Parasite Eve is a fairly decent title, but doesn’t offer nearly enough content to keep you coming back for more.
You’ll stay in control of the police officer – Aya Brea – throughout the entire game, and won’t gain additional party members, so you may as well get comfortable with her abilities. In addition to her standard attacks with ranged or melee weapons, Aya also gains strange magical powers every few levels, an inevitable effect of the parasite evolution that’s causing other New Yorkers to burst into flames or melt into goo. The story itself is fairly interesting, although there are a lot of sections where the player has to sit back and scroll through text box after text box to move forward to the next scene.
Some of the scenes are rendered in full CG glory, and a good portion of these scenes integrate seamlessly into the action, much like we saw in Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy VIII. This is a really impressive effect, but one that’s marred by the rest of the game’s sub par quality in the sound and visual department. More of that in the breakdown, which is as follows:
Gameplay – Easy enough to master, since a lot of the game is moving Aya from Point A to Point B and scrolling through text boxes. The story is decent enough, but far too short for an RPG title. It’s probably a 20 hour play-through on your first pass, and you can spend more time if you play again and conduct the Chrysler Building mission. There’s not enough opportunity to break away from the set path. The battle system here is interesting enough, but not really worthy enough to carry the weight of the title, especially since you’ll spend more time reading and watching than playing.
Graphics – The handful of CG sequences used in Parasite Eve are masterfully done, and the style of blending these sequences into the action is well-rendered. However, during the actual game, the character’s look isn’t quite so good. The backgrounds are well rendered enough, but everything else looks really poor.
Sound – Again, the CG sequences makes this area shine, but during the bulk of the game, the sound quality is off by a wide margin. The music isn’t anything to write home about, and a lot of it is just down right awful.
Value – There’s another mode of play that becomes unlocked after beating it the first time, but . . . . well, I’ve never played through it, so I can’t really comment on it.
Tilt – The story is decent, but there’s a number of flaws here that don’t really justify a second attempt through it.