パラサイト・イヴ(Parasite Eve) is a Japanese franchise probably best known (in the West) for the three video games. It was an early rival of Resident Evil, alongside Silent Hill.

If you’re reading this, good job! This is currently work-in-progress and simply contains some notes.

So far, I’m liking Parasite Eve a lot. I find the Mitochondria stuff amusing as well. I wasn’t expecting to hear Richard Dawkins’ name mentioned.

I find the sewer to be a bit disorienting, though I wasn’t as annoyed as I expected myself to be. What I did find quite annoying is the museum, where the random encounters really started to grate on me.

There were times where I had trouble finding stuff and figuring out where to go next, so I did keep a walkthrough around just to refer to every now and again.

Day 5 onwards the game gets really tedious. I think this is a shame, because the rest of it is pretty solid. The enemies start to have a lot of health, have a tendency to do a lot of damage (and have attacks that are difficult or practically impossible to dodge) and you do a bit less damage too. So, seeing as this was the case, I decided to use cheats to beat the game. I determined that I could beat the final boss without cheating, but it would have taken forever (and I only decided this after about ≈45 minutes of me running around trying to fight the penultimate boss).

To be added soon, hopefully.

First impressions are okay as far as graphics are concerned. The story continuing on from where it is is fine too, I guess. But the first game didn’t have tank controls and this one does…so getting used to that is going to be a challenge, I can tell.

So far, they made the game resemble Resident Evil a lot. They gave it tank controls (mentioned above), the camera angles are (mostly) fixed. They also made it so that you have to press a button to go up or down stairs/ladders which is…a choice, I guess. You also have to press a button to open doors.
In the previous game, you could walk up and down stairs freely. To go up a ladder or open a door, you just had to walk up to it.

I’m about 50/50 on the tank controls. I don’t like that it was added, though I understand why, considering it’s a bit closer to the Resident Evil formula.
It’s way more survival-horror than the previous game was, though I haven’t yet seen how abundant ammunition is. The atmosphere is certainly more unsettling.

• Okay, I looked it up after getting confused in the credits. Apparently it’s adapted from a novel? And that this novel was first adapted into a film and two manga series? What?
• I ended up referring to the walkthrough here to help me get thru it.