Parasite Eve II

"Give me a gun, now... I mean, a remote control...."

Okay. Parasite Eve 1. The first game I ever bought for my PS One. (Along with Dino Crisis.) Many people didn’t exactly like the first Parasite Eve, but I found that the game had a mood and style which were both quite refreshing and good, to say the least. The real-time battle system was what really impressed me about the game. I had never actually played anything up to that point which allowed for free movement during battle. Impressive. So when I heard that there was going to be another Parasite Eve game, I was excited.
My friend ended up buying it, so when he was done with it, proclaiming its vast crapiness, I burrowed it. I figured I’d give iot a shot, since my buddy never really liked the first one to begin with. I popped in the CD and waited to be amazed.

To put it simply, I was so NOT amazed. Everything about the game bothered me furiously, and so I’ll go into detail about each aspect and why I hate it so much.

Graphics: 10/10 Okay, so I lied, I don’t hate everything about the game. The game’s graphics are top-notch, which is to be expected from a second-generation Square game. Everything from the Mojave desert town to the incredibly detailed office building place are superb. Good job, Square…

Character design: 5/10 Ouch. You’d expect the company that came up with FF7 would know a thing or two about characters, but obviously they must have fired those individuals and hired mimes. There’s no spoken dialogue in the game, which is really no big deal, except Square decided to add voice acting for things like grunting, or even the word ‘freeze’, spoken by a cop. This would be alright, if it weren’t for the fact that there was no point to the paltry ‘voice acting’, and its cheesiness. Some of the enemies look kind of cool, like little red parasite blobs that explode on contact. Other enemies, though, look like they came out of a preschool drawing book. A horse with a human face? Conceptually, it’s interesting, but visually it looks ridiculous. Characters like Aya seem a little flat and one-sided, and her almost constant cheeriness began to bother me. Also, some of her remarks sounded downright stupid and uninteresting. Granted, she was humorous and insightful at times, but mostly she just reeked of high-school drop out. The other characters, really had no character at all, which was no biggie, but you’d expect a bit more from a survival horror game.

Gameplay: 2/10 Did I say survival horror? If, like me, you expected the sequel of an RPG to actually be an RPG, get ready to be disappointed. The game plays exactly like a Resident Evil or Silent Hill game, only a lot worse. The only difference is that your health is given a numerical value, and you have ‘magic points’. (In which case the game can be compared to Galerians, but at least Galerians had a more interesting plot.) The battles are all predetermined, placed in specific spots. Actually, if you look a your map, you can see exactly where a battle will occur, as indicated by rooms which are coloured red. Good job, Square. Also, there is no leveling up due to this fact, but instead you get spend bonus points that you acquired in battle to buy items at certain locations, or up your magic stats and ‘buy’ new spells. What this means is that you end up looking at your map all the time to make sure you’ve killed everything to get the max bonus points. Trust me, this can get very tedious and annoying. The battle system itself is hindered by the all new ‘targeting’ system employed. It’s like Zelda’s Z-targeting, where you lock on an enemy and automatically aim at them. At first, it’s okay; the enemies are straightforward and simple enough to beat. However, later on in the game, where actually dodging enemies becomes an issue, (like with those damn horses,) you find yourself facing the stupid thing all the time because you decided it might be a good idea to lock on it. I’ve died many times this way. If you’re a better player than me, good for you, but if you’re only an above-average player, get ready for some cursing. I own every Resident evil game there is to date, including Survivor ( yuck ) so I think I should be pretty damn good at handling those ‘up is forwards and down is back’ controls. PE 2 didn’t make this easy at all. Inventory space is not really too much of a problem, but the items you can use in battle are. You can only carry maybe five or sox items with you at a time into battle which act as carry-ons, which, in a Resident evil game is more than enough, but in an RPG sucks, especially when you frequently get poisoned or blinded and shit. Generally, you waste one space for ammo, another space for your radar device which targets enemies and displays them via radar (an especially useful tool in a pre-rendered world,) and maybe another weapon in case you end up facing a couple of bad-asses. That leaves about three or four spaces if you’re lucky, and more often than not, you’ll want to carry some ammo for your super-gun in case you run out. Again, good job, Square. What this means is that if you get blinded, and don’t know the detox spell which negates this effect, you’ll probably have to wait the effects out, since the prospect of carrying an anti-blind in your battle inventory is ludicrous. Overall, crappy gameplay.
Okay, I know the line between RPG and action-adventure can sometimes be quite thin, (Zelda, let’s say) but this is no RPG. I’ve played enough of those to know the difference. Simple magic points aren’t going to deter me…. Did I mention that you have to check everything twice? Yep. Square decided it might be a good idea to make the game more realistic by having you have to check everything about three times. Point in case; you check a garbage can in the Mojave desert, and Aya proclaims that ‘ there’s nothing in there.’ Check it again, however, and you find that Aya missed something the first time and wow! there’s some medicine! There are usuall at least two or three messages for eveything you check, and you always check an extra time just to make sure that the last message you read was indeed the last one. I went through the first disc without realizing this, so missed a bunch of stuff. Yay! Fun!

Music: 4/10 Only okay. And I really mean okay. The first PE, while not exactly boasting a wonderful and memorable score, certainly had more depth and quality to its music, especially the piano pieces. PE 2, howvere, sports no real music at all, but instead simply ‘background’ or atmospheric noise. Which is fine, but since they don’t do it quite as well as say, resident Evil 2, or especially Silent Hill, they get marks docked big time. Hey, I though Square’ Brave Fencer Musashi had better music, and that’s not saying a lot.

Plot: 5/10 Again, big drawback. The story stems from the original PE, but other than the fact that you’re using the same character, there’s really no story. Basically, mutants are appearing all over and you must stop them. That’s it. Maybe by the time you beat the game there’s a story somewhere, but since I chucked the game and erased my save file soon after the second disc, I’m not quite too sure. You kill enemies. Great. Part of a police squad trained specifically to stop these foes, it’s your job to kill them. Wow, how cool! After one annoying boss fight with a huge flame-throwing bastard, your boss inspires you to continue with such encouraging words as, ‘You fought a ten-storey monster you say? Keep up the good work and keep searching…’ That certainly disheartened me. No ‘here’s a rocket launcher for your work’, or even, ‘great. You’ll have a huge salary increase when you return!’ Nothing. Which blows, especially after having to deal with such a pain in the ass. (By the way, you didn’t kill him the first time you met him, which can only mean another surprise appearance…) Oh joy.

Replayability: 7/10 As I’ve mentioned before, I never completed the game, since I hated it soooooo much, but apparently there’s like four extra game mode to plough through. Personally, the thought of playing the game even once through makes me wanna hurl, so the thought of trying to complete four, and expectantly harder versions of this game is about as appealing as masturbating with a cheese grater. The 7 is for those die-hard fans though, so at least you know there will be hours upon hours of playing.

Overall: 4/10 Like I said, I liked the first game a lot, but this game played to much like a reeeaaaaalllllyy crappy RE title for me to take it seriously. It wasn’t even creepy, just stupid. 4 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/12/01, Updated 12/12/01