Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 284: Parasite Eve

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Shane Bettenhausen continue the journey through the Final Fantasy saga with this side excursion into an abandoned Manhattan and 1998's Cinematic RPG Parasite Eve. (Cover art: Nina Matsumoto)

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, the worst podcast is inside the self. Hi, everyone, welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and here for a mind-bending, DNA-blurring, mitochondrial extravaganza. We have... Hey, it's Bob Mackey, and I can.

I got to say, God made Parasite Eve, not Parasite Steve. You know, that joke is a little bit regressive. I was making fun of regressive opinion. Ah, okay. It was satire. Who are you, Mr. Progress is your middle name? This is Shane Bettenhausen. O.G. Parasite Eve fan, big I.

I. Abraeisand. He's excited to talk about... He can say that, but I can't say Stan. Well, because the kids are saying it. It's where it's saying, T. Frog. No, it's because it's where it's from. Get with the time. That's terrible.

Anyway. Hi, everyone. We're here to talk about Parasite Eve, the 1998 cinematic RPG from the cinematic RPG. I stuck 1998 between the and cinematic from SquareSoft and Square Electronic Arts, as was happening at the time. And this is actually part of our ongoing Final Fantasy Friends and Family Deep dive episode series. We recently did Final Fantasy 7 and kind of jumped ahead to Final Fantasy 8 just to take advantage of the Final Fantasy 8 re-release, the remaster. But we do think it's important

to talk about Parasite Eve, because it did fall between Final Fantasy 7 and 8, and is very much a game in the Final Fantasy family. It is very stylistically similar in a lot of ways to Final Fantasy 7, and very mechanically similar to

Chrono Trigger, and comes to us courtesy of some cool people who worked on the Final Fantasy games. And it just feels very much kind of in line, with the whole Final Fantasy thing. So before we head along to, I don't know, what, Krono Cross, Final Fantasy 9, we should look at Parasite Eve

because it's 21 years old and that means it's old enough to drink, by God. Let's have a drink. Anyway, yeah, so I kind of gave the basic rundown on the game's first appearance and sort of what it is. But what experience do you guys have with Parasite E's... T. Frog, let me interject here. I want to put the listener back in the time. Because this was a really huge time for Square and for Final Fantasy and for JRP's in general.

Like, you know, anybody who's listened to the Final Fantasy 7 episode understands that that game was, like, a pivotal watershed moment in the popularity of Japanese role-playing games in America. Like, I worked at... And in Europe. And in Europe. And I worked at Europe. And I worked at retail. And I remember, like, hundreds of people coming in who had never played a Final Fantasy or a JRP buying it. And most of them actually liking it. Some of them were turning it because they couldn't read.

But in general, it was a big hair. So immediately, the follow-up was Saga Frontier. And they said, I hate RPGs. And, like, yeah. And so it looked like there was nothing else in the ilk of, like, serious high-production events. Now you're more adult-oriented. And then Final Fantasy tactics came out. And people were like, this is Final Fantasy, but it's weird.

Right, but a lot of us, you know, who were down with FF from before, were super excited to see this Renaissance for Square and Final Fantasy. And then Paraside Eve was the next thing that got announced that had clearly some of that DNA. Like, obviously, you know, Nomura's art evokes the work he done in Final Fantasy 7. Like, you can see that from the key art. Ayurbrae looks a bit like characters from Final Fantasy, so you're kind of excited. And also, Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy. he is the director of this

Or like, you're jumping ahead So let's talk about where we first Experienced the game, as I said We knew, like I knew reading in game fan Reading in EGM that like this was coming from Not just like some B-Team at Square It was Final Fantasy coming to America That was the EGM cover

With Ayabria on it And are we going to later talk about the idea That 5757 was once going to be set in New York City We can talk about Hot Blood of Joe, the detective I want to talk about Joe Yeah, hot blooded Joe Not just Joe Hot-blooded Joe.

The detective. So, Shane, you said you worked at retail at the time. Yes. And clearly, as an EGM reader, you were tuned in to the fact that Squarespace was coming to America with Ayabrea on a black cover. Yes. Everything was changing. It was going to be different.

Also, Square's first M-rated title. Also important. They came to the U.S. Well, I guess it wouldn't have been em-rated in Japan. Right. So you were there for it, day one. I imported the Japanese version because I was that excited. So that was day, like, negative 300.

Day negative. But, like, and, you know, we know. knew that this was kind of a Western adult take on sci-fi fantasy RPG with a little bit of survival horror because this is a post-biohazard post-resonable world? Yeah, Resident Evil had been up for a couple of years. That was 96.

Post-R-E-2. Post-R-E-2. And even though this is not survival horror, it has a few elements of that genre in it as well. Yeah, I don't think it could exist without Resident Evil as a predecessor. And much like post-FF7, it has a huge CG pivotal cutscenes

that are the thing you remember often when you think about this game. Right, sure. Yeah, that's not what I'm, you're jumping ahead in the syllabus again. I'm just asking like what your first experience with the game was. But all of this was part of like the promotion for this game, you knew you were going to get kind of a thing like Final VII.

And your first experience is that really importing it, loading it in that first hour and a half of the game, which much like an FF7 or an FF8 later, kind of knocks the player over the head with like a giant set piece with amazing production values and like an interesting hybrid combat system that is both action and RPG. So I was instantly super into it. Okay.

Bob, how about you? I was on the square train from 1991 onwards. Wow. It could do no wrong. Even Saga Frontier I bought, but it didn't divert that train. It diverted my train.

I was like, that was maybe a series I won't follow anymore, but of course I was excited by Parasite Eve. It reminded me of Final Fantasy 7. I was excited about an RPG with a modern flare

because I like Earthbound. And thankfully, it was a short game so I could take advantage of GameStop's three-day return window or seven-day return window even. So I played a lot of games in under a week or under three days and returned this. So this is one of them. But I really loved it.

And I was sad that this was sort of an evolutionary dead end for Square. There were no other cinematic RPGs in the second game, which I did play eventually, much more recently. It's a bad action survival game. Yeah, it's a totally different game. I would say the evolution of this game, the successor, is vagrant story. Yeah, I can say it. It doesn't have the cinematic sense in the, you know, in the CG, but instead it is cinematic in its presentation. It takes all the CG of Parasite Eve and renders it in real-time graphics and creates a much more consistent worldview.

And I don't think there was really any staff in common between the two games, but like the battle system and just the movie-like presentation of Vagrant Story to me says, yes, this is very much the next Parasite Eve, although it's set in, you know, medieval fantasy past as opposed to. this year is New York City. It's funny you say that because I've never really drawn in parallel, but you're right, the basic progression and combat of those two games is on paper similar, but like the insane minutia of Vagran stories, you know, makes it seem

much harder to me. Parasite Eve is very much a Hollywood action blockbuster video game, whereas Vagrant Story is like HBO miniseries. But you're right, the way that the player's progressing to the world isn't that different. And it is strange that they didn't use this more. They didn't come up with other things like Parasite Eve.

Because really, I mean, to rewind all the way, Paraside Eve was not originally created for this. This is like a sequel to a book, and the author of the book co-wrote wrote on this story as well. I thought I was reading last night when I was researching that Hideki Sena, the author of Parasitee, the novel, did not have any direct involvement with the game. Oh, I read that he did work on the original premise for this.

Someone's wrong, and we're going to get angry letters of that. I want to say before we go on any further that I wanted to see more games like this, and I didn't appreciate a short RPG at the time. time, but I feel like the medium limited the form of expression in that an RPG was expected to be a very long game. So this was an outlier, and lots people liked it, but lots of people hated it because it was

a very short game. I mean, Chrono Trigger is like a 15-hour game. This is like a 10-hour game, and Vagrant Story was originally like a 15-hour game, but Square said, wait a minute, actually people want long RPGs, so they just patted it out into a 30-hour game. I mean, I'm tripping head a bit, but I was

there. And I remember... You keep doing that. And I remember thinking that the main story, was a little short, but then there is a very replayable kind of new game plus mode, we'll get into it later, that made me feel good about the 6,900 yen I spent on this 20 years ago. Yeah, I have never had a problem with a game that is the right length that is concise, especially if it gives you incentive to explore it more. And this game does have a new game plus mode. It also has, within that new game plus mode, an expansive, sprawling dungeon RPG experience.

So, you know, I feel like it kind of touches on. everything. It's got the best of both worlds. But, you know, if this had been a 40-hour game from the start, it would be so drawn out and so tedious. And I'm glad they don't, they didn't do that. And even though it calls on an RPG, you only really have one character. And like, at the time, we realized, oh, this is not a traditional term, you know, like traditional term-based Japanese RPG where you're gathering up huge cast of characters. You know, so I, I think the survival horror element made me expect a shorter game. Yeah. And, you know, it's not like the idea of a single protagonist

RPG was so bizarre so out there. I mean, you had games like brandish or whatever that were action RPGs. Zelda was, you know, sometimes touched on the RPG genre, Symphony of the Night. Like, all these games are single player kind of action-driven experiences

and they work, single-character-driven experiences. And this was very much in that spirit. And this is also the era, you know, peak PS-1, where like, things such as CG cuts, lavish CG cutscenes that filled the screen and like great soundtracks that sounded almost like

Red Book Audio, just, you know, they weren't but like you go good sounding sound like The opera. Right, parts of it were but like the production values were like cutting edge, right? So like, again, there were very few places you could go in the world of console gaming and see things that looked and sounded like this so it felt like, you know, even though you were getting

less experience, it was very high quality. So let's rewind to what you were saying about this being a novel. So Parasite Eve was originally a novel, novel, novella, A lot of Japanese RPGs actually come from that, like Magame Tensei, et cetera. In this case, it was a science fiction sort of horror novel about, it was called Parasite Eve, written in 1995, published in 1995, about a woman who becomes host to something called mitochondria Eve. She was a living expression of the will of the symbiotic organisms that live inside all human cells, kind of like midi-chlorians. And basically a series of weird and kind of gross events results in mitochondria Eve conceiving a child that will be, quote unquote, the perfect being, a creature that is capable of harnessing its mitochondrial power to alter its DNA at will to adapt to any situation. So basically like proteus from the X-Men.

And I think they ultimately stop that from the ultimate being from coming into existence in the novel. and then this game is essentially it's not an adaptation of the book it's more like an unofficial sequel where the events of the book are actually kind of recapped in a later chapter and they talk about oh yeah back over in Japan this thing happened and we narrowly stopped

the extinction of all life on earth but now it's happening again here in New York right and like I read a few different things whether or not the original author Saina had any input in the actual work on the screenplay And, like, the book here, you know, actually says the entire screen was written by Tokita, Takashi Tokita, but it was adapted from, you know, the original novel. And, like, you know, I don't want to spoil things, but, like, the New Game Plus actually has, like, a lot more story in it if you ever finished it. It kind of completes the story well beyond the normal game.

And, like, I think at the time, I remember, like, shortly after this came out, there was talk of, you know, a feature film being possibly made in America where Madonna's production company had option the rights. Maybe Madonna was going to star in a U.S. version of Parasidi, I remember being super excited. I was thinking there was a Madonna connection. I didn't know what it was, but there is a Japanese movie adaptation of that novel. A few years later. A few years later. Yeah. But like I remember at the time of Parasite-E think it wouldn't be cool had Madonna made a Parasite Eve, the game, is that as it says, they're on the Japanese packaging that you brought in. It is a Square USA Presents game. Right. That is bizarre. Yeah. So, you know, to understand what that means, Square had been wanting to crack the U.S. market, break into the U.S. market, for quite a while. They started up their studio in Redmond during the Super NES era, and that team produced exactly one game, The Secret of Evermore. And that game is fine. You're being unfair.

So is that Square Soft? That was Square, U.S.A. Square U.S.A. Square U.S.A. was the Japanese development and publishing studio. Square U.S.A was the American branch. but that was like the original square EOSA was in Seattle or Redmond and I believe they disbanded after Secret of Evermore

and I might have some of the details here wrong but as far as I remember you know once the team disbanded they went on to form Big Rain and they created crap what was that PS1 RPG? Shadow Madden? Oh my god the less you speak of it the better. Yeah that was kind of a mess I forgot about that. Yeah, sorry.

But, you know, Square did not give up on the U.S. And they established a studio in Honolulu and began working with teams in L.A. to do the CG for Final Fantasy 7. Or was it the Hawaiian team? Right. And eventually that Hawaiian team went on to make spirits within the future film. Right.

So basically they kind of established a new studio in the U.S. And if you look at the credits, like the creative staff, the creative direction comes from Square, Japan, but basically all the heavy lifting, the programming, the art design, the CG, everything, was rendered, like, produced by Square USA. And it's all American names and, you know, names not Japanese. And so this was very much a collaborative effort.

Like, in a lot of ways, it's kind of the direction that Square would work 20 years later, or, you know, 15 years later, in the current generation of consoles, hiring out, you know, studios internationally to work on things like Final Fantasy 15. Well, and this is three years before Metal Gear Solid 2. And I remember at the time, the idea that this,

the revered Japanese role-playing company was making a game, you know, set in America, kind of celebrating America, having all these set pieces like the Statue of Liberty. Like at the time it felt... You could tell it's America because there's guns everywhere. It's all about guns. You go to the hospital in the lobby.

There's ammunition. And the entire subsystem we'll get into is all like gun fetish stuff. At the time, I remember thinking it was cool that not only was Final Fantasy popular, but Square was making a game for America, kind of for America, set in America with Japanese sensibilities. So it's called a cinematic RPG because it does have a movie like quality. Like it really plays up the CG cutscenes and they're much more consistent and integrated better into the game than Final Fantasy Sevens. Like you don't get this weird stylistic change.

It's basically like, I mean, I think there's some really great seamless cutscene integration in FF7. that this game doesn't really do as much. It's much more like, here's a game scene, then all of a sudden it cuts and it's movie, but there's not as jarring a visual change. Yeah, there's less running around on top of FMV than there would be in FFAs, right? Right, yeah.

And you don't go from, like, realistic CG characters to digital pop-eyes, and then randomly there's a digital pop-eye CG scene. I mean, but I was like this era was one where you could, like, have this, like, bafo, insane, over-the-top CG scene in, you know, in the first hour of the game, and this one will I'm sure get to it. It's Eve's big reveal, but it's insane.

Like, at the time, it was just exhilarating. It's like, this is, we'll put butts in seats. Beautiful, insane. And then we will set those butts on fire with our minds. Everyone, everyone emulates. But, yeah, and, you know, it is a much shorter RPG than people were accustomed to. But I really wish this had been in a direction that video games had explored. Instead of, you know, people saying, I want a lot of game for my money.

I wish people would say, I want good replayable game for my money. I mean, it's funny because like this premise of like, oh, take, you know, kind of what would have been just a genre film and make a fairly linear game out of it with a little bit of action, a little bit of RPG. It still would work for lots of things today. Yeah, I mean, this is something I would love to see people revive. But, you know, even though this game sold really well, I feel like it did well enough to, you know, inspire a sequel. It was a hit. They didn't keep exploring this direction. And I don't know, I don't know exactly what happened there.

And like both the sequels divert so heavily from the structure and gameplay of this. And really, I can't point to another game in the last 15 years that's really like this game. Yeah, it's pretty unusual. So the key staff for this game, the creative staff, the leads, were mostly Final Fantasy people. Kind of, there's some downtime between Final Fantasy 7 and 8. Pause, isn't Toki to like FF3 guy, kind of? Yeah, so you have Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy,

who had been sort of the director on the series up through 5, and then switched to more of a producer role for 6 and 7 and 8. but was still overseeing everything. And, you know, this is the point where he started to have Hollywood ambitions that would, again, culminate in the spirits within, which would culminate in him leaving square. Is he the creator of active time battle or? No, that is Hirouki Ito. Damn it.

Sorry. It's okay. Sakakuchi was the original director of Final Fantasy. The fun through five. Is Tokita the director of Chrono Trigger? Yes. I thought so. But we were talking about Sakaguchi.

Also, Blade Venser or Musashi. Brave fencer. All right. So yeah, anyway, Sakakuchi was the producer here. So he kind of had the same role that he did on Final Fantasy. The director, who is the, okay, director, storywriter, and planner, which in Japanese game development terms means designer, was Takashi Tokita, who was the designer, director on Final Fantasy 3, on Final Fantasy 4, on Chrono Trigger. Like, he was heavily involved in... Hanjuku Hiro? Yes, of course, we can't forget about Hanjuku Higua. He's also a fun guy. Like, when I finally met him later, you know, like, he was. He's not what I expected. Yeah, I've interviewed him once, and it was, I think I've mentioned this on the show,

but I interviewed him once, and it was at a bar during GDC where they were, like, Square was just holding an event for the Final Fantasy 4 remake, I want to say, and his requirement to interview him was that you did a tequila shop. So he was just sitting on this couch, just slugging back tequila every 15 minutes, anytime a new person came up. And I was like, wow, I feel that tequila, and he was just, yeah. He's a character. I would like to talk to him about Parasite Eve one day.

Yeah. But, you know, he was, you know, what I learned when I talked to him was that he had a theater background. And that was, that kind of informed the style of Final Fantasy 4 and, you know, the overall vibe. And I think that accounts a lot for the cinematic aspirations of Parasite Eve. Like, he is someone who took sort of visual stage narrative seriously and was, you know, found it very important. So he was a natural fit for Paraside Eve. Well, and like the cinematic bent Parasite Eve, like, I didn't bring in the soundtrack, but like the soundtrack almost has like a movie style poster with everyone's names,

written as if it was a big cinematic film. And I think Square kind of saw this as like marketing it like it was a blockbuster film. Agreed. So also on the team, you have Tetsuya Nomura, who had kind of risen to prominence with the character designs for Final Fantasy 7. Only recently. longer. Yeah, like, I think he was just becoming hot.

He was a fresh-faced young kid with a love for zippers and straps. Everyone is normally dressed in this game, though. Yes. Like streetwear. I feel like Parasite Eve is Nomura's horniest series. Yeah. His Final Fantasy characters tend to be pretty, like, they're outlandish in their costumes, but, you know, aside from, like, Lulu showing some cleavage,

you don't really get a lot of Nomura kind of feel in his oats. but here, like, Ayabrea is a young, hot, blonde detective who sometimes fights crime without a shirt on. Well, yeah, like, I have to bring this up. I mean, like, in the key art, like in the manual, like, I was just looking at the Japanese manual, there's, like, three pieces of key art of Ayabreya. And, like, one of them, she's, like, you know, in like a undershirt kind of, like, one arm up, like really come hither in the other one. She is wearing a jacket and no, nothing on underneath.

Oh, yeah. I'm looking at that now. And holding her gun. No, it's in front. in front of her crotch. And her pants are unbuttoned. Her pants are unbuttoned. And she has like, you know, this is kind of this vacant look.

I mean, it's, at the time, it was shocking, really. It was, you know, this was 20 to two years ago. And it was very raw. Yeah. There's also another one where she's, like, in a black dress and she's sitting on a chair and her one leg is kind of propped up on, it's just floating on air. Yeah. You don't actually see what it's connected to.

But, yeah, Nomura definitely was like, let's sex appeal of this game out. But she was strong. and, like, you know, it wasn't just like cheesecake. Yeah, within the game, you don't get any of that. You don't see the shower scenes until Parasite Eve 2. Right. Like, in this game, she goes, okay, the game starts out and she's on a date at the opera. A blind date.

And everything goes horribly wrong, and her date runs off in panic. And she starts kicking ass, and she doesn't stop kicking ass until the game is over. Pretty much. At no point is she, like, helpless. At no point is she, does she, like, freak out and cry and say, oh, God, I can't have. handle this or this is so scary. She's just like, I don't really understand what's happening here. Eve, you're really weird and this is all like mind-blowing and I don't understand what's happening to me, but I'm going to stop you. Yeah, she's very tough. She's a cop. At no point does she

get scared. You're right. She is hot-blooded Joe. Yeah. Josephine, maybe. Well, are you going to get about her design though? I was reading that originally, Sakuchi wanted a much, a character with long hair, like a very long-haired protagonist and Nomura was a fan of short hair. So they kind of met in the middle. She has this weird kind of haircut, actually. She's got a mullet. She's got a sexy mullet. It is the 90s, and there is time for regrettable haircuts. I also recently read that Nomura had considered putting Ayabreya in

Kingdom Hearts, but the rest of his staff convinced him to change it to Ayrh. And I was thinking how strange it would be had Ayabreya banning Kingdom Hearts. Well, I think the idea was that part of the game she would be Ayabreya and then, like, at some point, Ereth would come in instead. That was what I saw. I don't know. Maybe I misunderstood. Anyway, so yeah, like Nomura did the character. designs here, and they're very Nomura-ish, except

hornier. Well, just I. Like, the other characters are just Nomura. So the battle designer for this game is Yoshihiko Maikawa, a name that I did not recognize, but he had been at Square for a few years, and this was his last project with Square. After this, he was one of the people

who established Alpha Dream, and he has been the producer on every single Mario and Luigi game. Wow. So the idea of, like, a visually splendid, action-touched, action-kissed RPG with some real-time elements. That's very much his vibe. If I think about the way you progress through a Mario and Luigi game,

it isn't completely dissimilar to how one progresses through a Parasidi game. That's actually one of the two directors of Mario RPG. There's a weird connection to Mario RPG from Parasite Eve. It's a weird offshoot because the composer's the same and the battle director is the director of Mario RPG that would later become, not Paper Mario, but Mario and Luigi. How many, two-m-R-R-R-P-R-R-P-R-R-Morra. Shrmoh, didn't do any of the other Mario-on-Luiji games.

Oh, she does all the Mario and Luigi games, and Paper Mario is different. It's intelligent systems and somebody else. But she, yeah, her soundtrack is also much different for those games than this one, too. So, yeah, we should mention Yoko Shimomura, who composed one of, in my opinion, the all-time great soundtracks here, I feel like the only thing that doesn't hold up are the vocal samples, which are samples of a real opera singer. Yeah, like, specifically in the, opera tunes, not like

Sonya memory, not the theme song. No, like where you actually have live vocals, it's great. I mean, it's better. It's just, it's just the, the sound sampling capabilities of the PS1, we're somewhat limited. It's way more listenable in 2019,

2019, 2020 than FF6. I was just listening to the soundtrack last night. And it is, yeah, you can still listen to it. But they're right, those are the weak links. But, like, at the time, this soundtrack was super ahead of its, ahead of its time. Oh, yeah.

I specifically interviewed Shimamura about this. It's been, oh, God. It was when she had first written the main theme for Final Fantasy versus 13, so probably like 2008. 10 years ago. Yeah. But, you know, I talked to her about this album, and I was like, you know, what was the inspiration for the soundtrack?

Because it was so ahead of its time. And she said, you know, we went to the U.S. and spent some time with the L.A. team to work with them. Did they take it to a dance club or something? Yeah. She said, you know, while we were there, they took us to a dance club. and she had a hard time putting in it a word. She was just like it was such a strange experience

and I felt very weird being there and I just channeled that experience into this soundtrack. Well, it worked because it's kind of all over the place. Like when you go back to it, you kind of imagine where you think it's going to be like, oh, the opera and some beats. But like the main theme is actually kind of traditional and sad and beautiful, but then like Aya's theme, the theme of Aya is like much scarier.

It kind of borrows from like the Halloween soundtrack, but then it turns into like a four-on-the-floor bangor. And then so many of memories sounds like a really good, like Chaudet song with like a dub beat. It's amazing stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of ambient sound, a lot of ambient music, very sort of atmospheric. And then you have a lot of sort of drum and bass, electronica. And then you have the opera stuff. And then you have all these things together at the same time.

Yeah, and some of the dungeon music is really creepy. I was listening to last night, like, oh, kind of sounded like the knife. It's like, it's really good stuff. Right. And then you have, you know, like the police station theme, which is more traditional, but it's still a little downbeat. And then you have, you know, like some short musical stings for the cutscenes. I don't know, it just goes, it goes a lot of places and it's very inventive and really felt very like ahead of its time, you know, kind of like you'd expect from Yuzokushiro or someone. And it really, to me, this was the soundtrack that really established Shimamura as someone to be reckoned with, which is stupid because she, you know, She'd already, like, she was the Street Fighter 2 composer, so she was a legend already. But this was the point where she broke out to me. From the material. Because, like, it was like, oh, you didn't have to make things that sounded like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, right?

You're like, you're making things for, you know, gritty, dingy America, kind of overrun. It's somber and sad. And, like, some of it kind of sounds like Silent Hill music at parts, even. It's really interesting. Except it's a year before Silent Hill. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a typical for her because I now associate her with Kingdom Hearts and Mario Luigi games.

very bouncy, catchy, lighthearted music. She's so versatile, though. She has maybe, you know, of any game composer I can think of, I can't pin down Shimomura. Like, I don't hear something and think, oh, that's Shimomura. But that's not because she has no personality. It's because she can just do whatever she needs to do. She can fit the theme, and whatever she does is always going to be great.

Apparently this soundtrack is like a cult classic. They actually reprinted it a few years ago, so it's one to get. This is one that they really need to do like a live performance of, you know, like an arranged version where they actually have, you know, a soprano singing the Eve parts. Have you heard the remixes album? It's not all great. I have not heard that yet.

Like, she only remixes a few of the songs. Hers are really good. Not all of them are good, but it's, you know, if you're a fan. Hmm. But yeah, great music, and I would love to see them revisit it. I mean, they're doing, you know, Krono Orchestra this fall. So surely we can get Parasite Orchestra. Yeah?

No? I don't know. And then finally, there's the L.A. Team Square USA. say. They did the heavy lifting on the grunt work for this game and also took Shimomura to a weird club. So I feel like in a lot of ways this game was ahead of its time. And the collaborative nature, like international collaboration, was extremely unusual. You just didn't see the sort of thing happening very often. So it was really cool. And the game, I think, turned out really well and is very memorable. You know, we've done a micro episode on this

a long time, a few years back. But it was like 10 minutes long. And I feel like this game definitely deserves more exploration than that, because it is such an interesting, if somewhat dead end to the RPG format. It's still a unique take and stands apart. In this quarter on the Greenlit podcast network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this quarter, VHS oddies, confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters. We watch movies and beat them up.

I'm Jeremy Parrish, and if there's one thing my detractors can agree on, it's that I'm incredibly pretentious. That's why I've launched Alexander's Ragtime Band, a podcast about the most pretentious music. on Earth, Progressive Rock. Join me, James Eldred and Elliot Long here on the Greenlit Podcast Network for a deep dive into the most pompous rock music ever made.

From ABWH to Zep. Hey, Chris, what's the War Rocket Ajax podcast about? Well, Matt, if we were smart, it'd be about murders, but it's actually about comics. War Rocket Ajax. It's not about murders.

But it is weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Thank you. All right, so Paraside Eve is a story-driven cinematic RPG, and a story is nothing without its character. So let's go briefly through the characters. We've talked a bit about Ayabreya, but she is a police detective with a dead sister and hyperactive mitochondria. That is the essence of Ayabria right there. Well, and there's clearly something different about Ayyabrea because unlike everybody else, she's not bursting into flame.

Yeah, so the game begins with her on her date at the opera. Blind date. And the blind date. Suddenly the singer, the diva, the diva. The subrano, the diva. Yeah. And everyone explodes into fire, except Aya. Yes.

And so she stands up. And because she's a tough cop lady, she has, you know, she's wearing her little black dress. But she also has a thigh holster. And this, you know, the. The soprano singer has morphed into this hideous monstrosity called Eve. With very long arms and fingers. So the monstrosity is Melissa Pearce, the opera singer, and she becomes Eve, the manifestation once again of mitochondrial evolutionary potential.

Spoiler alert, maybe this is a result of someone's hubris thinking they could save their wife after a car accident and doing an experimental medical procedure on her mitochondria. Mr. Freeze. The real Mr. Free's story. I will say, like, the characters in this story are all very stock and very Hollywood types, but it was fun to see them in the context of a JRP.

And eventually, Eve gives birth to a super baby, not like in Metal Gear Solid, just a... The ultimate baby that flies around because it is superior. This is, like, you fast forwarded where, like, you know, we've gone to the opera house, she's taken over the Statue of Liberty, the Super Baby's born. You're

end of the game now. Yeah, yeah. I spoiled it, all eight hours of it. But there's a lot of other cops and people helping with their guns and supporting cast. Yeah, there's Daniel Dulles, who is her boss. He's kind of the Mertaw to Ayas Riggs. He doesn't have a cute kid who gets in trouble and just go rescue him. Yeah, young Ben.

His ex-wife dies horribly in Central Park. She becomes part of the LCL blob. Right. There's a giant massive, like, mutated humanity running around town. Yeah. poisoned the water supply. Well, and that's eventually what helps give birth to the ultimate creature at the end there. Yep.

So Daniel Dulles' ex-wife is Superbaby's midwife? Well, and remember at the time, I like that, like, shit gets real. Like, at the beginning of the game, it's like, you know, New York City is fucked throughout. It's a disaster. They evacuate the city on Christmas Day. That's hardcore. You know, this is a good Christmas game. Although, actually, you know, this is a good Christmas game.

Actually, you know, I haven't been to New York on Christmas, but I've been there on Thanksgiving, and it is kind of like playing Parasite Eve. Like, no one is in New York City on Thanksgiving. I'm like, wow, the streets are empty. What's what's going on? I had a Parasid Eve experience in that. I was just in Seattle for Pax, and we know someone who works at the Paramount Theater,

which was opened in like 1928, and we got a tour of the behind the scenes of the theater, and I was just thinking of the opening of Paraside Eve, just alone in an old sort of, you know, stage theater, all the back alleys, all the rooms full of junk. No, it was really silent. Oh, you're really silent. I had a Parasideeve experience at Pax, too,

in 2009, I got swine flu from a beanbag. From a beanbag. Did you eat the beanbag? No, I just sat on it. But then I was telling that story this year at Paxx, someone went up me, they're like, my friend got a flesh-eating bacteria at Pax. Whoa. Is it the entire, why I don't sleep with people at Pax?

The entire room with all the beanbag chairs in it? It's basically a petri deer. It's a disease farm. Yeah. Don't lay down there. Don't ever go over there. Yeah, I remember 2009 very well because my wife got. swine flu while she was on a tour of the country photographing hotels and stuff for a freelance company that she was freelancing.

Wash your hands, Retronauts listeners. But also I got back from Pax and I was fine, but then I had to go to a Halo ODST review session with David Ellis who picked up the swine flu at Pax. So he was like sitting there right next to me, recording video footage while I was trying to review ODST and I was like, I don't want to die. Please don't breathe on me. Anyway, Paraside Eve. Ayreya, she didn't have to worry about that. So Daniel Dallis is kind of like the more buttoned down version of Barrett Wallace.

You know, African American, single father, hot-headed, but ultimately a good guy, reliable, and fights for what's right. I feel like they were kind of stamped from the same mold. And it was actually very unusual to see single father, like African-American single fathers in entertainment. It's still in common. It's still uncommon. Two years ago. Yeah. Like, you just don't see that very often.

So, you know, whatever mishandling they might have had from not being culturally aware necessarily of the issues there, he's a great guy. And he is one of the main characters. And, like, you kind of need the sun to be, like, this, you know, distress thing to be a distress later in the game. Yeah. You know, because Aaya doesn't really have close relationships. No, she's kind of aloof.

She's a nice enough lady, but she's not really close to anyone. And, like, when her blind date runs off in a panic, she's like, whatever. There aren't a lot of characters in this game, but there are also more people at the police station that aren't given key art or anything, but they are given strong enough personalities that you know who they are who are given up. Yeah, and then you have, at the police station, you have Owens and Garcia. Yeah, yeah. They do have some key art. They have never remember it. They have no more art.

And they're kind of like they feel like film characters. They're like these kind of wisecracking guys who help you with your guns. Right. And then one of them dies and you feel bad for him. Spoilers. And one of them is extremely into gun safety. That is the Japanese writer coming through saying, like, hey, guns are actually kind of bad. If you're going to have a gun, be really responsible.

Don't leave your ammunition sitting around in the hotel lobby, et cetera. It's true. And then finally, the other, like, really important character is Kunihiko Maeda, who I feel is meant to be sort of the POV character. He is a Japanese scientist. He's kind of like nervous and bumbling, but he knows a lot about the mitochondria stuff. And it is critical to kind of explaining the backstory and the, you know, drawing the line to the original Parasite Eve, the novel.

And so he plays a kind of a crucial backup role. He explains everything. It's really ashamed that they turned him into just like a simpering pervert in the third birthday. Oh, God. But there's a lot of things that the third birthday did it wrong. I mean, if you get to the very end, there's Ayah's sister, Maya. It was named Maya. Maya and Maya.

And that was her twin sister who was killed in a car accident. And I, I think, got her eye. Yes. Like she lost her eye in the accident and was given Maya's eye as a replacement. And so she like sees visions of things that Maya saw. And apparently Maya was the host for mitochondria Eve or something. She was like the perfect one or something. Yeah.

And so like the integration of her biology into Ayah's biology is what gives Aya the ability to unlock mitochondria. And that is what sets Aya, Brea, apart from other police detectives in that she can control her mitochondria. but not in an evil, horrible way like Eve, more like in an RPG skill kind of way. She has a skill system. It's very much like Dragon Quest skills or even Krono Trigger, where at set levels she gains new powers and they are very finite and specific, but they are, you know, using her mitochondria to do things like heal or defend or go faster. Actually, and again, the combat is interesting because, again,

it's a weird mix of active time battle and running around. issuing commands. Yeah, I can't remember what they call the battle system in this. It's probably like active time battle 3.0 or something. But it feels like kind of an evolution of chrono trigger, which is an evolution of Final Fantasy, in that, you know,

you do have the active time battle meter that fills up, and once it does, then you can perform in action. But in the meantime, you can run around freely. Within a circle. Yeah. There's like... Well, no, like within basically you can run around on the screen. But the thing is,

Like there's some positioning elements to this. Like, enemies have a certain range and also your actions have a certain range. When your turn comes up and you bring up the command prompt, that's when it kind of takes on its own personality and it brings up this sphere that surrounds Aya and you can perform actions and attack enemies within this sphere. So you're kind of like a weapon you have equipped as well. Right, right. Yes, the weapon range and so forth.

But also like your skills are kind of based on that too. So you can target any enemy. any enemy within this sphere. And again, this is... And some weapons can attack multiple enemies too. Right. But again, this is very similar to vagrant story, except you can't really target individual parts of most enemies.

I think there's some bosses where you can target like left leg, right leg. But, you know, this would evolve in vagrant story so that you're not just targeting an enemy, but you're saying like, oh, I want to attack this body part and debilitate it so it can't run. Yeah, I feel like that... I'm not sure what their philosophy was, but I feel like this game was meant to reach non-RPG.

players or to, if you bought Final Fantasy 7 and you didn't play RPGCP, like, what is even happening? But I feel like if you bought this and didn't play RPGGCP, be like, oh, well, I can figure this out at least because it's simple enough. Because you can still run around. Yeah, yeah. Right. So you can't, you can't just like, if you look at the Final Fantasy 7 remake, you

can run around in battle and just like spam the attack button. Here you can't do that. You have to wait until your ATB meter fills up, and then you can take an action. It's a bit like Grandia 2-ish, but before Grandia 2? Before Grandia, way before. I mean, Grandia had a similar time. well, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it definitely felt different.

Like, there was a continuity from FF7, but, like, it felt easier and more pared down, for sure. Yeah, I was struck by how simple it was. I didn't think it was bad, but I replayed this about five years ago. I was like, oh, it is pretty simple. Yeah, I mean, it is definitely taking that Kroner Trigger style and giving you the ability to run around between actions. But, you know, Chrono Trigger was very much about, like, simplifying the Final Fantasy concept to be more like Dragon Quest and kind of striking a happy balance. And this does that, but instead of having a party, you just have one character. So you kind of have to balance, like, do I want to attack with a gun or use a parasite power

or like a mitochondria power here or what? I thought melee attacks or weapons in this? No, no, she did have a baton. I thought so, yeah. It's very weak. And, like, you know, my memories of this were that, like, it wasn't very difficult to use this game systems to power my gun to where normal combat would be fun and easy. And then bosses were strategic and difficult, but in, you know,

general, like, the regular combat was fun. I didn't feel bad about it. You know, you kind of wanted to grind, and we'll get to the EX game, new game plus later, but like, depending on what weapons you did and what you did to your guns, you could actually make very powerful implements. Yeah, that was kind of the core power-up system. You could find different guns throughout the game, and then you could modify those guns, and each of them had, like, equipment slots, kind of like the weapons in Final Fantasy

7, but instead of just, like, putting spells on them, you were putting modifiers, like you can shoot different kinds of rounds, like you can shoot acid rounds, or you can extend the magazine or you can extend the range or get multiple shots against a single enemy. So you had a lot of options that you could find and customize your weapons and at the end you're getting like a rocket launcher.

But do you want to use the rocket launcher because it only has one shot per round? Do you want to stick with a barretta or something which is going to have more bullets? So yeah, you kind of had to figure that out. It was considering how simple the game is, it gives you a lot of options within a fairly small rubric.

Yeah. You mentioned Chrono Trigger, and I remember that game. There was no, so your movement and your location did matter occasionally, but there was no real way to intentionally move to a certain spot. I feel like this was them saying, let's do that for people, and let's make location and movement a part of the system when we couldn't before. Yeah, Chrono Trigger, you would, like, kind of just automatically jump into a spot, and there are some skills that would, like, hit all enemies on a line.

But if you were not lined up with the enemies, you couldn't get anything out of it. Yeah, I felt more luck-based, just like, oh, I happen to be in this spot to attack this enemy, or they happen to be in this sort of arrangement. Yeah, and that was fine because it was kind of like recognizing an opportunity and seizing it, but you couldn't manipulate the game very easily to give you that. Whereas this was much more that way. And so you did have some positioning, some freedom to do that. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know. So the game kind of works in a Final Fantasy style in terms of the environmental presentation. It's a lot of pre-rendered, you know, illustrated static backgrounds with some minor animation in them, all sort of linked together. The presentation tends to be a lot more cinematic in that it has tighter, closer shots. There are very few areas where you see kind of zoomed back, like Central Park and maybe one or two other spaces.

But for the most part, it's much closer, yeah. But, you know, I remember thinking that I kind of like liked these pre-render backgrounds better than a lot of FF7s because they were lavish and, you know, by the time you get to the Statue of Liberty or like the opera house, so they're very pretty and, you know, great art direction. And because it's trying to recreate reality and doing a fairly good job of it with pre-renders, I kind of liked it better. Because, you know, obviously at this era, I really was sad that we weren't getting real-time graphics. It would take a long time for, like, you know, real-time graphics to match the pre-render. But I felt like Parisite Eve visually did a good. good job. And I feel like, like, of that era, it's one of my favorite use of render graphics. Yeah, it's really nice. The backgrounds remind me more of FF7 than 8 in that

they're more cluttered and more about replicatingly filth and dirt and just disorder of the world. And eight was a little more, I mean, there were areas like that, but it was more like here's a pristine city or here's like a nice vista or here's a place you'd want to visit where Midger and other areas in FF7 were much like New York in this game, just like piles of things, trash, grimyness. Right, and kind of getting back to the connection between Final Fantasy 7 and Parasite. We mentioned hot-blooded Detective Joe earlier, and that was kind of the original concept for Final Fantasy 7 was that it would be set in New York City and would star a detective. And that obviously didn't happen.

Hot Blooded Joe became Cloud and New York City became Midgar. But then you have this, which is basically sort of a regurgitation of those concepts and them saying, like, hey, let's do this in a game that is actually makes sense. I'd love it when they won't let go an idea and it comes back in a different fashion and you guys see what could have been. Yeah, so it works out really well. Another similarity to Chrono Trigger is that there are no random encounters in this game.

Right. As you're running through the environments, there are trigger points that you'll cross over. So you can keep tripping those encounters at those points, but you're never going to be blindsided. You're always going to know, like, you know, once you get a feel for the area, Like, you're going to encounter monsters here.

So it's all kind of structured and set, which, you know, in some people's opinion, might be bad because it's just like, well, you know, you can't grind as much. Yeah, and, you know, there's no surprise, there's no randomness. But I do appreciate the fact that also, like in Chrono Trigger, there is no separate scene for a battle. When you encounter enemies, you are fighting them in that space. And that's something that, you know, Final Fantasy games still don't really do outside of the MMOs. But there also aren't a finite amount of battles. You can grind if you want to. Yeah, yeah, you can return to spots.

But it's always like, you know, you're going to be fighting an alligator and a crow here. And that's, yeah, it's fine. Oh, one thing that I really like about this game is the way that it has a hub. And you don't really see that a lot in RPGs of this era, the idea of having a persistent space that is kind of safe for you. And, you know, it is kind of driven by story. Like, you go back to it at certain times. And there are sometimes when you can't go back to it. it, but it does kind of bring back the style of something like wizardry, you know, that

kind of classic dungeon RPG where there's a town that you go to and you use that as your home base and that's where you stock up and that's where you rest and that's where you buy new weapons and that sort of thing. And it's the police station here. So you have those guys who are- And it makes sense, like diogenically. You're a police officer, you're investigating these things. Yeah, like, yeah, you've got to go back and file a report. Yeah, that's what you got to do. And then, you know, Wayne's going to upgrade your weapon and then lecture you about it. All right, so I feel like that kind of goes through the fundamentals. So let's give a brief rundown of the story, which takes place in Christmas 1998.

Remember when New York City was abandoned in Christmas 1998? I remember that year. Good year. Yeah, yeah. Actually, post 9-11, the view of a tragedy in NYC is very whimsical in this game. Yeah, yeah. Like, the city just kind of clears out automatically. Everyone's like, oh, we got to get going. But basically, it starts on Christmas Eve, and Aya goes on a date to the opera.

Also, Paul, pause. I mean, like, you know, I'm a swinging bachelor, but, like, blind date on Christmas Eve? I mean, that's a lot. I feel like Christmas being a romantic holiday is more of a way more of a Japanese thing. Right. You know, that's true. Anyway, the date goes horribly wrong because everyone in the theater bursts into flames. Merry Christmas.

So she decides I'm going to gun down this horrible opera singer who caused everyone to die. and she chases her backstage and there's a little bit of like survival horror, you know, key hunting, like pixel hunting for items in the back rooms, but there's also some sort of diagetic narrative where you find notes and things like that. So it's definitely kind of picking up the Resident Evil thing.

You're fighting mutated rats and things like that in the backstage. The first cutscene of a rat's getting mutated is very body horror disgusting. Yeah. Yeah, it's just like it's body. body ripples and bulges and explodes into this horrible house. Yeah, the enemy design throughout is pretty grotesque, I'll say. Yep. It's a pre-Syland Hill as well.

Yep. So anyway, she tracks down Eve and there's a fight, but then Eve runs off and is like, ha, ha, ha, I'm the villain. So that's it for day one. Aya goes back outside and the police are like, oh, wow, everyone's dead except you. That's weird. I remember at the time thinking it's interesting again, like both the protagonist and antagonist, like strong female characters, like female heroin, female evil throughout the whole game.

Which is, you know, again, unique at the time. So the next day, Christmas, there's a press conference, which, you know, happens all the time on Christmas Day. And Ayah spills the beans about Eve and decides to go visit a scientist, Maeda. No, no, no. It's a different scientist, right? At the first one, yeah. It's Krauss or whatever's name is. Yeah.

Yeah. The clearly evil one at the Museum of Natural History, which, by the way, has the best exhibition ever. It's a Chocobo exhibition. Right. I love that, yeah. Also, like, we're going to skip ahead of, like, you know, there's a giant, like, dinosaur skeleton, which ends up, you end up fighting. But this is also post-Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs are still really cool now?

Wait, dinosaurs are not really cool now? Not really. They were really cool in the 90s. They're birds. Bob, I thought you love birds. I do, but, I mean, we're in the post-Durassic World era now. Oh, right. They're Chris Pratt.

Chris Pratt. He's one of the 15 Hollywood Crises. Chris Pratt sucks. Jurassic World suck. Dinosaurus were cooler in the 90s. Come on. Okay. They were.

There was even a TV series called dinosaurs. I'm the baby. Not the baby? Anyway, a lot happens on Christmas Day. There's a concert in Central Park, and people go to that because that's what they do on Christmas Day, I guess. And everyone there turns into LCL from Neon Genesis Evangelion. And it's pretty upsetting. They melt into a blob. Except Bin Dallas, for some reason, he survives.

A day after a tragedy at a concert, people go to another concert in the same city. Yes. And after lightning strikes twice, although. not lightning from Final Fantasy. People are like, hey, actually, maybe this is bad. So Manhattan is evacuated, and it's clean and painless, and the city totally empties out because that's exactly how it would go in her life. But there is a really cool scene on day two where Aya and Eve battle once again on the back

of a horse-drawn carriage, which is like straight out of Castlevania Rondo of Blood. Like she needs to launch a giant skull. Is that in Central Park where that's happening? I think it's been, yeah. I think it's on the streets out surrounding Central Park, but, you know, Central Park's really big, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of road, but it's running past Jerry Seinfeld's apartment or whatever. So, yeah, day three, that's when Maeda comes into the plot, and he provides a synopsis of the novel, and then Eve blows up the police station. Yeah, he knows, like, how he got made from the scientists who tried to bring his wife back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But the, you know, the attack on the police station reminds me a lot of one of Terminator movies. Is it Terminator? Two. Two? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I feel like it was

very inspired by that. They said, let's make a Hollywood movie. What is one of the biggest Hollywood movies ever? We got Jurassic Park and we got Terminator 2. The repercussion of T2 were still being felt 10 years later. So day 4 is maybe the first time the word sperm was ever used in an RPG. That shocked me.

It's like so much talk about sperm. I'm 16 years old playing this video. She is going to the clinic to steal the sperm. You must stop her. It's pretty wild. Yeah. Eve wants to get pregnant. And I guess, you know, she just like cuts out the middleman. And the man altogether?

Yeah, she just like, just give me some hot, hot sperm. Yeah, she's just going to talk to a man. She just wants the sperm. She steals the sperm. Goes to the Statue of Liberty. I had chases after her and is like, whoa, I'm tied up in all of this too. My sister is dead, and that's important. But yeah, then there's the, no, actually the Statue of Liberty is the next day.

Oh, you're right. Yeah, day four is, there's a big fight on top of the hospital. You fight a scorpion or a spider on top of the hospital? Yes. And what annoys me about this game slightly is that there are, like, like two quick time events that are instant death unless you know exactly what you have to do. I forgot about this. And it feels like they were trying to add action elements, but the punishment is way too great.

Like there's a final scene where something is chasing you, but this one is one of them. Is it a game over if you fail? Just game over, yeah. There's two jet fighters that come in to attack Eve, and she, like, flies up and kills the pilots. Yeah. And so their planes crash into the hospital buildings. So, yeah, like, this would maybe the, yeah. Airplanes crashing into a couple of towers in New York City.

It's rough. It seemed like a good time. I forgot about these parts because I, yeah, I did, I replayed the first hour last night, but I didn't get deep into it because it's been 20 years. But like those QTEs, that was very of the era. Yeah. So if you do not escape the roof on time and do the proper QTE, then you're still on the roof top when the planes crashed into the hospital. And you explode in a fiery ball of death. It can be hard to read the backgrounds at times.

and also I don't think you're signaled well enough to let you know, like, you will die and have to be able to save if you do not get out of here. Yeah, it doesn't fit very well, but there's only a couple of these missteps. And once you die once and have to fight the scorpion again, you're like, okay. Well, and I think in that era,

that was kind of seen as like a fun gameplay mechanic because other games had this in the 90s and like not so much anymore. Mm-hmm. All right, so day five, that's when you get the Statue of Liberty. Straight out of Ghostbusters 2 comes to life, right? Yeah. It gets it kind of mutated.

It's like broken and like, yeah. Well, that massive LCL from day two, the Christmas mass. She brings it there. It's still just throbbing around in New York City and finally decides I'm going to go infect the water supply and turn everyone in New York City, which is abandoned, into me. But she stops it from getting into the water supply. But then at the end, she fights Eve again. And it turns out now Eve is pregnant and has like 20 breasts and is just like huge and weird and, like, like, huge and weird. and like super creepy body

being. Yeah. And so then the blob comes and protects her, like shields her and takes her away so that she can give birth to a baby. The flying baby, the ultimate being, which is born and attacks Aya on a ship off the coast. Oh, by Staten Island? Yeah, sure.

So anyway, Aya's like, the only way to kill a baby is to blow up an entire ship, and that's what she does. But there is a big fight and by this point, Aya knows her Liberate skills, so the fight is basically cake, because Liberate is basically instant win. It's like Omni slash.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, basically. Like, you activate Liberate and you're super powerful and have high defense and can use, like, I think a beam attack. I mean, is the premise that she has, like, managed to comprehend the mitochondrial power. She's gone SSJ level nine. Right. She's like, she's about like, you know, purified herself of the evil of it,

control it. And then the slime baby chases you. Yep. And you have to know which way to go or it's game over. Yep. Again. Yeah. But you blow up the ship and, uh, you save the world.

and then Maeda says, perhaps it is we who are the parasites. And it makes you think. But is it really over? No. No. Because then there's New Game Plus. Chrysler building. New Game Plus allows you to take all the cool stuff you did to your gun and your good armor,

your body armor, because militarized police is cool. But starting over at level one. Yes, but you have like kick-ass gun with acid shots and like, you know, multi-burst and really great body armor. How far can you get in? Those little rat dudes are no challenge whatsoever. Alligators, I laugh at them. So, yes, after a few days into the game, new game plus mode, the Chrysler building in the center of New York City in downtown, midtown,

opens up and you can go in there. And it is 77 floors, just like the real Chrysler building, randomly generated floors. And every 10 stages, you fight a boss, or every 10 floors you fight a boss and you can save. And also, this is 1998. like Shire and the Wanderer style games aren't exactly popular in America.

No, but Squared had been exploring this kind of idea with Tobol. And Tobol and Chocobo. His Chocobo? Materious Engine? The first one had come out in Japan. The second one, which came out in the U.S., I don't think was out. Tobol number one had a little bit of this.

But, like, yeah. At the time, like, I knew that this type of game, a randomly generated, rogue-like thing was a thing in Japan. There was also Lovia 2. Lovia 2 had it as well. But, like, this was one of the first ones that I experienced. And I actually, because that first play-through

Parasity 1 was a little short, I wanted more. And I actually did play a sizable amount of the Chrysler building back in the day. I honestly never really spent that much time with it. And I wish I had because that's kind of my jam. That's kind of your jam. Yeah, like, you know, dungeon crawling. In an Art Deco building?

An excuse to just, like, not worry about the story and focus on a great combat system. and fight my way through difficult bosses and battles. That sounds great. And then at the top, you do ultimately fight, like, the ultimate version of Eve. Maya. Who is your sister Maya, who is dead but actually not. And if you can defeat Eve, then Maya is able to overcome Eve's influence on her body.

And basically, you get the good ending where Maya, like, purges Eve, basically. and Iya basically purges her own mitochondria power and so they go off and, you know, Maya and Iya can be sisters and live happily after together again. Yeah, it was cool. And it was like, at that time, one of the first new game pluses like that that I had seen. Yeah, I mean, Kronertrigger had new game plus, and so, you know, you've got the direct carryover because there was Kroner Trigger staff here.

But this, yeah, like putting an entirely new aspect, like basically doubling the content of the game in New Game Plus was pretty cool. Yeah, it was still a fairly new idea. I think now any game you expect New Game Plus, even in an action game where it's like, well, of course I'll be able to play through it again with all my stuff, right? But then it was like, here's a new idea we're playing with.

Let's see what we could do with it. So it was fun to see that. Yeah, so very kind of groundbreaking. And I think the game reviewed pretty well back in the day. I don't think it got, you know, Final Fantasy scores. Yeah, but like eights, a few nines, you know. Yeah, people, I think people complain, oh, it's too short.

But it's really cool and, you know, distinct, and makes it's a very striking game. I think, you know, putting myself back in that headspace, it gave me the idea that, oh, wow, we're going to see a lot of these new IPs from Square. They're going to, like, come and do new things post-Final Fantasy 7. We're going to, like, and there weren't as many as I... There weren't a lot of new things like Paraside Eve after Paraset Eve.

There was Vagher's story, basically. And Brayfencer. Is Brayfencer that much like Parasite Eve, though? It's a new IP that they're trying to develop, yeah. Yeah, and, like, the first one did feel like it would be a larger franchise than it ended up being. But Parasite Eve just feels so serious, and so Western focus

and there was really nothing else like that maybe you could say the bouncer could have been that but like has there been an episode of the bouncer

on the retronauts? Definitely not. Well but I'll say it is the same in that like you had this idea it was going to be something long

and it was everything very short I mean like a fourth of the length of Paraside Eve but like yeah Parasite Eve the fact that

Paraside Eve 2 was not the direct sequel it should have been I think kind of damaged the future of the franchise we won't get into Parasite Eve 2 too much here but like

had it had it had the same combat system as Parasite Eve 1, I think maybe we'd still be playing more Parasity of games

now today. Maybe. At the very least, if it weren't a mediocre survival horror game, we'd be playing more Parasite of games.

Yeah. We did eventually get a third game, the third birthday. Which, by that point, it was a long path because it was. Originally announced

as a mobile only game. It was a mobile game. And it focused on, like, the trailer for that, the preview, for some reason, focused on Ayabreya

getting married. And that doesn't Doesn't actually happen in Parasity, the third birthday. And covered in blood or something? Yeah, like that becomes part of the backstory. Yeah. But this game does not have the license of Parasity, which is why it's called the third birthday, which is, I don't know if that was a choice or they didn't want to pay for it or the author didn't want them.

The original author had the rights and, like, the games didn't come out on digital until like 2010 because he had the rights and they finally got them the rights back. Yeah. Seems like a mess. But I'll remember is that you told me to not play it because your clothes get shot off. It's a major mechanic in the game. Yeah, it's like... I said that Parasite Eve was peak Nomura horniness. I thought it was a Toriyama guy.

But this is like... Well, the artwork, there's a lot of horny Nomura artwork, but Toriyama... Not Akira. No. But the Final Fantasy 13, Lightning Superfan. Mottoon Toriyama. Yeah.

See the director of their birthday? No, he was the writer and... Yeah, he was the writer. The director was Tabata. Yeah, yeah. Now, off making... LARPS, I think. But I seem to recall that Tabata was not the one responsible for the clothes destruction

mechanic. Outside of the clothes falling off, is it decent? I need to revisit it. Yeah, it's okay. It kind of is like a third-person shooter version of Omicron, the Nomad Soul. I love David Bowie. There's no David Bowie, but you, or is it Messiah? It's the game where you can like take over.

Messiah. Okay, Messiah. Yeah. But don't they also, like, de-h-h her within the story? So, actually, I want to say this era was the era of a lot of really super horny PSP games for some reason. Yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and spoil this. Go for it. IAbrea in the third birthday is not IAabrea.

Iabrea died. What? And she is actually the force responsible for all the monsters that keep spawning around. Like, Ias. Wait, are Iyabria? Yes, our Ayabrea, her tormented soul, is causing an incursion of these monsters into. New York City and then the world. Not Maya, Ayabra.

Tower of Babels, yes, our Ayabreya. And it turns out Ayah in the game is actually Ayah's body with the soul of Maya. So she's like a woman having her clothes shot off, but she's in her mind.

She's nine years old. It's funny because while we were talking... It's like the opposite of the Fire Emblem characters that look nine, but are actually a thousand years old. She looks 25, but actually she's nine. Does that make it less... I don't know,

No, it's still creepy. We're talking about Ayabrea, and I looked her up on Wikia really quick just to see, like, stats about her. It's like, 1972 to 2010, I'm like, wait, she died? Yes. Yes. She died for reals. Well, you've actually made me slightly curious to revisit third birthday. Okay, so as a game, the third birthday is a third-person shooter, and basically you control

Aya slash Maya, and you are fighting these demonic monster incursion things, so you don't actually control. Ayah, what happens is you're like using some sort of weird time travel machine that sends Ayah's mind into the bodies of people who were at the events. So at any point you can

like target another person who's like a combatant, like an AI character and take over them, take over their body. It's a geist. Yeah, kind of. But you know, it's only combative characters. Can't take over a bowl of dog food like a knife? You can't take over anything except combatants. Like armies

Army soldiers. Weird. Yeah, and each character has, like, you know, different weapons load out and that sort of thing. But that's not what I want from Parasite Eve. No, it's kind of a strange game. Like, I think it works well as a, you know, kind of like a portable third-person shooter,

but then you get all the story stuff in there, and it's like, you know what we need, you know what we need? We need a real-time, beautiful remake of Parasite Eve. Actually, not even real-time. Just keep the battle system. Remastered. They're doing everything from that era.

By real-time, I meant the graphics. I say actually, keep the battle. system. You're right. I actually think Parasite Eve battle system in a real-time multiplayer game could also work. Like if ATB functioned and everybody had like was on the same timetable, right? Like time is a thing and everyone has ATB. It's all functional. Like you're like a monster hunting where people are fighting with Parasitee power. That could be cool. Yeah, I could see it like someone brings up their menu and everything freezes and you get a shot at someone. Although I can see how that would be exploited because people would just

focus on building their speed attribute so they would get more initiative than other players. I mean, even a real-time Parasite, where it is a third-person shooter with beautiful graphics. With that story, that's music. I mean, I think it'd be good. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever see Square

revisit Parasite Eve. Maybe not even for re-releases, which is a shame because it's a really cool and interesting game. I think you're right because it's a license. And it's available on like PS3, PSVita. It is currently available. Yeah, I wonder how much longer it will be available, though. It is still up. I checked it last night. It is still up there.

But, yeah, I worry because it is a licensed property. Like, all good things, they eventually get delisted. Yeah. So, basically, that's it. That's Paraside Eve. But I think, you know, it's the kind of game. Like, if you were of our generation and you experienced it back in the day, it is still worth going back to because it still holds up in a lot of ways. And it's also, you know, a relic of its era. But if you're a young person who loves Final Fantasy, it loves Nomura, likes good music.

Who doesn't? I think it's actually a fun weekend because it's also, it's pretty light play. You know, it's not that hard. It's not that long. I would still kill for a short RPG. Whenever I hear an RPG is short, I find out it's like, oh, it's only 25 hours. Like, no, I want an 8-hour RPG. Ten-hour RPGs are like the shit.

Yeah, I mean, I think developers need to recognize the fact that some of us are very old and very busy. And we don't have 150 hours to sink into a game. Like, just give us a short, compact experience, give us the option. to explore more material. Like, to me, Parasite Eve is a perfect length and the new game plus makes it even better because, hey, there is extra substance here, but it's optional if you want it.

And it's there for you to explore at your leisure. So basically what I'm saying is bring back Parasite Eve, let this no longer be the road less traveled. Let it be the road most traveled. And we will buy your games and play them as opposed to maybe buying them and definitely not playing this. if the FF7 remake is eight hours

long. That would be fine. Sadly, it's not. They've said it's, you know, as substantial as FF7 itself. There's a lot of Midgar to explore. Excellent. Anyway, that is the Parasite Eve episode of Retronauts, the proper Parasite Eve Retronauts. And I think

that's pretty much all there is to be said about this game. We've covered all eight hours of it in about a quarter of the time, just like the bouncer. So anyway, Shane, thanks for joining us. Thanks, out there for listening to this podcast. I am Jeremy Parrish hosting this episode

and you are listening to Retronauts. It is a podcast you can find at Retronauts.com and online at various podcatchers and apps like iTunes, et cetera. You can also support this show and make more episodes, inspire, pay for more episodes, fund more episodes, yes. I was threatening to fund my own episode on Boogin Guy. We'll see if I do it.

Yeah, I mean, you give us the cash, we'll do it. But yes, you can support this show for three bucks a month, and that will give you early access one week early to every episode we produce at a higher bit rate quality than we go out in public with. Can I get a 4K photo of your fedora? 4K, absolutely. 4K Fedora?

I do not have a fedora here. And there are no advertisements in the Patreon episodes. So I think that's a great incentive to go to Patreon.com. slash Retronauts and subscribe to us. And if you don't, that's okay. You can still listen to us for free, but we'll be your friends if you pay us. Yes, that's how friendship works in America these days. Where can we find you, Jeremy Parrish?

You can find me at Retronauts.com and on Twitter as Gamesbyte, and you can also check out my YouTube channel, just look for Jeremy Parish. What's your most recent book that I can purchase? You know, I actually had to take a break from producing books this year. Upcoming next year is Virtual Boy and Super NES Works, but my most recent books are Gameboy works volumes one and two. If you keep a look at that virtual boy, it'll make you see red in your eyes.

I'm done with a virtual boy. Okay, good. Yeah, it's over. Anyway, Shane, what's up? You can find me on the Twitter at Shane Watch, all one word. Shane Watch. And you can play PlayStation games

on the PlayStation 4. Ah, yes. Finally, Bob. As for me, I am Bob Mackey. Find me on Twitter. As Bob Servo, I also do other podcasts about old things. They are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon.

They're about The Simpsons, of course. and we do a different cartoon from a different series every week on What a Cartoon. And please go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons to find out more about those. And there's lots of bonus stuff there waiting for you. And that's all the warbly sampled opera we have for you this week. Join us next week for probably not warbly sampled opera. In this Padere

with a man Ah Ah Thank you.