It's 1998 and resident evil 2 just dropped everyone in the survival horror genre is going crazy just in time for square to publish their own survival horror game.... Welcome everyone to PARASITE EVE a survival horror with an RPG flavor in this mini review i will discuss various aspects of the game from gameplay to story to graphics.
Intro: yes i dedicate an entire section to the intro why? Cuz the intro serves as a way to introduce you to the game and be your first ever look into the game world , how does parasite eve intro fare? Well we are first greeted by a fimilair logo of course the "squaresoft" logo a one that signals you are in for a good experience , the intro opens up with a shot of the statue of liberty the music is quite calm but soon the guitar picks up and you are shown various shots of the events of the game jets flying , strange mutated dogs and massive slime then the music calms down with a more of a piano playing a bit of foreshadowing to the sinister nature of "eve" we are shown the details of the human cell and such then for the guitar to pick up again with more action oriented scenes add on it the many words that are connected to the game story and themes like "evolution" "conception" "fusion" and liberation
The beginning: we start with a Cutscene that shows NYC during the Christmas eve clearly everyone is having fun right? Riiiight so we begin the game at the theater just exiting the car we meet our protagonist who we will be playing as for the rest of the game "aya brea" a cop and aged 25 to be exact we are attending an opera play well when do the horror starts? Just wait bro anyway we walk down the hall and the show begins well everything looks normal so far i mean it's an opera play come on what can go wrong? Oh foolish me if only i knew what would happen after that now FOCUS here because it's when the actress gets to sing she has quite a voice yeah? She sings and just there we get a closer look onto her face as she stares at us directly suddenly the lead actor gets ignited and the whole cast starts burning just for the audience to get caught in fire too save for us "wtf? What's going on?" was my reaction we quickly confront the actress and a fight erupts well here goes our first fight and i dont know how to do anything quite a genuis move on my part to skip the tutorial so i press X and ha? Well time freezed! alright so few shots fired from my pistol and the insane actress retreats talking about mitochondria? "what??" I'm confused....
We chase her well we should expect i wasn't playing the game correctly you see i decided to choose the "wide screen" option for my video display and this created a weird in fact very weird collision issue where everything is messed up in terms of collision i thought it was square fault so back to chasing the weird being i get to a hole in the ground and first hesitate to jump but decide to do so few moments later here we get to see the first ever mutation of a creature effected by the actress powers in a high quality horrifyingly gross cutscene where we see a rat turn a monster alright now what do i do? I decide to check the rooms one by one since the hole lead us to the backstage and the many rooms found there most are locked but one is open we enter just to find burned bodies they look freaky i find a key moments later and open another room we get to call the police department the phones are our save points i find the actress room that has her diary reading the diary it becomes evident this woman was taking lots of medication wanting to be lead singer but she seems to be in poor health condition I have enough questions by now i head to the only remaining door that was locked we meet the actress she turns into a monster with hands so long they look uncanny as hell seeing this i go "OH FU-" then i get slapped to death that was my first death i go back and face her again this time i manage to beat her yet she seems unfazed we continue the chase down to the sewers where she turns herself into some sort of slimey matter and escapes us I'm left with a lizard looking creature kill this thing and with that our introductory section is over starting the 6 days that the game events take place in.
Gameplay: the game has quite a take on the survival horror genre while having resource management and quite the limited healing you have your own magic called parasite eve hmmm coincidence? The magic plays a large role in your ability to sustain wounds and control enemy movement and can LIBERATE basically it's your ultimate dealing high damage in exchange for all your PE energy how you gain PE? through battle PE regenerates slowly and when the battle is over the amount of PE left is what you have until the next random encounter this means you will need to use PE carefully , you can equip weapons whether it's pistols , machine guns or grenade launchers and even an RPG! but you can edit these weapons to your liking through bonus points you gain them when you level up you can invest them into weapon stats or increase your item capacity or have higher active time to make a move sooner.
an example of the stat screen.
you can merge weapons togther increasing their stats and effects like an armor vest being immune to poison i did merge 2 guns creating this power house
since the game features the protagonist with a pistol i figured going full on pistol build is more lore accurate
Story: I'm not gonna say much here the game is based off a novel which someone at square must have read and went "damn this is dope let's make it into a game" I'm looking at you mr sakaguchi , quite a compelling story and a likeable cast whether it's the good hearted and badass aya with constant flashbacks to her dead sister memories the sinister and creepy eve who is the antagonist , your police partner daniel who is trying to raise his kid after divorce he is also quite the menace at times , or the nerdy maeda who keeps handing you luck charms Idk what those do but i kept them with me , some side characters have a little story tidbits like torres being quite a professional gun expert yet his statements oppose using guns you find out later why and it makes it understandable why.... I will not dive much into the story.
Soundtrack/sound design: the game has quite the soundtrack backing it up the music along with lifeless places you visit combined with the presence of burning bodies creates a strong and tense atmosphere , not to mention the other tracks like the battle/boss themes and the overworld theme which sounds badass overall a decent job when it comes to music oh and i can't forget the troubling opera singing that signals the presence of eve hearing that can almost instantly make you go hyper focus mode the sounds do the job pretty well in capturing the atmosphere.
The "horror" : alright here is where things get a bit shaky so the game advertises itself as a survival horror but isn't so "horror" resident evil/silent hill offer better scares now that's not to say the game completely sucks when it comes horror the main horror comes from the CGI cutscenes like the rat transformation or the dog sheeva scene where her head freaking splits into 2 yeah what a freaky sight , other scenes worth mentioning are when the camera focused on Melissa (the actres) during the performance and the scene where eve stares directly into the camera and tells to "hush" other than that monster design is mostly "ok" the only creepy or uncanny monsters are the polar bears the twitching jaws of rats and that very weird entity encountered in the hospital Idk what it is but it's easily the creepiest of the monsters oh and those blue dinosaurs with how their eyes look , now don't get me wrong if you find yourself facing a dinosaur that went extinct or a frog whom tongue can cause you injuries yeah i get it would be scary but that's probably not gonna happen , one another thing worth mentioning is the battle transation which features some sort of heart beat along with the environment going full gray and aya freezing i suppose this means aya freezing in shock sensing the presence of a creature nearby or outright spotting it this is further reinforced by when you escape battle and the animation that plays after well i didn't know you can escape battle until i was in beneath China town in sewers.
Graphics: pre render environments look good and hold up pretty well can't say the same for the rest
Conclusion: overall this game provides a fun hybrid of survival horror and RPG with a very entertaining gameplay and a good story further helped by the impressive sound design all help to create a fun experience along with the biology themes , however a stronger emphasis should have been put on creature design and the horror could be improved by a vast margin , the idea of the mitochondria becoming sentient and it killing Melissa and taking over her body is some good paranoia soup along with the many creepy CGI scenes but the game itself doesn't offer any scary monsters to fight you can say the game is scarier when you aren't fighting and is even more tense when you are during a battle transation in a new place , lacking any variety of death animations also hurts the fear and horror vibe , and no voice acting hurts the game even further combined with my BIGGEST complaint WHY DOES AYA WALK SO SLOW? Arent we supposed to be a fit policeman why the hell do i have to walk so slowly.... I heard a remaster went down anyone played it? Is it any good? Now PE would greatly benefit from a remake that pumps up the horror aspects
Overall 7/10 game
ending gear
Intro: yes i dedicate an entire section to the intro why? Cuz the intro serves as a way to introduce you to the game and be your first ever look into the game world , how does parasite eve intro fare? Well we are first greeted by a fimilair logo of course the "squaresoft" logo a one that signals you are in for a good experience , the intro opens up with a shot of the statue of liberty the music is quite calm but soon the guitar picks up and you are shown various shots of the events of the game jets flying , strange mutated dogs and massive slime then the music calms down with a more of a piano playing a bit of foreshadowing to the sinister nature of "eve" we are shown the details of the human cell and such then for the guitar to pick up again with more action oriented scenes add on it the many words that are connected to the game story and themes like "evolution" "conception" "fusion" and liberation
The beginning: we start with a Cutscene that shows NYC during the Christmas eve clearly everyone is having fun right? Riiiight so we begin the game at the theater just exiting the car we meet our protagonist who we will be playing as for the rest of the game "aya brea" a cop and aged 25 to be exact we are attending an opera play well when do the horror starts? Just wait bro anyway we walk down the hall and the show begins well everything looks normal so far i mean it's an opera play come on what can go wrong? Oh foolish me if only i knew what would happen after that now FOCUS here because it's when the actress gets to sing she has quite a voice yeah? She sings and just there we get a closer look onto her face as she stares at us directly suddenly the lead actor gets ignited and the whole cast starts burning just for the audience to get caught in fire too save for us "wtf? What's going on?" was my reaction we quickly confront the actress and a fight erupts well here goes our first fight and i dont know how to do anything quite a genuis move on my part to skip the tutorial so i press X and ha? Well time freezed! alright so few shots fired from my pistol and the insane actress retreats talking about mitochondria? "what??" I'm confused....
We chase her well we should expect i wasn't playing the game correctly you see i decided to choose the "wide screen" option for my video display and this created a weird in fact very weird collision issue where everything is messed up in terms of collision i thought it was square fault so back to chasing the weird being i get to a hole in the ground and first hesitate to jump but decide to do so few moments later here we get to see the first ever mutation of a creature effected by the actress powers in a high quality horrifyingly gross cutscene where we see a rat turn a monster alright now what do i do? I decide to check the rooms one by one since the hole lead us to the backstage and the many rooms found there most are locked but one is open we enter just to find burned bodies they look freaky i find a key moments later and open another room we get to call the police department the phones are our save points i find the actress room that has her diary reading the diary it becomes evident this woman was taking lots of medication wanting to be lead singer but she seems to be in poor health condition I have enough questions by now i head to the only remaining door that was locked we meet the actress she turns into a monster with hands so long they look uncanny as hell seeing this i go "OH FU-" then i get slapped to death that was my first death i go back and face her again this time i manage to beat her yet she seems unfazed we continue the chase down to the sewers where she turns herself into some sort of slimey matter and escapes us I'm left with a lizard looking creature kill this thing and with that our introductory section is over starting the 6 days that the game events take place in.
Gameplay: the game has quite a take on the survival horror genre while having resource management and quite the limited healing you have your own magic called parasite eve hmmm coincidence? The magic plays a large role in your ability to sustain wounds and control enemy movement and can LIBERATE basically it's your ultimate dealing high damage in exchange for all your PE energy how you gain PE? through battle PE regenerates slowly and when the battle is over the amount of PE left is what you have until the next random encounter this means you will need to use PE carefully , you can equip weapons whether it's pistols , machine guns or grenade launchers and even an RPG! but you can edit these weapons to your liking through bonus points you gain them when you level up you can invest them into weapon stats or increase your item capacity or have higher active time to make a move sooner.
you can merge weapons togther increasing their stats and effects like an armor vest being immune to poison i did merge 2 guns creating this power house
since the game features the protagonist with a pistol i figured going full on pistol build is more lore accurate
Story: I'm not gonna say much here the game is based off a novel which someone at square must have read and went "damn this is dope let's make it into a game" I'm looking at you mr sakaguchi , quite a compelling story and a likeable cast whether it's the good hearted and badass aya with constant flashbacks to her dead sister memories the sinister and creepy eve who is the antagonist , your police partner daniel who is trying to raise his kid after divorce he is also quite the menace at times , or the nerdy maeda who keeps handing you luck charms Idk what those do but i kept them with me , some side characters have a little story tidbits like torres being quite a professional gun expert yet his statements oppose using guns you find out later why and it makes it understandable why.... I will not dive much into the story.
Soundtrack/sound design: the game has quite the soundtrack backing it up the music along with lifeless places you visit combined with the presence of burning bodies creates a strong and tense atmosphere , not to mention the other tracks like the battle/boss themes and the overworld theme which sounds badass overall a decent job when it comes to music oh and i can't forget the troubling opera singing that signals the presence of eve hearing that can almost instantly make you go hyper focus mode the sounds do the job pretty well in capturing the atmosphere.
The "horror" : alright here is where things get a bit shaky so the game advertises itself as a survival horror but isn't so "horror" resident evil/silent hill offer better scares now that's not to say the game completely sucks when it comes horror the main horror comes from the CGI cutscenes like the rat transformation or the dog sheeva scene where her head freaking splits into 2 yeah what a freaky sight , other scenes worth mentioning are when the camera focused on Melissa (the actres) during the performance and the scene where eve stares directly into the camera and tells to "hush" other than that monster design is mostly "ok" the only creepy or uncanny monsters are the polar bears the twitching jaws of rats and that very weird entity encountered in the hospital Idk what it is but it's easily the creepiest of the monsters oh and those blue dinosaurs with how their eyes look , now don't get me wrong if you find yourself facing a dinosaur that went extinct or a frog whom tongue can cause you injuries yeah i get it would be scary but that's probably not gonna happen , one another thing worth mentioning is the battle transation which features some sort of heart beat along with the environment going full gray and aya freezing i suppose this means aya freezing in shock sensing the presence of a creature nearby or outright spotting it this is further reinforced by when you escape battle and the animation that plays after well i didn't know you can escape battle until i was in beneath China town in sewers.
Graphics: pre render environments look good and hold up pretty well can't say the same for the rest
Conclusion: overall this game provides a fun hybrid of survival horror and RPG with a very entertaining gameplay and a good story further helped by the impressive sound design all help to create a fun experience along with the biology themes , however a stronger emphasis should have been put on creature design and the horror could be improved by a vast margin , the idea of the mitochondria becoming sentient and it killing Melissa and taking over her body is some good paranoia soup along with the many creepy CGI scenes but the game itself doesn't offer any scary monsters to fight you can say the game is scarier when you aren't fighting and is even more tense when you are during a battle transation in a new place , lacking any variety of death animations also hurts the fear and horror vibe , and no voice acting hurts the game even further combined with my BIGGEST complaint WHY DOES AYA WALK SO SLOW? Arent we supposed to be a fit policeman why the hell do i have to walk so slowly.... I heard a remaster went down anyone played it? Is it any good? Now PE would greatly benefit from a remake that pumps up the horror aspects
Overall 7/10 game
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