Parasite Eve
Publisher: SquareSoft (1998)
Console: Playstation (Available on PSN for PS3, PSP, PSVita)
Genre: JRPG/Survival Horror
Estimated Year Purchased: 2003
(Spoilers, Ahoy!)
Parasite Eve is one of the last of my PS1 RPGs that I bought in high school and didn’t finish. That list has dwindled this year, starting with Xenogears (a game I borrowed from Z-Trigger co-host Brandon and purchased for myself while in Louisiana, and finished this year), and continuing with Star Ocean: The Second Story, and Wild Arms 2. And, like that trio of JRPG, I still hold my original save file for Parasite Eve. However, that’s not the one I used to finish a run earlier today. The run I completed today started in 2014, when I was living in Winston Salem. Let’s talk about that 2003 (probably) run first.
I first rented Parasite Eve after getting my PS1 while visiting a friend of mine from elementary school. It seemed like it would be short enough to try to blast through, and it was a game I recognized from the GamePro Playstation Encyclopedia, a magazine I considered my game collecting bible at the time (also, I’d love a new copy; PDF even). The visual style looked great, the combat looked cool, and beyond any of that it was Square responding to the success of Resident Evil!
Parasite Eve told the story of Aya Brea, a New York cop, the lone survivor of a freak incident at an opera where the entire audience spontaneously caught fire. Over the course of six days, she attempts to stop Eve, who shares a history with our heroine. The merging of JRPG turn based combat with the nascent Survival Horror storytelling and level design leads to tense combat where strategic timing for attacks and healing are the key to survival. The gameplay has aged extremely well, and the game is short enough that it never overstays its welcome. The visuals are a fine example of what the PS1 was capable of, and the music is stellar. Yoko Shimomura fans should take note; this game has a much, much better score than the famed Kingdom Hearts score. The only negative I can really throw at Parasite Eve is that the script, while usually one of the best seen on the PS1, can get a bit overblown. The game is something of a sequel to a novel of the same title written by Hideaki Sena, which was also adapted into a film. Sena, a pharmacologist, knows his biology, and the script reflects this. However, it doesn’t break down the science to us laymen, and it gets hard to wade through from time to time. It’s not so bad that it kills the story, but I do feel like it’s worth mentioning.
My run didn’t go well, and I didn’t get much help from my friend, as he didn’t like JRPGs. Eventually, I got to take another shot after buying a copy from Electronics Boutique, a short walk away from the Target in Wilmington, NC. I remember paying about twenty bucks for my copy, a black label copy with a plain white demo disc (which I’m going to talk about a little later), and being excited to take a proper run on a game that I did enjoy upon rental, even though it threw me more than I could handle at the time.
I can back up what I say next with a glance at my original saves: I had no idea what I was doing upon my original run of Parasite Eve.
According to the times on that run, I reached the Carrier at the end of day five with about seven hours on the clock. I know that I used up all of my rockets on the T-Rex fight in the museum, and that I had very few medicines, and equally pathetic amounts of ammo. The fact that I made it past Eve and even attempted the battle with the Ultimate Being is pretty astonishing. I’m not saying I was a good gamer or anything. I was terrible at games at the time. I haven’t improved much, but I can piece together winning builds now, which is something I had no idea how to do back then.
This run originally took me a couple of weeks, as I wasn’t playing consistently. I can remember being genuinely shocked when Brandon borrowed the game for a weekend, and brought it back on Monday, telling me that he’d finished it. He couldn’t explain to me why I’d had such a poor run, but he the fact that he did it irked me. I wasn’t able to scratch the surface of the Ultimate Being battle, and he’d finished it off in a weekend. In retrospect, of course, I know that Brandon was just better at games than I was. I mean…he still is. But I can hold my own now.
I would try again on and off for the next several years, but I didn’t take a serious stab at it until 2014, when I started over from scratch while passing time before reuniting with my wife, who had moved to Raleigh to start a job prior to our marriage that November. I had just wrapped up a run of Lunar 2, a game she bought for me at Edward McKay, fulfilling a long held wish to own that gorgeous PS1 masterpiece (a game deserving of its own blog someday, and I wanted to topple another of my PS1 RPGs.
I would work through a carefully played run up until the end of Day 4, and then fell off of playing. I was packing to make the move to Raleigh, and I didn’t have as much time for serious gaming. I want to say that I tried to pick up the run once we settled into our apartment in Raleigh, but I don’t remember any details of that run.
This brings me to 2017, one week ago (mid-November, for future readers sake), and I picked up my run. I continued a strategy that I figured would be pretty foolproof for finishing the game. However, this wasn’t a clean success. I still struggled to deal with some tough moments, like getting stuck in the Warehouse sidequest after fighting the boss, and being incapable of leaving without dying. I had to learn about escaping battle from the manual (which is hilariously embarrasing), and that allowed me to continue after being stuck for two days. Three days after reaching the Museum (Thanksgiving is a hard week in retail), I finished the game.
The strategy I took to this run is fairly…stupid. I didn’t use any stat boosts for any of my weapons or armor until I reached the boss fights against the dinosaurs in the Museum stage of the game. It was a this point that I chose a weapon – a grenade launcher with a whopping seven customization slots – and used every tool I’d collected to stack stats and special abilities onto this one gun, and did the same for the best armor I had in my inventory. I then loaded all of my bonus points onto the attack stat of the gun. Needless to say, dealing damage wasn’t an issue any more, and I bested the last bosses of the game with far less difficulty than I had upon my first attempt.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t take two attempts to finish Parasite Eve and it’s final encounter. No. I had a different problem.
After fighting the final boss, Parasite Eve pulls a Resident Evil, and forces the player to run through a final set of halls to set the self destruct on the Aircraft Carrier to destroy the Ultimate Being once and for all. On my first attempt to perform this task, Aya decided to walk back to a door where she’d been running from the a blob that wouldn’t scare Steve McQueen, and dies.
I did a lot of swearing after this happened.
But, I went back to it earlier today and finished. Another fantastic JRPG from the finest era of the genre tucked firmly beneath my belt.
Parasite Eve did well enough to warrant a sequel in 2000. I have never played Parasite Eve II, as I do not have a copy. Nor do I have the psuedo-sequel The 3rd Birthday, a much maligned PSP game from 2010. I would like to play them, of course, but I’ll save my comments on their qualities for when I play them. Despite the question of their quality, Parasite Eve demands to be played. Sure, it’s not a scary horror game, as the industry was years away from games that are genuinely terrifying, but it’s a great Survival Horror game from the early days of the genre. It’s also an excellent JRPG, a unique experience from that genre that stands out amidst its contemporaries.
Now, back to that demo disc that I spoke of earlier.
Parasite Eve came packed with a third disc, containing trailers of upcoming SquareSoft games, and a full demo of the extremely ambitious Xenogears. This is where I will admit that I passed up something that day at Electronics Boutique all those years ago just so I could play Xenogears. At the time that I bought my copy of Parasite Eve, Xenogears was out of print and not easy to put hands on. I seem to recall copies of the game running for about fifty bucks, and I didn’t have a job. It was a game that I wanted to play and didn’t think I would ever get a chance to play. Just a taste of this game was enough to sate my interest…for about two hours, in which I stretched my playing of the demo enough to grind Fei’s levels to absurd heights before finally seeing the ending. I fell in love with Xenogears that day, and would replay the demo disc a few times before Brandon bought a Greatest Hits reprint that came out our senior year of high school. I didn’t get my hands on one of these reprints, however. It didn’t come to stores where we lived, and even when I had the money for it, online shopping didn’t happen very often. Strange to look back on that fact.
I don’t recall any of the trailers, so I can’t comment on those. However, I find myself bizarrely nostalgic about the concept of demo discs. They are a byproduct of an era when the internet was painfully slow, the reason why Playstation Magazine was able to steal eight bucks from it’s non-subscribing readers each month, and the reason I learned about games like Intelligent Qube (which I will never own due to a nightmarish aftermarket value). It’s how I got to take Aeris along for the ride when Cloud and Barret took down the Sector 1 Reactor in the Tobal No. 1 Final Fantasy VII demo.
All in all, Parasite Eve has been an excellent piece of my library for almost fifteen years, and I’m glad to know that I could do it again at any time. It’s still a great game, and I hope that someone goes to PSN after reading this, and takes the journey for themselves.
WordsThing 