Multimedia Week Part III: Parasite Eve Review Part II (Game)

Parasite Eve the Movie- it exists, and supposedly even with English subtitles, but Netflix doesn’t actually have copies available. IOU one Parasite Eve review.

Arbitrary Confectionary Rating: I have no idea, but in my imagination, Parasite Eve the movie tastes like mee grob. Or however it’s spelled. If you ever see mee grob at a Thai restaurant, you should try it. It’s like candied prawn noodles. It’s delicious. Kinda messy though. They’re very sticky.

Parasite Eve (game): Trying to directly translate the book into a game wouldn’t have worked so well. I suppose they could have made a point a click adventure game, but I don’t know that there’s really enough mystery to carry that. And those games don’t make the big bucks, and are rarely made in Japan. Heck, they’re rarely made at all anymore. Though there are some. There’s a well reviewed series of mini Back to the Future point and clicks in development now (two or three of a planned five have been released). So what else would’ve been a direct adaptation? Lab simulator. Can you imagine a game where you never do anything but run stuff through centrifuges and things? So the game didn’t do these things.

Instead, it’s a semi-sequel. It changes location from Japan to NYC, and the new lead character is Aya Brea, a busty blonde police officer. At the time, female mains were pretty rare. They’re still outnumbered, but at the time there were only a handful. So there’s a point right there. It’s an RPG, my favorite genre. Those games are text heavy (not always well written, but what can you do?). Thing is, most RPGs are high fantasy settings, with the occasional space opera. Parasite Eve is contemporary, real world. So there’s another point in its favor. The plot itself has nothing to do with the plot of the book, but it definitely uses a lot of the same ideas and images. It actually expands on the idea of Mitochondrial liberation for example, prominently features transplant surgery and the birth of the ultimate being. And though they’re sort of amusingly awkward in retrospect, the support cast was solid as well. Two in particular. One was Daniel, Aya’s mentor on the force and a trigger happy giant bear of a black man with a heart of gold who couldn’t be more obviously a stereotype of what Japanese people think Americans are like if he tried. The other was Maeda, a scientist who the game indicates is actually Toshiaki from the book, which would be impossible, so don’t even worry about it. Suffice to say, he’s smart, socially awkward, and tends to be easily impressed as well as give out useless good luck charms. In short, he’s what the Japanese think Americans think Japanese are like. But I forgive them. Even though they’re all a little thick. Because the game has so many crazy pseudo-science things going on, everyone put on their stupid hats before they went in to work so that even the dullest player could follow along.

The game is essentially about Aya, Daniel and Maeda trying to track down Eve, a Mitochondrial entity possessing an opera singer and recklessly “liberating” the mitochondria of various creatures she comes across, mutating them into beasts. Along the way we learn that Aya is pretty much the only one who can stop Eve because Eve’s original host was Aya’s identical twin sister, Maya. The opera singer received Maya’s kidney when she died in a car accident, and Aya herself got a cornea. So Aya has similar power but her own mitochondria have chosen to support the current symbiosis rather than putting an end to an insufferable era of “nucleic domination” and hence giving Aya all kinds of abilities that in any other game would be described as magic. It’s a modification of the book’s premise so that there are A) more things to fight and B) an actual way to fight back since the creature in the book was pretty much unstoppable. It sounds dumb on paper but it actually works really well. Until towards the end, anyway. Somehow, Eve uses a crowd she melts into goo to make magic stem cells and uses them in one of the later dungeons so you have to fight DINOSAURS resurrected at the Museum of Natural History. Seriously. That’s not a joke. Plus, I went to that particular museum a lot as a kid. Honestly it hasn’t changed much over the years. And I feel compelled to point out that I have yet to be eaten by a dinosaur.

The graphics are ass. They’re from the early polygon era so everything is realistically proportioned, but hideous to behold. Except the CG scenes which were pretty rockin’ at the time. Not many games have opera houses filled with people spontaneously combusting within the first five minutes. That’s class right there.



The soundtrack was perfect for the game. The game itself is short, but there are incentives to replay it, such as an alternate final dungeon. It’s broken up into bite sized chapters, each taking place on a successive day. They take a cue from the book and each of these chapters is named after a stage in the development process of a life form. Combat is iffy. You dodge enemy attacks in real time, but you have to wait your turn to attack. It was pretty neat but Aya’s movement speed isn’t so great, enemies frequently take up half the screen, and there isn’t anything like a block or a guard roll. Dodging is performed purely by running out of the way which is often impossible, so you’ll usually just tank the attacks and pop healing medicine as needed. And if any of you even remotely cared about anything in that paragraph, I’d be surprised.

Still, it’s fun to replay it once in a while even now, and back when? Well, this was one of the best things Squaresoft ever produced. Indeed, since then they’ve pretty much just been making uninspired trash that relies too heavily on cinematics. Honestly, it was all down hill for that company from there out. At least as far as quality. They were raking in the dough like you wouldn’t believe until just recently when people finally started to wise up. Indeed, between 2000 and 2010 I got the impression that Square was making bad games on purpose, waiting to see how bad they would have to be before people stopped throwing money at them. And, because there was backlash against Square always porting old games to new systems and releasing them at the price of a new game, they’ve been forced to start obeying the unwritten rules of the modern age and releasing them digital only as budget titles. So here's the upshot of their decade of douchery- If you’ve got a PS3 or a PSP (Sony systems) the word on the street is that Parasite Eve will be re-released shortly to celebrate the release of the third game in the series. “PSOne Classics” as they are known generally go for $5.00-10.00 if you’re interested.

Arbitrary Confectionary Rating: Danish. You walked in hoping to get a jelly donut but they were out, so you begrudgingly pick up a Danish instead, sighing about how the sugar isn’t powdered so it won’t make a mess, and how there’s more jelly and you know where it is. After a moment’s contemplation you’re not sure why anyone would have gotten the donut since this is clearly better. Plus, depending on your mood, you can get it light and flaky (play once) or dense and filling (replay for additional content). Sure the jelly looks weird when it’s out in the open but that doesn’t stop it from being delicious.