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Up All Night: Parasite Eve

Posted by John Constantine

Welcome back to Up All Night, the only place on the internet where you can be subjected to the trashiest videogame fun you can have at 2am on a Saturday night! What’s that you say? You can get that all over the internet? Well, screw you, pal. The difference here is that these are games you’re only supposed to play after drinking two liters of peppermint schnapps out of a Hello Kitty sippy-cup and after you tried to convince that chick at the bar that you’re related to Tom Selleck. Games so bad, they’re really bad. But awesome. To celebrate the franchise’s impending return on the PSP, we’re taking a look at the 1998 dollop of joy known as Parasite Eve. It’s the story of New York City cop and babe Aya Brea fighting a psychotic opera singer named Eve who’s leading a revolution on New Year’s Eve in 1997. The Shyamalan-worthy twist is that the revolutionaries are mitochondria! That’s right, cells are evil in Parasite Eve. They turn normal folk and rats into disgusting monstrosities or orange goo, depending on their mood.

Truth to tell, Parasite Eve was and is unique. First, it’s actually an adaptation of a novel by Hideaki Sena. Second, its characters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura and they all look like normal human beings, i.e. nobody wears an inordinate number of belts. Third, it was Squaresoft’s first explicit attempt at making a “cinematic RPG”, a game that openly aped filmic storytelling. Parasite Eve’s CG cutscenes were given top billing when the game came out, cementing the gameplay-into-flashy-cutscene narrative presentation pioneered in Final Fantasy VII.

Why is Parasite Eve Up All Night worthy? The gore-laden-monsters-in-Manhattan story and protagonist with secret powers (and an even more secret past!) are enough on their own, but the haphazard action-RPG play puts it over the top. Cheesecake as it is, though, I have a lot of love for this game. It doesn’t play great, but it had a lot of great ideas (game adaptations of novels? Awesome.) Also, Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack is unbelievable, a great mix of down-tempo techno and creepy-as-sin orchestral jams. For anyone out there with a PS2 or PS3, track down a copy before the new sequel drives eBay prices into the upper atmosphere.

More Up All Night:

Trojan
Dark Sector
Ex-Mutants
Nightmare Creatures
Bad Dudes
P.N. 03

Related links:

Yoko Shimomura Gets Commemorated, Orchestrated
Square-Enix: Reeling in the Devotees, Playing the Console Market With Aplomb

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Posted Aug 04 2008, 01:00 PM

Filed under: john constantine, up all night, final fantasy, yoko shimomura, parasite eve, square-enix, tetsuya nomura

Comments

Rob said:

I vaguely remember this game being fun and pretty good graphically for the time. I had only the first disc for some reason (good ol playstation 1) so I only played like 1/3 of the way through it...but I remember it being pretty solid.

August 4, 2008 2:29 PM

xxsodaboy said:

Part of this game's charm came during its final moments, particularly because trying to escape with the clunky controls was so tense.

August 4, 2008 2:57 PM

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John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

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