Remembering Parasite Eve, a game ahead of its time – GameSpew (2024)

It’s Christmas in New York City, 1997. The camera pans across the city, sweeping across skyscrapers and through the streets on a winter evening, eventually settling on a car pulling up outside Carnegie Hall. Out of it steps Aya, clad in a striking black dress, as her date boasts about how his dad managed to get them tickets for tonight’s show. Aya is reluctant, but heads inside.

A woman in a red dress is about to be burned at the stake for her crimes and bursts into a booming, operatic song. As her melody bounces off the walls, the crowd, Aya among them, watches on in awe. Then the other cast members on stage explode into flames. Members of the crowd too. Aya looks around just as her date combusts and instead of panicking, she draws her gun and rushes the stage. She’s NYPD after all.

That’s how Parasite Eve kicks off, and for protagonist Aya, it’s all downhill from there.

The woman in red becomes the monstrous being ‘Eve’, who embarks on a quest to genetically manipulate the entire population into a new species through their mitochondria. It truly is the powerhouse of the cell.

It’s up to Aya, immune to the manipulation, to stop it through a narrative that intertwines sci-fi intrigue with hard horror in this survival horror/RPG. Parasite Eve takes place over six days in various locations across New York, where players can fully explore environments for valuable resources, solve puzzles, and help survivors, backdropped by the delightfully eerie soundtrack.

Its combat is a unique experience too, particularly considering it was released in 1998. Breaking the trend of JRPGs and their turned-based systems, battles here occur in real time. Aya can evade attacks as a timer builds up to allow her to execute actions, such as firing weapons or using her unique abilities granted from her relationship with her mutating mitochondria.

Parasite Eve wasn’t exactly a mainstream success

Parasite Eve is a game that seems to have slipped through the cracks of gaming culture. It’s considered something of a cult classic in some circles, but it never managed to gain much traction with the mainstream. Reviews looked upon it fondly, but perhaps it never caught on because it was ahead of its time.

That’s not to say it was a failure, though. Parasite Eve sold just shy of a million copies in Japan in the few months following its launch, and by 2004, that number was almost two million globally.

Its sequels didn’t share the same level of success, however.In 1999, Parasite Eve II abandoned what made the original unique, seeking to fall more in line with Resident Evil, leaning more into the survival horror aspect and adopting more rigid, fixed camera angles. Mixed reviews meant a decline in sales.

In 2010 there was an attempted return to the series with an entry for the PSP, The 3^rd Birthday, which further deviated from the core elements that defined the original. Another poor performance sales-wise all but put the series to bed.

Eve’s unseen influence

While Parasite Eve might not be a household name today, its success may be more nuanced as it has certainly influenced numerous games since its launch.

The game was developed by SquareSoft, the company behind the wildly successful Final Fantasy VII and beyond, which of course went on to become Square Enix. Those highly-regarded turn-based RPGs wouldn’t be what they are today without the lessons learned from Parasite Eve. But it goes further than that.

Parasite Eve’s combat system blends together real-time and turn-based combat, which Square Enix has been delving into more in its more recent Final Fantasy games. But the influence goes beyond combat to the very nature of genre itself. Parasite Eve released in an era of games clearly defined in their genres, but it went and blurred the lines, drawing together the RPG with survival horror.

Players could level up their characters with the XP gained from downing foes, but had to balance this risk/reward with managing the scarce resources they had to hand. It added an extra layer of tension to the game, deciding whether expending the rounds was worth the XP to level up, or to run away to fight another day while remaining underpowered. This sense of jeopardy was one of the game’s greatest strengths, constantly making players second-guess themselves.

Let’s also not forget where Parasite Eve came from. The game was an adaption of the novel by Hideaki Sena, which a doctor’s attempts to reincarnate his dead wife. Those attempts spiral out of control, unleashing a mutation of cells that birth a consciousness aiming to bring about a new dominant species on earth.

It certainly wasn’t the first game based on literature — there was a The Hobbit game released way back in 1982, and the 80s also saw a number of games based on Dracula come to fruition. But Parasite Eve was one of only a handful in the 90s, and perhaps amongst the first to offer a rich narrative

A return for Aya?

With Parasite Eve’s 25th anniversary passing by last year with no announcements on a remake or remaster, it would appear that any reboot or continuation of the series is highly unlikely.

There was a glimmer of hope when in 2022 a trademark was filed for ‘Symbiogenesis’, a phrase used to describe two organisms merging into a superior one, which is the core of Parasite Eve’s plot. However, Square Enix soon put any rumours to bed when it revealed that Symbiogenesis was the name of an NFT art project just a few weeks later.

The only (legal) way to play Parasite Eve today is by digging out your old PS One and playing a disc copy of the game. If you manage to get hold of one, you won’t regret it. Alternatively, if you don’t mind simply watching, there are a few long plays of the game on YouTube.

But for now at least, it appears that Eve will remain little more than a retro treasure.