The History of Parasite Eve

The cinematic RPG, built from a horror novel.

Parasite Eve (PlayStation, 1998) is a sequel to a book: Hideaki Sena's 1995 science fiction horror novel, the first winner of the Japan Horror Novel Award. Square, a studio that built its worlds from nothing, adapted someone else's, moved the sequel to New York, staffed it mostly with Americans, and released its first M rated game. Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi sold it with a label of his own: the cinematic RPG.

THE MAKING

Los Angeles and Tokyo, about two years

Sakaguchi loved the novel and recommended it to director Takashi Tokita; Sena, consulted, told the team to do whatever they liked. Development, including pre-planning, ran roughly two years, and production was based in Los Angeles: a staff of about seventy people, roughly 30 percent Japanese and 70 percent American, the first major American and Japanese co-development in Square's history. Japanese staff handled concept art and final checks; the CG was built together. Developer interviews from 1997 record the arrangement while the game was still being finished.

The game was first planned as a direct sequel set in Tokyo; Sakaguchi suggested New York City instead, and built the story outline himself, deliberately avoiding films so nothing would influence it. Tetsuya Nomura designed the protagonist, NYPD officer Aya Brea, created by Sakaguchi; the novel's events stand behind the plot, with the book's host, Mariko Anzai, established as Aya's biological mother.

THE DESIGN

Six days, one city, pausable combat

The game runs six days from Christmas Eve 1997: an opera performance where the audience combusts, a mitochondria revolt across Manhattan, and one officer whose cells answer differently. Combat is pausable real time: Aya moves freely while an Active Time gauge fills, then stops the action to fire, use Parasite Energy abilities, or change equipment, an RPG's menu thinking inside an action game's space. Guns are tuned and rebuilt with tools and parts, so the weapon bench is the character build.

Yoko Shimomura composed a score the record describes as "inorganic" and "emotionless" by design, opera voices over electronics, widely acclaimed on release and issued in two album releases. The mature tone was the point: this was Square testing whether its Final Fantasy VII audience would follow it into horror, with an M on the box.

THE EDITIONS

Two discs on both sides of the Pacific

Japan · March 29, 1998

Two discs, product codes SLPS-01230 and SLPS-01231, released a year after the novel's film adaptation. The novel itself did not reach English readers until years after the game.

North America · September 1998

Two discs, SLUS-00662 and SLUS-00668, with a Greatest Hits reprint in 1999. In a shipping mixup, over two hundred copies reached Best Buy stores a week early.

PlayStation Network · 2010 to 2011

PSOne Classics: Japan November 2010, North America March 2011, the edition most modern players meet.

THE RECEPTION

Favorable, with the limits noted

Metacritic · 81

"Generally favorable" across 17 reviews, 82 percent of them positive, none negative.

IGN

Praised the beautiful graphics, cinematic sequences, and mature tone, and joined the consensus complaint: the plot is linear.

Game Informer

"Exquisite" backdrops, bemoaned the long load times between environments and battles.

Sales · 3 million with its sequel

Parasite Eve and Parasite Eve II together had shipped over 3 million copies worldwide by 2010: a real franchise, at a third of a mainline Final Fantasy's scale.

THE LEGACY

Square's road not taken

Parasite Eve proved Square could work in another register and another country: a licensed property, a Western setting, a Western heavy staff, an adult rating. The sequel leaned toward survival horror and split the audience; the series then went quiet for a decade. What endures is the experiment itself and Shimomura's score, and a standing collector's distinction: the game is a sequel to a novel most of its Western players could not read, which makes the Japanese book, the film, and the two soundtrack albums part of the same shelf.