Two teasing bits of video and a few scant comments about the direction for Square-Enix’s PSP title, The 3rd Birthday, have had to serve as morsels to feed my appetite for a continuation of the Parasite Eve series. While good things come to those that wait, my patience for more details is at the boiling point, because the franchise has always been the good horse to bet on. The original title emerged during a period of legitimate experimentation for Squaresoft, and remains one of the most intriguing and potentially important deviations in the company’s development catalog.
Side-stepping the typical Square-speak of the day about the first cinematic role-playing game, Parasite Eve presents layers of possibilities, which make the physical game as much a mutation as the creatures running loose within the world coded to the disc that carries it. And from a company prided on pushing visuals, narrative, and occasionally the mechanics underneath those fancier concerns, Parasite Eve is a series that represents an evolutionary experiment, finding a strange and peaceful balance of those elements where one so often overshadows the others. Deviations and changes in the continuation of the franchise are not risks, but instead the very means of staying true to the inherent nature of the game and its narrative heartbeat.
Parasite Eve represents the chaos of change and evolution in a way that isn’t simply confined to narrative concerns, but is also a potentially continuing mutation of design and style.