Parasite Eve
Woo, Parasite Eve. Square Soft’s cinematic RPG. Guess we know what inspired Final Fantasy 13. This game came out long before games like Uncharted Heavy Rain starting taking on the genre name. Although, I’m not exactly sure what cinematic RPG was supposed to mean, it doesn’t really play any different from other RPGs. You level and fight randomly encountered baddies while using an ATB bar. You use magic, except they don’t call it magic, and you use items. Maybe because sometimes the pre-rendered backgrounds moved this deserved to be called cinematic, I don’t know. Or perhaps you can beat this game in the same time it takes to watch a long movie.
The story of Parasite Eve is essentially taken from the Japanese novel under the same name. Aya Brea, a New York City cop, is the only person who can stand up against a biological threat that targets a person’s mitochondria (mitochondria is the power center of your cells). When activated by Eve, a person pretty much turns to people-jelly and merges with more people-jelly to create a monster similar in size to the Staypuff marshmallow man from Ghostbusters. That’s pretty much all you need to know about the game to understand what’s going on. They do mention a connect to Aya, Eve and Aya’s sister Maya (real original naming scheme there) and introduce a few minor characters, but none of it gets too complex.
What I loved in this game was the ability to fully customize your weapon by merger stats and adding different abilities to it. There rarely is a more rewarding feeling than creating your own hand cannon from scratch. That kind of goodness makes a man forgive a lot of flaws. And the game does a good job of throwing different types of weapons at you, much like Resident Evil 2. Hand guns, shot guns, grenade launchers, batons, rocket launchers, etc. all make an appearance at some point in the game and have their own balance. Rocket launchers are the most powerful, handguns are the quickest, and batons are terrible.
What really blows in this game are the character graphics. The backgrounds get their pre-rendered on like a normal survival horror game (or just general Playstation game period) but the characters look like a mess. Ben, who’s supposed to look like a little boy, looks more like a grown man whose 3ft tall. Even from far away the models look pixilated and choppy. If anyone’s played Xenogears, you probably know what I’m talking about. Also, for a cop, Aya sure does run like she’s got a load of bricks in her pants. Isn’t she supposed to be a trained police officer? Why does she always run around like she’s got rubber bands tied around her knees? It makes sense in the beginning when you control her and she’s wearing a dress, but later she changes into jeans, but runs the exact same way!
If you play through the game again, you unlock the Chrysler Building which you can climb up and get the secret, real ending. But good luck with that. All the halls and rooms look exactly the same. They just copy and pasted about 6 different types of areas and repeated that for about 80 floors. And most of the floors are randomly generated. So let’s sum this up: copy and pasted floors, 80 floors and randomly generated. Now try navigating all that. Be prepared for some major déjà vu. I got myself lost a lot of the time and spent some floors just trying to figure out where I was. The game offers no map, and you really can’t chart your progress. Only the boss floors are scripted. After you beat a boss, you get the key to travel all the way up to that floor. I’m not sure what building has a key for certain elevator floors, but ok. Bosses happen every 10 floors so if you die / go back down, you’ll have to climb those 10 floors all over again. What a horrible bonus area. And it’s not like you can even level up while you’re there. The enemies are pathetic, and only the last 3 bosses are really challenging.
I would’ve been content with the series ending here but…
Parasite Eve 2
Parasite Eve II is the direct sequel to Parasite Eve I (this is the kind of thing I’m paid to research) and instead of just New York, now the outbreak has spread all over the United States. Or at least that’s what I think since you spend all your time in the desert out in… let’s say New Mexico. Honestly, it’s all sand. Your only land marker is a seemingly deserted motel / gas station. Eventually you’ll uncover an underground research facility because really what evil biological company ever builds one on the surface?
Parasite Eve II makes an interesting alteration to the fully-customizing your gun with your own preferences in an intuitive upgrading method by completely removing it and gives you static weapons which never change. Thanks Squaresoft, for a second there I was enjoying the series. In fact, there’s really no leveling system either. I mean, you can upgrade your psy-energy or whatever they called it, but only about 3 of them are ever useful. They did this to make it seem like you were playing an arcade game rather than sitting at home playing a console game. Even though you play arcade games in an arcade surrounded by noisy 5-year-olds begging mommy for another quarter so they can play house of the dead 4 and need to leave me the heck alone while I play Cliffs of Dover on expert with a 20lbs controller in the shape of a guitar. Arcade style must be code for shallow because that’s what this game felt like. Just diving head-first into a game you thought would have some depth, at least in the weaponry department, and instead cracking your head open on the pool-floor that is disappointment.
The story takes a turn for the weird, and that’s saying a lot, by having the new batch of crazies wanting to build an ark for all the mitochondria creatures. Something about genetic superiority maybe, I have no idea. I would love to know how anyone gets the resources to actually build one underground and one that can support an entire ecosystem. The wallets of convenient plot-holes runs pretty deep I guess. Just ask the Umbrella Corporation.
At least the character models don’t look like someone threw up a bunch of pixels this time. In fact, the graphics are great for the PS1 (and so does the hotel shower scene). And they better, it was released in 2000. Everything looks and animates beautifully. There are some really smooth effects in the final boss fight. Of course if you stand around and admire them, you’ll probably burst into flames. Final boss is one that took me quite some time to beat, mostly because it didn’t dawn on me until death number thirty that the grenade launcher is king. In retrospect, the explosive death cannon should’ve been an obvious choice, but I still can’t get over the fact there’s virtually no stat progress in this game at all.
Who knows, maybe Parasite Eve 3rd Birthday will return the series to its roots. And maybe Square Enix isn’t entirely staffed by monkeys smashing their faces against keyboards and will actually RELEASE AN INTERNATIONAL VERSION OF A GAME, YOU KNOW, INTERNATIONALLY.
Dino Crisis
While we’re in the era of the Playstation 1 game, I’d like to pad out this retrospect with one more game from 2 generations ago, another entry into the genre by Capcom, Dino Crisis. I know what you’re thinking. It’s a survival horror by Capcom, but instead of zombies they used dinosaurs. Well yeah, I mean where do you go after zombies, ninjas? Actually that would’ve been awesome. But dinosaurs are good too.
One thing Dino Crisis does better than Resident Evil is make you weigh actually fighting off the dinosaurs with just running away. Ammo runs low in this game and some dinosaurs respawn indefinitely, so you have to make choices whether battling is really worth it, which is how a survival horror should be. I can’t be properly scared if I’m packing enough heat to defend myself against a stadium of undead. It’d be entertaining as all heck, but not scary.
So you’re probably wondering how they decided upon dinosaurs; I mean, one cannot just let the fact that they’ve been extinct for millions of years just walk by. Of course, the story has to start out with some bonkers-scientist playing God and meddling with nature. Soon enough, Jeff Goldblum comes along and makes some jokes with Sam Neil and… no wait, I’m thinking of a much better story. Actually the dinosaurs came through a time portal. I’m not sure which part of that is more ridiculous: time portals or dinosaurs.
One thing that’s always bothered me is: you see the portal in which all the dinosaurs come through to this time period. But it only fills up the height and width of a normal hallway. So how does that explain the T-Rex? How did that thing make it through and get outside? There are no doors big enough to house that thing. And it’s not like he tore through the facility, all the buildings are still intact and usually in perfect working order.
The graphics are pretty good for the PS1, and the voice acting is… well Capcom-quality.
Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly
Playing Fatal Frame II isn’t like playing a normal survival horror game. You’re sent to an abandoned, possibly ancient Japanese village full of ghosts, you play as a young, Japanese girl and you have your sister wandering off every now and then due to her own ADD. Everything is completely foreign to the average US gamer, sans the ADD part. And that’s what makes it unique, nothing is familiar. You’re thrown into a strange place with strange characters using very strange methods of combat. Enter the camera obscura.
It may sound really, really dumb on paper, but works surprisingly well since the game took extra care to build combat around it. Normally you walk around in 3rd person perspective until you use your camera. Suddenly you’re in 1st person trying to fend off the deceased. This throws all the action right at you. And it’s no simple point-and-shoot camera. The camera is your only means of fending off your attackers, and the fatal frame refers to a moment during combat when the ghost is a mere split second before hitting you, thus, the most frightening parts of combat are encourage by letting the ghosts get as close to you as possible. Quite brilliant. You can upgrade your camera in various ways as well as collect different types of film to increase your damage.
The latter half the game has you being constantly chased around by a phantasm that’s indestructible and can kill you with one hit. Though it doesn’t come in without warning; all the color in the town fades into black and white while a retro film grain runs through the screen. This is a great example of suspense, a feature most survival horror games never seem to understand is necessary to properly terrify someone. The anticipation of knowing something might happen is more deeply disturbing and perturbing than seeing something jump out at you. You let the anticipation fester inside your head, trying to predict what will happen. Your imagination does all the work of terrifying you, and all the game has to do is foster that.
This means of terror is also prominent in Japanese horror movies and something western horror movies attempt but never quite pull off. For whatever reason, western horror movies would rather scare you with horrible acting, horrible plot, inserted two horror icons into the same movie and have them battle or torturing someone. None of which are really that scary, except the horrible acting.
Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented
I’m almost convinced the subtitle of this game was talking about the people who played it. I loved Fatal Frame 2, so I was ready to jump into this game to get my j-horror on, but Tecmo had other ideas.
Everything in Fatal Frame 3 just becomes so routine and mundane, not exactly terrifying when you’re used to everything. Some person dies, you investigate, suddenly you’re going to this town in your dreams and waking up in the exact same manner every day with a tattoo spreading across your body. It wouldn’t be so bad waking up this way every single time if they didn’t use the EXACT SAME cut-scene to do it with. You run around the same area again and again, switch between 3 characters, a little girl, your main heroine and the blandest guy in the world. It’s nice that certain areas can be accessed by certain characters, but really, you’re just staying in the same building the entire game. Eventually you’ll have to back track at some point and way too often.
The tense moments of running around the ghost-filled complex by having you interact around your own house / apartment. Every now and then a ghost figure will appear for a few seconds. This provides a nice contrast between was should be feeling comfortable and safe into being paranoid; one of the few good things about this game.
The highlight of Fatal Frame 3 comes with a boss battle somewhere passed the halfway point of the game. The setting is such: you’re forced to get on your belly and crawl underneath the floor boards of a Japanese room. You have about a foot of space between the dirt and the boards that make up the floor. Already, you’re dealing with dark areas and claustrophobia, a prime example of making the player uncomfortable without annoying the crap out of them. Suddenly, a hostile ghost appears and decides to take advantage of your vulnerable state. This is great gaming. This is the only vivid memory I have of this game, and for good reason. The game set up and executed this intense battle perfectly.
I suppose I could end this by pointing out the U.S. has still not gotten Fatal Frame 4 for the Wii. Nintendo of America decided that it wasn’t worth bringing over. But thanks a crap-load for the Crystal Bearers, Sengoku Basara: Samurai Heroes, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Samurai Warriors 3 and a mountain-pile of shovel-ware. Glad to see quality control is doing their part in ruining my life. How about you work on making a console that can actually work with current generation technology? I’ll tear into the Wii another time, for now, I have one more installment. But I saved my favorite series for last.
“I still don’t believe it. The dead can’t send letters, yet I came here to see my Mary. Our special place – what does that mean? This place is too full of memories. The only way to get to the center of the town is through this tunnel, but there must have been an accident or something because the entrance is blocked. But wait… The map shows a single road through the forest that leads to the town. Looks like the only way to get to the town is to take this road on foot. I can’t see anyone in this thick fog, or should I say I don’t feel anyone. I see a run-down building nearby. There’s no one inside. I am alone in the mirror’s reflection. I look at the man in the mirror and mutter a question. ‘Mary, could you really be in this town?’”
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