Maybe Halloween emerging on the horizon has something to do with it, but whatever the reason, Parasite Eve piqued my interest recently. The only game in its series that qualifies as a JRPG had been on my list for a while — it’s one of those big names I’ve consistently heard praised over the years — so I decided to check it out.
This 1998 PlayStation classic serves as a sequel to the synonymous novel by Hideaki Sena, published three years prior. Apparently, that book caused the surge in popularity of Japanese horror that led to all the classic PS1 horror titles we know today, but I dunno; I’m just reading Wikipedia here. Let’s talk about the game.
You play as Aya, a cop working for the NYPD. Yep, in a cool twist on the genre — at least as far as we got in the West at the time — Parasite Eve takes place in real-world New York City, featuring landmark locations like Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler Building. I can’t help but think this must have contributed to the game’s popularity here in the good ol’ USA, but regrettably I wasn’t paying much attention to PlayStation in the ’90s, so I couldn’t say for sure.
Anyway, Aya’s out on a date at Carnegie Hall when all breaks loose — the star performer of the evening’s musical, Melissa, suddenly goes batshit and murders everyone. I’m not even exaggerating: everyone but Aya dies, kicking off the plot to figure out why the heck only she survived. After regrouping with her partner and boss, the trio eventually link up with a Japanese scientist named Maeda, who had investigated a similar incident in Japan. Over time, this rag-tag group learns that Melissa was not technically Melissa at all; rather, an entity known as “Eve” inhabited her body to cause all the destruction.
Eve’s the main antagonist, if you couldn’t guess from the game’s title, and said game isn’t afraid to get into the nitty-gritty of her origins — if anything, it inundates you with intricate, science-based backstory. Biology wasn’t exactly my strongest subject in school, so I’ve got no idea how accurate or at least plausible any of this stuff is, but apparently, Eve’s mitochondria have gone berserk due to some shady experiments and took over her body, while also allowing her to exert control over others. As it turns out, Eve’s master plan is to use Melissa to birth what she calls the “Ultimate Being” — no, not Shadow the Hedgehog, he’s the ultimate lifeform, and … OK, I’m getting sidetracked now.
At any rate, only Aya can stop such a threat, and over the course the story she discovers her own link to Eve. It’s intriguing stuff — the game spends a lot of time on plot, which can be to its detriment. Parasite Eve plays out very slowly in general — walking… anywhere, for instance, takes ages; going through doors triggers long loads; and menus ain’t exactly snappy. The backgrounds may look beautiful, but the PlayStation’s limitations are readily apparent by the game’s sluggishness, which grew tiresome by around halfway through and felt like a slog for the rest. If you’re thinking, “Hey, that’s just how games were in 1998”, then I’d direct you to Banjo-Kazooie, a game with virtually zero load times that came out the same year.
Of course, that’s talking cartridges versus CDs, which to be fair is a whole other argument. Meanwhile, Parasite Eve rewards your patience by featuring jaw-droppingly gorgeous visuals. Its pre-rendered backdrops are out of this world, or rather, of this world, only in a way that’s so detailed and realistic it really feels like you’re walking around New York City, even when playing in 2023. I’ve gone through enough PlayStation titles at this point to say this is among the best looking games on the system, and it may be worth checking out solely for that aspect.
The music, too, stands out as a strength. Yoko Shimomura, established in her career by this point — yet nowhere near the stardom she’s since achieved — brings another soundtrack of pure gold, but there’s something different about this one. It feels … lighter than usual. There’s lengthy segments with no backing audio whatsoever, and while some may see this as artistic, it felt off to me. Particularly in horror-tinged games like this, sparseness works on occasion, but there’s just enough music here to provide the needed atmosphere.
In the end this comes down to a matter of taste, but other limitations of the PlayStation hold the game back. Most doors have finicky load triggers, where you’ve gotta stand in a certain spot to trigger them. Why game devs can’t set a sphere around the door and have any X-button press within that area activate it is beyond me — I’ll cut them slack, though — I may be a programmer, but I’ve never worked on games, and I’d bet there’s plenty I’m missing.
Thankfully, the dungeons are pretty cool, dripping with 90s horror atmosphere, though a few locations drag on too long or are convoluted beyond belief. Central Park especially fits this mold — I wandered around that damned place for what seemed like hours in Days 2 and 3, only to realize I was supposed to be in a whole other location. Sheesh, I never get that lost in the real Central Park. On the other hand, I appreciate the game’s lack of hand-holding — if you don’t pay close attention to the dialogue, you could easily waste time backtracking or grinding where you don’t need to be.
Unless you’re using a walkthrough, that means hours upon hours of combat, which unfortunately is the one mechanic that disappointed me most, due to its unrealized potential. Like any good PlayStation JRPG, battles here are turn-based. Yet, they also work like a quasi- third-person shooter, with cooldowns, where during her turn Ava can run wherever she wants and fire off a shot, use an item, or tap into her Parasite power, which are like spells. For the first several hours, all this is fun as hell. The problem — common for JRPGs of the PlayStation era — is that Parasite Eve’s systems don’t evolve enough over the course of the game to keep my interest. Besides the controls consistently feeling a little janky, there’s a simple lack of difficulty in that if you’ve paid any attention at all to the weapon upgrade system, you’ll do just fine by moving a decent distance away from the toughest enemy, unloading, and repeating ... for ... every battle. The game throws all kinds of options at you, but the basic guns and ammo are just fine as long as you pay even the slightest bit of attention to NPC like Wayne, who offer helpful storage and upgrades.
You can improve your guns by transferring effects from one to another. For example, if you’ve used a bunch of stat-up items on your main gun, then find a gun with better base stats, all you need is a Tool item to copy all stat upgrades over at once. Here’s the rub: using a Tool destroys the old gun. Also, stats aren’t the only upgrade you can clone. Some guns have special modifiers, like firing custom ammo, or even crazy stuff like letting you act twice in a single turn. A tool can also transfer these effects, but only one per gun, so the ease of combat comes down to how well you balance upgrades against your resources. Only a Super Tool can transfer stats or a modifier without destroying a gun, and maybe you can see where I’m going with this.
The problem, of course, Parasite Eve being a pseudo-survival horror game, is that Tools and Super Tools come in limited supply, with Super Tools being extra rare, so I didn’t know how many the game would throw at me. I got plenty of regular Tools, all right — not enough to be careless yet enough to consistently upgrade my main gun — but I really needed Super Tools to make the customizations I wanted and held off for most of the game on experimenting too much. I figured, no problem, normal battles are easy enough, so once I’m close to the final few bosses, I’ll do a major upgrade sesh since I’ll be decked-out with equipment by then.
This came back to bite me in the butt, ‘cuz Parasite Eve suffers from a bizarre pacing problem. For the first five in-game days, you start in the police precinct in the morning, where you can access your storage stash, then you visit a few locations which play out as dungeons, before finally heading back to the station to end the day. Going in, I knew there were six days, so I’d planned to do my final upgrades at the end of Day 5. Parasite Eve had ... other plans, however. See, at the end of Day 5, the game all of a sudden decides it’s in a major rush and throws you into a boss gauntlet that ends the day in a new location. You start Day 6 with access to your weapons guy, who somehow made it there too, yet for some reason without the ability to install any of the key gun upgrades you’d want at that point.
After eight-plus hours of dead-simple gameplay, this came as a shock. I’ll admit, I ran out of ammo and couldn’t continue, since up till then I’d focused on a sub-machine gun build that chewed through bullets. Now, I actually appreciate this; it was the first time I had to deal with any sort of challenge during my run, and I love when RPGs force you to spec properly to take on tough bosses. But.. where was all this during the rest of the experience? Parasite Eve’s poor pacing kills the systems that otherwise had all the ingredients necessary for an addictive upgrade loop.
I can’t help but think the overwhelming praise I’ve heard for this game falls into heavy nostalgia territory. This is one neat little adventure, sure; I’d recommend it for its compelling story and unique gameplay ideas. But there’s ultimately not much to it. Parasite Eve fits that classic paradigm of early 3D JRPG — deep mechanics galore that don’t matter enough in a practical sense. It fails to provide adequate challenge, depth, or length to justify its complex systems, with acceptable thresholds of damage output too easy to achieve. Whenever a game has a ton of options I never felt the urge to bother trying out, it’s never going to reach the upper echelon of RPGs in my book. Nonetheless, Parasite Eve makes an admirable attempt, and it’s not a title to be forgotten.
Thanks for reading this month’s edition of JRPG Journey. See you next month for a look at another PlayStation classic, Vagrant Story.
