Parasite Eve

Final Fantasy VII’s original 1997 release felt like a seismic shift for the industry. It arguably wasn’t – games had been chasing “cinematic gameplay” for at least a decade while elaborate pre-rendered backgrounds were similarly nothing new. But Square successfully convinced the mainstream, not only that RPGs were cool, but that a budget close to a major motion picture translated directly into superior gaming quality. It’s the best way I can describe the feeling of how FF7 was hyped as a gaming event that you simply couldn’t miss. It helped that its story and graphics both solidly delivered.

So how does a company follow this up? What does “cinematic gameplay” look like going forward? Well, Square chose to use the FF7 engine to go up against the PlayStation juggernaut that was the Resident Evil series. Weaving a paranormal story with top-class pre-rendered backgrounds, surely Square could get lightning to strike twice.

As sales numbers show – not quite. It eventually sold around 1 million in Japan and 1 million in the US by 2004, but this was scraps next to the 10 million of FF7. At the time, I remember Parasite Eve was best known for the included Xenogears and Final Fantasy VIII demo disk. Contemporary critics bemoaned its short length, familiar plot points, and less-strategic action combat – more or less complaining that it wasn’t Final Fantasy VII. Time seems to have been kinder and I would have to agree that, removed from 1998’s monumental expectations, Parasite Eve is an action RPG totally worth checking out.

Parasite Eve, the game, acts as a sequel to a popular Japanese horror novel with a slightly bananas plot. If you recall the 90s’ Human Genome Project (with Metal Gear Solid being another serial referencer), mitochondrial DNA was the first genome to be successfully sequenced. If you recall 6th grade science class, mitochondria is the structure “powering” every cell. Sequencing mDNA showed that it was unique to any other structure in a cell, prompting the theory that sometime in our history, cells and mitochondria were separate organisms that formed a symbiotic relationship which carries on today. That part is real – based on actual research.

So, what if our own mitochondria are ACTUALLY SENTIENT AND HAVE LEARNED TO HATE AND RESENT US?!?!!

That’s pretty much the plot. Mitochondria are instantly mutating their hosts for reasons unknown; conveniently whipping up grotesque monsters just like Resident Evil’s T-Virus. Other times, they simply blow all their stored energy at once through spontaneous human combustion. Plot convenience determines which one happens when. Meanwhile, a sickly opera singer has become – I guess – a giant, scheming mitochondria, because every game needs a boss.

I wonder if this wacky plot helped the game’s weak response in the States. It definitely highlights the difference between Japanese and Western entertainment sensibilities. Parasite Eve truly is as well-researched as any Michael Crichton plot, with the original novel’s author even having a background in pharmacology. But I believe the Japanese are generally more willing to embrace the nonsensical, as long as it looks cool. Western audiences walk a fine line between keeping something grounded in realism before it gets too weird. We don’t like it when it gets too weird – our faces get all frowny and suddenly we feel like we’re wasting our time. See American responses to Bollywood action scenes. I guess our ability to suspend disbelief is far more fragile.

Now, why errant mitochondria causing a rat to grow to twice its size and shoot fireballs out its ass comes off as silly, but Marvel movies make a cool $30 billion, I can’t say. It’s a really fine line.

You play as twenty-something NYPD officer Aya Brea. We begin with Aya arriving to a date at the opera in a fetching black dress. Our aforementioned diva antagonist takes the stage and belts out an aria that causes absolutely everyone in attendance to burst into flames. This would be metal as fuck for a Cradle of Filth concert, but a bad look for Carnegie Hall. Only Aya is mysteriously unaffected. She pulls a gun from somewhere under that dress and charges the stage, setting off a hunt over the next six days for the mitochondrial queen and The Truth™ behind why our cells are betraying us.

There are three acts, with stakes rising appropriately as Eve tears absolute ass through New York and the police ineptly respond. A good cast of characters is maintained throughout. Your partner Daniel – clearly based on Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon – stands up for Aya but recognizes only she can truly face the supernatural threat. His young son, Ben, often gives us someone innocent to rescue (don’t worry, Aya is never shoehorned into a motherly role). A shifty scientist gives us someone to suspect and investigate. And Maeda, a fish-out-of-water Japanese researcher, gives some comedy relief, a lot of exposition dumps, and a tie-in to the original Japanese novel.

As said, scenes are all pre-rendered, allowing for gorgeous preset lighting, impressive texture work, and a wide variety of cinematic camera angles. All characters are low-rez polygons, though with higher detail and more realistic proportions compared to Final Fantasy VII’s squat, chibi designs. Areas look moody and realistic; very much in the vein of Resident Evil on a city-wide scale. You’ll visit snowy Central Park, ruined city streets, a history museum, and even the sleek office floors of the Chrysler Building in New Game+. And it’s the ’90s, so of course there’s sewer levels.

The cinematic angles and backgrounds make the game look fantastic, but do start to interrupt gameplay. The camera can tilt and pan within a shot to follow Aya as she runs around, so the view doesn’t feel too limiting, but old game design issues still arise. It’s not always clear which direction to go. Angles shift sometimes when you don’t expect it. Obvious 3D treasure chests hold most pickups, but camera angles sometimes hide chests behind foreground objects, where you have a hard time spotting them. A few times I only got a glimpse of a chest from one angle, then had to run under or behind something in the next screen and smash the X button. Some background items (drawers, closets) can also be searched. The game doesn’t highlight these in any way, forcing you to run around and, again, smash that X button on any suspicious furniture.

Enemies, at least, won’t sneak up on you from off-screen – but only because all combat is RPG-style random encounters. Only bosses are visible in the world, while everything else strikes without warning and cannot be avoided. Impressively there’s no fade to black or loading of a separate combat scene – a nice technical innovation – but the effect is still the same. The camera slowly frames Aya in the center as the battle loads, your polygon foes fade in, and the fight begins.

Parasite Eve is billed as an RPG, but does away with FF7’s turn-based combat and menu systems. Instead, you directly move Aya inside a restricted battle arena while you wait for your action bar to charge. You have less than a screen’s worth of movement to run around your foes. Once your meter is charged, a tap of the X button pauses the action and projects a wireframe dome over Aya. The “range” stat on your weapon determines the size of this dome, which shows how far away you can be from an enemy while still hitting it. Use the X button to assign bullets to anyone within range, hit Square to confirm, and Aya will take her shots.

As a blend of action and RPG, it’s… okay. I like the idea of actively repositioning to avoid enemy’s claws or fire patterns. You can slip right between a rat’s fireballs as they fan outward, or move to the side of a boss to avoid a deadly beam attack. Unfortunately, those arena limits start to get in the way. You’re locked to maybe 80% of a single screen, which makes it difficult to avoid quick or large enemies. Multiple enemies all but guarantee someone’s getting a hit in on you. There’s no actual dodge button, giving you no way to scoot out of the way in a critical second. Running erratically to avoid shots always felt more awkward and comical than slick and stylish – more Benny Hill than The Matrix.

There are no party members in combat, it’s always just Aya, so free movement seems like an attempt to give you something to do while your action bars charge. You’ll see this real-time system show up again in later PS2 RPGs, but I don’t feel like it makes combat more engaging or exciting than a good, tactical, turn-based system. If you’ve been playing old menu RPGs where you’re just picking “Attack” four times in rapid succession and waiting, then I can see how this system might feel new and exciting, but it’s definitely not any more tactical. It’s also arguable whether it’s more engaging in any helpful way. It’s not a bad system, especially since Aya is the only fighter at play, but it’s not a great one either.

As you keep playing, Aya develops mitochondrial powers of her own. In practice, it’s magic, and it’s how you’ll be able to heal yourself, boost attack power, or purge poisons using recharging energy. Waiting for the independent “Parasite Energy” bar to charge gives you another reason to run around wildly between attacks, but it also gives you an effective set of tools to survive some rather lopsided engagements. Many of these effects are duplicated with items, but I’ve always favored using a system that recharges over one that just depletes. Not using PE is intentionally ignoring a mostly-infinite resource.

Not relying on medicine items also frees up your limited inventory. Taking a page from survival horror, you can only carry 30 items at a time. Small items do stack, but guns, medicines, and weapons do not. Even plot items will take a space in your inventory until they are used. A chest in Aya’s police station lets you store supplies, assuming the current level hasn’t locked you out from heading back to it. You can temporarily leave items behind in opened treasure chests – one item per chest, then return to that chest if a slot opens up. Otherwise, you’ve got to use items up or destroy them. Any combat loot you don’t have space for gives you a chance to swap for items in your inventory, but the leftovers are immediately lost forever.

Managing inventory becomes a lot of work and was never much fun. I admit, this may be a personal problem, just because I don’t like throwing items away. Parasite Eve demands it. You absolutely do not need every single weapon and medicine you pick up – but you don’t know this at the time – so its a lot of fretting over what to take with you while trashing low-level medicines in the name of Survival Horror. Oddly, though, your ammo is never limited. All ammo (except rockets) fits in single, bottomless ammo box that takes up one slot in your inventory. You’ll need to decide which guns to take, but you’ll never worry about having enough rounds for them.

Those guns are many and varied, with names taken from real-life counterparts. They roughly break out into handguns, rifles, and submachine guns, but the actual differences get blurred by the game’s upgrade system. Weapons have unchanging base stats for Damage, Range, and Ammo capacity. A weapon’s base stats cannot change, while you generally find weapons with better base stats as you go. However, you’ll find mods that add bonus stats to one of a weapon’s three values. Using these mods attaches a small, permanent bonus to the weapon, such as +2 to range.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Limited tools found in the world let you destroy one weapon and move ALL of its bonus stats to a new weapon. Find a rifle with better base stats than the handgun you’ve been modding? All of the bonus stats accumulated onto the handgun get transferred to the rifle. Newly found guns may already come with bonus stats, so you can spend tools to destroy “useless” guns and add those sweet, sweet bonus points to your current super-weapon. Bonus mods never seem to go higher than +3, but there’s no practical cap on accumulated bonuses. You’re growing pools of bonus stats in the +20s or +30s to all three stats, that can all transfer to a new gun as needed.

Weapons also include optional modifiers – these too can be taken off a sacrificial gun and added to your main one. Modifiers range from grenade shots, to shotgun-like spreads, rate of fire increases, poison, ice, and so on. You can end up with some almost Borderlands levels of weird guns – like an SMG that shoots 10 tranquilizer shots from one action bar, or a shotgun with a range the length of the entire screen. Your base weapon type will influence its base stats – rifles usually have good range, SMGs usually have a rapid-fire modifier – but you can take mods from one gun to alter another’s behavior completely.

It doesn’t end there. After you beat the game, you’re given the option to “engrave” one weapon and one piece of armor. You literally give them names and carry them directly into your next playthrough. That’s how my second playthrough sees Aya wielding the mighty Upfucker – a handgun that shoots shotgun shells (hitting multiple enemies at once), takes four independently-aimed shots per action bar, holds 36 shells and has a damage bonus of +95. It fucks enemies up. I forget what gun it started as, but it doesn’t matter – at this point, it is truly the Pistol of Theseus. Carry the same main weapon into playthrough after playthrough and you can theoretically end up with game-shattering bonus stats of 999 in each stat.

This is where the real RPG mechanics come in, because Aya’s personal growth is rather limited. You earn Bonus Points as you level, which can be spent on limited stats for Aya like Defense, Parasite Energy, and Item Capacity. These stats do not carry over into later playthroughs, while the game is balanced enough that you really don’t need to boost your stats. Aya’s default bank of PE was plenty to get by, while the item limitations aren’t bad enough to spend points on. You can instead transfer those bonus points to weapon and armor bonus stats, which DO carry over. Spending points on your main weapon and armor will benefit you more – and longer term – than spending them on Aya ever could. I cannot stress enough how overpowered your gear is allowed to get – and it’s kind of magnificent.

If you’re not interested in multiple playthroughs, that’s understandable. Parasite Eve does offer one whole section of new content in New Game+ – the aforementioned Chrysler Building. This becomes available a little after you escape the opera and is a new, 30-level dungeon of content and goodies. The building’s layout is totally randomized, with each level acting as a maze of the same corridors fitted together in different ways. If you’re looking for new story or environments, this ain’t it. But if you want more of the game’s combat system with a tiny bit of “True Ending” bonus plot, it offers a decent, exclusive challenge to check out.

It’s worth mentioning that Parasite Eve is surprisingly gory. Lovingly-rendered cutscenes show animals splitting open as they mutate, people being burned alive, and eyes melting out of sockets as their owner liquifies into a puddle of goo. None of the humans look particularly realistic – we’re still at the marionette stage of CG characters here – but it’s definitely attempting to be a serious work of body horror. You also might not appreciate children in peril or animals in pain, which the game sometimes serves up both of at the same time!

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Parasite Eve. If Square was out to compete with Resident Evil, then I feel like they succeeded here. I can’t say I adore its combat system, or that I’d want to play more action RPGs like it, but I can say it’s at least as awkward as trying to aim a gun in Resident Evil. That may be a backhanded compliment, depending on your own feelings, but I’d never say that Parasite Eve is overly frustrating to control or to play through. Maybe unsatisfying at the worst – though I definitely enjoyed watching my weapons (and their effects) get increasingly absurd.

Plotwise, again, its equal to the first three Resident Evils. Aya is a believably strong female lead, even if she’s allowed to flaunt the law in some questionable ways. Some of what she’s able to pull off also seems, politely, really unlikely, but it’s certainly in keeping with action hero logic. If you’re not afraid of a plot that moves along nicely despite making little logical sense, and a combat system that feels like a novelty rather than a revolution, there’s a nice 8-10 hour action/adventure here that’s totally worth playing.

 

The Good

Great production values with moody pre-rendered environments. Plot moves briskly across six days and two discs. Hybrid combat system gives you things to do while controlling a party of one, while still offering some of the same turn-based choices. Had the misfortune of being the follow-up to Final Fantasy VII, and it’s better than that reputation.

 

The Bad

Combat feels restrictive while running to avoid attacks feels unnecessary. I think I would have been fine if this was a turn-based RPG. Plot is kind of bonkers. Leans heavily into disturbing body horror – doubly so if you’re sensitive to detailed cutscenes of innocent animals getting painfully mutated.

 

…I can’t believe it! So THAT’s how she controls inanimate objects…!! And of ALL THINGS!!!! She’s CRAZY!!!” – Aya