cena himself acknowledged by softening the tone of his future novels sadly it also seems like some of the language hasn't exactly survived its translation as certain lines feel very strangely constructed take this Oddity for example toshiyaki absent-mindedly clenched his abdomen he urinated at the sight of the thing he could barely move he clenched his abdomen the gentle curve of the monster's pubic Mound aroused him or how about the equally clunky the monster snarled at toshiaki toshiaki at bellowed what toshiaki answered absent-mindedly in order to grow in size cells must fuse new lipid vesticles with the cell membrane the monster growled the vesticles are transported to the sites of Fusion on actin cables toshiaki screamed it reads like a combination of a fangoria short story and a science reference book and while its core ideas are fascinating the execution at least in English anyway is very lacking and makes for a tough old read it would have been a hard book to recommend in 2005. let alone in 2023 but what's important is it was deeply popular in Japan in 1995 and film studios were circling like vultures eager to extract their pound of media adaptation flesh now the book's success was not only good news for hideaki Sena who was able to leave pharmacology and pursue a career as an author but also for the book's publisher kadakawa Corporation amazingly kadakawa was primarily known for producing big budget movies and throughout the 70s and 80s they had a string of domestic hits they encouraged them to step onto the global stage and try to go head to head with the Giants of Hollywood funnily enough this hadn't worked out all too well and in 1992 the company's big International gamble a thriller starring Andy McDowell and Viggo Mortensen called Ruby Cairo had utterly bombed it managed to only make back four hundred thousand dollars against a 25 million dollar budget which led to it being dropped from American distribution and devastating the company's reputation kadakawa had to dramatically scale back their Film Production Ambitions and where they'd once produced as many as 10 movies a year they spent the next three licking their wounds and trying to stay solvent the opportunity to head back into the market came in the shape of the surprise success of Parasite Eve which their smaller publishing Wing had picked up and meant that the parent company automatically held the film right instead of selling them off to the highest bidder it was decided that they should fund the movie themselves and so they contracted the talents of rising star director masayuki Ochi who was given a modest budget of 500 million yen and told to convert literary success into a theatrical hit after an eight-week production schedule Parasite Eve was released on February 1st 1997 and almost immediately it became clear that it was very much not a hit during its five-week theatrical run the film only managed to make back around half of its production and marketing budget not flopping as hard as Ruby Cairo but certainly underperforming enough to make an international release not viable while other J horror adaptations like the ring and The Grudge rate in millions at the international box office Parasite Eve was once again left behind and while it was sometimes to be screened at Niche horror events and was actually subtitled into English its chances of seeing mainstream success went next to zero in interviews years later oti would blame the film's poor reception on Studio interference claiming that Executives have pushed for major revisions to its themes and plot which had prevented him from creating a true horror experience it's a Tale As Old As Time Studio gets worried about their cash pushes their creatives to make changes and it all backfires hideously a perfectly believable explanation for the film's box office woes the thing is Parasite Eve is a rather more Curious movie than that explanation would have you believe and after watching it I'm not actually sure I agree with oti's assessment of his own work it's a fascinating example of Studio interference potentially creating something more interesting and despite its poor reviews and Commercial failure it's one of the most strangely captivating movies I've ever seen now a huge part of that is that I think the movie format is a much better fit for the story of Parasite Eve despite being only 300 pages long Cena's novel is full of overly in-depth scientific explanations they don't really need to be there and when strip back to its core beats its small cast of characters and locations are a natural candidate for a tightly paced screenplay now that might sound less interesting than the flashback Laden Source material but it's a classic storytelling structure for a reason and it allows the focus to remain on the things Parasite Eve does well which are often surprisingly different from the strengths of the book the film places a much larger emphasis on the relationship between toshiaki and kyomi with the entire first half concerned with her death and our main character's inability to accept that it's happened instead of lengthy sequences exploring the finer points of surgery or explanations of cellular composition we have long somber scenes where toshiaki degenerates in front of us slipping into denial and depression in a way that sets up all the science fiction Terror in the second half unlike the hyper pace of Western horror films there's a real slow burn where we can sense that things aren't quite right but you're never sure if that's because of the supernatural or just because the lives of parasite Eve's characters are pretty miserable what makes this change of tone really work is that the film's score is absolutely fantastic I have no idea how he became involved in this project but the soundtrack was put together by legendary Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisashi at this point he was already responsible for some of the greatest film scores of all time and his work utterly elevates parisaif Beyond its simple camera work and basic acting soft piano Melodies enrich romantic flashbacks a tonal synths pulsate through moments of intensity an hisachi even crafts unique themes for each character which adds a recurring familiarity that twists and shifts throughout the course of the film a movie like this has absolutely no business sounding this good and for any fans of Angelo bad lamenti's work on Twin Peaks you'll be right at home in this unique blend of atmospheric and thematic scoring now oti's big criticism was that all this human emotion and romance lessened the atmosphere of horror and honestly he's not wrong as parasite often doesn't feel anything like a horror film and takes well over an hour before we begin to see anything reminiscent of the genre because the focus is so far away from the scientific theory the supernatural elements of the film are presented as if they could be fragments of our characters tortured imaginations and when they do finally arrive it comes with a real punch and almost feels like a Twist obviously thanks to the reputation of the novel and the video game almost everyone going into this film will expect some form of supernatural horror and that's a real shame because had this film been called something less obvious like Kiyomi or Eve this pivot Into Darkness would have carried a much greater impact now after the reveal that Eve and the mitochondria are behind everything the pace goes up a notch and we're thrust into a classic japanese horror finale with kyomi floating through the halls of the hospital setting police officers Ablaze and kidnapping young Marico in order to birth the ultimate being here we get our last big Divergence from the book as the ending has been changed considerably although this time I think that's less because of Studio interference and more because senna's original conclusion wasn't all that satisfying in the book The mitochondria forcibly impregnate Marico leading to the birth of the ultimate being which through the cold and emotionless style of senna's writing is really not a particularly Pleasant thing to read it's an element that's taken almost Universal criticism and certainly feels like a sensitive subject being used for shock value rather than to truly serve the story in ogi's alternative Eve reveals to toshiaki that Kiyomi never really loved him as she'd been under the influence of her mitochondria from the moment they met and all of his experiments had been to revive a woman who'd been forced into their relationship amazingly instead of this breaking him toshiaki appeals to Eve despite this harrowing Revelation the love he had felt was still real and whether it was with Kiyomi or Eve he couldn't bear to be apart from them anymore this apparently softens the heart of the mitochondria and in a flaming pillar against the night sky the plan for the ultimate being is abandoned and our protagonist and antagonist head into the Afterlife together choosing each other over world domination now as a narrative conclusion this is about as cliche as it's possible to be but it's saved once again by the work of Joe Hisashi the music raises this climactic scene from nonsense to captivating and as the final notes of Eve's theme play over our characters burning final moments it feels and looks impactful even if the story doesn't quite do the scene Justice I suppose that's a real beauty of filmmaking as an art form it's Visual and oral before it has to be logical and despite the head scratching change in motivation it's just a captivating bit of Cinema now despite being a long time defender of many the book was better opinions I'd surprisingly recommend the movie over the novel simply because it's a much smaller time investment and Santa's writing style really is an acquired taste that won't be for many readers parasite either movie might not have a fantastic reputation compared to its genre appears but it's still a unique Horror Story in a sea of low budget slashes and well worth a look simply to see The Genius of Joe Hisashi away from the colorful world of Studio Ghibli with the film disappointing at the box office and the novel confined to Japanese Shores the reality for Parasite Eve was that despite its early success in Japan the series simply hadn't done enough to Warrant major International interests or any sort of meaningful long-term reputation just like countless other small novels and low-budget horror films it should have faded into the background but as I'm sure you're well aware this is not the end of our story and is in fact just the beginning that short-lived Fame Parasite Eve had found as a novel and film would be nothing compared to the Legacy it would leave in a completely different medium the upstart world of the video game so while our story stays in Japan here we switch tracks and shift to another set of ambitious storytellers in January 1997 Japanese developer squaresoft became the most important video game company in the world when they released Final Fantasy VII on the Sony PlayStation to enormous critical Acclaim and financial success originally they tasked their American office with selling 500 000 units but after just 12 months Final Fantasy VII had sold almost 3 million us copies with monster success in both Japan and Europe taking the total to well beyond 10 million globally it was the sort of success that was usually reserved for Mario or sonic and this Blockbuster here opened a lot of new doors for the fast growing Japanese Studio big publishing deals were struck with Sony and Electronic Arts and with lots of hungry young developers applying for positions and masses of money pouring in squaresoft found themselves in a rather unique position they were free to fund all manner of strange and creative projects but actually had the ability to deliver on them and a new audience who were Keen to lap up everything the company produced between 1997 and 2000 squaresoft's run of PlayStation releases marks one of the greatest streaks in video game history with almost everything from this period resonating with their fans and enjoying at least cult status if not massive generational Acclaim along with Final Fantasy VII Square's big name franchise sequels like Final Fantasy 8 and 9 Chrono cross and legend of Mana would all become Classics of the genre and somehow managed to blend design Innovation with positive reviews and further financial success even Square's new IPS seem to make massive waves and young developers like yasumi matsuno and tetsuya Takahashi were given the freedom to follow their dreams leading to Masterpiece games like Final Fantasy Tactics Xeno gears and vagrant story with almost Limitless budgets developers who felt like they could take on any challenge Square even began to Branch outside of role-playing games and this atmosphere of creative freedom led to some very interesting takes on other popular 90s genres 1997 saw the release of Bushido blood a samurai-based fighting game that reimagined the combo chains of Tekken into a tense standoff where a single blow could win the round that same year they'd release einhander a shoot-em-up that Blended their Flair for storytelling with the gameplay of gradius and in 1999 they'd release a cinematic street racing game called racing Lagoon that felt like a combination of Grand Terrace Gizmo and a visual novel by the end of the decade they'd released a mascot cart racer a cartoon Dungeon Crawler an open-ended action adventure a 3D brawler an even branched out into portable gaming everything was possible and nothing was off the table and so it should come as no surprise that they also turned their attention to a whole new genre that had been captivating audiences around the world survival horror in 1996 heavily inspired by the growing J horror movement that the original Parasite Eve novel had been a part of Capcom designer Shinji makami had put together Resident Evil and just like Final Fantasy VII it taken off both at home and abroad creating an entirely new style of game that focused on creating tension with its gameplay and horrifying players with its visuals with square in a position to chase after almost every single popular trend of the mid-90s the decision to go after this Market seems obvious but this is actually where the history of this franchise begins to get a little confusing you see the origins of Parasite Eve the video game a surprisingly found long before Resident Evil was ever released back in the world of two-dimensional development legendary designer director producer and writer hironobu sakaguchi who is one of the core members of squaresoft's leadership team had been toying with the idea of a horror themed detective game set in modern New York as far back as 1994. and this premise was at one point poised to become Final Fantasy VII unfortunately the troubled development of Chrono Trigger had required Square to reassign all manpower to the project and by the time work resumed on the next big Final Fantasy game its direction had changed to the industrial Punk tale of environmental terrorists that we all know so well today now with Resident Evil Making Waves and square looking to expand their catalog it's not hard to believe that sakaguchi would revisit this concept but that doesn't really explain why he chose to do it with a pre-existing IP after months of searching trawling through Japanese interviews and old magazine previews I can't find a single explanation for why squaresoft a company renowned for original storytelling so committed to Fresh ideas that at this point they had never produced a true narrative sequel would decide to license a small horror novel to adapt instead of creating something themselves there's absolutely nothing on record to explain this and all I've been able to discover is some conjecture that katakara Corporation was Keen to sell the license due to their financial difficulties this decision to adapt rather than create makes even less sense the further into development we get as when Parasite Eve was announced in late 1996 it was revealed that the game would be a sequel to the novel rather than an adaptation an hideayaki Sena would have no involvement in its production with sakaguchi's Team Penning an all-new story within the setting with the questionable motivations behind its creation and sakaguchi owned producing rather than working Hands-On on its development Parisa Eve had all the makings of a catastrophe but squaresoft in the 90s wasn't any old company and the shared Talent within their roster had developed a knack for producing incredible games from the most unlikely of circumstances the job of directing and writing Parasite Eve was given to Takashi takita a rising star who was coming off the back of two highly successful SNES games his last two directing credits were 1994's live alive and 1995's Chrono Trigger which were both legendary RPG Swan songs for the 16-bit ERA with Chrono Trigger in particular becoming a big International hit and enjoying a Monumental Legacy now while many RPG directors prioritized complex battle design and inventive ways to convert role-playing into video game form sakaguchi chose takita because he approached design in a very different way he was a massive fan of Cinema having wanted to become an actor before he went into the gaming industry and this love of the dramatic can be found all throughout his games which usually emphasized storytelling and memorable visuals above the nitty-gritty of numbers and systems this was the perfect fear a sakaguchi or Parasite Eve as the next step in Square's exploration of the PlayStation cinematic potential with CGI cutscenes planned to make up a huge part of the game's run time Square even gave Parasite Eve the moniker the Cinematic RPG which indicated just how heavy an emphasis they placed on its creative presentation and storytelling now while takita penned an all-new story based on sakaguchi's ideas the job of crafting parasite Eve's characters would fall to another squaresoft up-and-comer tatsuya namura namura had put together the famous character designs in Final Fantasy VII and during its development he'd become an increasingly important part of the team contributing story ideas and quickly growing into one of sakaguchi's go-to guys when he was asked to work on Parasite Eve sakaguchi requested a character that could emulate the popularity of core designs Lara Croft a lead character that was both strong but also very feminine a powerful self-sufficient heroine that could blend being an action hero with a hefty dose of sex appeal now rather ironically considering all this newfound responsible ability nomura ended up confusing some of his work briefs and the final design of parasite Eve's main character New York police officer Aya Breyer ended up being a combination of two different ideas he was working on sakaguchi had originally wanted a more homely design along the lines of aerith Gainsborough but such was nomura's talent that the team decided to stick with the Slender blonde look of Aya who they felt would stand out better and would avoid any negative Tomb Raider comparisons the final piece of the puzzle that was parasite Eve's development team was composer Yoko shimomura who'd recently joined the company after defecting from Capcom in her last job she composed the iconic soundtracks for both the street fighter and final fight series but since arriving at Square she'd only had a few smaller jobs mainly owing to noburo uematsu's well-deserved place at the head of the table luckily for her she'd worked together with takita on live alive and when offered the opportunity to work on a big budget CD based soundtrack she grabbed the chance with both hands and never looked back along with simply being able to do much more on the PlayStation than was possible on the SNES the role of the soundtrack was very important to the Cinematic presentation of Parasite Eve as it was decided early on that the team would avoid using any voice acting this meant that shimamura's score would not only have to augment the action and cut scenes but would have to provide all of the emotional way to the game's many scenes of voiceless dialogue influenced by the modern American setting shimamura created a soundtrack that's a rather unique in Square's catalog issuing the folk and Prague influence of umatsu's Classics in favor of a distinct blend of techno Hard Rock and operatic choral music it really is a master class in both constructing memorable themes and complementing the on-screen action and unsurprisingly this work reignited shimamura's career and she would go on to become one of the most respected composers in the entire history of the industry with such a talented team working on the project those presumed issues behind the game's creation ended up hardly making a difference despite the development team being split between Tokyo and California in just two years Parisa Eve had gone from a loose idea in sakaguchi's head to a completely fleshed out cinematic horror RPG in September of 1997 the first trailer was shown off at Tokyo game show despite it consisting entirely of pre-rendered footage the video game media were absolutely entranced a marketing campaign that similarly focused on the game's visuals also hit American and Japanese televisions and by March 1998 the game was ready to ship to an excited fan base ready to see what Square's next big video game would look like upon release reviews didn't quite match up to the Glorious Acclaim that met Final Fantasy VII with most Publications settling on around a 7 out of 10. but that muted critical response wasn't shared by consumers in Japan parasite you've quickly sold over 1 million copies making it one of the best-selling games of 1998 and when it was released in America later that year Commercial Success struck again with the game passing 2 million units sold worldwide by the end of the year eventually it would get Greatest Hits re-release and while we don't have any definitive final numbers it's likely the sales total was anywhere between two and a half and three million units despite Parasite Eve having existed since 1995 it was the video game that finally made it a recognizable International franchise but what was it about this strange licensed game that found success where it had eluded the novel and movie the simple answer is that 1990 squaresoft made undeniably good games but the more complex and far more interesting reality can only be found by diving into this strange world of mitochondrial monsters and cinematic horror action what sets Parasite Eve apart from almost every other release of the PlayStation generation is that it is one of the most confident genre Blends ever pressed to a disc now it has a well-known reputation for mixing the survival horror of Resident Evil with the ambitious storytelling and complex mechanics of squaresoft RPGs but in reality it is so much more than that and brings a lot of surprising influences into its unique video game mixture it's got the visuals of a big budget summer blockbuster the heart of an 80s buddy cop film and the twists and turns of a science fiction Thriller all wrapped up in a narrative that is genuinely connected to hideaki senna's original entry in the Parasite Eve Saga time might have made its visuals less impressive its gameplay ideals might be dampened by later Innovations and its narrative might have been eclipsed by greatest storytellers but there is still absolutely nothing that combines this many different ideas into a single experience and makes it work one of parasite Eve's most interesting qualities becomes clear within seconds of starting a new game and it's the way that it is paced it's not just a video game influenced by the ideas of Cinema as much as it is a video game that's been structured to work like a movie now this probably doesn't sound like an important distinction but the game's opening sequence is the perfect illustration of why this approach sets Parasite Eve aside from its peers it's both a tutorial level and a gripping start to the game's narrative and while most RPGs start notoriously slowly and survival horror games tend to throw you right into the deep end Parasite Eve manages to walk the thin line between these two worlds everything begins on Christmas Eve at the New York Metropolitan Opera House a limousine pulls up to the front and outsteps a young blonde woman in a black evening dress and heels this is our main character officer Aya Breyer and she is on a date although it isn't going particularly well with Aya struggling to relax and enjoy herself unsurprisingly this tension ends up being well founded as during the show's climactic scene a solo by the female lead the rest of the cast suddenly burst into flame throwing the audience into a state of panic seemingly unfazed by this the lead sings on and as her voice fills the theater so do The Flames with fiery bodies tumbling from the upper Circle and survivors scrambling to get out now obviously one of the big drawers of Parasite Eve was the promise of squaresoft making an M rated game and frankly this cutscene shows that they were going to make the most of it it's a disturbing and gruesome sequence one that carries just just as much impact now as it did in the 90s it also highlights the unique way that takita chose to implement the game's fmvs you see where Final Fantasy 7 used cut scenes as a sort of climactic reward for completing an area or defeating a boss Parasite Eve weaves them into the rest of the gameplay and uses them as a cinematic tool meant to sit alongside the in-engine dialogue and combat it's something we'll touch on in Greater detail in a later section but this constant use of shorter Clips is a really clever move that ends up making the game feel much more grandiose so along with establishing how Parasite Eve is going to present its story The Opera sequence also cleverly lays out every other element that will become important during your playthrough and it does this in a very natural way that very much lessens the feel of playing through a tutorial luckily for Aya she appears to be impervious to the singer's powers and so she rushes to the stage and demands that the actress stop whatever it is that she's doing a request that is promptly denied here we're introduced to parasite Eve's combat which at first seems rather simple once a battle begins you're free to move around as you please and have to avoid enemy attacks and position yourself in range to return fire although you can only do this when your action bar is full it's reminiscent of both turn-based combat and third person action and as we'll find out across the course of the game this is a combination that works really well the battle ends with the woman declaring herself to be Eve an all too familiar name to Veterans of senna's Novel she flees into the backstage area but not before claiming that she and Aya are more similar than they appear which seems to prompt a vision of a young blonde girl lying on a hospital bed confused but determined to prevent any more deaths Ayah chases after Eve and we head further into the building inside we get our first taste of parasite Eve's level design which takes massive influence from both Resident Evil and traditional RPG dungeons the aim is to unlock the door at the back of the level and to do so you have to find certain items which open locked doors following a sequence that eventually leads you to the key that you need to exit the area you find ammo dotted around and have to manage a limited number of inventory spots and between the Diaries you can read and the Monstrous creatures that try to get in your way it'll be extremely familiar to anyone who's spent time in the Spencer Mansion or midwich Elementary School where things differ is that all of the combat in Parasite Eve is governed by a far more RPG style system that's very similar to how battles were laid out into keita's last game Chrono Trigger that game's big combat Innovation was that the battles weren't random and you could see enemies on the map before you engaged them not only did it mean that you could avoid combat when you didn't want to fight but it also meant that even the most basic encounters had been designed by the developer and often came with Unique Mechanics or attacks designed to complement where you were in the game now Parasite Eve doesn't let you see enemies before you fight them but all the other encounter mechanics from Chrono Trigger have been carried over every single battle is carefully crafted and victory rewards you with XP that contributes to level ups and eventually unlocks new spells similarly once you defeat a group of enemies that fight will go onto a cooldown which means it's possible to clear out rooms and hallways and wander around safe from harm but only for a small time so while you're exploring and doing battle with monsters and looking for keys Aya stumbles into the singer's dressing room and here we're given a little snippet of the mystery that the rest of the game will spend unveiling the singer's name was Melissa and in spite of her Joy of being cast in the lead role she'd been struggling with an illness and was loading herself up with powerful medication in order to be ready for the show the next time we see her sitting at a piano in the rehearsal space it's clear that Melissa just like Kiyomi before her has been taken over by her mitochondria and in a gruesome bit of body horror she transforms into the Twisted witch-like creature known as Eve after yet another unwinnable boss fight Eve flees into the sewers and while Aya gives Chase she's eventually stopped by a monstrous creature that resembles a giant mutated crocodile and this acts as the true boss fight of this little tutorial sequence for a game that began Life as a hard-boiled detective story set in a real world location some might already have their eyebrows raised at the idea of fighting giant lightning lizards and deformed rat monsters but actually I really like how this Fantastical enemy design is baked into the Sci-Fi roots of the franchise when we first step into the lower levels of theater we're treated to a brutal David Cronenberg style scene where a rat morphs into a hideous monstrosity and the explanation is that Eve's power over mitochondria can influence cellular evolution in any living creature each of the monsters we Face from the smallest encounters to the very biggest bosses are all twisted Corruptions of whatever was present when Eve arrived at this location and it's both an interesting development of the ideas in Santa's novel and a clever way to explain the legions of monsters that we have to do battle with anyway with victory over the crocodile creature Aya makes her way back up to the surface and with the tutorial behind us you'd expect the rest of the game to kick into gear and so what comes next is pretty surprising indeed instead of the World Map opening up and I are hunting down Eve in a whirlwind of combat encounters locked doors and boss fights what follows is a pretty long sequence of story-driven scenes that contain virtually no gameplay now that's not out of the ordinary for RPGs especially those with a heavy emphasis on storytelling but this dialogue Focus section is almost 40 minutes long which is an astounding amount of time for any game to ask the player to Simply sit and watch especially considering that it comes just as you're getting to grips with the game's mechanics this should be a screeching handbrake on the pace but remember parasite functions more like a movie and so this sequence is actually one of the best parts of the entire game when Ira emerges from the theater she's immediately accosted by a reporter who badges her for information about what exactly is going on this leads to the rather blunt introduction of her partner Daniel dollis he rescues her from the media scrum and the two speed away in his Cruiser which gives us the first of these incredible ride-along shots which look almost like the game is simulating a green screen it's just so charmingly put together and this hyper focus on stylish presentation elevates a simple conversation into something captivating that sticks in your mind what also helps is that parasite Eve's writing is very sharp and manages to avoid almost all of the Weak video game cliches that so often plague the dialogue heavy games of this era ire and Daniel might look like a typical cop Duo who won't get along but they're actually very good friends we find out more about their personalities and backstories through what feels like natural conversation at the NYPD headquarters were then introduced to the rest of the cast who much like Daniel get quite a bit of screen time and end up feeling like more than a group of fenders and Quest givers there's this really great scene where Captain Douglas Baker takes Aya into a press conference to try to convince the media that there's nothing to worry about it's all going well until Aya decides to interrupt and reveal the existence of Eve which of course throws the Press into a frenzy and exacerbate the stressed out police captain just like the scene in the police car it's not a huge deal to the story but the way it's presented with camera flashes simulating the assembled journalists is just so charming and this scene will stick in your mind long after you finish the game so along with Baker and a couple of sidekick detectives the other key characters we meet here are Torres and Wayne who run the police Armory on the basement floor of the building Wayne is a passionate weapons Enthusiast while Torres who lost his daughter in a gun-related accident is working here to try and keep firearm respect High and the two have a very interesting Dynamic generally speaking video game weapons are not only useful but fun to use and often form part of a reward system encouraging better play with the promise of bigger Firepower in Parasite Eve Torres provides a dissenting voice and while there isn't an option to play passively which makes sense seeing as we're fighting bloodthirsty monsters it's surprising to hear a variety of opinions on such a serious topic especially in a Japanese developed game from 1998. so pretty soon IRA and Daniel are out on Investigation following up the only lead they have a cellular laboratory at the Natural History Museum which is reportedly researching mitochondria yet again the Cinematic presentation is just top-notch with little touches like the two cops speaking to the Museum's security guard before they head in and having to sign the visitor book before you can go upstairs that might sound like nothing but little moments like this add so much to the believability of the world break up all the dialogue with something that reminds you you're playing a video game upstairs in the lab we meet Dr clamp a scientist specializing in mitochondrial research and a man who couldn't be more obviously annoyed to have two cops interrupting his work now amazingly this is where Parasite Eve the video game starts to really connect with Parasite Eve the novel and this scene feels like it was written by Senna himself instead of watering down the scientific jargon for video game audiences sakaguchi and takita lean into it very quickly our characters are discussing the mitochondrial eve Theory the makeup of the cell and how Evolution might have been influenced by these once bacterial parasites it's pure speculation but I think this is why Square went after the Parasite Eve license sakaguchi and takita must have just genuinely liked the novel and felt they could put together a video game in its image now here I've also got to take a moment to talk about the lack of voice acting which usually wouldn't be all too notable for a game from 1998 but really is very apparent considering the sheer glut of text in this game this 40 minute stretch of almost non-stop reading isn't the only time this happens and for many people this is going to be a deal breaker after all you're here to play a video game and not read a book right well not exactly and I think Parasite Eve is actually better off for taking this approach as it's what allows all the writing to work the simple fact is that voice acting is expensive and takes up a huge amount of storage which means scripts have to be much leaner and that's just simply not what this game is trying to be it wants to have fleshed out characters acting out a complex plot by sticking to text and using shimamura's score to add some dramatic Flair we get that for the small price of just a bit of reading with even the tiniest amount of Imagine Nation you can clearly hear the voices of the characters and everything from intense confrontations to acquire emotional moments will come across without the need for human voices I'm well aware this is a big ask in 2023 but if you're usually put off by a lack of voice acting I really implore you to give this a go as I'm sure you'll be surprised at quite how immersive it can be anyway back at the NYPD headquarters Baker calls a meeting as the department finally has a lead Melissa was due to perform at a concert in Central Park and for some reason this hasn't been canceled leading the police to believe that Eve is planning on showing up unfortunately for Daniel his ex-wife and his kid Ben both have tickets for the show and in a flash of panic he rushes off to try and prevent them bursting into flame like the audience of the Opera Aya obviously chases after him and after almost 40 minutes of Slow Burn World building we're thrown back into the survival horror RPG gameplay just like in the Opera House in Central Park we're looking for keys to open locked doors managing our health and ammunition and doing battle with a host of monsters this time made up of the zoo's escaped animals which have fallen under Eve's mitochondrial spell it might sound and look simple but this is where Parasite Eve begins to layer on some more complexity and adds a few more Concepts to deal with in the battle system firstly enemies can inflict status effects like poison or slow and you have to weigh up carrying items to deal with this or spending your energy to cast healing spells it's not exactly the difficult inventory management of Resident Evil but your slots fill up very quickly and before you're too far into the zoo decisions have to be made about which items you keep and which you leave behind now a big reason for this is that along with health packs keys and Status items you're also constantly finding weapons and tools and this forms the other half of parasite's progression systems along side traditional level UPS in short different weapons do different amounts of damage can be fired from different ranges and usually come with some sort of unique attribute like an Uzi firing five bullets at once or a rocket launcher that fires a single heavy blow the tools you find allow you to move an attribute from one weapon to another so on top of the natural spread of guns you can also mix and match things you like and create custom weapons you're free to switch at any point in battle and as the combat encounters increasing complexity parasite very quickly becomes a pretty engaging action RPG now Central Park is where all of the gameplay mechanics start to come together it's also unfortunately where one of parasite Eve's big flaws first emerges and it's something that's so surprisingly simple outside of combat Aya moves very slowly and in the wide open spaces of the park it can feel like you're just not traveling at a speed that makes sense inside the NYPD or opera house it's not such an issue because the environments are much smaller but here as you travel across some really large screens you can't help but wish for a sprint button now this has become quite a famous point of criticism but unfortunately I think it's a consequence of the action RPG gameplay that couldn't really be avoided you see Aya's movement speed inside and outside of combat is exactly the same and this has obviously been done so there isn't a disorientating change in how you control her the issue is that the speed she moves has to be carefully balanced against all of the different enemy attacks and if you a Sprint it would make avoiding damage completely trivial and tip the combat too far towards quick reactions again just like with all the reading this is something that some people are going to struggle to come to grips with and I'm not going to lie getting lost and then wandering around a sluggish Pace isn't an enjoyable experience but in my view it's a small price to pay for the combat to work properly now of course this whole sequence isn't just combat and exploration and once Ayah makes it to the amphitheater we're treated to what is probably the most notorious cut scene in Square Enix history despite Aya's efforts she's too late to intercept Eve and when she arrives at the top of the stands we find our Nemesis addressing the confused audience claiming sarcastically that this will be the most special Christmas of all thanks to her Newfound Freedom the camera then pans down to the audience and we get what might be the most horrific 30 seconds in video game history fluid leaks from a man's eye and when he blinks the entire eyeball liquefies and runs down his face across all the seats the audience is melting we see Limbs and heads burst and dribble down the aisles congealing into a massive cellular ooze that Eve draws towards her even by today's gore-friendly standards this is some intense stuff and while parasite Eve's RPG gameplay might fail to deliver the scares that you'd expect from a horror title it's impossible to deny the disgusting body horror that takita's team was able to conjure in these short fmvs between this melting scene and the audience burning in the opera house there's this constant sense that at any moment your focus will whip around and you'll be subjected to some of the most disturbing imagery not just on the PlayStation but in video games full stop eventually the Central Park sequence comes to an end with yet another boss fight against Steve this time taking place on the back of a carriage being pulled by a self-immolating horse once you do enough damage Eve reaches out to Aya attempting to connect with her mitochondria in order to reveal the nature of their connection but as she does this The Carriage spins out of control crashing into a wall and leaving Aya unconscious all she's left with is another vision of that hospital but instead of just one girl there are now two so this little section we've just walked through is really the core formula that makes up parasite E we watch an extended sequence of notably silent but really creatively presented cut scenes and then you're sent out onto the world map to Battle through a level before the whole process repeats again that might sound a little reductive but there aren't really any new mechanics added after the Central Park level and while we might find a new weapon or unlock a new spell parasite is very much a game that plays its hand early and hopes that small variations are enough to keep you interested for the entirety of this run time the main reason you'll keep playing is not that you're desperate to solve that next puzzle or level up your gun but because you want answers to the game's Mysteries after Aya blacks out in the crashed Carriage we cut back to Daniel who's miraculously found his son Ben after he left the amphitheater just in time to avoid being liquefied Meanwhile we're introduced to the third pillar of our Scooby-Doo gang kunihiko mayada a Japanese scientist who'd been studying the work of toshiaki nagashima and upon hearing of a similar incident taking place in New York he caught the first flight out and snuck into the now quarantined Manhattan Island fortunately for Aya maida stumbles across the wreck at Central Park and manages to drag her to an abandoned building where he contacts Daniel and reunites the two partners along with being a quirky little character in his own right maida actually serves a pretty important role in the plot and that is to connect the events of Parasite Eve the video game back to the events of Parasite Eve the novel very quickly the two detectives realize that this strange man can be quite a lot of help in their mission to stop eve and he's constantly called upon to explain the science behind the Fantastical things they encounter which just like the novel has its roots in real-world scientific theory after explaining the events of the first encounter with Eve how she overtook the body of Kiyomi nagashima and died while trying to create the ultimate being maida is shocked to hear about Aya's powers and her invulnerability to Eve's influence and this prompts the trio to head to the museum laboratory in order to conduct an experiment by comparing a song sample of the human Ooze from Central Park with some of Aya's blood maida discovers a stark difference while the mitochondria in the Ooze are taking over their cells in the Aya sample they're working together with the nucleus generating power without destroying the host you see where hideaki Center took influence from The Real World mitochondrial eve Theory sakaguchi and takita built upon this by Loosely incorporating some of the ideas from Richard Dawkins selfish Gene Theory essentially while some mitochondria have evolved to take over from their host leading to the creation of Eve others have embarked on a different path towards self-preservation and it's this conflicting faction that is giving Aya her abilities what's particularly cool about this is that it's quite a clever Twist on the traditional Chosen One Trope that's so often found in other role-playing games Aya's abilities don't come from Serendipity or fate but from the very same scientific ideas that first influence Senna and the way sakaguchi and takita have Twisted this into something that fits naturally into a video game is very much a testament to their skill as writers now while that does go some way to explaining things Daniel raises an important Point why is it only Aya's mitochondria that are doing this well maida doesn't know and before he can work it out they're interrupted by the returning Dr clamp who unsurprisingly is extremely annoyed to find Our Heroes messing around with his equipment things get even more heated when Daniel discovers the names of both his boy and ex-wife on clam's computer requiring Aya to step in and stop him from doing something very rash the three agree to leave the lab but it's pretty clear that something fishy is going on and as they drive back to the station they agree that clamp clearly knows more than he's letting on and needs to be closely watched back at base camp things have taken a turn for the worse as the headquarters are currently Under Siege by Eve's mitochondrial creatures and with half the force outmanning the quarantine those Left Behind are clinging on for dear life we fight from room to room clearing out the monsters and rescuing injured officers before finally ending up on the top floor where Captain Baker and Daniel's son are cornered by a police dog that's transformed into a hideous Cerberus now when the Beast finally goes down Daniel and Ben are reunited but it's a victory that comes at a high price the NYPD has been ravaged by the attack with quite a few of the smaller characters like the friendly cop from the front desk and detective NYX not making it the biggest loss is Officer Torres from the Armory whose commitment to his anti-gun philosophy ultimately led to his death as he couldn't even bring himself to fire a weapon in self-defense it's a bitter moment not just because of the loss of a likable character but because this ends the intro interesting discussion about firearm usage in a crisis and I can't help but feel like Torres was cashed in for a cheap way to up the stakes anyway the team quickly deduced that Eve must have launched this assault in order to distract their attention and after some more discussion about how she could be trying to recreate the ultimate being they work out that her next Target must be the sperm bank at the local hospital now Francis Hospital is an important moment in Parasite Eve because it marks both the high Watermark of the game's level design and also the moment that its combination of gameplay Styles starts to become unstuck as a space to explore the hospital is easily the closest that Parasite Eve comes to creating a genuine slice of survival horror there are puzzles and locked doors NPCs to save and key cards to unlock new floors and it's all delivered against the backdrop of a classic horror setting that's made all the more uncomfortable thanks to shimamura's ominous tension building soundtrack what makes this even more interesting is that throughout your wanderings Aya will frequently see that young girl from her Visions which creates an atmosphere of mania where it's unclear if it's a stress-induced fragment of our imagination or some unknown consequence from the changes happening in her body in the hospital everything just works together perfectly and it's a super memorable location that's paired with an equally memorable plot reveal after following the young Apparition to the top floor of the hospital Aya finally reaches the sperm bank but the place has been ransacked with Eve taking what she came for and leaving documents and Equipment strewn across the floor as Aya Stoops to pick up the key to the elevator she glances at one of these documents and suddenly makes a startling discovery that begins to tie parasite Eve's plot threads together she has in her hand the HLA donor list which was the very same document that clamp had on his computer with the full list in front of her Aya realizes why this matters and it's not because it lists the names of Daniel's family but because it lists hers you see on December 23 1977 Melissa pierce the singer from the Opera was brought in for an emergency transplant and received organs from a mother and daughter who had just died in a car crash Aya's mother and sister Maya brayer and Marico brayer that's right Aya is the daughter of the young girl from hideaki senna's novel who was groomed by Eve to be the vessel for the ultimate being after being saved by toshiaki sacrifice she presumably moved to the U.S and eventually had two girls Arya and Maya sadly tragedy continued to haunt Marico and in 1977 she and Maya were both killed in an accident but not before their organs bearing the cultured mitochondria from the Japanese incident were transferred into both Aya and Melissa this is the explanation for both Aya's powers and Melissa's transformation and once again ties the events of the game profoundly to senna's original story hardcore fans will be quick to point out that the dates involved don't really line up with the events of the book but I'm happy to give this a pass because I just love the sheer ambition on show here the idea of taking a slow paced horror science fiction novel that only had moderate success in Japan and turning it into a blockbuster PlayStation RPG sounds utterly absurd out of context but you've got to say that the story of Aya Brea really does work as a sequel to senna's novel both in tone and context and takita and sakaguchi Both Deserve huge credit for making something so unlikely feel so coherent now all that being said from this point on that link starts to become a lot looser as whilst we're obviously wanted to honor the license they had a reputation for producing Hollywood style Blockbusters which they intended to make good on Up on the Roof we're thrust into a boss fight against a giant spider and unlike the dog in the police station or the lizard in the sewers this one doesn't get an FMV that explains how it came to exist it just sort of does now while that's a little disappointing as a boss fight this is a really cool encounter as it brings some fresh ideas to the table and can be a really punishing battle if you've not got enough resources or Firepower not only is this Beast really quite massive and surprisingly fast but it shoots out these web patterns which if they hit lock you in place and line you up for a massive Fireball attack as you need to stand still in order to fire especially if your weapon uses more than one bullet it quickly becomes a tense dance of movement and timing your shot with a frantic race to cast a healing spell if you end up being stuck as if that wasn't hard enough it's also the game's first two-phase boss fight as once you've taken off a chunk of its Health the battle moves over to the other side of the roof and you have to do it all over again in a much smaller space as an action RPG fight it's great fun but it's about as far away from senna's slow paced science heavy Pros as you can possibly get and from here on out Parasite Eve heads off into the world of action Cinema and never looks back just before we step onto the roof we get a quick cutaway to the arrival of the US Navy who immediately launched three fighter jets into the city with the intention of blowing away Eve with overwhelming Force once the spider is downed Aya and Eve come face to face but just as our heroine begins to appeal to the sister that she hopes is still in there the Jets arrive and the action ramps up to 11. with a flick of Eve's wrist the pilots liquefy in their seats and were treated to an utterly glorious FMV of the planes crashing into one another and exploding against the New York skyline as Ayah watches in horror she realizes that one of the wrecks is heading straight for the hospital roof and we get our first timed sequence where you have to race over to a window cleaning lift before the Jack crashes into the building it's not so much Resident Evil as it is Independence Day and from the arrival of the military the stakes and excitement began to ramp up and up until we reach an utterly Bonkers conclusion that would make Michael Bay jealous so while the story races towards its conclusion we've got to take a moment to talk about parasite Eve's RPG systems because how they affect the late game is a real point of concern we've already touched upon how the game is built around two progression systems the first being level ups that increase your health and unlock new spells and the second being the upgrades you can give to your weapons the first system is tailored completely by the developers and while you could hypothetically grind an area to gain a slight Advantage it's not really designed for this and a vast majority of XP you get is from beating the game's bosses what this does is ration which spells you have at different points in the game and it means the mechanics can be ramped up in complexity knowing that the player will always have the tools to deal with them when you fight against the worm boss in Central Park you've got both a stronger heel spell to handle its increased damage and a slow spell which you can use to prevent the boss from escaping underground similarly when you're fighting the spider should have just unlocked haste which speeds up your action bar and increases your movement speed and also as the added bonus of dispelling the monster's route this system works very well and keeps your power levels rising in lockstep with the challenges you face but frustratingly the same can't be said for how your weapons develop and this is because it's entirely controlled by the player remember those tools that move attributes from one weapon to another well there's only a limited amount of them in the game and this means if you waste weapons tools Shifting the wrong attributes onto weaker weapons you can end up at a pretty massive disadvantage with no way to correct it it's all the more frustrating because some weapon classes like shotguns or grenade launchers are frankly just not worth using because the damage isn't high enough to Warrant a slower charging action bar similarly while the game's machine guns charge up a lot faster they almost all have terrible attributes like being unable to Target specific enemies or forcing you to stand still for long periods of time this means that the optimum way to develop your weapons is to just pour every single upgrade into a single class and as some of them aren't found until a few hours into the game it invariably ends up with you exclusively using either the rifle or the pistol as you get them both early on and they have a good balance of damage and speed having a spread of useful and distinct weapons that you have to choose between is a Hallmark of survival horror design and while it's clear that this was an idea at some point in parasite Eve's development it's just been washed out through poor balancing now while that's disappointing the issue of hyper optimization gets even worse when you factor in the game's bonus point system which honestly doesn't add anything other than the potential to break its balance even further essentially with every level up you also get bonus points which you can invest into some of Aya's attributes in order to improve them beyond the natural curve now while you can do things like increase your carry capacity or improve your Magics recharge rate the absolute best use is to load additional raw damage onto your weapon which can then be shifted with the tools each time you find a better gun with enough bonus points and through sticking to a single weapon class by the hospital level you can become extremely overpowered which has the Dual negative effect of removing virtually all of the tension from combat and devaluing the vast majority of the loot you find in the game's treasure chests the flip side of this is if you spread your bonus points around misuse your tools and constantly change weapons you'll be so weak that some of the later sections are virtually impossible to beat which ruins the game in a completely different way the margin for keeping the weapon system from breaking the game's balance is just far too fine and I think a big part of this is that the natural mechanics of survival horror and role-playing aren't actually all that complementary you see survival horror is governed by scarcity you have to conserve ammo and make difficult decisions about when to heal and when to take risks and the core ideas are at their best when the player is weak and has to improvise Solutions the vast majority of RPGs work in a totally different way they're built around progression and reward with the player's power constantly growing and a steady stream of satisfying upgrades that allow you to defeat once insurmountable challenges and take on ever more complex encounters two philosophies pull in totally different directions and balancing a game that draws from both is an incredibly difficult job and one that has cinematically minded director like Takashi takita likely wasn't all that interested in doing now where this contradiction becomes even more clear is in the game's single optional area the warehouse which becomes accessible after Aya leaves the hospital Parasite Eve is an extremely linear game and to be upfront there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as we said many times already the focus isn't on expansive World design but a roller coaster narrative and being pulled from scene to scene is what gives the game its movie like pace this is why the warehouse is such a curious addition as it's the only area in the game that doesn't push the narrative forwards and contains nothing to link it to the nypd's investigation or Eve's plan to birth the ultimate being in fact when it first appears on the map it arrives with zero Fanfare without a mention by any of the characters and no actual plot reason for Aya to head there when you arrive it's been guarded by a single nameless cop who tells us that Eve is inside and then promptly abandons his post leaving the job of clearing out the facility to officer brayer inside of the building we don't actually face Eve but instead do battle with a host of very strong enemies that depending on your own power level will likely pose a bigger threat than most of the game's bosses the biggest offender being these spiders who hit like an absolute truck and can web you in place just like the battle atop the hospital between the brutally high damage and the tiny spaces to maneuver in it's a fundamentally challenging area area regardless of how developed your weapons are and this comes with a boss fight to match in the basement we fight a giant mutated crab and while its presence doesn't really fit neatly into the hole all of the enemies represent the environment you're exploring concept it's a complex fight that will likely drain all of your healing items while you try to blast through it's gargantuan Health pool it's all great stuff really until the fight is over your reward for clearing out this area is the rocket launcher which sounds like a pretty major deal until you remember that the weapon upgrade system means this isn't really much of an increase in Firepower now I might be slightly disappointing but the real pain comes next Victory against the crab doesn't take you back to the entrance and you now have to retrace your steps with every single enemy encounter having respawned remember when I said that this game could become impossible if you hadn't created a proper weapon well this is a big part of why that is and without any energy to cast spells or healing items to recover damage you can become trapped in the warehouse endlessly grinding these battles until you get a fortunate run and manage to escape this hell hole considering how well most of the areas in Parasite Eve flow from start to finish it's a surprisingly poorly designed area which genuinely leaves me wondering why it was even included this isn't a game that needs side content or optional areas and its inclusion only plays to the team's developmental weaknesses by taking them away from the Cinematic spectacle that they do so well what makes this smart all the more is that the warehouse can only really be tackled before or after the other worst area in the game and it makes for an unpleasant one-two punch right when the narrative was picking up speed the next compulsory location is Chinatown although this is really just a single road that we walk down to get to the actual level which is the dreaded RPG sewer sequence the area is laid out as a rectangle of eight identical four-way Crossroads and all you've got to do is find the one exit that takes you out of this Zone and onto Freedom with a map for reference it only takes a matter of minutes to escape but of course Parasite Eve never provides you with one so you're left to wonder The Identical corridors with no indication of what you're even looking for now plenty of games have maze levels but what makes Parasite Eve so painful is that is slow movement speed is paired up with some torturously designed enemy encounters the sewers are full of these bat enemies whose only attack is a supersonic Ray that gives you a blind debuff and this prevents you from firing your weapon it has to be purged off with either a spell or an item and as you can't escape from combat every one of these many many encounters feels like it takes triple the amount of time it should do to add insult to injury just like in the warehouse Chinatown and the sewers don't even really contribute much to the narrative as the level concludes with Aya out by the Riverside watching the mitochondrial ooze head towards your next location the museum and here everything Fades to Black and we get the prompt to change over to disc 2. now at the risk of getting into hyper nitpick territory this is a really lame point to have this happen changing discs is a major moment and when done right it can feel like you're transitioning from one chapter to the next in Parasite Eve it just happens randomly after you defeat a giant centipede at the end of the sewer sequence and once we load up disc 2 we're right back where we were standing and even have to walk a few screens over to leave the level before we can head off to the museum in a game that drenches every single scene in cinematic Flair it's a surprisingly functional moment while It ultimately isn't a major issue I find it hard to believe that takita missed the dramatic potential behind opening up your console and swapping to the next big chunk of video game so between these two pretty wonky levels of the way the RPG systems can quickly spiral out of control you'll have to forgive me for making powers like Eve sound like a poorly put together game because it really isn't when it's taken in the round the reality is is that the combat is still great fun regardless of how powerful you are and the warehouse and Sewer levels are relatively short and don't derail the pace all that badly these elements aren't happening in isolation away from the good stuff that came before and luckily their impact is lessened even further by the arrival of parasite Eve's utterly Bonkers finale which might be the most off the rails and Brilliant few hours ever printed onto a PlayStation disc the conclusion of Parasite Eve is split neatly into two sections the first being the Natural History Museum which is the last proper level and the second is an extended sequence of fmvs cutscenes and boss fights that brings everything to a bombastic end what makes this part so special is it's where Parasite Eve sheds the influences which have defined it up until this point there's no more Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII or even senna's original novel this last section is pure unadulterated over-the-top Square soft ambition immediately after we leave the sewers Aya heads over to the museum and the entire premise of this level is to locate both Dr clamp and Eve who are hidden away somewhere amidst the giant exhibitions it's a simple objective but the challenge comes from quite how massive this area is as the museum is easily the biggest location in the game and sprawls across three floors made up of all different kinds of rooms you have to clamber out of broken windows use external fire escapes and deactivate a security system which unlocks even more rooms to get lost in now this might just seem like a big portion of a meal we've already eaten quite a few times but what sets the museum apart is that the tone shifts rather dramatically from simmering science fiction horror to something that more closely resembles a Michael Crichton novel just like in every other location Eve's mitochondrial influence has flooded the building with monsters but instead of these being born out of local rats and stray dogs the parasites have revived the Museum's collection of fossils and iodus battle with a horde of mutated dinosaurs we're constantly ambushed by pterodactyls and velociraptors with the zones two bosses being a triceratops and a Tarana Source racks now despite its inherent absurdity the whole reason to do this is to up the ante and that's matched with some equally big developments in the story once Aya gains access to clam's laboratory she discovers maieda has already snuck in and has been busy continuing his experiments on is cells the result is a special gun which he believes should be able to defeat Eve the only problem is that it has a damage stat of one which makes it fundamentally useless before I can ask any more questions the two are interrupted once again by Dr clamp and this time the mask slips and he outs himself as a full-blown villain just as he's about to attack Aya with a scalpel Daniel comes to the rescue with what might be the greatest Haymaker in video game history he lays out the professor and stands over him demanding answers to the surprise of absolutely nobody Dr clamp isn't all that big on the human race and had been working together with Eve in order to make sure that this cellular rebellion was successful while the ultimate being from the Japan incident had eventually died thanks to being conceived from incomplete sperm this time the good doctor has genetically engineered it to guarantee Eve's Offspring will live with the birth just minutes away clamp Lords his victory over our heroes and then as they try to arrest him he calls on Eve to ignite the mitochondria in his body luckily Daniel and maida are able to dive out of a nearby window and Aya survives thanks to her own cellular Powers but it's a small consolation considering the most powerful creature ever conceived is about to be born and begin the mass extermination of the human race so with the clamp key in hand and the Museum's boss defeated we can open the way to Eve and here the game transitions into a roller coaster of intense Hollywood action that lasts well over an hour and takes us all the way to the credits deep within the Museum's Egyptian exhibition Aya finds Eve perched upon a throne with red veins stretching out to hold her in place now hands placed gently upon her swollen stomach suddenly out of the sewers burst the mitochondrial ooze congealing together into a warped imitation of a human being which then smashes through the wall and lifts the pregnant Eve away to safety helpless to stop such a huge monster Aya Daniela maida chase after it in their Cruiser but the three can only watch in horror as the Ooze wraps itself around Eve forming a protective barrier and shooting down anything that gets near with searing blasts of energy all that's left is one final desperate plan by the Navy our Trio is whisked away to the aircraft carrier stationed in the middle of the bay and here they meet Admiral Williams who proposes what might be the most absurd military plan in U.S history as Ayah can't be killed by Eve's energy attacks the plan is to Chuck her into the cockpit of a helicopter and then have her fire a nuclear warhead at the mitochondrial giant from close range the fact that she can't even pilot a helicopter doesn't seem to matter as it will be said to Auto and all she has to do is pull the trigger seeing no other option Aya agrees and despite Daniel's protestations she hops into the chopper and heads off to Liberty Island now if we're being honest this plan makes absolutely no sense ice Chopper can still be shot down even if she's personally invulnerable and for some reason they send an escort who are unsurprisingly all immediately killed hell there isn't even an explanation for why they need to use helicopters at all as they could surely just fire the missile from the carrier or have the autopilot press the trigger as it's clearly pretty Advanced the thing is I'm not sure you're really meant to think about it this much and instead you're just meant to sit back and be caught up in this Whirlwind of 1990s Disaster Movie visuals and the tropes of a Touhou monster flick so as Aya reaches Liberty Island she fires the missile and destroys the huge mitochondrial creature but as with any good monster film this doesn't quite save the day as Eve remains unscathed knowing that there can only be one resolution she parachutes down to the island and with thrust into the final battle set against the suitably Epic backdrop of a destroyed Statue of Liberty caked in the remains of the Central Park audience now all these explosions and base jumping and 80-foot monsters have blown away any semblance of survival horror parasite Eve's RPG Roots come roaring to the Forefront in these last boss fights either just before or just after the T-rex fight in the museum you'll unlock Aya's final spell liberate which uses up your entire magic meter and effectively works as a final fantasy style Limit Break It transforms our heroine into a hyper-evolved mitochondrial State and Deals eight massive hits to the enemy in a flurry of crazy animations as if that wasn't over the top enough Eve has a transformation of her own and in this state she can fire off a powerful attack that has its own little cutscene where she flies up into the night sky and launches an arrow made of energy back to the Earth this whole battle is just a crazed mess of mitochondrial spell effects and RPG super attacks and frankly it's just fantastic if you're gonna shed your connection to grounded sci-fi horror you might as well do it with style and The Showdown with Eve signs off on their sibling rivalry in a truly memorable way as Ayah strikes the final blow Eve makes one last attempt to flee but she's finally run dry with a blank expression of disbelief on her face the superior being crumbles to the floor and disappears beneath the Ooze just like all the humans that she held in such contempt back on the aircraft carrier everyone is elated at Aya's Victory and as our three protagonists look out over the devastation of New York it feels like we're about to hit the credits and then we don't instead we regain control of Aya and can go inside of the ship where we find Wayne from the NYPD who can offer access to our stock of items and perform any remaining upgrades as if that wasn't ominous enough the ship's quartermaster will also replenish your ammunition and give you some healing items which is a pretty Brazen way for the game to tell you that your battle is not over there remains a small question of the ultimate being which despite its mother's death has managed to survive and with its obscene amounts of cellular power it destroys two of the Navy ships with a mere thought knowing that their goose is cooked Admiral Williams orders an immediate retreat but Aya decides enough is enough and stays behind to try and finish this fight once and for all as Daniel drags maida to the chopper the infant monster clambers aboard the ship and despite knowing that it wants to live just as much as she does Aya draws her gun and the true final battle begins now at first this might seem a little underwhelming compared to the hyper anime Jewel against Eve but the ultimate being has a pretty cool mechanic that ties into the idea that it's constantly evolving well it starts off as something resembling a baby and doesn't really offer that much challenge very quickly it begins to transform and over the course of the fight it'll shift across five different phases that all increase in both complexity and literal size by the time it reaches its mature form it's a muscle-bound demon that can fire off massive energy blasts and frankly even with the liberate Super Attack it's a suitably punishing test that genuinely does take some skill and item management to be able to defeat once it passes into its ethereal final form I as weapon regardless of how many bonus points you sank into it becomes ineffective and it's pretty clear that the ultimate being's ability to endlessly adapt has decided the outcome of this fight that is until our hot head partner and quirky Japanese friend come to the rescue you see throughout the game maidos is constantly giving us these little origami good luck charms which take up a slot in your inventory can't be discarded and don't do anything just before the ultimate being climbs aboard the ship he tries to give something to Aya and presuming it's just another paper trinket Daniel drags him away up in the helicopter however we realized that this was quite a costly mistake turns out maida had been working on a special kind of ammunition that utilized Aya's unique mitochondria and in his rush to get away Daniel prevented him from handing it over luckily for us we're in the hardcore action movie section of the game so realizing his mistake our partner takes the ammo and without even stopping to grab a parachute he leaps from the chopper intending to literally throw it over to Aya as if that wasn't quite over the top enough as he gets closer to the ultimate being it's mitochondrial energy sets him on fire despite tumbling through the air while a flame he somehow still manages to make the throw before plunging into the ocean it's like someone saw the rocket launcher scene from the end of Resident Evil and thought let's do that but make it as crazy as physically possible and honestly why not the entire appeal of making a movie-influenced video game is that you can do things that wouldn't normally be possible and this is up there with some of the most obscene action in any game ever produced so once you've got Midas Special ammo you can load it into his gun and this bumps your damage up to 999 per shot which makes your Victory almost entirely assured with the last bullet fired the creature begins to ride in pain and split apart although once again this isn't actually the end of the game while Daniel's heroic leap and getting to use a maximum damage weapon feels like the perfect place to end things we instead get one final strange piece of gameplay where Aya has to run away from the injured ultimate being and find something aboard the ship that can put it down for good being brutally honest despite only lasting around a minute this part is very poor for all of the clever elements of Parasite Eve it's so odd that they chose to end things with the focus on one of its worst elements Aya's movement speed and trying to manipulate this into an exciting chase scene just feels ridiculous and not in the awesome flaming Bass Jump way what makes it even worse is if you somehow get clipped by the ultimate being or take a wrong turn you instantly game over and that means having to re-watch about 10 minutes of cut scenes and redo the lengthy five-phase boss fight it's just a strange moment to end the game and while I admire the ambition to try and manipulate one final exciting scene using maida's powered up gun felt like such a better place to conclude our story anyway with the ship set to self-destruct Ayah leaps overboard and in the ensuing blast the weakened ultimate being is finally destroyed bringing parasy Eve to its true conclusion with Daniel miraculously unharmed all that's left are two last scenes that wrap everything up as the sun rises over New York maida Ponders on everything that's happened and if the mitochondria that spawned Eve and the human race are really any different after all can you say Humanity's treatment of our own host the blue planet we live on has been anything other than parasitic while that's a somber and confronting thought our very last minutes are rather more light-hearted who returned to the place where we first met Aya the New York opera house and here we once again find her attending a show but this time accompanied by Daniel maieda and young Ben as a three joke around it seems like life has returned to normal until the female lead begins her solo and something on stage ignites our three spring from their seats but it's just a torch the Miss Cries From the audience for them to sit down they sheepishly return to their seats the last thing we see is Aya's eyes glowing purple as the mitochondria within her cells go about their microscopic work but it's not just within her every living cell in existence contains these beings and our final image is that same glow in the rest of the audience a chilling reminder that while Eve has been defeated the threat of another Rebellion is never truly gone considering that this final hour contains almost no gameplay and pitches its tents squarely in the camp of on-rail Storytelling it's a highly engaging conclusion that somehow deeply philosophical and comically over the top a crazed blend of ideas that really reflects the identity of Parasite Eve it's a game that's entirely defined by taking influences and Concepts that seem like they have no business coexisting and weaving them together in harmony proving that you don't always have to rely on complex level design and airtight gameplay systems to create a meaningful video game experience well that is if you don't include the post game Parasite Eve is not actually over when you complete your first playthrough and surprisingly it has quite a sizable chunk of both story and gameplay content that you can only access in its version of New Game Plus which is called EX Mode while the idea of carrying over your stats and Equipment into a second playthrough might seem like old hat back in the mid 90s this was a very novel concept and Incredibly Takashi takita is the man to thank for the term New Game Plus was first used in Chrono Trigger made up a big part of what made that game so ambitious unlike most RPGs which tend to have a clearly defined conclusion Chrono Trigger has 15 distinct endings which are all accessed at various points and some of which require a higher power level from having already beaten the game it not only adds a massive amount of replayability but also gives you the satisfaction of tearing through the game with all your high level gear and honestly if you only play through Chrono Trigger ones you're not really getting the full picture so given to kita's extensive history with this idea it's no surprise to see it present here in Parasite Eve but unlike in his last game you could argue the EX Mode genuinely detracts from the experience of playing through this game for starters all it carries over is a single weapon and single piece of armor which you choose with Wayne on the U.S Navy ship at the end of the game this means that even though you have a pretty major increase in power from the very start you still need to unlock all of your spells which happens at the exact same rate as it did in your first playthrough disappointingly this means you don't really get to experiment there's no firing the rocket launcher in the opera house using haste to race around the Cerberus or obliterating the spider boss with liberate but frankly this is the least of your worries as I mentioned earlier EX Mode has quite a bit of unique content and it's almost entirely found in a new location called the Chrysler Building which is accessible from the moment you unlock the world map the thing is that doesn't happen until after both the Opera level and the first lengthy sequence of cut scenes unless there's no way to skip dialogue it means you need to play the game for an hour and a half before you can even see the new area it makes for an incredibly strange setup where your ex mode weapon allows you to skip most of the combat but you're forced to sit through all of the dialogue which is pretty much the opposite of what most players would want from a second playthrough we're not here to relive the story but mess around with our high level gear and that seems to have been completely forgotten when you finally do reach the Chrysler Building you'll come face to face with ex Mode's second big issue and that is its balancing the building contains bosses stronger enemies and unique weapons which weren't available on your first playthrough and these have all been arranged into 77 unique flaws that you need to battle through the trouble is if you head here as soon as you can you won't be powerful enough to complete the whole building and will likely have to leave after about 5 or 10 floors in order to gain more levels and relearn all your spells in fact the recommended time to tackle the entirety of the Chrysler Building is after you've defeated the T-Rex at the end of the game that means in order to properly engage with the main reason to do an ex mode run you have to virtually beat Parasite Eve from start to finish twice without being able to bypass any of the long dialogue scenes and fmvs now if that sounds like something of a slog you haven't seen anything yet as the Chrysler building itself seems tailor-made to drive players insane each of the floors is made up of an elevator which can take you back to the entrance a storeroom that contains some Loot and the stairs to the next floor but how these are laid out is totally randomized that's right every single one of the buildings 77 floors is a randomized maze and it is as mind-numbing as that sounds with no map to reference no ability to escape from battles Aya's slow movement speed and the insane decision to only have you able to save every 10 flaws each journey into the Chrysler Building is a torturous repetitive Endeavor that rewards very little for your efforts the soul redeeming idea and EX Mode is its alternative ending offers a totally different conclusion to the battle against the ultimate being if by some miracle of patience and free time you're able to reach the top floors of the Chrysler Building Aya makes a terrible Discovery at the very Summit is a purebred version of Eve hidden away as a contingency in case the ultimate being plan fails and to eye as horror it is housed in the body of her long dead sister much like eve took the form of kyomi back in Japan klamp was able to replicate this process with Maya in an even crueler twist Eve is able to use this Cellular Connection to recall Maya's Consciousness and before Aya's eyes her sister begins to speak creating a disturbing picture of a confused and scared little girl that's desperate to go home to her mother when Avery takes control Aya raises her gun and the purebred is all too happy to oblige with a final taunt that any shot fired will be at her sister's body this fight is easily the hardest in the game and without proper preparation potentially over the course of multiple EX Mode playthroughs you're going to have absolutely no chance of Victory not only does it have 40 000 HP which is more than five times that of the ultimate being but the fight has a pseudo timer periodically the purebred will summon the ghost of Maya and depending on how long you've been fighting for it'll activate a heel which can eventually get as large as 10 000 HP it effectively forces you to fight super aggressively and that then opens you up to a huge range of attacks including a different ghost spell which can take you down to a single point of HP obviously RPGs are famous for their hyper difficult secret bosses and Maya is just as deadly as anything found in Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest it's a true challenge to reward all those countless hours spent climbing the Chrysler Building so if you do manage to defeat her we get a very strange alternative ending where Eve realizing Aya's mitochondrial Supremacy attempts to take over her body salvation comes in the form of Maya Who presumably having seen her beloved sister in danger is somehow able to take control of the rebellious strain of mitochondria in an instant the threat of the ultimate being and Eve are completely destroyed and the two sisters are once again reunited in a strange cellular Union that allows them to communicate at the cost of all I as Powers the two decide to head home and after a particularly strangely placed disc change the credits begin to roll as much as this ending doesn't make a lick of sense and is clearly lacking the explanations that Maeda would usually provide I don't really mind that and I actually like how the game has two completely different conclusions and leaves it up to the player to decide which they prefer the Hollywood Blockbuster Battlefield where Aya gets to be the action hero or the low-key fight for her sister's Soul where mitochondrial deus ex machina Saves the Day it's never been confirmed by sakaguchi or takita which is supposed to be Canon and I hope it remains that way because this hidden reunion at the top of a monster-infested skyscraper is the sole reason to Soldier through the agony that is otherwise parasy Eve's EX Mode so that's the video game and really I think the explanation for it finding financial success where the novel and film otherwise faltered isn't really all that obscure the massive interest in squaresoft's post Final Fantasy VII output would have likely guaranteed solid sales regardless of how the game turned out but there's much more to Parasite Eve than the reputation of its creator bad absurd combination of genres and influences gives it a kind of crossover appeal that's pretty rare in a video game from this era you can find something to like from all manner of perspectives whether you're a horror fan looking for dark visuals an RPG player wanting to get stuck into systems or even just someone wanting to be wowed by the quality of the cutscenes there are just so many reasons to put down money and buy a copy of Parasite Eve obviously it does have its flaws and in some instances they are pretty glaring but when taken as a whole it's a video game experience that transcends traditional measures of quality in favor of being supremely memorable with fantastic sales numbers on both sides of the Pacific and squares hot streak still running a maximum temperature a sequel was a full-gong conclusion many fans felt that in Parasite Eve there was the potential for a franchise that could have massive appeal and potentially even grow to rival Final Fantasy well unsurprisingly given the chaotic history of this franchise what came next was something very different indeed generally speaking creating a sequel to a popular and profitable video game isn't all that complicated you already have the characters and Concepts laid out gameplay only needs to be iterated on rather than invented and you should be working with a team of people who are already deeply familiar with the property all you've got to do is cook up a new story maybe throw in a few small twists and you should have a recipe for another big hit for the vast majority of video game developers and Publishers this is how you create a franchise but squaresoft in the 1990s did not operate like a normal developer and Parasite Eve was anything but a normal franchise you see hironobu sakaguchi notoriously hated the idea of square producing direct sequels my final fantasy would get sequentially numbered releases every game that came out of the company had entirely different characters mechanics systems and stories this culture was apparently fostered so each development team would treat their games like they were the last they were ever working on and clearly it had a positive effect as the company was producing hit after hit now the downside to this approach meant that there were no set teams dedicated to individual series and once a game shipped Square's staff members were encouraged to explore new ideas and start the creative process over from scratch this is exactly what happened with the star-studded team that put together Parasite Eve one and by the time audiences were ready for a sequel its creators had long since gone their separate ways and were busy on entirely different projects after once again impressing with their directorial and design work takita and nomura were immediately handed vital roles in a newly formed team that was taking on the incredibly important job of developing squaresoft's first ever PlayStation 2 game as the Next Generation console was due out in Japan just two years after the release of parasite League one there was little time to waste if Square wanted to be part of its launch and takita was seen as the ideal director to produce a small scale game that could take advantage of the new console's graphical muscle with nomura designing the game's characters this new team produced a single title the bouncer which despite its strange appearance shares quite a bit of fundamental DNA with Parasite Eve just like in their last game the bouncer takes place entirely in a modern setting and is jam-packed for the cinematics and cut scenes with storytelling making up more than half of the game's run time on top of this its gameplays yet another genre blend this time taking Square's famous RPG systems and Plastering them over a beat em up complete with an early attempt at chaotic ragdoll physics while that might sound interesting the bouncer isn't actually all that great and really suffered from a difficult development cycle that hampered its potential any reputation it has nowadays is mainly rooted in people making fun of it but I think it deserves some credit for being the next evolution of takita's cinematic style even if it doesn't quite work as well as it did in Parasite Eve now sadly it wasn't just parasite Eve's director and lead artist who were unavailable to work on a sequel while hironobu sakaguchi had come up with its concept bought the license and then produced the game very quickly after its release he was being stretched from Pillar To Post and was utterly overwhelmed with work for starters the production of Square's first feature film Final Fantasy the spirits within was going incredibly badly and costs had begun to spiral out of control as the ambitious project ran over schedule for some reason Square had decided to base their studio in Hawaii and this not only dramatically increased the cost of doing business but also kept sakaguchi from working on many of their biggest projects back in Japan titles like Chrono cross Xeno gears and Final Fantasy 8 were made almost entirely without his input and this isolation prompted him to start a passion project in order to reconnect with the craft that he loved in late 1998 development began on Final Fantasy 9 which would be made entirely in Hawaii and would focus on taking the series back to its high fantasy Roots the sakaguchi writing producing and overseeing systems design all while desperately trying to get Spirits within back on track there was simply no space in his schedule for Parasite Eve without a returning director writer producer or art director any hope of A Parasite Eve sequel should have died then and there but as if by some mitochondrial Miracle sakaguchi found the perfect person to take over the series and deliver that much requested follow-up in 1996 Kenichi iwau had joined the company after working at Capcom where he'd been a well-respected game planner and scenario writer his early credits included cult classics like demon Crest and Disney's Magical Journey but it wow found real Acclaim when he was asked to join the Resident Evil team in order to help Shinji mikami get the project back on track his work ended up being invaluable and huge portions of the seminal survival horror game were born from his writing the character designs of Chris Jill and weska the plot of a special forces team investigating a shady Corporation and even most of the game's diary entries including the famous itchy tasty line came straight from the hand of Kenichi awao his grounded approach to horror storytelling curbed some of mikami's more exuberant ideas and it's extremely likely that without his contribution Resident Evil would not be the Juggernaut series that it is today now funnily enough when the game went to print the team had relatively little faith that audiences would actually like it I'm frustrated with capcom's low budgets and small scope for marketing it well decided to jump ship to square who he felt were leading the industry and would allow him to better fulfill his Ambitions obviously Resident Evil would go on to sell over 5 million copies that year alone and Shinji makami quickly became a household name but for a while that ship had already sailed and he was now part of the squaresoft juggernaut his first project was writing and planning einhander which was Square's attempt to Branch out into the world of side-scrolling Shooters while the game itself is a creative Riff on the action found in gradius or r-type asking you to craft Builds on the Fly and utilizing the PlayStation's Graphics to impressive effect it was a Wow's story contributions that really set einhander apart and critics lavished Praise on Square for managing to create a shootamer that told a proper story as einhander was released in late 1997 and Parasite Eve shipped in early 1998 the timing could not have been any better and it wow quickly found himself in a meeting with sakaguchi being asked not only to write a new Parasite Eve story but if he was interested in directing and managing the team that would be developing it it was a job with immense pressure but it was exactly the sort of opportunity he'd left Capcom to find and of course he accepted now his work began in Square's new Osaka office it wow quickly realized that squaresos leadership were interested in his team creating something a little different to the Cinematic horror RPG that takita and sakaguchi had produced a few years earlier in fact his working on Resident Evil was more crucial than he realized as in essence that was exactly what they wanted him to make since a while had left Capcom Resident Evil had exploded into one of the most popular franchises in the world and between the first title it's a various ports and its two PlayStation sequels Capcom had sold more than 15 million copies worldwide in just three years Square wanted a piece of that action so while taquita was left to pursue his cinematic genre blending instincts with the bouncer it wow was asked for something more traditionally survival Horror in order to appeal to Veterans of capcom's Flagship series considering the strong identity of the previous game this was quite the change of Direction and when Parasite Eve 2 was finally shown off to journalists a TGs in 1999 this Stark difference was splashed across every magazine preview and unsurprisingly was treated with a lot of skepticism and really how can you blame people the game is being managed by a completely new team the director was a relative unknown with very little design experience and the change in style was driven entirely by commercially minded Executives nothing about this should lead to a great video game but just like the unlikely environment that birthed its predecessor Parasite Eve 2 somehow transcends these pitfalls and comes together into an extremely engaging game it's a contradiction both creative and uninspired built on the ideas of the last game while also rejecting virtually everything that made it memorable tightly designed mess of a video game that can only really be understood by picking up a controller and diving into its peculiar world the only reasonable place to start any discussion about Parasite Eve 2 is the fundamental differences between itself and its predecessor now these might not seem all that large on the surface after all we're still playing as a higher Brea we're still fighting mitochondrial monsters and still casting biology fueled spells but really outside of these surface level similarities virtually everything else functions very differently Parasite Eve 2 is still a combination of RPG and survival horror ideas but this time that mixture is weighted much more heavily towards the latter and as we'll Discover It Feels less like a direct Sequel and more like a reimagining twisting familiar Concepts into new and interesting forms this unique identity is made clear from the very first moments of the game while the opening credits play as images of the enemies we defeated in Parasite Eve 1 are blasted away while someone practices their aim on a gun range it is of course Aya Breyer who in the aftermath of the Manhattan incident left New York and joined an FBI agency in Los Angeles called the mitochondria investigation and suppression team or missed for short their role is very simple to hunt down all the remaining neo-mitochondrial creatures or nmcs that survived Eve's death and escaped out towards the American West now I might conjure Dawn of the Dead style images of a United States overrun with horrific monsters but mist's agents are very effective and outside of their agency and a select few members of government the existence of a malevolent strain of mitochondria remains a well-kept secret with her practice finished Aya bumps into Pierce Carradine another missed agent who's delivering a new set of orders there have been reports of mitochondrial creatures in LA's Acropolis Tower a missed leadership one Ayah on site immediately and with that you gain control of our heroine and although you can talk to pierce and find out a little bit more about the mission and Jody a woman who works in the Mist Armory there's really nothing to do here except jump in Aya's car and head to the tower well he gets stuck into the first major gameplay Zone now despite all the talk of big stylistic departures Aya's arrival at the Acropolis Tower feels straight out of Takashi takita's cinematic Playbook not only do we get a bombastic FMV of a police helicopter crashing down into the street but also an amazing graphical technique which I'm not sure I've ever seen before as I heads towards the police barricade instead of walking across a static image the background and foreground are created by playing a cut scene that progresses with your movement it gives us a whole scene an astounding cinematic Flair and as the camera peels around to focus on the crashed helicopter or pulls up from two cops to show Aya heading into the tower you can hardly believe that you're playing a game from 1999. now this is all the more notable because this Innovative idea literally never happens again and from Aya's arrival on the top floor of the tower Parasite Eve 2 sheds any attempt to tell a cinematic story and grounds itself wholly in traditional survival horror gameplay this leads us to Parasite Eve 2's most notable change its control scheme which Beyond its story its presentation or its systems drives the biggest wedge between this game and the last unlike the prospective driven movement of Parasite Eve 1 where iron moves in the direction you push the d-pad here we are squarely in the land of tank controls where up moves ire forward and left and right only rotates the Direction She's facing now if you've seen any of my other videos you'll know that tank controls do not bother me in the slightest and while I'm a storied advocate of this system I'll spare you another passionate defense in favor of a look at why a Wow's team made such a controversial change it might be hard to believe but during the game's first press release a TGs 1999 Square claimed that two of the biggest complaints they'd received about Parasite Eve 1 were its random encounter style battles and how your movement was reset after each camera angle change given video game development was still years away from truly functional 3D cameras switching to tank controls was seen as a way to address this second issue as it would mean that you could hold a single Direction and move through many screens without any disorientation now I'm sure that sounds absurd to those of you who did test tank controls but if you can believe it this was a change that was widely praised with IGN of all Outlets reporting that players would likely find this new movement system much more comfortable for people who argue that tank controls have always been bad design this is hard evidence to the contrary as in the late 1990s they were factually considered to be the optimum way to put together a 3D game in this style anyway to go along with the more classical survival horror movement enemy encounters have also seen a major redesign and this was similarly done to try and address the complaints of being unable to see your foes once in the Acropolis Tower I quickly realizes that the SWAT team sent to deal with the nmcs have all been slaughtered and after exploring the plaza she comes face to face with one of the culprits an entirely new breed of mitochondrial monster who transforms from a woman into a hulking monster in another disturbing FMV while we still get that iconic heartbeat freeze frame to indicate that a fight has begun combat functions vary differently and instead of enemies appearing out of the blue and thrusting you into a cordoned off Battle Zone everything takes place in real time with no separation between exploration and combat that might not sound like a huge deal but it really fundamentally changes how you approach every second of gameplay enemies can now jump out at you at any moment but you're also free to run away this does a great job of heightening the atmosphere of tension the other major change is the absence of Parasite Eve one's ATB bar and instead of queuing up actions for Aya to carry out the game has a much more involved flow requiring you to dodge attacks time reloads and pick your shots all in real time now considering the tank controls this Probably sounds horrific but it works really well thanks to the clever implementation of a lock-on system by pressing Square IO will Target the nearest enemy and repeated presses will cycle through different foes if you turn away from an enemy to dodge or move to safety when you stop she'll automatically turn back towards her Target and this makes the whole process of engaging in combat far more enjoyable than in something like Resident Evil or Silent Hill if this is starting to sound a little too much like an action game don't you worry as there's still a pretty big dose of survival horror decision making and RPG progression firstly your inventory is now based around how many attachment slots are on your armor instead of being able to Simply pause battle and chug down healing potions you have to preset items that you want to have available in any combat deciding what should go in these slots is rather challenging as while there's still your basic heels and MP restores Aya quickly finds all manner of additional options like a GPS which gives you a radar or flares that can stun enemies and that's on top of a variety of different weapons that all have unique strengths and weaknesses depending on who you're fighting you never have enough slots to cover every single eventuality and this system does a great job of replicating that strategic planning that makes survival horror so enjoyable the moment you open your inventory and realize you're missing a poison antidote will cause real panic and it's a great way to offset the more active combat this difficult decision making is also found in the way the RPG systems work which have been entirely redesigned and much for the better as fun as it was to gain levels and unlock new spells in Parasite Eve 1 the strict XP curve made it almost impossible to experiment as the whole game was based around you having specific abilities for specific boss fights in Parasite Eve 2 you have visibility of every single spell Aya can learn from the moment you arrive at Acropolis Tower and the XB you gain from Battle is spent on locking and upgrading them in any order you want with just eight spells to choose from they all have a massive impact on how you approach combat and manage your resources so depending on where you invest your XP the game can play very differently for example you can invest in fire spells pyrokinesis and combustion and this turns Aya into an FBI monster slaying Mage where where you're constantly managing your MP and trying to position yourself to hit multiple monsters at once don't fancy that or you can go into Earth Magic antibody and energy shot which increases your defenses and weapon attack powering up your guns and keeping the focus on the base combat mechanics you can buy spells that cure State assailments and provide heals which opens up more space in your inventory or you can go into stuns that allow you to easily escape from combat and preserve your resources in an entirely different way there's just an amazing amount of choice and as each spell and each upgrade brings its own function to the table there's never a moment where you feel like you've wasted your hard-earned XP or unlocked something that has no use it could be so easy to Simply look at the tank controls and the real-time combat and declare this to be a resident evil clone but I really feel like that's quite reductive even at its most action orientated Resident Evil never comes close to matching the depth of variety T in Parasite Eve 2's combat or the reward found from diving into its systems as a pure video game experience it's just extremely fun to play but systems and gameplay have always only ever been half of the appeal of Parasite Eve and a captivating story with creative presentation is the other so as Ira explores the tower she runs into a fellow list agent Rupert Broderick and after the two fight off an nmc attack he tells her to call HQ and request immediate backup this brings us to another clever little design idea which is how Parasite Eve 2 incorporates saving into the reality of its Game World just like in the first Parasite Eve all of the save points are telephones with the idea being that saving is higher calling head office to report her progress that in itself was a cool idea but here it's taken a step further and each save is accompanied by a conversation that either helps Advance the plot or delivers new objectives they work like a miniature version of the Codex calls in Metal Gear Solid and add a creative story Flair to something that's usually totally functional and virtually never acknowledged as a legitimate in-game action on the phone Iris told by Pierce that unfortunately there is no backup coming so she and Rupert will have to bring the situation back back under control on their own a task that is quickly made much harder by the arrival of another threat in the Taoist Church Aya walks in on Rupert being attacked by a huge Mast soldier who immediately leaps over her head and out of the stained glass window neither agent has any idea who or what that was but with Rupert now injured it's left to Aya to discover what is going on this is then made all the more complicated in the Tower Gardens as she overhears what looks like one of the remaining SWAT team members planting a bomb and talking about how the missed agents would be handled by something called number nine it turns out that is the giant leaping Soldier and Up on the Roof Aya comes face to face with him once again surprisingly he claims to be an nmc Hunter when Aya tells him to drop the Detonator he attacks her and with thrust into the game's first proper boss fight now we'll talk about Parasite Eve 2's boss fight in more detail in just a second but for now all we need to know is that despite Aya defeating number nine he manages to activate the Detonator and get away leaving our agents to be rescued by a chopper while the tower explodes beneath them fast forward a few days and we're back at Miss head office where IRA and Rupa are being debriefed by missed chief officer Eric Baldwin who has a new assignment for agent Breyer she's being sent out into the Mojave Desert to a small town called dryfield where there have been some reported sightings of nmcs with the mystery of the Acropolis Tower still unresolved she's unsurprisingly frustrated but before she leaves Pierce lets her in on the discovery that might connect the two locations during the tower incident Aya recovered an earpiece from one of the nmcs and inside its mechanism was sand that pierce has traced to the Mojave Desert it looks like someone or something was controlling the mitochondrial monsters and clearly the answer to our questions lie somewhere in the town of dryfield so Aya gets in her car and we head out into the rest of the game this whole sequence lasts just under an hour and it does a really great job of introducing the new directions Square wanted to head in while retaining just enough of the series cinematic past this combination of new and old is exactly what I meant when I said that Parasite Eve 2 often feels like more of a reimagining than a true sequel if you go in wanting to see more of Daniel and maida or explore a city under siege or even immerse yourself in another center-style hard sci-fi story this is not the game for you but what we do have is a unique reinterpretation with a lot of its own potential now the question of if Parasite Eve 2 makes this change of Direction worthwhile is one that dominates the rest of the game so Aya arrives in the dusty roadside town of dryfield a supposed Oasis of civilization surrounded by the Wasteland the Mojave Desert a sole objective at this point is to contact the locals and see what they know about the supposed nmc sightings but something is obviously wrong from the moment she gets out of her car the place is a ghost town and at the local Motel she discovers the reason why just like at the Acropolis Tower the town is overrun with mitochondrial creatures freakish horse monsters with human faces malformed shamblers hiding in the shadows and all manner of disturbing would-be creatures all of which are distinctly hostile and all of which want to prevent Aya from exploring the town's Sunday streets now this brings us to yet another major departure from the previous game which is how Parasite Eve 2's levels are constructed Parasite Eve one had a few glimmers of Resident Evil inspired design but really the game's individual zones functioned more like RPG dungeons you arrived at a location fought your way through its rooms and then face down a boss before returning to the world map and proceeding to the next area Parasite Eve 2 Jetta sends this structure in favor of much more detailed zones that we spend far more time in with dryfield accounting for around a third of the entire playthrough and just a handful of other locations to discover afterwards in typical survival horror fashion your objective usually consists of unlocking a specific door or reaching a specific area and this is predictably done through solving puzzles and finding Keys all while fighting off the deformed residents in this respect the accusations of CopyCat design do hold some weight and when you're looking at your map ticking off outdoors and making sure you've explored every room it's impossible to ignore the comparisons to Resident Evil the thing is this is a really solid way to design a survival horror game which is exactly why it's so often replicated and parasite E2 does manage to bring enough unique flavor to the table to prevent it from becoming totally derivative for starters dryfield is really detailed and on top of simply looking great almost everything can be interacted with this usually prompts Aya to comment on her surroundings and as ever she's a Charming mixture of sarcasm curiosity and confidence with her snarky comments providing the perfect foil to all the unsettling atmosphere in dryfield's abandoned street now interestingly this environmental detail extends Beyond adding narrative flavor as diligently checking every object usually rewards you with additional items sometimes it's just a simple Coke can that you can take from the General Store fridge or a case of leftover ammunition in an office but in a few places it gets far more interesting in dryfield this takes the form of the riddle which is a really well put together puzzle that asks you to pay serious attention to your surroundings in the public toilet you can find an incomplete message scrawled on the wall and if you fill in the blanks this gives you a clue to both the answers riddle and the location of the next message hear it solve my riddle before you go how many phones and dryfields streets then proceed go down below to the sunless molehills where red blood sleeps this won't mean much until you end up in the General Store's Wine Cellar where searching around the barrels rewards you with the next clue this process repeats a few more times taking you to a dilapidated house and then a motel room each time asking you to count something in the driving area phones urinals wine caskets and then mirrors before directing you to a jet black door beneath the moon's cold glare this is of course the locker located in The Loft and if you punch in the code 4487 you're rewarded with the holy water an equivable item that permanently increases your defenses by 25 but at the cost of reducing your available item slots the fact that this is all completely optional is a Real Testament to how much effort was put into designing this area and the intuitive use of this single space doesn't just end with sarcastic comments and hidden puzzles as you progress further into the game dryfield actually changes around you substantially altering the gameplay in ways that keep this single location fresh when Aya arrives in the town it's the middle of the day and our first steps take place against the backdrop of a blazing Desert Sun compared to the Perpetual night of Resident Evil or the nightmarish dimensions of Silent Hill it hardly even looks like a horror game but this is all being done to set up a transition later on after some initial exploration you'll run into dryfield's two remaining occupants Kyle Madigan a pi who's been hired to investigate the town and Gary Douglas a cantankerous mechanic who lives with his trusty dog Flint after rescuing Kyle from the top of the dryfield water tower iron him agree to share information and he reveals that he's investigating a nearby underground shelter that was built by a doomsday cult and apparently is the source of all of the nmcs Mr Douglas who seems happy to have a capable FBI agent around confirms that this is indeed the case and hands over a motel key so Aya can set up a base of operations and then ask her to check out the General Store Annex as he believes there might be someone trapped inside now on top of directing us to our next objective Mr Douglas also acts as this Zone's shopkeeper and after a call with Pierce missed HQ he agrees to trade our Bounty points for items in his collection which includes ammunition consumables and new weapons it's an interesting concept because the ability to buy healing items and restock on ammo should really ruin the survival horror atmosphere as eeking out your resources is a major pillar of that genre's gameplay in order to remedy this the shop only ever stocks the weakest form of restorative items and with only a handful of attachment slots it's not actually all that beneficial to load up on these small fry heels instead the vast majority of the game's most powerful items still have to be found out in the world either drop from powerful enemies or as a reward for exploration like in the dry field riddle and this helps balance out the availability of resources that having a shop brings that's also true for the game's weapons which are balanced around having strengths and weaknesses rather than being based on a hierarchy of power like the pistols shotguns and grenade launchers of Resident Evil the pistol for example has a really solid rate of fire and reloads quickly but is overall the weakest weapon in the game you'd think that might mean it's always replaced but through adding upgrades and finding more powerful ammunition it's perfectly feasible to take it all the way through to the late game and really which weapon you use is more about what complements your play style rather than which does the most damage for my playthrough for example I stuck to the assault rifle which fired very quickly but had the drawback of requiring a lot of standing still especially given its lengthy reload animation this switched up the combat so it was much more focused on positioning and then that influence which spells I invested in as I wanted to up my defenses and healing in order to deal with any mistakes the build variety is surprisingly Broad and it really does add a lot of potential for experimenting with subsequent playthroughs something which games in both the survival horror and RPG genres don't always manage to nail so anyway after a bit more exploration in the paths beneath the town and some back and forth to find a wrench in order to move a wardrobe Arya eventually ends up in the dilapidated house and here she once again comes face to face with the freakish Soldier known as number nine confusingly the woman who he's just killed turns out to be an nmc and while Aya tries to question him he claims that his destruction of the Acropolis Tower was to save the city from another New York style mitochondrial outbreak unconvinced Aya decides to arrest him and we then thrust into a short boss fight which resolves in a pretty surprising way number nine suddenly recognizes Aya as being related to Eve and At The Mention Of Her name our hero begins to lose control of her powers igniting the mutant soldier in a blaze of cellular combustion and then slumping to the floor in a few State she begins to hallucinate and sees what looks like a vision of herself strapped to an operating table the world around this young version of Aya begins to war and with a burst of power she destroys her restraints and escapes from the room eventually she awakens after she's found by Kyle but hours have passed and night has now fallen on the town which brings that big shift in the environment that we spoke about earlier our main goal is now to get out to the underground shelter in the desert but unfortunately as ice car has been Trashed by nmcs we're thrust into another level-wide hunt to find alternative transport now the main difference between dryfield at night and dryfield in the day is that along with a much more spooky Ambience a new set of enemies has rolled into town and areas that you've previously cleared out have now become repopulated that might not sound like anything particularly crazy but it's quite the Twist on traditional survival horror design which generally has set enemies at set locations and this mix-up ends up being a real double-edged sword obviously the main reason to do this is to keep the zones unpredictable and with the new encounters comes new mechanics like small exploding creatures that look like babies or spider-like monsters that can turn invisible and it does succeed at creating a different atmosphere that feels distinct from dryfield during the day now the downside of this is that because you're rewarded for enemies you kill with both Bounty points that you can use to buy items and XP to invest in your spells this cycle of respawning enemies encourages you to make sure that you clear every single encounter every time a Zone resets despite the tank controls and real-time combat and the inventory management and the puzzles this small feature ultimately makes Parasite Eve 2 feel more like an action RPG than a horror game as instead of looking to avoid combat you're usually trying to find it for some players this will fly in the very face of what makes survival horror enjoyable but I find it actually suits Parasite Eve 2's mechanics and and its narrative remember Aya is no longer a confused New York city cop and she's even further removed from the civilians that star in Resident Evil or Silent Hill it's literally her job to hunt down mitochondrial monsters so it makes complete sense that she would want to exterminate any and everyone that she encounters and would have a high level of Competency in doing so so the dryfield Knight sequence goes like this you fight your way over to Mr Douglas and ask if you can borrow his Bronco he agrees but the thing needs gas and a little tune-up so you head over to the lobby solve a puzzle which gives you the Bronco key take that up to The Loft to get the Jerry can take that over to the gas pumps and then refill the Bronco which gives our mechanic friend time to get it working again it's a lot of work for our busy agent and she decides to get some rest before she and Kyle head out to the shelter which results in another vision of young Aya she's clearly scared and on the run and as the picture Fades she's surrounded by four creatures that look exactly like number nine Aya wakes up shaken not sure what these hallucinations mean and as she's showering and trying to compose herself a monstrous new problem shambles into dryfield this is the burner and unlike our skirmishes with number nine it forms the first proper boss Encounter of the game a hulking multi-story Beast with a flamethrower sticking out of its jaw that can deal and take a serious beating Parasite Eve 2's boss fights are its centerpiece moments and Beyond The Fantastic art of these disgusting monsters they're also where the combat mechanics shine brightest thanks to their huge Health pools and much stronger attacks all of your items spells and weapons feel a lot less powerful and this injects a real sense of Panic it's slowly burn through your resources praying that you'll be able to make another Dodge or strike that final blur when used correctly boss fights and survival horror games and action RPGs should leave you feeling like you've only lived by the skin of your teeth and after two sequences where you become increasingly comfortable the burner is the perfect way to cap off this section of the game when you finally emerge Victorious dry field lies in Ruins and the motel is almost entirely destroyed Kyle and I decide that they need to head to the shelter immediately before anything else can happen so our two Heroes hop into the Bronco and head off into the moonlit desert now this is a pretty important moment of Separation because not only does this Mark the end of the first disc but also a pretty massive shift in Parasite Eve 2's storytelling structure and sadly overall quality first disc was a Triumph of imaginative reinvention managing to redefine itself without losing its identity the second disc is where this Balancing Act tips over and the interesting design begins to unravel at first there isn't anything obviously wrong and actually disc 2 starts out quite strong we're treated to this haunting FMV of the horse-like nmcs watching the Bronco and the way this is presented makes what could be a very stupid looking monster design look quite disturbing anyway the creatures attacked the Bronco and we regain control of Aya with our heroes backed into a corner Kyle gets injured and Aya tells him to get to safety while she fights off the mitochondrial horde which throws us into a protracted combat sequence where you have to fight wave after wave of the horse-like monsters this is the start of a very short area called the mines which while still pretty fun begins that downward slope of Parasite Eve 2's second half the issue isn't so much the gameplay which is still a great combination of action RPG combat puzzle solving and a really cool boss fight against the white Primark Chaser which has a great mechanic where you can either ignite barrels to damage it or use them to light up the room in order to Target the boss itself now the issue comes from how the tight level design starts to become a little wonky and doesn't really feel like a natural progression from the interconnected rooms and shifting environments of dryfield the entire area is completely linear and very short only dealing out about 20 minutes of combat and puzzles before you're in the boss fight and then on to the next zone now the idea of a short transitional area isn't that weird but what is odd is the Obscure way with which we get to the next Zone once the boss is defeated Aya finds a motorbike and if you inspect it twice it somehow activates one of the electrical lines which if you go back to the power station you can redirect to open a passageway hidden inside of the mine walls and this leads to the underground shelter just unnecessarily obscure for a section of gameplay that only lasts a handful of minutes and in fact I'm not even really sure what the mines are supposed to add why not just have Kyle and Aya drive straight to the shelter and then have the nmc attack split them up there rather than this odd little sequence that fortuitously leads us exactly where we need to go regardless of this it's the next area the shelter where things really begin to fall apart and this is a pretty large problem considering this Zone accounts for virtually the entire remaining run time before our two investigators head out in the Bronco Kyle tells Aya that while the shelter was built by a doomsday cult it was later purchased by a large international corporation and surprise surprise we quickly discovered that the entire facility has been converted into a massive scientific laboratory it's just the most cliche survival horror setting possible and it does nothing to alleviate those accusations of wholesale plagiarism in dryfield there was at least an attempt to do things differently but in the shelter we could honestly be playing Dino Crisis or Resident Evil and the flourishes that make Parasite Eve feel unique are sadly all missing instead of puzzles that are based on environmental Clues with decoding passwords to access computer systems and instead of an in-world explanation for a shop we plug our Bounty points into a faceless machine that spits out ammunition and weapons most disappointing is the shift in the narrative which much like the environment begins to feel very familiar while exploring the shelter and looking for Kyle Aya discovers documents relating to the work of Dr Bowman the facility scientific lead and here we finally get some answers that explain this second outbreak of mitochondrial monsters essentially after the New York incident information about Eve's parasitic powers found its way into the hands of a large pharmaceutical company and the shelter was purchased in order to study its potential in advancing human evolution under the cover of the Mojave Desert experiments were performed on human test subjects as Dr Bowman and his team attempted to twist their physiology in all manner of strange directions unsurprisingly these tests LED them towards the creation of powerful super soldiers called Golems the Ayah discovers Frozen in stasis and from which number nine clearly originates the existence of such scientific cruelty would be shocking enough but Aya makes another terrible Discovery the goal of This research wasn't simply to create Unstoppable killing machines or hyper-adaptable slaves but to push Humanity as a whole to what they considered to be the next level this is called the second neotany plan and it aims to extend these supposed gifts to every single man woman and child on the planet in the center of the shelter is a huge anmc an artificial neo-mitochondrial creature and within its cocoon lies the power to create a virus that will spread this transformation around the globe this Revelation takes us into the final stretch of the game as our objective becomes stopping the activation of the anmc but it's impossible to not feel underwhelmed that this is the explanation for all the Intrigue and mystery that was set up during the Acropolis Tower and dry field sections it's just far too similar to the plot of Resident Evil we've got an evil pharmaceutical company scientists with no morals experimenting with dangerous technology and a laboratory where things have clearly gotten out of hand really it couldn't be any more similar if it tried and in interviews after Parasite Eve 2's release even Kenichi awao acknowledged that they should have done much more to try and create an original narrative now sadly the problems with the shelter don't end with its story and Aesthetics as it also suffers from a host of structural design issues from the moment I stepped through the hidden passageway there's around half of Parasite Eve 2 left to play through but almost the entirety of this is spent inside of these drab metal hallways with only very brief sequences that take you outside of it now this doesn't necessarily have to be an issue but the problem is that the shelter is surprisingly small with each of its three floors considerably less complex than dry field you very quickly run out of new spaces to explore and end up traveling through the same Halls running back and forth as the game's objectives take you from one side of the complex to the other it's frustratingly repetitive and this is where the respawning enemy system really starts to take its toll the mutated creatures of the shelter revive an astounding four times and it means a lot of the second half of the game consists of clearing out rooms and hallways that you've already passed through multiple times in dryfield this structure worked well because while you similarly ran back and forth across the map the environment shifted around you and kept things interesting here it simply feels like a move to pad out the remaining run time and instead of building tension or Panic it's just repetitive now this would be bad enough on its own but this huge spike in the number of enemies accidentally causes a much more serious problem with four sets of respawns there's now the potential to gain a lot of BP and XP and this sudden influx of resources really throws the game's balance out of whack by the time I was approaching the final hours of the game that strategic decision making which made the early section so fun having to carefully decide which weapon I bought or which spell to upgrade gave way to Simply unlocking every anything available and having more money than I knew what to do with without any real effort I ended up with a maximum amount of grenades possible and an almost fully leveled up ire this obviously has a massive impact on how challenging the game is and the sort of atmosphere that it's able to create now that is a lot of negativity to process but it's not the entire picture as there are still some great moments there will likely be enough to keep you engaged until the credits roll while the moment-to-moment gameplay might bottom out in terms of creativity the boss fights are still fantastic and almost make up for the disappointing late game combat there's a small sequence where Aya becomes trapped in a decontaminating chamber and to escape she has to slide down a dust Chute and into the domain of a freakish monster called the Glutton just like the burner before it the glutton's design is great taking up almost half the screen and slowly closing down the space you have while it tries to suck you into its gaping more one element that I really like about these fights is that along with the massive Health pools that really give you a chance to unleash all that ammunition it Wow and his team weren't afraid to get complex and give their headline fights a lot of different moves and phases that you need to get to grips with these bosses aren't just down sponges and you need to work out the mechanics quickly learning when and where to strike and how to stay alive funnily enough another strong sequence during eyes time in the shelter comes from a completely different direction eventually Aya discovers that the shelter sits above a construct called the Neo Arc a facility built to showcase the results of Dr Bowman's experiments it's designed to resemble a zoo and cleverly the biomes of the Ark provide an in-world justification for all the different creatures that Aya comes into contact with those long-legged Chasers were designed to live in the wide open Savannah while the monkey-like Golems excel in dense rainforests and thick-skinned mossbacks survive the Arctic tundra this in-world justification for the design of your enemies was one of Parasite Eve One's best ideas and it's nice to see it carried over and expanded upon with the broken glass and barricades giving a clear explanation for what happened to the scientists up in the shelter another element that makes the Neo Arc notable is that it's almost entirely puzzle driven and you have to solve a series of quite complex brain teasers in order to get through this section the reason for their existence is a little tenuous apparently having been designed to entertain visitors but with some suspension of disbelief you'll find a very welcome break from the Relentless action RPG combat that dominates the rest of the second disc the pyramid puzzle in particular was very satisfying to work out as it involves first matching symbols to create a cipher and then using that Cipher to decode two colored sequences one that takes you to your objective and the other that leads to an optional boss that drops a powerful item on top of being rewarding from a progression perspective it's just satisfying to have a chunk of gameplay that something a little different and without this jaunt into the Lush forests of the Neo Arc the second half of Parasite Eve 2 would be a substantially worse experience now my final point of Praise is reserved for the game's big narrative twist which I quite like despite making almost zero sense after defeating the Glutton Aya bumps into Kyle who despite falling down a chasm in the mine is doing all right for himself and it's discovered that there's something being protected by a huge wall of mitochondrial energy in the very center of the facility this is what prompts our journey into the Neo Arc as Aya destroys two biological generators which allow us to pass through a heavily armored door and discover the source of this power turns out that the source is Aya or more specifically a clone of iron you see the faceless Corporation funding the shelter had somehow gotten hold of her DNA and used it to create an exact copy which could act as a nervous system for all Bowman's Creations those Visions I was having earlier in the game weren't flashbacks or hallucinations but memories of her doppelganger Breaking Free from captivity the spark which allowed the monsters loose and began the events of the game seeing that her young clone is an innocent prisoner Aya decides to rescue her and tells Kyle that they'll call her Eve now personally I think Maya would have been a much more fitting name considering that Eve was a mass murdering psycho mutant but when that helmet comes off and you see Aya's face underneath you can't help but be drawn in and it's a welcome moment of cinematic emotion in what has otherwise become an uninteresting Resident Evil rerun now sadly this moment of brevity is broken up by the Golems who have all awakened from their cryogenic sleep and they break into Eve's Nursery looking to recapture her Kyle holds them off while our two heroines Escape out of a broken window but while they're racing to the exit Eve is snatched by a revitalized number nine powerless to stop him the Golem makes off with the young girl and here we begin the final sequence of the game a crazed climactic mess of a conclusion that is as confusing as it is captivating unlike Parasite Eve 1 which had two conflicting enemies that were based around the new game plus system Parasite Eve 2 follows a more conventional setup with a good and bad ending that trigger depending on certain actions that you take during the game considering how closely the second disc runs to the structure of Resident Evil 1 this should come as no surprise but what makes this system so strange is quite how many actions contribute towards your ending and how utterly obscure some of them are the very first ending critical event is all the way back during the burner attack on dryfield and you can easily miss that there's another dimension to this fight when the monster first appears Mr Douglas and his dog Flynn are on the ground floor if you don't defeat it within a set amount of time it'll destroy a section of a motel and leave the town of its own accord now you might think this is preferable to wasting valuable ammunition but sadly this results in Flint dying which on top of just being an absurdly cruel punishment has a really big knock-on effect during the rest of the game you see during your time in the shelter you can find a locked gate called the full moon door and by solving a quick puzzle at a switchboard a few rooms over you can head through it and into a completely optional area now that might sound exciting but incredibly when Ira emerges from the passageway she is back in dryfield considering that the back end of the first disc revolved around finding a way to travel the massive distance between these two locations the existence of the full moon door is somewhat confusing and it's made no better by the purpose of this little back track which is critical to deciding your ending if you saved Flynn during the burner fight he'll be waiting for you when you arrive back in town and clearly he wants you to follow him at the water tower Aya discovers an injured Pierce Carradine the missed agent from the start of the game who's taken it upon himself to head out into the desert and try and provide some assistance unfortunately as he's not much of a fighter he's landed himself in some hot water and it's up to Aya to get him back on his feet now the way this is done is astoundingly obscure in the courtyard of the motel is an ice machine and if you go and grab some for pierced upon his wounds he'll tell you he's feeling a lot better the only thing is you have to do this two more times and if you don't do it quickly enough the ice will melt and you'll miss your chance to save him I'm never usually one for hand-holding but the dialogue between ire and Pierce implies the opposite of what the game wants you to do and if you've never seen the ice machine or don't realize it can melt you're banging out of luck and locked into the bad ending now if by some miracle Pierce does survive you'll eventually link up with him at the shelter control room where he tries to provide remote assistance But ultimately he ends up being captured while Aya is away in the Neo Arc this then leads to another completely critical but utterly missable event when you eventually return to the control room you'll find Pierce has left you a memo which reveals that the shelter's system contains copies of every single Mist Hunter report and this leads Pierce to believe that there must be a traitor within their organization it's a shocking Revelation but on its own this will still give you the bad ending and what you're meant to do is immediately save the game which prompts a phone call where Aya tells Rupa and Jody to get out of missed headquarters now even if you do manage to follow all these strange steps you're still not out of the woods with a shelter overrun with mitochondrial monsters and a huge nmc that's about to release a worldwide virus the American government decides to step in we get a brief scene from The White House where the president orders a cleanup operation and this leads to the U.S military showing up at the shelter and making mincemeat out of a horde of golems that have cornered Aya she's taken to a nearby temporary base and here we learn that Kyle Pierce and Eve are all still missing which means in true Action Hero tradition it falls to Aya to head back into the shelter rescue her compatriots and save the day at this point you're free to purchase any remaining weapons save your game and then head towards the game's final sequence but there are still steps to take if you want to get the good ending while chasing after number nine you'll stumble across the motorbike from the Mine level and laying on the ground nearby is a teddy bear the Aya recognizes as belonging to Eve once you're in the military Camp you can then have Flint the dog who has somehow found his way across the desert use the bear to pick up Eve's scent and this then leads you to her location now what's odd about this is that once you head back into the underground lab almost all of the doors are permanently locked except the ones that lead to Eve's location so this interaction with Flint doesn't actually add any benefit Beyond creating an arbitrary requirement for the best ending what makes matters even worse is that even then there are still more criteria to fulfill and what you're supposed to do is ignore flint and run over to the Golem cryo Chambers where you'll find the injured Pierce and resuscitate him only when this final interaction is done or you have satisfied all of the requirements to see the game's best ending and and frankly it is just an absurd sequence of illogical events that seem purpose-built to be missed on a first playthrough we've already touched on how strange it is that the shelter in dryfield are connected but there's so much else that makes no sense why do you have to save the game immediately after seeing Pierce's memo where does Eve's teddy bear come from as she clearly doesn't have this when they escape the nursery what sort of injuries can peers possibly have that are life-threatening but are also cured by an ice pack and why does so much of this revolve around Mr Douglas's dog by comparison other survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill gate their best endings behind simple exploration or keeping characters alive but you can do that in Parasite Eve too and still come up short I hate to be so cynical but it really feels like the kind of system designed to sell walkthroughs rather than provide meaningful gameplay and considering this is all rooted in keeping a dog alive at around a third of the way through the game it'll take a lot to convince me that these strangely disconnected steps add anything to the experience so regardless of the ending you're heading towards eventually Aya ends up in the control room which is where Parasite Eve 2 comes to a conclusion first up is the obligatory speech where the villain reveals their plan and number nine is more than willing to deliver this apparently the idea is to have the humongous artificial nmc consume Eve which should unleash its true potential and allow it to disperse the mitochondrial virus around the world as if that wasn't a horrible enough Prospect Aya also has to deal with another shocking Revelation standing beside the Golem is Kyle Madigan who has been secretly working towards the second neotani plan from the very beginning manipulating Aya into helping him discover Eve's location honestly I did not see this twist coming especially as Kyle and Aya have a sort of tense romantic relationship that simmers throughout most of the game I'd taken this to mean that they were just an inversion of the typical Action Hero rescuing the damsel Trope and completely missed the hints that Kyle would turn out to be Parasite Eve 2's version of Albert weska it's certainly surprising but not exactly original that is until Kyle shoots iron and then turns towards number nine foreign ly after having seen the results of Bowman's research first hand he decided that becoming a neo-mitochondrial freak was not actually all that appealing and opted to go with the old Double Bluff in order to save the day also he thought unfortunately there are bigger forces at play than our little control room confrontation and after having ordered their troops to withdraw the U.S military fires an orbital cannon at the Mojave Desert hoping to clean up the growing mess with a more permanent solution when we rejoin our Trio they are in a bad way Aya survives thanks to her mitochondrial Powers but Eve is thrown down into the anmc nest and Kyle lies injured on the far side of a ravine as if things couldn't get any worse the orbital Cannon's impact has caused the artificial mitochondrial being to hatch from its cocoon and as its hulking body Rises towards the ceiling we're thrust into the game's last confrontation now throughout Parasite Eve 2 the boss fights have been a real highlight mainly because they marry interesting design with genuine difficulty creating an engaging challenge that even players with tons of ammo and spells will have a hard time blowing past this final boss takes all of that to another level and is an astounding difficulty Spike which has become notorious for shutting unprepared players out of the credits there are countless game facts posts about how exactly you're supposed to beat this encounter the simple answer is that you need to be planning for this fight from virtually the first minute of the game round one is against Brahman a huge mitochondrial monster that sits in the middle of the control center and tracks your movement while unleashing a host of different powerful attacks each one relates to a different body part and you can destroy these sections individually and this reduces the spread of moves that you have to deal with although you only have to destroy the eye in his stomach in order to progress to the next phase now it might seem like the obvious strategy is to take out the body parts in order to allow you space to focus on the eye but this leaves Brahman with a single attack a monstrous energy blast that is virtually undodgeable hitting you for a guaranteed athp which is enough to one shot higher unless you're wearing end game armor or have a high level defense spell active the sheer threat of this unavoidable attack means that instead the optimum strategy is to destroy the eye as quickly as possible but this creates a whole host of issues that we'll discover in just a moment when Brahman is defeated a shortcut scene plays and in its dying throws the creature reaches out and absorbs Eve creating a union between the two beings a new mitochondrial eve that resembles the final form Ayah faced on Liberty Island this is the true final boss and it is a battle that will make Veterans of even the toughest action game sweat and frustration Eve's moveset is absurdly strong and she attacks with such a pace that it renders many of the game's weapons pretty much useless my weapon of choice had been the assault rifle which I upgraded to have a grenade launcher attachment and this felt extremely strong in regular combat against most of the game's bosses the issue I found was that the reload time for the grenades was longer than the gap between Eve's attacks and the rifle ammo on its own didn't do nearly enough damage you see the fight has a certain flow that you have to follow after doing a series of diving attacks evil began to supercharge all the mitochondria in the room and if you can't deal 150 damage to her during this stay the explosion will go off and this causes heavy damage and drains your magic down to zero if you're hit by this even once you're essentially boned as it means no healing or defensive spells and as there is no break to restock your inventory between the two monsters you have to rely on just a handful of items to carry you through two extremely tough fights now this would all be hard enough on its own but after you deal a set amount of damage the fight switches into a second phase which is even more punishing Eve's primary mode of attack switches to these homing balls of lightning which given the fixed camera angles are really hard to avoid and then periodically she'll split off a ghostly clone which chases you around the arena inflicting random state assailments if it hits you Contracting paralysis or silence will effectively end the fight and so you spend most of this phase running for your life desperately trying to get enough space to cast a purge or heal before you can even think about doing any damage remember I mentioned the consequences of rushing down Brahmin well here is where those chickens come home to roost as the two monsters Health pools are actually linked for each body part that you don't destroy on Brahmin Eve has that much health added to her own pool which means if you go straight for the eye she'll have over 14 000 HP which along with the brutal mechanics makes for a fight so difficult that many people have legitimately never beaten it the only way that I could have even a slight chance at overcoming this hellish encounter was to spend virtually all of my resources tanking brahman's unavoidable energy blast so I could destroy its whole body and then during the e-fight carefully timing my grenades to get through the first phase and then simply praying to God for sheer luck in the second eventually I did manage to clear it but I won't tell you how many attempts it took and how high my blood pressure became during the process with certain weapons like the lmg or a fully upgraded poison spell this fight is a bit of a different beast but there's just simply no way to know that your build will fall apart in the final moments especially when the difficulty isn't anywhere near this high at any other point in the game its notorious reputation is more than deserved and despite the agony of endless failed attempts it's a fitting end for a game that does place the vast majority of its focus on its action RPG combat and that's very evident as once Eve has been defeated the game wraps up astoundingly quickly by some miracle when mitochondrial eve disintegrates it leaves behind the child Eve Who's completely unharmed and while Aya passes out from her wounds she's able to wake up for just long enough to see Kyle one last time when the military arrives the double agent is nowhere to be found our final scene is a debrief between a nameless General and the president of America where it's made clear that the US has managed to cover up the events of the game and knowledge of nmcs and mitochondrial power remains an underground conspiracy theory now the reward for completing all the Absurd events to get the good ending comes right at the end and disappointingly it's just a series of still headshots with text that explains what happened to each character Aya was able to adopt Eve and with help from her friends at Mist they were able to expose the traitors and Purge the organization of any bad faith agents Mr Douglas and Flint are rebuilding dryfield and Kyle has been seen in years despite searching for him the strangest of these relates to pierce who leaves mist and goes to work with kunihiko Maeda which is a particularly odd throwback to Parasite Eve 1 considering none of the game's cast are ever mentioned at any other point realistically in the age of YouTube where virtually every cutscene is available with just the click of a mouse this short slideshow is not worth the effort required to unlock it and I think the juxtaposition between Parasite Eve 2's final cut scene and its final boss really highlight where the priorities were during this game's development even with the poor balancing and uninteresting environments of its second half parasite YouTube really does succeed in blending survival horror ideas with RPG gameplay in a way that its predecessor never came close to but the issue is that it's wrapped around an underwhelming story that ends up being extremely derivative despite initially looking quite promising so many of the game's Mysteries like the reason for the mitochondrial outbreak in the Acropolis Tower the explanation for number Nine's presence in dryfield how Aya and Eve are able to share memories and who exactly was behind the purchase of the shelter these all remain unanswered and to have the plot wrap up so quickly is really very unsatisfying parasite made its name as a series that obsessively explained itself with both senna's novel and takita's game going to Great Lengths to justify every event and character with some sort of piece of exposition the story of Parasite Eve 2 simply feels like an idea that a wow had for another Resident Evil game and that's a real shame considering the unique identity of the franchise was one of the main reasons for its success the very last seconds of the game highlight this disconnect perfectly while Parasite Eve 1 ended with a chilling reminder of the mitochondria that resides in us all keeping the focus locked onto the game's core themes Parasite Eve 2 concludes with Aya and Eve at the New York Natural History Museum where they are surprised by a shadowy figure who he can presume is Kyle Madigan it's a traditional meat and potatoes video game Happy Ending and while that would be perfectly fine for any other game it's just not Parasite Eve now while that might leave you feeling slightly deflated this focus on gameplay over creating a cinematic story means that the post-game content is substantially better and a Wows team absolutely succeeded in making multiple playthroughs worth your time depending on a few different criteria when you complete the game you'll unlock new game modes which remix the gameplay in some pretty interesting ways the initial two are replay mode and Bounty mode which both function very differently replay mode is substantially easier than the base game as it gives you more XP and BP for each kill and allows you to purchase your end game equipment from the moment you arrive in dryfield it's really designed to take away the hard decisions from the early game and give your license to just have fun bouncy mode on the other hand is the complete opposite Here regular enemies drop almost no XP and BP and instead you have to seek out powerful Golems which are dotted around the game's levels in order to gain any resources it essentially fills the zones with a ton of mini bosses and it's actually very fun to try and work out ways to bring them down with only the early game items by clearing these you can unlock another two modifiers scavenger mode which removes almost all the game's items and nightmare mode which appropriately combines the enemies of bounty mode with the scarcity of scavenger mode and is a ludicrous challenge that only very few players will be able to clear thankfully unlike in its predecessor you can now skip both dialogue and cutscenes which makes taking on the post game content a far more enticing Prospect while there aren't any hidden alternative endings all four modes are well worth experiencing and keep the focus squarely on the one area where Parasite Eve 2 does actually deliver Parasite Eve 2 released in Japan in December 1999 and then in the US and Europe in August and September of the following year given everything we've just discussed it shouldn't be surprising to hear that it got a real mixture of reviews and really split critics down the middle Outlets Like official PlayStation magazine play and famitsu gave it glowing reviews while organizations like Edge IGN and all game were very negative it seemed that there was little consensus about what the game did well and what it did badly and depending on which review you read you could leave with wildly different interpretations of where this game's strengths and weaknesses lay I think a big part of this muted critical reception was thanks to the huge gap between its Japanese and English language releases which sadly put Parasite Eve 2 up against a handful of Next Generation titles that made its tank controls lack of voice acting and small scope looked slightly dated that same year the Dreamcast had released and titles like Skies of Arcadia Jet Set Radio and Resident Evil Code Veronica were pushing the boundaries of video game visuals and this can't have helped iwell's team when they were producing what was essentially a survival horror throwback even squaresoft was guilty of contributing to this atmosphere as that year they'd announced Final Fantasy 10 for the upcoming PlayStation 2 and with its incredible visuals orchestral sound and futuristic presentation it must have been hard for critics and consumers to look at late generation PlayStation 1 games in the same way they had just a few months earlier this muted critical response did have an effect on sales and Parasite Eve 2 ended up selling quite a bit less than its predecessor only just north of a million copies as the first game had sold almost three times that and without even being released in pal regions it was safe to say that this Resident Evil style experiment hadn't entirely worked now I think that in 2023 away from those contextual pressures it's much easier to see what Parasite Eve 2 brings to the table and if you're looking for a pure synthesis of survival horror and action RPG it's hard to find any game from any generation that Nails this with as much Flair the issue was that in the year 2000 squaresoft's priorities had started to change and that world of experimentation that birthed these two strange sci-fi horror passion projects began to transform into something very different as the 90s rolled over into the 2000s squaresoft became a very different place and this had a huge impact on the kind of games that the company produced the biggest change was the loss of hironobu sakaguchi who despite spearheading their 90s golden age and mentoring many of its younger talents had decided to leave Square unfortunately he'd never been able to salvage Final Fantasy the spirits within which had massively bombed when it was released in July 2001 and this had caused sakaguchi to lose a lot of confidence in himself after pulling away from Hands-On development he eventually left his position when Square merged with fellow Japanese giant Enix in 2003 without sakaguchi it wasn't just the company's name that changed as swearinix's development style began to transform and while they had once reveled in experimentation over the next few years the focus shifted towards more traditional AAA development while Final Fantasy continued to get bigger and Bolder f efforts were made to core other areas of the industry and big development deals with companies like Nintendo and Disney were signed in Final Fantasy 10 2 they began to produce more typical sequels and alongside this they embraced portable and mobile gaming recognizing just how much money there was to be made in the handheld space now this change of Direction affected Parasite Eve in two major ways the first was that the high concept mid-budget games of the 1990s of which Parasite Eve was the definitive example were no longer part of Square's strategy especially considering many of the genres they'd experimented with had gone rather out of style side-scrolling shoot em ups and arcade style Brawlers were giving way to first-person shooters and cinematic action games and unfortunately survival horror was also very much on the way out by the mid-2000s even Capcom was having trouble selling these types of games and when Shinji makami's Resident Evil remake which might be the greatest survivor horror experience ever to be made released to lackluster sales and accusations of dated gameplay it was clear that the ship had sailed for everyone the second issue was that just like in the aftermath of Parasite Eve 1's release there were simply nobody at Square pushing to make another game in this series while Parasite Eve 2 had released a slightly disappointing sales and reviews the work produced by kanichi I wow was internally seen in a pretty positive light and immediately afterwards he was offered a job working on Square's upcoming MMO Final Fantasy XI when it was released in 2002 it was a big hit and it wow spent the next 10 years as an important part of its core team working on multiple console ports and a host of large expansions which of course meant that he had no time to return to survival horror with Takashi takita having moved into the company's portable division after the failure of the bouncer there simply wasn't anyone available who had any connection to the series and so for almost 10 years Parasite Eve lay in hibernation without so much of a whisper of its return now in order to fully understand what ended this Hiatus we need to take a quick look at someone who is becoming very influential at the company when we last saw tatsuya nomura he was primarily a character designer but in the years since he created sephiroth and Aya Breyer his reputation had continued to grow and in the aftermath of Square's merger he became one of their most important figures in 2002 he designed and directed Kingdom Hearts an action RPG that Blended Final Fantasy characters with the world of Disney animation and it had been a runaway success selling 6 million copies in just a few years and spawning a franchise that went from strength to strength over the course of the 2000s in between all this he'd also produced Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII a prequel to the game that kick-started Square's golden age and just like with Kingdom Hearts it had been met with critical Acclaim and massive sales no mean feat considering it was Square's first game on Sony's fled PSP handheld despite having started his career drawing characters and writing backstories nomura was quickly filling the void left by sakaguchi and Square's leadership felt that they could trust him with almost any project as virtually everything he worked on during this time turned gold this brings us back to Parasite Eve as nomura had never forgotten his work on Aya Brea and in 2006 he proposed a Revival of the series claiming that she was simply too good of a character to leave forgotten on the PlayStation 1. his idea was to reboot the franchise moving away from the Parasite Eve title and refocusing the series around Aya instead of the scientific theory of hideaki Sana in place of Hardcore sci-fi horror he imagined a more adult and mature Direction leaning much harder into Aya's sex appeal and to reflect this the game wouldn't be called parasite E3 but the third birthday signifying a major break from the series past to go along with this modernization nomura proposed that the series shift onto mobile phones which might sound ridiculous but it was a growing platform and square had recently had a lot of success there thanks to the release of before crisis an episodic Final Fantasy VII prequel that had made quite a bit of money it was a bold plan but given his recent track record the Square Enix board were happy to give the go-ahead and nimura began assembling a team to make his vision a reality his first move was to hire Hajime Tabata as director as they'd worked together on crisis Corps and Tabata was seen as a portable game specialist in addition to this matomo Toriyama who'd written both Final Fantasy 10 and 13 was brought in to Aid with the story treatment and yoshinori katase squares legendary producer was also involved in an oversight and management role with such an experienced and talented team it quickly became obvious that they could deliver much more than a mobile phone game and so the project was shifted to the PlayStation Portable a platform that square really believed in and would give the game commercial scope outside of Japan where Advanced Mobile phone-based gaming wasn't particularly common it was a move that perfectly suited everyone involved but that was pretty much where the good decisions Ended as the rest of the third birthday's development was played with issues that had a major impact on the finished product the first was that nomura had gotten the go-ahead on the assumption that they would produce a shooter which was by far the most popular genre in the late 2000s video game landscape the problem here was that Square Enix had almost no experience making this sort of game and so they had to scramble to pull together anyone that had any familiarity with the genre most of the lower level devs were drawn from the team that had put together Dirge of Cerberus a third-person shooter starring Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy VII although this wasn't actually much benefit durge had not been received well when it was released in 2006 with its Gunplay in particular taking heavy criticism so it was clear to Tabata and nomura that they would have to bring in outside hell if they wanted to avoid making the same mistakes at the recommendation of square CEO yoichiwada a contract was agreed with a small studio called hexadrive which was made up of ex-capcom employees who had experience designing and shipping modern big budget third person shooters now unfortunately that experience came from working on Lost Planet extreme condition an attempt by Capcom to break into the modern AAA shooter market and which had similarly received very average reviews again with particular criticism leveled at its gameplay mechanics as we'll discover later this grotesque lack of successful development experience had a major impact on the third birthday but incredibly the issues don't end there for all the leadership team's Talent there was a surprising lack of focus on the development process and virtually every single team member was working on multiple projects and rarely spent any lengthy period of time dedicated to the third birthday while nomura had come up with the idea The Lion's Share of his time was spent working on Final Fantasy vs 13. a big budget action RPG That was supposed to serve as a sister game to toriyama's Final Fantasy XII things were no better with Tabata who incredibly was also work working on a final fantasy spin-off Final Fantasy agito 13 which would eventually become Final Fantasy type zero apparently the development process became so fractured that kitase had to step in and forced a batter to finish the third birthday telling him that both of his games would be canceled unless he produced something the third birthday was eventually released in Japan in December 2010 and in the rest of the world a few months later but it had taken its team almost four years to produce and the reception it received made it very clear that it had not been worth the time critical opinion was pretty average with reviews generally falling at around a seven or six out of ten but the reception from long time parasite E fans was far more negative and this has really come to Define this game's Legacy accusations of character assassination nonsensical writing and frankly uncomfortable Direction have all been levied against it along with well-warranted criticism of its chops as a functional video game the Mantra has become that the third birthday killed Parasite Eve and given it's the last game in this retrospective that's an easy premise to believe but what is it about this game that prompts so much hatred well there's only one way to find out and let me tell you it isn't going to be pretty even with the lowest of expectations it's hard not to be impressed with the third birthday's opening cut scene which seems tailor-made to tug on all that Parasite Eve Nostalgia and butter you up for this revival just like in Parasite Eve one we find ourselves in New York on Christmas Eve and very quickly this image of festive cheer gives way to Disaster Movie style destruction a strange tentacled creatures burst out of the ground destroying large portions of Manhattan and killing thousands with a fantastic remix of the NYPD theme playing over the top of some awe-inspiring visuals and a final shot that creates a clear homage to the opening of the first game even the most skeptical of fans will question if this can really be as bad as people say unfortunately this is about as close to sakaguchi's Vision as the third birthday ever gets now firstly we need to start with the massive changes in storytelling gameplay design and structure because when nomura and Tabata said that this would be a separation from the series established history they were not lying those plant-like structures that we saw tearing through New York are called babbles and along with ripping up the Manhattan skyline they spawn hordes of malevolent creatures called The Twisted which seemed to be singularly focused on spilling human blood obviously this is pretty bad news and through reading the games in World timeline we can discover that despite endless armed incursions and desperate nuclear strikes these structures have spread across the entire world and have essentially wiped out the human race this is the situation that we find Aya Brea in as she is now working for the counter-twisted investigations or CTI an organization that is discovered a way to potentially turn the tide in this war apparently Aya has a mysterious power which to see TI call over diving essentially she can transfer her soul into other beings and through the use of a specialist machine this can be done to send her back in time and influence past events the goal of the organization and of the entire game is to use this power to investigate key moments in the Twisted Invasion and try to change the course of history now this almost immediately raises some pretty big questions whereas Eve or any of the characters from the last two games why does Aya suddenly have this new ability how did she end up working at the CTI and what exactly is a babble or a twisted well the explanation is that Aya has no idea either as she has Amnesia just before the Twisted outbreak she was discovered with multiple bullet wounds lying on the steps of Saint Thompson Cathedral by Hyde bore the CTI lead investigator but Aya's body eventually healed her mind remains badly damaged and Beyond her name she has no idea of her mitochondrial past this forms the Dual narrative thrust of the third birthday the cti's attempts to save Humanity from the twisted and a journey of personal Discovery for Aya trying to work out who exactly she is and where her mysterious power comes from now we'll return to the plot in just a second as there is a hell of a lot more to unpack but first we need to look at the meat of the game which is the third birthday strange take on the third person shooter genre unlike the RPG inspired New York of parisai Eve 1 or the interconnected hubs of Parasite Eve 2. the third birthday is structured around a series of linear missions which you select from the menu at the CTI headquarters this is not too different from the structure employed in Tabata and nomura's last PSP title Crisis Core and honestly it does suit the digestible nature of portable gaming while it would be great to freely explore a devastated New York or jump between multiple timelines at once Simplicity is the name of the game when it comes to handheld video games by removing the lengthy dialogue scenes or exploratory gameplay you get a very tight experience that is entirely focused on action and plot now the problem with this is that such a lean video game needs to be built on top of quality design and quality writing and the third birthday struggles to deliver either the vast majority of the gameplay takes the form of a pretty traditional over-the-shoulder third-person shooter where you move from chest high wall to chest high wall blasting enemies and making your way through the game's many linear encounters now this might already raise some eyebrows as the PSP was a notoriously poor console for 3D action games thanks to its single analog stick which wasn't even really a proper stick games that had a fully controllable 3D camera were pretty difficult to play and often developers had to come up with creative control schemes in order to make this work the most notorious was The Monster Hunter claw grip which had you bend your index finger around the front of the console in order to manipulate the camera and it legitimately required physical stamina to keep up over a longer play session it would be easy to presume that the third birthday being a shooter would fall foul of these same issues but amazingly its control scheme is probably one of its better designed elements just like in in Parasite Eve 2 everything functions around a lock-on system which is done by holding the left shoulder button and this immediately alleviates most of the potential camera issues there aren't really many moments where you're having to aim and move at the same time and as you spend most of the game crouching behind cover this system suits the flow of combat now this might give the impression that nomura and Tabata were looking to emulate the success of Gears of War but to its credit the third birthday has quite a few twists on this formula and does have its own identity Aya's ability to overdie isn't just a narrative concept and features heavily in the gameplay by pressing the triangle button you can teleport into another body and as Ira is always accompanied by a squad of soldiers this is a huge part of the third birthday its most obvious use is to Simply jump out of danger and each time Aya runs out of Health you're given a brief window to over dive away which effectively makes the number of soldiers in your squad a kind of pseudo life system the other reason to do this is to take advantage of their position or weapons as unique soldiers are often placed in a way that allows the gameplay to take on different forms when it's at its best you'll be diving into a sniper placed high above the action or taking over the controls of a tank and Blasting hordes of powerful Twisted these moments genuinely are pretty exciting but they're very few and far between and for the vast majority of your time outside of being low on health the only reason to switch bodies is if you've somehow run out of ammo and need a new weapon now your overdive's functionality doesn't end there as it also has an offensive use enemies have both a health bar and an invisible stamina bar and by reducing the latter you can put every single foe into a stunned stay which opens them up for a flashy overdrive attack which deals a huge amount of damage that in itself adds an interesting Dynamic to the gameplay but surprisingly there's quite a bit of hidden depth Beyond simply pressing triangle every time you kill an enemy with overdrive you have a chance of picking up a strand of DNA and then in between missions these can be arranged onto DNA boards with this cycle providing the game's RPG mechanics basically depending on the different colors of DNA that you slot into the board you'll unlock different abilities which are added to your overdrive and there's quite a spread of different powers to discover some trigger a heal either for you or your allies others activate unique Buffs or trigger additional damage and as you can always see what your combinations will produce you're encouraged to experiment and constantly swap out your assigned skills on paper it's a great idea but its execution really lets it down and robs the system of any of its potential all of the DNA abilities trigger via a percentage chance and this means In the Heat of combat you can't rely on having a heel or revive or haste available and you have to treat them as a sort of added bonus rather than a core pillar of the gameplay in fact depending on the abilities that you have set sometimes you won't even notice them activating and even with all the time you can spend tinkering with your DNA board it can feel like this whole section of the game makes very little difference unfortunately this is also true of the game's other progression system I as Weapons where again what looks like complexity actually masks some seriously shallow design for every single enemy you kill you gain points which you can spend in the CTI headquarters on a range of different guns and attachments which change up their stats most of them are just straight upgrades like more ammo or better accuracy but the ones that make the most difference are the parts that influence the type of damage that your weapon does very quickly you can change over to impact ammunition which does far less damage but triggers stun States much faster this of course means more overdives and more chances to see your abilities in action the sheer damage that the overdrive attacks do completely offsets the loss of normal damage and it renders virtually your entire arsenal of weapons and upgrades utterly meaningless with shotguns grenade launchers sniper rifles and revolvers all totally outclassed by simply triggering a stun and then warping into your enemies the way all these systems interact makes for an amazingly one note game you enter into a room hunker down behind some cover and then trigger overdrive attacks until the encounter is over with what little variety there is dwarfed by the hours and hours of repetitive combat the obvious counter argument to this is that there's nothing saying you have to use this strategy right well this takes us to another big issue with the third birthday is gameplay and that is its ludicrously poor balancing for some reason even the most basic enemies in the game can kill you in around two or three hits and considering just how many you have to fight in a single Mission doing anything other than pumping out the maximum damage possible will result in many many game overs any inclination towards experimenting will be quickly forgotten you'll find yourself right back in the reliable cycle of endless overdriving frustratingly even when the third birthday tries to mix things up it usually gets to buy balance wrong and this is really clear in two specific moments where we leave the comfort of cover-based shooting the first is a notorious section in the first level where you're chased by a twisted called The Reaper if it gets hold of you it's an instant game over so you have to run away and use OverDrive to keep one step ahead when you've got a clear view of where you're meant to go it's a somewhat passable section of gameplay but the vast majority of this sequence takes place in a wide open room you have to run around destroying three orbs to open the exit but between the wonky camera the instant fail States and the confusing layout you'll be praying for the comfort of the predictable combat equally as strange is a section in a latter mission where you pilot a helicopter circling around a skyscraper blasting barnacle-like Twisted with missiles and a chain gun it controls like an old school on-rail shooter but frankly lacks any of that genres customary difficulty or complexity and honestly I'm not even sure if it's possible to die during this odd little sequence the overarching problem with the third birthday is that it's just not particularly interesting neither aggressively bad or consistently engaging and when the entire premise of the project was to reboot a popular franchise that already had a clear identity this can only be looked at as a major mistake any excuses about Square enix's inexperience in the genre or the limitations of the PSP simply don't hold any water because nobody was forcing them to make this sort of game given the sheer quality of other action RPGs on the system and from the very same team no less it's very hard to understand why this was done with all that being said the Lion's Share of backlash that the third birthday faced surprisingly wasn't focused on the gameplay and instead revolved entirely around the outlandish story that nomura and Toriyama had put together as both men were responsible for some of square enix's most widely derided narratives this should come as no surprise and in 2010 both were coming off the back of some of their most notorious work Toriyama had just finished working as the director and writer of Final Fantasy 13 which come out a year earlier and had been subject to very heavy criticism likewise nomura had been on a run of eight Kingdom Hearts games in eight years and while the PS2 games were held in high regard the sheer amount of sequels prequels side quills and spin-offs that were required reading in order to understand the overarching plot was already wearing very thin so with that in mind it won't be particularly surprising to find that the third birthday is plagued with many of these same issues and shares very little in common with the two stories that takita and iwao had put together in the 1990s and even less with hideaki senna's grounded scientific horror which began this whole journey before we get to the really painful stuff let's start with some positivity and that is that I don't hate the core concept of Aya traveling back in time to try and prevent the Twisted Invasion while it's a million miles from the mitochondrial monster movie plot to the last two games the early missions do use this premise to good effect and it sets up enough mystery and Intrigue to push you through the repetitive combat our very first dive takes us to Club sacrifice on the 24th of December 2012 one of the first locations that the Twisted attacked during the initial Babel outbreak Aya appears in the middle of a concert but very quickly a series of portals open and in the flash of an eye the scene turns to one of Total Slaughter as a huge twist it begins to chew through the audience this throws us straight into the first boss fight and when ire and a squad emerged Victorious the objective shifts to hunting down the remaining monsters and trying to find any survivors that have managed to avoid the Bloodshed now obviously the mission is success but Upon returning to our own time Aya discovers that interfering with the past isn't quite as simple as Hyde and the CTI team had made it out to be Aya's actions had caused some unintended Ripples and while many people had been saved and the Twisted Invasion partially slowed CTI is now being run by Hunter Owen a cynic who believes that the past can't be altered and who's looking to get the organization shut down even worse the events at Club sacrifice have also unintentionally killed Thelonious cray one of Aya's operatives as in this timeline his military unit was reassigned to a different location where they were all wiped out this directly leads into the next mission as Ayah dives into the past to try and change the present and save cray this short sequence is a glimpse into what the third birthday could have been as there's a lot of potential in seeing a time-traveling monster story subject to the butterfly effect where saving the world might have horrific consequences for our main character and their relationships unfortunately that is where the positivity ends as the story quickly goes off the rails and might well be the worst piece of work that either one of its writers has ever put together unlike in Parasite Eve 1 where we discover more about our cast through natural conversation and seeing them spend time together the third birthday hides everything away in an in-world encyclopedia Toriyama pulled this exact same move in Final Fantasy 13 and just like in that game this decision leads to utterly incomprehensible dialogue where characters that we don't know talk about things that we don't understand and expect you to follow along now this kind of in media res writing can work really well in a massive RPG where the developer is trying to create a sense of immersion but in a tightly paced Thriller like the third birthday this just leads to a massive amount of confusion for example when we're first introduced to Hunter Owen we have absolutely no idea who he is or what he wants when he pulls a gun on Aya claiming that she's just like the Twisted they're trying to fight you'll have no idea what's happening until you head into the encyclopedia this problem plagues the middle of the game each just loads more complex twists and more dramatic Revelations on top of the last never taking a moment to breathe and actually explain itself within the space of about two hours we're introduced to a new operative called Gabby who immediately dies with an unsurprisingly betrayed by Hunter Owen who promptly disappears from the rest of the plot which then leads to Aya managing to resurrect cray only for him to betray us before turning good again and then dying anyway and this is all while Aya appears to be having some sort of mental breakdown hallucinating images from her past as she tries to recover who she is I genuinely wish I could give a more accurate summary of the events that happened during these missions but after having played through the game multiple times and even dived into its Wiki I honestly can't work out how any of these events tie into the wider Twisted story and that will become even more apparent when we get to the game's ending for a series that built its reputation on cinematic movie-like storytelling seeing the early potential give way to overly complex try nonsense is a huge disappointment and while the cut scenes are all beautifully put together the voice acting is very high quality there's simply no substitution for good writing clear motivations and solidly written characters this brings us on to the game's biggest crime which is a change so notorious that it virtually eclipses everything we've already spoken about Aya Breyer the centerpiece of the entire Parasite Eve franchise has been substantially Rewritten and is now a very different kind of character all of the confidence and sarcasm which made her such a likable protagonist has been jettisoned and in place of a capable and experienced field agent she's been reimagined into a much weaker character with far less agency instead of taking the lead and cti's investigations she has to be guided around like a novice and reacts to most of the game's monsters in the most pathetic manner possible she constantly in a state of panic or confusion seemingly on the verge of tears throughout the vast majority of the game and it makes for such a strange departure considering that nomura proposed this entire reboot because he wanted to further Explore her character the supposed in World explanation for this monstrous shift is eye as Amnesia which means she doesn't remember the events of either of the first two games and is thus far more intimidated by everything happening around her the thing is this explanation doesn't really cut it as even if we accept she doesn't remember Eve or number nine or any of her Fantastical battles at the very start of Parasite Eve 1 she confidently dives into action while the audience Burns around her and this is before she even knows what mitochondria is stepping up to the plate when nobody else will is a core facet of her character so to see this removed in favor of such a feeble reinvention makes me question if nomura even understood why Aya Brea was popular in the first place what makes this even more confusing is that it's in complete contrast with the gameplay but Aya is treated as a Messianic figure who's capable of single-handedly turning the tides of the war there's a huge dissonance created when we battle through a level killing hundreds of creatures without comment or hesitation only for a cutscene to trigger an Aya to begin shaking in fear or become bracked with self-doubt now this would all be bad enough on its own but in a fit of utter Madness Tabata and nomura paired this weakening of Aya with another big change in how she's presented for some reason there's a mechanic where as Aya takes damage her clothes will rip apart slowly revealing more of her body until she's wearing nothing but a few shreds of fabric it's just the most Brazen fans service I've ever seen and as her body remains totally unharmed it's clearly been included to stimulate a certain kind of parasite fan rather than represent the struggle she's going through in the gameplay or to add anything to the narrative what makes it all the more ridiculous is that this mechanic isn't even tied to your health pool so you can be running around at full health with Aya looking on the verge of death and this persists even when you're back in the CTI headquarters which makes absolutely zero sense as the missions are supposedly happening in the past now there's nothing inherently wrong with having a very attractive lead character and wanting to show them off or even having their clothes rip apart as many other games incorporate that same idea to great effect in combination with all of Aya's hyper-suggestive moaning nomura and toriyama's attempts to create a more mature story ironically end up coming off as very childish instead of the confident and feminine lead character that sakaguchi origin he wanted we're left with someone who is overly sexualized and also incredibly weak a combination that should be extremely off-putting for anyone who's normally adjusted so if it wasn't already pretty obvious the third birthday is built on some pretty damn shaky foundations but amazingly this first half of the game is its high Watermark and from chapter 4 which is about the midpoint of the game things take An Almighty nosedive while on a mission to Grand Central Station where I are in a squad of soldiers are attempting to destroy the roots of one of the babbles we're treated to yet another overly dramatic Revelation with the mission successful hide or desire to be pulled back to the present day but as the protest activates Aya comes face to face with her past somehow in front of her stands Kyle Madigan who desperately asks if she's managed to remember herself yet as Ayah disappears from this time she begs Kyle to protect Eve and as she slips away he says that he'll do everything possible to protect their little princess when we return to 2013 things have changed once again Aya is now living in a rundown apartment with kunihiko Maeda who's come over from America to try and assist his longtime friend the reason for this is that in the two months since the Grand Central Station Mission CTI was attacked with every team member losing their lives and the overdrive machine being destroyed which of course means Aya can't undo this horrible development even more shockingly it looks like this attack was carried out by none other than Kyle Madigan and this sets up the second half of the game where each Mission has Ayah chasing down Kyle desperately trying to find out the reason for his actions and how they relate to the protection of e now if you're confused I don't blame you this twist comes out of nowhere and yet again makes virtually no sense catapulting us not only into the second half but into a totally different story that's broadly unconnected to the time traveling Matrix plot from the first few missions any hint of coherent storytelling is cast aside and we dive head first into the very worst excesses of nomura and toriyama's divisive Style just before we reach the third birthday's notorious ending we need to take a quick moment to talk about kunihiko maida because while there's been much made of the changes to Aya's personality it's the wholesale Corruption of our favorite Japanese scientists that upsets me the most outside of agent Breyer maida is the standout character from the first game The Perfect Blend of comic relief interesting Exposition and genuine emotion with our quirky friend playing a crucial if rather understated role defeating Eve his absence from Parasite Eve 2 always struck me as a real missed opportunity not only because he does feature very briefly in the ending but because he could have easily slot into the role played by Pierce Carradine it's something that always irked me so when he popped up in the third birthday replacing the CTI operatives as I as infield contact I was actually pretty pleased regrettably that relief lasts mere seconds as nomura and Toriyama have seen fit to totally redesign our bookish scientists who without the splash screen and outfit would have been virtually unrecognizable instead of endearing nervousness Maeda is now extremely creepy constantly making references to Aya's body and even drooling over Eve who despite looking like an older teenager is only mentally about 10 years old it's as if nomura saw the innocent Crush from the first game and then spun this out into its most extreme form taking the jokes and foolhardy bravery and genuine intelligence and reducing it all down to a stereotypical basement dwelling nerd who's never seen a woman in his life so with our new unpleasant partner in our ear iron manages to catch up to Kyle Madigan on the roof of the north shallows Tower and yet again as if it was the only thing nomura and Toriyama knew how to write we have to sit through another uncomfortable scene where a character froths at the mouth over just how attractive I is the reward for not turning off your console is some long-awaited answers although predictably these do little to disperse The Cloud of confusion that hangs over this game for some reason Kyle transforms into a giant monster and once he's defeated Aya is gifted a vision that reveals what happened on the day she lost her memory turns out she was getting married to Kyle and Midway through the ceremony the couple was attacked by a militia who stormed the church just as they were exchanging their vows despite suffering hideous injuries Aya is able to muster enough strength to reach her pistol but shockingly instead of turning on her attackers she aims at her little sister and as the screen turns black we can hear a single gunshot it's a shattering Discovery but even with her fragmented memory Aya isn't wholly convinced why would she kill Eve and why would Eve want to kill her unfortunately there is little time to work out what's going on as the situation in New York begins to disintegrate as Kyle dies in Aya's arms all of the babbles begin to merge into a single being a monstrous Tower of sinew and spine that dominates the entire Island the grand babble this takes us into the final mission and a series of Revelations that derail this runaway train of a story to a new cosmic low and sadly drive a spike through the heart of the franchise in a very permanent way turns out the Hyde bore from the CTI is very much not dead and is headed into the heart of the grand Babel in order to use its power to access something called Time Zero according to maida this is because he's become a shape-shifting high one an all-new race being that a waging an interdimensional war with the twisted and who apparently we've been fighting all along in the form of the game's boss fights at this point I just accepted that it was going to take far more than a single playthrough for me to understand what the hell is happening so I decided to just give up and focus on the gameplay unfortunately the final mission is a ludicrous slog and makes it abundantly clear that even with all of the outside help from hexadrive Square Enix are simply just cursed to make terrible shooters almost every encounter in the grand Babel feels like an endless Gauntlet of enemies with wave after wave spawning on top of you which causes that gameplay flow of triggering overdives to become so stale that you could hammer a nail with it the one Innovation is a new enemy type the hilariously named mudflaps although the game would be substantially better for their removal as they are one of the most poorly designed enemies I've seen in a long while at first they seem much like any of the other larger Twisted that you fight but once they're killed they transform into a ghost and if it catches hold of you it's an instant game over the only way to survive is to quickly over dive to a nearby Soldier but if you run out of grunts it's straight back to the last checkpoint the only way to avoid this happening is to destroy the mud flap with an overdrive kill but as they have huge Health pulls it's surprisingly hard to judge when they're low enough for this to deliver a mortal strike and not just accidentally trigger the ghost form there's also some very poorly thought out design in the mission's boss fight where you face off against the reaper and finally get some payback although it won't particularly feel like that or you struggle against the fight's mechanics the idea is to over dive into a soldier that has a special kind of laser gun and then chip away at its Health before jumping away to another before it pounces on you in theory this is pretty simple but a combination of the reaper frantically teleporting all over the arena and the terrible free aim on the PSP makes this a lot harder than you'd think and that's without issues like the reaper getting stuck or running out of soldiers with the correct gun or simply not having enough time to land any damage before you have to make a switch in the very best games everything just clicks and the third birthday is the definitive example of a game where nothing Clicks in isolation from each other its ideas probably don't seem too egregious but when taken as a whole once you've had to sit through a solid hour of this massive mechanics and cut scenes and endless twists it's just so painfully obvious that everyone involved had their attentions elsewhere which has robbed Ira of the big return that she badly needed so after all that we eventually catch up with Hyde which thrusts us into the very last moments of the game and these are a Non-Stop roller coaster of incomprehensible plot developments and few State dialogue before we get to the juicy stuff we first need to defeat him in a boss fight and once again despite pouring over the wiki I have no idea what is supposed to be going on we're doing battle on an ice rink in the middle of New York and Hyde has Twisted himself into this stretchy insect form where he races around the arena and we have to use the Petrified bodies of the CTI operatives in order to recover our health and avoid his attacks when this phase is done we're thrust into this liminal time space where Aya defeats hides monstrous true form with an unlimited Super Saiyan form of her own I'm sure this is supposed to be a throwback to Parasite Eve 1's Liberty Island 5. but frankly it's so short and sandwiched between so much other nonsense that its impact is totally lost and I'd forgotten it had even happened until I was reviewing the footage with Hyde defeated he disintegrates into nothing which leaves Aya standing Before Time Zero the location that holds the answers to the third birthday's Mysteries and so all that's left is for her to step inside Time Zero is Aya and Kyle's wedding and while the vision she had earlier in the game is pretty close to correct it missed out a few very important elements the ceremony is indeed attacked by a nameless militia and the bride and groom are both brutally injured but when Aya grabs hold of her gun she doesn't actually shoot heat and instead something much worse happens this is the moment that the overdive power was awakened except that it wasn't in Ayah fearing that her sister was about to die the ability erupts out of Eve and in a wild burst of power the first ever overdive reaches out across the church when Eve opens her eyes she's inside of her sister's body but unlike with the soldiers during the missions the sheer magnitude of power has permanently destroyed Aya's Soul locking Eve within this new vessel all along throughout every cut scene and Mission and boss fight we've been seeing Eve inside of her sister's shell and this is the explanation for her wildly different personality and lack of memory before this point now we'll Circle back around to this insane twist in just a moment because the revelations don't end there Hyde who is somehow alive again informs Eve that this event birthed both the twisted and the babbles which are formed out of the fragments of Aya's destroyed Soul how or why this could possibly happen is never explained and all this Revelation serves to achieve is the complete character assassination of a once beloved PlayStation icon not only are we not actually playing as Aya but through the Twisted she is effectively the game's main villain and we spend every second of gameplay destroying her soul something that I can't imagine even the most forgiving of Parasite Eve fan can ever accept I just can't for the life of me work out why they chose to go in this direction especially given nomura had predicated everything on wanting to explore Aya's character further and then made a game where she barely features apart from in this ludicrously subversive way as if things couldn't get any worse just as Hyde is about to absorb Eve the original Aya Brea does come back and her actions in the brief few seconds where she's on screen easily Eclipse everything else in this God forsaken game she's cool she's strong she's sarcastic and she puts a bullet through Hyde's head without a moment of hesitation if the game ended here it would have been a rough ending but at least things would be back to normal but alas nomura Tabata and Toriyama have one final stain to rub into the reputation of this once great franchise for some reason in order for the fractured timeline to repair itself and for the Twisted Invasion to be averted Eve has to shoot and kill iron and they even force you to pull the trigger when the job is done everything resets back to the start of the wedding but as the two stand up at the altar Kyle knows there's something different about his bride looking out from behind those eyes is Eve instead of Aya and the game ends with him coily wishing her a happy birthday before he walks out of the church and the credits roll there is just so much wrong with this ending on so many levels for starters it barely makes sense where does the overdrive Power come from who's trying to kill Aya and Kyle why are the CTI members at the wedding before Aya had even met them why does eyes Soul create the Twisted who will water the high ones and why would Aya's death be the Catalyst for everything returning to normal there are literally more plot holes than concrete story ideas and even if there were explanations it doesn't change that this is just a terrible storyline that isn't going to satisfy long time fans or newcomers simply put the time traveling Matrix style Shenanigans are where the plot should have stayed and everything that comes after the CTI is destroyed my Aida returning the body swapping the high ones the grand battle none of that should have made it into the Final Cut and I'm amazed that a team with so much writing experience could allow something this poor to slip out into General release it's often called the worst ending in video game history while that might sound hyperbolic I think I do agree in a way I can forgive the clumsy and uninteresting gameplay because the team is attempting something they weren't familiar with and while it obviously didn't pay off it's hard to criticize Brash creativity when we spent so much of this video praising it what's harder to swallow is everything else and as your finger hovers above the trigger during that cursed final cut scene it's impossible to not long for a timeline when nomura had just let sleeping dogs lie with middling reviews from critics and a hugely negative fan reaction online the third birthday sales were a strange Beast as on release it actually sold quite well shifting a couple of hundred thousand units in its first week which for a PSP title not called Final Fantasy or Monster Hunter was considered a pretty good return thing is as hardcore fans began to make their opinions heard though sales quickly tapered off and the third birthday began plummeting down the charts in every territory by the end of the month it was being outsold by football manager handheld and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean PSP which made that expensive four-year development cycle suddenly look like a pretty large mistake while this would be the last we'd see of agent Aya Brea it would not be the last of nomura Tabata and Toriyama as despite the third birthday's colossal financial and critical failure all three men would remain at the Forefront of square enix's development for much of the next decade Toriyama was tasked with creating a host of Final Fantasy XII sequels which were really more about squeezing value out of the tool set rather than because there was huge demand for more of his writing and when both 13-2 and Lightning Returns released they were both heavily criticized for yet more incoherent and overly complex storytelling nomura fed even worse and saw his reputation absolutely tank over the next few years as his directorship of Final Fantasy Versus 13 which eventually became Final Fantasy XV descended into fast with the reports that at one point he tried to redesign the whole game into a musical he was eventually fired from the project which was finished by none other than Hajime Tabata and while the game did eventually make it to Market it enjoys a reputation that's almost as tarnished as the third birthdays and was very much not worth the 15 years that it took to make by the mid-2010s it was clear that Square Enix Heyday was long in the past with their developers struggling to recapture the lightning in a bottle that had been their run in the 1990s creativity and experimentation gave way to Trend chasing and doing everything possible to protect their bottom line and in this new atmosphere that growth which had taken Parasite Eve from novel to film and then into the world of video games finally reached an evolutionary dead end and the series slipped quietly and permanently into Extinction if you cast your mind back to the start of this video we spoke about how survival horror has come roaring back into popularity thanks to an explosion of interest in video game remakes with the long and complex history of Parasite Eve laid out before us it's time to work out if this franchise could ever join the likes of Resident Evil alone in the dark and Silent Hill and come creeping back out of the Shadows into the Glorious world of high definition Percy I think it's important to establish that there's absolutely nothing physically preventing Square Enix from making a Parasite Eve remake or sequel a reality as well they've fallen on Hard Times from a creative point of view the company is still as financially powerful as it's ever been you often hear that one of the main reasons we've never gone back to this world of mitochondrial horror is because Square no longer holds the Parasite Eve license but I think this is a pretty ridiculous argument considering they could just repurchase it at any time unlike the video game critical authors of the Witcher or Metro franchises hideaki Sena has always been very positive about the games even going as far as to say that he thought the first title was a worthy successor to his novel so I find it hard to believe that he wouldn't be happy for square to attempt another Revival really I think the core of the issue goes back to something we've discussed at multiple points during our retrospective and that is that Parasite Eve has never had a true champion Someone For Whom the series is that passion project and would always be there to push for another game while the first title was born thanks to the creative boom of the sakaguchi era I'm not convinced it would have ever gotten a sequel if Resident Evil hadn't been doing so well and Kenichi iwao hadn't fortuitously ended up as squaresoft if I'm being honest I don't really believe that Parasite Eve was ever supposed to be anything more than a single game and really it's become a franchise in spite of itself with both the novel and film only enjoying limited success and the sequels never replicating the Acclaim of takita's cinematic RPG unfortunately this brings me to a rather confronting thought which is that in the third birthday we may have already had our Parasite Eve reboot and in the cold and calculating minds of the Square Enix board they'd already returned to the well and were poisoned pretty badly given that square has a long history of remaking their games and in recent years have started to really deliver on some long desired titles like the Final Fantasy VII remake a HD remaster of Chrono cross an all-new Valkyrie Profile game and even a gorgeous collection of every 2D Final Fantasy it's depressing to think that nomura and toriyama's subversion obsessed fever dream might have cost us the chance of ever seeing Aya Brea again however likely you believe A Parasite Eve remate B that doesn't answer the question of what it could look like because this raises a similar issue and if we ignore the third birthday any potential remake would have to make a tough decision between the cinematics and RPG systems of Parasite Eve 1 and the survival horror action of Parasite Eve 2. the problem as I see it is that while the obvious answer is to remake Parasite Eve 1 that would be a far more challenging project than giving a facelift to Aya's adventures in dryfield the first Parasite Eve is so quintessentially PlayStation one with its creatively designed background its 90s ATV combat profound lack of voice acting and fixation on FMV animation you'd have to redesign almost every element of the game in order to suit modern taste and this would be just as much work as creating a new IP from the ground up while square has shown that they're more than willing to do this for something like Final Fantasy VII I'm not sure Parasite Eve has the reputation to Warrant such a huge development process this must be one of the major reasons for the radio silence around the franchise now ironically I think Parasite Eve 2 is a perfect fit for the over-the-shoulder single space exploration formula that's currently selling so well while its tank controls and strange optional content would obviously have to be reworked it's not hard to imagine a Resident Evil 2 style version of the Acropolis Tower or the shelter the game's heavy focus on real-time combat and customization will be right at home on the PlayStation 5 or the Xbox series X the issue is of course that remaking the second game without touching the first simply won't happen so the franchise finds itself in a strange holding pattern where it feels like it should be part of this Rising wave of survival horror popularity but there isn't actually a clear path for it to get there frustratingly in late 2022 it looked as if this deadlock might be broken when reports emerged that Square Enix had trademarked a property called symbiogenesis the name for the concept that sparked senna's original idea websites and social media were filled with hope that something might come from this but disappointingly on the 3rd of November symbiogenesis was revealed to be an nft collection and had absolutely nothing to do with the franchise that it derived its name from in fact just a few days before this video's publication it was the 25th anniversary of the release of Parasite Eve one and sadly it passed by without mention or acknowledgment all but confirming that this new commercially focused version of Square Enix is happy to leave the series in the past hopefully one day I'll be proven wrong and we'll see Parasite Eve once again pushing the boundaries of cinematic video game storytelling but until that day we'll just have to be content with what we do have the most important takeaway from this video should be that experiences don't need to be dressed up in the bells and whistles of modern production in order to have value and this is the one unifying thread in the chaotic and disconnected history of this strange franchise whether you're captivated by the ideas of senna's Novel engrossed in the atmosphere of ogi's movie thrilled by the excitement of takita's ending elated with your victory over a while's final boss or even if you can somehow enjoy nomura's incomprehensible narrative all of these experiences form a unique family that deserve to be remembered for what they are rather than what they could be thanks for watching here I need to say an extra special thanks to my patrons for all their support through the process of making this video you might have seen that I unfortunately had to have surgery and the recovery was pretty difficult which has massively impacted the production of this retrospective but every message of support and encouragement has been so hugely appreciated and really helped get this over the line if you're interested in supporting the channel the link is just below and every penny helps keep sponsorships and ads to as lower level as possible and hopefully should help keep the channel alive for a long time to come hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you on the next one

Channel: I Finished A Video Game

Views: 8,635,273

Keywords: parasite eve, aya brea, squaresoft, survival horror, rpg, final fantasy, resident evil, silent hill, playstation 1, chrono trigger, capcom, video game, video game review, video game retrospective, retro games, video essay, long form review, final fantasy VII, 90s, super nintendo, playstation 2, dreamcast, role playing game, horror, horror games, literature review, film review, the ring, the grudge, Japanese horror, junji ito, crisis core, playstation portable, psp

Id: feCqT1S5pxI

Length: 233min 26sec (14006 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023