Parasite Eve (or, SquareSoft’s Experimental Cinematic RPG)

Aya Brea’s date night at Carnegie Hall is tragically cut short when the show’s new singer eyes her in the audience, activating an unknown ability deep in her cells that lights everyone in attendance on fire except the stunned NYPD detective who chases the mutated Eve backstage. The theater is a perfect place to start Parasite Eve’s story, as the game, inspired by survival horror games of the time, was SquareSoft’s experiment with cinematic techniques, using digital actors on its virtual stage. Since RPGs are fundamentally about surviving dungeons and harsh environments with the resources you have in your inventory, Parasite Eve was a great opportunity to experiment with new ideas. Directed by Takashi Tokita, veteran of Live A Live and Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve is a cinematic police procedural that merges game genres to tell of the six day quest to stop Eve’s genetic awakening before it changes humanity forever.

The ‘90s was a transitionary period for videogames as short arcade games gave way to multimedia home consoles, and studios pursued longer cinematic experiences primarily done through alternating between CG and in-engine cutscenes. Because texture mapping was still limited and couldn’t express environments in detail enough to emulate the resolution of contemporary 2D games, many 3D ones used static prerendered images on fixed camera polygonal environments, a technique Alone in the Dark revolutionized and Resident Evil made mainstream. SquareSoft fully adopted the structure after Final Fantasy VII’s phenomenal success, and the company implemented the design for the rest of the generation. While Square still made traditional polygonal JRPGs, it experimented with cinematic storytelling techniques for a new generation of games of higher definition characters and drama.

Game adaptations of novels and movies were nothing new, but Parasite Eve offered something little seen: a videogame acting as sequel. By then, discoveries in genetics that resulted from the Human Genome Project and the popularity of Richard Dawkins’ landmark book The Selfish Gene became a hot topic for pop culture, and advances in computer tech made sci-fi horror a genre mainstay. Genetics and biology made the deconstruction of life seem both exciting and horrific, contrasting the sleek and sexy jumps in technology with the grotesque meat and fluids of body horror. With a story about energy-producing mitochondria evolving humanity, the original J-horror Parasite Eve novel became a big enough hit in Japan to get a movie. The new science freed Square to morph biology into magic, and Parasite Energy allows Aya to cast offensive, defensive, and support spells. The opening opera, a symphony of orderly math and chaotic biological mutation, sets up the story’s emotions to come.

The opera is intro for how Parasite Eve mashes mediums together, theater into cinema to TV and JRPGs to Survival Horror. Its the product of an era that alternated between real-time cinematics and Full-Motion Video CG, and by it’s design overlays flat pre-rendered images onto blocky polygonal environments. Heck, it has a large polygonal diorama of New York city with days and nights and moving boats and helicopters, an overworld to move between locations or collect B-roll and establishing shots between story beats and scene changes like a film. This was uncommon at the time.

Parasite Eve was a more mature story than Square commonly worked on, and its modern New York setting was a far cry from the fantasy settings that had made the company famous. But the NYPD HQ serves a functional base of operations to start most days, get pivotal story info, shop for supplies and upgrade weapons, and save. Where Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs in FF7 were translated into chibi character models with exaggerated proportions and glaringly geometric shapes, his PE models were proportioned and detailed. It also increased the production value, with the camera easily transitioning between subjects, a product of Alone in the Dark’s camera system and small maps that can frame characters up close.

Parasite Eve uses Lethal Weapon’s buddy cop structure and Christmas setting, as the younger white cop Aya contrasts her grizzled black veteran partner, Daniel, the dynamic a great way to communicate story info to the player while bouncing the characters off each other. RPGs quantify character traits into numbers and the “role-playing” structure lends itself well to cinematic fiction, well-positioning Parasite Eve to apply AitD’s environmental design into a cohesive game. Character abilities, progress, weapon properties, map routes, and enemy placement already characterize the parts that go into an RPG quest, it just needs the means to present the resulting gameplay in interesting ways, and so it’s worth analyzing these elements to see how well Parasite Eve’s overall design fits its cinematic aspirations.

Runnin’ and Gunnin’ (and Castin’)

After years of evolution, SquareSoft’s main JRPG design consisted of a game world with random battles and separate combat modes, spells and abilities that cost Magic Points, and FFIV’s Active Time Battle system where the rate at which a character can act is determined by their speed stat. While the ATB was a means to make traditional turn-based combat more action oriented and consistent with real-world, the separate overworld and combat environments made adventuring disjointed. As Square’s predominant systems, Parasite Eve would incorporate these elements, adding real-time control to Aya to run around the maps even in the thick of battle to avoid enemy attacks and position for her own. In that action can be stylish, Parasite Eve’s gameplay was the most cinematic the company had produced.

Chrono Trigger overlaid its combat mode onto the adventure in a similar way, and Tokita would reuse this for PE, except that enemies randomly spawn into maps, initiated by a greying of the screen and pulsing heartbeat sound, as if detected by psychic premonition. Despite the random battles, merging adventure and combat modes creates a cohesive sense of place that brings the action one-to-one with real life. All characters immediately start moving about the screen as their respective ATB gauges fill, but pauses completely when Aya goes to select an action for her turn, which then reanimates the world while her animation plays out.

Since RPG’s translate traits into stats, weapon profiles were given area of effects that represent their range and spread, with a sphere around Aya corresponding to her equipped weapon’s effective distance. Different guns come with different number of actions per turn, so she can fire at multiple enemies per turn, and players need to account for reloading, so they’re not stuck immobile while an enemy goes for the kill. Unfortunately, Aya’s running animation provides a sluggish sense of speed. Still, avoiding attacks in real time directly turns the evade stat into a mechanic, proving that RPG elements are well represented in Parasite Eve’s action gameplay, adding physicality to Chrono Trigger’s design.

The maps that the flat-images-on-polygonal-shapes design produces aren’t that different than CT’s locations. In classic action game terms, enemies have attack patterns and behaviors that can be learned to theoretically allow experienced players to beat it untouched, which gets harder as enemy numbers increase and combine types. In turn, Parasite Eve captures the timing, movement, and spacing of action games. The camera system allows for a variety of map designs, angles, and geometry, which help establish tone and space, but suffer from invisible wall syndrome that leads to cheap hits in combat and running by braille. Bosses are large and come with unique elements including multiple targetable points and different forms.

Parasite Eve’s survival horror aspirations extend throughout its gameplay, especially its emphasis on resource management. Conservation has always been a part of RPGs. Managing HP and Parasite Energy for offensive, defensive, and support magic are classic role-playing concepts, but it’s accentuated with the Resident Evil-like need to conserve ammo. Enemy targeting becomes important, too- guns that fire multiple rounds can target each individually at the cost of divided total damage, forcing strategic decisions about who gets shot in which order. Choose carefully, because while Aya takes all her shots, the enemies continue to move about the screen, maybe even out of range of her bullets, or one dies on the first of three rounds you planned on firing at it and so cancels those two attacks for the turn. This is interesting stuff. And don’t forget to remove the ammo from guns you drop or sell them.

And yet, Parasite Eve’s combat exists in a grey area between action game and RPG that perhaps came from Square’s inexperience with action games, especially in 3D space. Turn-based combat is a necessity for party-based games where you control multiple characters, using menu selection for characters that were impossible to simultaneously control in real time. Compare PE with Final Fantasy Tactics, released the year before, where characters get one movement and one action every turn, essentially separating the use of your feet and hands. Parasite Eve gives your feet constant action by letting you run around during combat, but your hands can only be used when the ATB fills, allowing you to use your weapon, an item, or a magic ability. The result is a game that is neither fully action nor fully RPG, but a sometimes arbitrary amalgamation of each, that should have gone full Resident Evil. Regardless, Parasite Eve’s cinematic ambition is benefitted by having real-time, action-oriented gameplay, even if it’s not fully dedicated to it.

Movie Machines

The police procedural is as old as TV and film, and Parasite Eve applied many of its classic techniques to make its maps feel like film stages. This is well-realized by the in-car driving cutscenes, where Aya and Daniel discuss the plot while cruising New York City streets lined with buildings and lights. Accompanied by a great 90’s synth soundtrack, these shots consist of a static foreground layer of part of the car depending on the angle, the characters moving in their seats behind that, and an FMV of city streets passing in the background, with a text box layered on top of it all. Shot with Alone in the Dark’s camera system, these simple, solid scenes represent the spirit of the genre and show the mechanisms that move all the elements along, allowing us to see the virtual machine that generates Parasite Eve’s cutscenes.

Pacing is important for all entertainment to generate, build, and release energy and maximize emotional intensity. A work like a story will be filled with dozens of different progressions for the plot, characters, and themes, each divided into smaller beats. Many times, these beats happen independently, but will often coincide with others, stacking them onto the same moment. Film, music, and other performed entertainment have tight control over their pacing, and how a piece builds horizontally and vertically can make even mundane moments breathtaking.

This is important because the tighter a work is produced, the more all its parts sync up, which requires a virtual machine working efficiently. While a text driven work like a novel is obviously carried by its pacing down to the word, its at the mercy of the reader including how fast they read and how many words they filter out, all of which affect the psychological connection between reader and story. Compare this to spoken dialogue where exchanges have an objective length, defined by the author and not the audience.

The Eve investigation leads Aya and Daniel to the Museum of Natural History and the biologist Dr. Klamp. The good doc tells them about mitochondria’s vast energy potential, and its symbiotic relationship with living organisms, perhaps the real driver of human evolution. Watching the dialogue between the three, the cinematography moving between three camera shots that show Aya and Daniel acting in one, the scientist in another, and the general room for some objectivity, the limits of Parasite Eve’s design become apparent. While the dialogue is presented in text, scene length is dictated by the character models ‘performing’ their animations, which means that players with different reading speeds will experience the drama differently, especially when the reading and animations are out of sync. Fast readers find themselves waiting for speaking characters to finish animating, to reach their mark if they are walking or stop moving their arms if they’re emoting, before the next chunk of story starts, triggering its own dialogue and animation. Slow readers finish only to find the characters idling, the game patiently waiting for them to press X so it can proceed. Parasite Eve emphasized its character choreography, prioritizing its new digital actors to cinematic dynamism.

Since programming is a sequence of confirming actions that initiate other actions, Parasite Eve’s cinematic unit of measure consists of text and animations, and only when both have been acknowledged will the next set of dialog and animation play out, which can start with a shot change to a different character. This is how its story progresses and pacing resolves, proceeding through a chain of actions until the scene has completed. Emphasizing model choreography was Parasite Eve’s mistake, because everything in a scene becomes dependent on it, with its funniest moment a character infinitely running into a closed door until the player presses X to move on. While not completely immersion breaking, hiding scene progression behind text dialogue and model choreography like this can affect the game’s pacing and drama.

Despite the small awkward moments Parasite Eve can produce, the cinematic design is really quite functional. While other games with the structure layered polygons over static pre-rendered images and the extent of the FMV integration would be small for TV screens, PE regularly uses large FMV backgrounds to create interesting scenarios for cinematics and fights, not only able to simulate the police car racing down the NY streets but put the player on a runaway carriage through Central Park. Parasite Eve would be crucial experience for Square’s cinematic talents, an important transitionary game for the cinematic powerhouse the company would be for the next decade.

Script and Development

Day two ends with Eve turning a Central Park concert audience into a mass of mitochondrial goo that escapes into New York, prompting the rest of the city to evacuate. While simple, the day/night script structure creates a satisfying rhythm of events, an ebb and flow of tensions, that starts with quieter investigation scenes before segueing into dungeon crawling sequences set throughout the city. That gives way to sequences in SoHo, Chinatown, and NY Memorial Hospital, and while the script’s A plot focuses on Aya and Eve, Daniel’s B plot develops well, promoting the veteran detective after the station was attacked by Eve’s beasts and Capt. Baker was injured saving Daniel’s son, Ben. It’s a well-constructed progression, providing momentum in the early hours.

Parasite Eve incorporates its biological themes throughout its story, and its main characters represent different forms and relationships: Aya and her twin Maya as genetic copies and transplantation, Daniel and Ben as genetic legacies, natural evolution vs scientific experimentation, or, hell, the mass of mitochondrial people-goo as biological colony of a larger body that compares well to New York as a “body” of civilization. It’s about family, between individuals, uniting humanity, and expanding across all organisms, focusing down to a shockingly cellular level. PE fits a good amount of story in its 10-hours without wasting time.

As with other RPGs, growth is divided between the mechanical skills and techniques the player develops, while the systems build Aya’s level and Battle Points to affect her HP, Parasite Energy and spells, Active Time speed, and carry capacity, as well as transferring equipment stats and attributes to build ideal weapons and armor. Combat is a combination of different elements intersecting, and the flexibility of these elements results in different gameplay considerations. Until you realize that multi-shot weapons divide total damage between bullets rather than stack cumulatively and that different weapons take different times to shoot, you will chew through ammo and take more damage since your feet are planted, with the only reward being a single stun locked enemy. Only when you find weapons with the ability to take multiple actions will you be able to inflict non-penalized damage and stay mobile. Choose accordingly.

Ultimately, all a game’s design decisions are felt by the player, and in Parasite Eve, this is strongest in the final fight against the ultimate mitochondrial being, born from Eve, on the decks of a US aircraft carrier. In a four-phase battle that starts against an infant and ends with its perfect adult form, Aya unleashes all her firepower until it falls. While not a difficult fight, what follows is the fruit of Parasite Eve’s design. As the being chases you through interior passageways to the engine room and out, where a single touch results in a Game Over that takes you back before to the 15-minute-long boss battle, you need to guess the correct path, run efficiently despite awkward perspectives and geometry, and avoid unnecessary distractions, as the game’s dedication to its animations cost valuable time all while the enemy closes in. And you will do it multiple times until you figure out the exact series of steps to take to escape. If a game’s finale is supposed to represent the culmination of all its ideas, this sequence unfortunately stacks all the small nuisances of Parasite Eve’s hybrid design into a frustrating end.

As with Chrono Trigger, beating Parasite Eve opens a New Game+ EX Mode, allowing you to take one equipped weapon, one armor, and all the contents of your item box while losing your level, spells, and BP. While the base game is identical in EX Mode, it opens the Chrysler Building, a 77-story dungeon with randomly generated maps that only provides shortcuts to the entrance every 10 floors. The Chrysler Building has Parasite Eve’s purest RPG gameplay, an endurance run with great rewards and unique enemies and bosses. Not only does this give you an easy way to rewatch the cinematic RPG’s story but hides its true ending, completing Aya and Maya’s personal plotlines. For as much as Parasite Eve merges movie and game, it was the game portion that evolved the movie storytelling to the next level, and SquareSoft would continue to develop their cinematic games portfolio using Parasite Eve’s genetic code.

DEVELOPER: SquareSoft
PLATFORM: PlayStation
1998

Dane Thomsen is the author of ZIGZAG, a sport-punk adventure in a world of electrifying mystery. With the voice of her people as her guide, Alex walks neon purple streets thrown into chaos, wielding the concussive force of her baseball bat the mighty ‘.357’ against the forces of evil. Print and kindle editions are available on Amazon. For sample chapters and to see his other works please check out his blog.