Game Beaten: Parasite Eve

Sun 16 Aug 2020, 19:01

Not sure how much I have to say about this game. I ran into it because I watched some random video on YouTube called 7 Short JRPGs Worth Your Time! and it seemed neat.

I started playing it and yeah, it's definitively different from my Final Fantasy games. It's very dark and moody. It's classy and aesthetic. Not really sure how to explain it. It almost feels more like a movie than a video game.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The game just has a different vibe and makes it feel different from other games.

I was kind of enticed by the story so I kept playing it, but eventually I got kinda tired of how slow it was and wanted it to be over so I started following a walkthrough. That made things faster, but the game is still very slow paced (your running speed is actually like a real life jog) so it still felt like it took forever, even though the game was less than 10 hours long.

It's just very slow paced and dark, which isn't really my kind of jam - but it suits the game. Parasite Eve will be remembered by me as the realistic New York based PS1 JRPG where you run around in realistic environments at realistic speeds. If you change that, it wouldn't be as memorable.

I can't write coherent sections anymore so I'm just gonna make a list of some other things I liked and didn't like:

Things I liked:

• The battle system. I liked that you could run around while waiting for your AT to charge. It's kind of similar to some newer RPG's I suppose.

• The music. Surprisingly, it's Yoko Shimomura. She made the soundtrack for Super Mario RPG, and this game, and they don't sound anything alike. My favorite track was probably Urban Noise - everytime I went to the map screen I had to stay there for a while to listen to this some. Missing Perspective is also very good. Out of Phase is perhaps the best one.
• The FMV's. For 1998 on Playstation, they looked fantastic. I think they could bump up the compression quality on them a lot since they had 2 discs for a game that's less than 10 hours.
• New York! It was super neat to be in New York for a PS1 RPG.

• Female main character and protagonist! If I get to pick gender in a video game where I create my own character I will always pick female so I was happy to play one here too.
• New Game+ mode! I might go back and play that if I feel like playing the game again. It could be fun to be super overpowered.

Things I didn't like:

• The D-pad gets completely disabled when you enable analog controls. This means you have to navigate all the menus, something you do quite alot in a RPG, with the stick unless you disable the analog controls by use of the very convenient analog button on the PS1/2 controller. I usually just did it with the stick, but if I was doing a lot of menuing I would disable it, and then re-enable it again.
• The confirm button is X and cancel is O, and you can't swap them around.
• Some of the dialogue. They used uppercase letters for alot of DRAMATIC WORDS and it just looked GOOFY!
• The final boss. I struggled with it alot until I realized you could just use Liberate and have it be a cakewalk.
• Some general clunkiness with the menus. Like moving stuff between storage, running out of space, dealing with Junk, not entirely obvious where your cursor is gonna go... Minor things but it adds up.

• The progress bar when saving... is that even a bar?
• The tool system for moving stats around between weapons and armors. You can very easily screw yourself with it.

Overall, it's a neat and very aesthetic game. Not sure I'd recommend it to everybody, but it's a pretty unique game so if you wanna check out a weird realistic PS1 RPG, go ahead! It's not a huge time commitment.

I'm happy to have played it because it's probably one of the more unique games I've played through.

Here are some random screenshots: