Whatever Happened To Parasite Eve?

Some kind of a review of Parasite Eve, Parasite Eve 2, and The 3rd Birthday. Will we ever get another Parasite Eve game?
Music by me except Parasite Eve Main Theme Piano sample from OST by Yoko Shimomura
• Parasite Eve 1 Full So...
and Somnia Memorias
• Parasite Eve Ending So...
• Final Fantasy VII (199...
• Hershey's Bar (1970's)
#jrpg #parasiteeve #horrorgaming #squareenix #finalfantasy #residentevil #ps1 #ps5 #the3rdbirthday

[@theman051991]

My favorite action RPG ever, I remember playing this game countless times, just trying to get through the tower, God I loved it. Repeatable games are the best.

[@davidblainescharizard]

Yeah it's definitely one of my favorite ps1 games, it's very unique for a rpg.

[@pashalq]

It's good to have a perspective like yours, I really appreciate it. I think Parasite Eve should have been left as it was as a single title. Not everything needs sequels - specially if it deteriorates like this did. I did play PE2 back in the day and enjoyed it to some degree. But Parasite Eve is one of those titles where it was possible to experiment with some elements that would be too much of a risk for bigger titles. Seeing it in context of the time is interesting. The focus on a narrative that is sort of a movie strung together with gameplay could even make it out as a precursor for their move towards Final Fantasys biggest flop - Spirits Within. A game like this is probably soemthing a senior member (like Sakaguchi) could carry to management to get it made. As far as I know, seniority carries much more weight in Japan. Such a passion project could be greenlighted simply because he wanted to - with no promise on high profatibility or such. I suppose that offered freedom to the team that otherwise wouldn't be available. Sure, that's all speculation on my part, but it seems to be brought up again and again if you follow creators who leave bigger studios (be it Sakaguchi himself, Kajima, Kamiya or to some extend Amano - lots of smaller creators bring up similar points although they won't have such big outlets covering their stories). I mostly miss the courage to experiment with gameplay in that sense that Parasite Eve did. Sure, it wasn't ground breaking, but as far as I know, it wasn't replicated either. PE2 already tried to appeal too much to common gameplay formulas while not being as refined as competitors. And I won't even start with 3rd Birthday. As a one-off, Parasite Eve was a great project and I'm happy it was made.

[@davidblainescharizard]

Thanks for the insightful comment! I was actually surprised to see that Parasite Eve was Squares best selling non-FF title on the PS1 and by quite a bit. Realistically there's probably no way they would have seen those sales and chose not to continue chasing for more, but that only makes it even more weird to me how much less effort they seem to put into the later games. But I think you're right, it would have probably been a better move to simply not make the sequels over half-assing them.

[@THECHAOSEMPEROR]

PE2 was my favourite as it was my first game in the series, I think if it had kept the same combat system as the first it would`ve done better and also it should`ve had voice acting.

[@davidblainescharizard]

Big spoilers from 15:15 to 17:00 so be careful! It's hard not to mention though 😮