The 3rd Birthday'll teach you to fear the Reaper.
For players who did not experience the joy of playing the first two games on the PlayStation, the game has the story background that you can read if you want, but it doesn't force players who know the story to do so. This particular game's story starts with huge, tentacled, somewhat giant-insect-like creatures called Twisted tearing apart New York, and on Christmas Eve at that. The 3rd Birthday doesn't make you wait for its gameplay to wow you - the CG cutscenes are so good you have to see them to believe them. Even CG-animated movies themselves look average compared to the cutscenes in this game.
The story is very good, but if you don't pay attention you won't understand it at all. Quite often, after the chapters begin and end, you have to access the database files and read a recap of events to get what fully happened. The game tries to make a shrouded-in-mystery plot like that of the Kingdom Hearts series - this is a Square Enix game, after all - but this kind of story's success may vary from player to player. If you're curious and don't mind doing quite a bit of reading in the database files, you'll understand it all.
The previous Parasite Eve games were RPGs with third person action elements. The 3rd Birthday is a third person action game with RPG elements. Because a lot of third person games with manual aiming mess up because of the PSP's single analog nub, the 3rd Birthday eschews manual aiming - except for some heavy weapons - and for most weapons you press the L trigger to auto-target and R trigger to fire. Turrets, sniper rifles and grenade launchers have to be aimed manually by standing still and aiming with the analog nub; like in Resident Evil 4, see? Mostly you have to move through areas taking out all the Twisted, though sometimes you can leave an area without eliminating them all and have other objectives. By the way, Aya's clothing can get torn from attacks to the point that it resembles little more than dental floss for some outfits; that's fan service for you, I suppose. Aya can change her protective gear and install different DNA chips which enhance her abilities before heading out on missions.
The element that's altogether unique to this game is Overdive. Aya has the ability to take over nearby peoples' bodies by Overdiving into them, acquiring their health, position and mostly one weapon except when you Overdive into civilians. This means you can position the characters (mostly soldiers) for crossfire - a condensed attack you do by aiming for some time with other soldiers and waiting for the Crossfire bar to fill before firing.
Overdive Kill is another ability in this game. If an enemy takes a lot of strong hits, a Triangle mark appears over them. Targeting them, Aya can Overdive into them and implode them from inside for massive damage.
There's yet another ability for Aya in this game - Liberation. In this mode, Aya basically turns into a superhuman, shooting without having to reload, moving extra fast, and inflicting huge damage on her enemies. To use Liberation, though, you have to fill your Liberation guage by killing enemies, so it's best to save it for the bosses - which are, yes, difficult.
That gets us started on the game's difficulty. The game is quite hard on Normal mode. Not unplayable, but not very forgiving. Blue Oyster Cult (who recorded the song Don't Fear the Reaper, not that anyone would remember), at the very least would find this game insulting, since the enemy you'll quickly learn to fear the most is the Reaper, which has a hard shell on it that makes normal bullets on it as effective as peashooters. At some points in the game, you'll have to sneak past or run from Reapers, because if one catches you and there's no one ahead to Overdive into, you're definitely dead. The game is challenging throughout, so while there's hand-holding in the tutorial, the game won't let you off easy for your mistakes unless Easy is the difficulty you select.
The graphics are quite simply some of the best on the PSP. We're talking PS2-level graphics here, and the visuals in The 3rd Birthday actually do surpass those of many PS2 games. Brilliant animations and mind-blowing cinematics make this game a visual treat.
The sound is middling. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but it's the only department in this entire game that doesn't hit the 'great' area at all. The soundtrack is well composed, but it's a little too gentle and light - those are the only words I can use to describe it - for a game like this. A harder, rock-y-er soundtrack would have made a better fit - and while there is a rock guitar in some boss battles, and is good to hear, the people working on the soundtrack still didn't realize this game needed a hard rock soundtrack instead of the forgettable music that comes with most battles. Also, while the voice acting is good, some of the dialogue is hilariously bad so the voice actors can't help sounding a little stupid. The sound gets the job done, but it could have been much better, and in the end it's the only thing in this game I feel needs complaining about.
There you have it: The 3rd Birthday is not a perfect game, but it does an excellent job at reviving a great franchise that had been stagnant for a decade. The gameplay, cinematics and graphics are some of the best for action games on the PSP, and while the story might not make sense for those unwilling to invest more time than watching the cutscenes and shooting Twisted, and the sound might not be as close to the hit on its hit-or-miss spectrum than it should have been, it's still an outstanding game.