Parasite Eve

Back in my early teens I was really obsessed with Square. On the SNES I played all of their localized games and were pretty much my favorites, they were the greatest video game company in the world by far. But I decided to buy a N64 instead of a PS1 (Mario in 3D was just too revolutionary to skip), and while I loved my N64 the consequence was to miss out on the future Square games. I managed to borrow a PS1 and play the Final Fantasy games, but never really got a chance to explore their other games from that era and here I am now more than 20 years after they've been released.

Parasite Eve is a game that shows its age immediately. The 3D polygons from that time haven't really aged well, I get that we all wanted gaming to progress towards 3D but many of the games from the late 90s haven't aged very well compared to the 2D games of the 16-bit era. However after a while you get used to the graphics and they aren't such a bother. The cut-scenes on the other hand still look amazing, they really done a great job at them and are still respectable to this day. It's definitely a game from the PS1 era, so just be warned if you are looking at it from 2020 eyes.

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with Square all over again. There's just something about their RPGs that make them stand above others, just overall strong production values, great stories and interesting and innovative gameplay. One thing that stands out immediately is that the game has an amazing soundtrack, this really stands out as one of Yoko Shimomura's finest work. It's not too far from the sounds of PS1's Final Fantasies which are among my favorite video game music. This really enhances the game and it's also got some solid sound effects to boot, like walking boots sound that really go well with the atmosphere. The battle system is a mixture of Action and Turn Based RPG, you've got an active bar but the game pauses while you choose your action. However what's different from a Turn Based RPG is that you must move manually in between acts to evade the enemy attacks and position yourself correctly for the next one. It makes the battles active and pretty fun, which definitely helps because single character RPGs are generally inferior due to the limit of options you can have.

This is said to be Square's answer to Resident Evil, and I have to say that it's much more than that. While there is an horror theme here, it's not about killing zombies with survival and whatnot, this is much more into the science fiction realm with a crazy apocalyptic story. Actually I quite enjoyed the story, and even at times it feels very dark and brutal (hence Horror) and it's got some pretty interesting twists. The game is about 11 hours long which felt just about the right length for this, it doesn't overstay its welcome and I think they balanced the length pretty well.

There's a few flaws here aside from the dated polygon graphics, some of the items can easily be missed because you must be positioned perfectly to pick them up and the same is for doors that don't seem to open unless you have that perfect angle. The battles are random encounters and they do feel a little too much in the Day 5 Museum area, the building is such a maze and having the random encounters pop up constantly becomes an annoyance. But I think these are fairly minor flaws, considering just how many things the game does well.

Overall a very strong PS1 RPG, it's very well rounded in pretty much all areas and quite fun with great gameplay, music and story. Definitely a time where Square were a master in their field, they just had those RPGs on lock and they seemed to release one great one after the other (many of them among the greatest of all time too). It's a nice twist on JRPG and would recommend it to fans of that, but not necessarily to people looking for a pure horror game as it's really not that.