Game: Parasite Eve, Squaresoft, 1998, PSXBeer: Henry's Hard Ginger Ale, 16 fl. oz., 4.2% abv
# of beers consumed during play: One for every circle of hell this game brought me to.
Level Reached: Ask Dante, but I think....
Level of Intoxication: Buzzed
Game
For anyone unfamiliar with Squaresoft (aka Square, aka Square/Enix, aka Squeenix), they are a company best known for pulling out of a nosedive by the skin of their teeth in the late 80's and then celebrating the franchise that saved them by slowly dissecting it and injecting characters and minigames that no one likes. While their games of late may draw criticism on a broad range of topics from story to gameplay mechanics to their mere existence, Squaresoft is still considered by many to be a AAA-game development house. Much of that reputation was garnered during the era of Final Fantasy VII, also known as the game Squeenix will never escape from. The crater FFVII made led to a fallout of experimentation on Square's part thanks to the bucketloads of cash they had suddenly found on their front doorstep. One of the seeds of this experimentation was a game called Parasite Eve. Up until starting this review, I'd never played this game, or even had any exposure to the plot. I went in blind. Right about now, anyone who played this game back in the day is starting to smile.
Gameplay
Parasite Eve is interesting in that it adopts the "active battleground" approach to combat, meaning that you and your enemies dance around the area until your timer comes up, at which point you're able to perform an action. This same basic system has been used countless other times, and in many different forms, ranging from Chrono Trigger (completely turn-based) to Eternal Sonata (completely timer-based), but no other game has managed to make it quite so awkward. At it's most simple, this mechanic boils down to two main precepts: 1. That the characters can move around, thus changing strategy based on placement, and 2. That there is a timer that dictates when/how long to attack, thus adding an active element to an otherwise turn-based affair. While PE manages to fulfill these requirements, it's much like how a register-jockey at Taco Bell fills the requirements of 1. Exchanging money for tacos, and 2. Breathing. Notice the finer details such as getting your order right or being courteous aren't included in that list. What I'm trying to get at is that the framework put in place by PE does work; you avoid attacks, you execute attacks of your own, you use up all of your ammo, etc. The issue is that it doesn't work very well, and unfortunately, it isn't due to any one core flaw. Your character controls like she's a bull plowing a frozen field while the obtuse interface and dangerously indifferent level design collude to murder you as many times as possible. Now, I know it sounds like I'm working PE over pretty good, and I am, but unfortunately, all of this criticism is aimed at a victim of its own place in time. Parasite Eve released at a time when the complexity of game engines and control schemes were rising quickly, but game developers hadn't yet realized this was a problem that needed to be addressed. Nowadays, young gamers are safe in the knowledge that the UI will clue them into control inputs, either contextually, or by including them in the interface. Parasite Eve knows nothing of such foolishness, and if you need to know how to do something, it's assumed that you had the forethought to write it down. The game does offer a helpful and lengthy "Tutorial" option, though it is nothing more than a menu of various situations in the game and an explanation of the controls and indicators. In this, the game's age is painfully transparent, and as you play, you realize this is by no means a bad game, it was simply generated during the painful adolescence of interactive home entertainment.
While the controls are syrupy and over-complicated, the hit-boxes spotty, and the camera angles disorienting, these shortcomings don't quite overshadow everything. Once these unforgiving elements have been accounted for, the feverish gunfights and RPG-inspired inventory management turn the game into something that can easily whittle hours off your day. This can be both a benefit and a detriment, mainly due to the old-school save system. Again, games of today have woven saving your progress seamlessly into the game engine; it's so prevalent nowadays that games can get bad reviews for not having an autosave indicator. In this case again, Eve cares nothing of your problems as a modern gamer and giggles horrendously as you're taken back to the title screen to replay 20 minutes of boss battles and CG cut-scenes. In fact, since I went ahead and used the words 'horrendous' and 'cut-scenes' in the same sentence, I'll go ahead and drop a little footnote here in regards to the CG movies themselves, even though they don't have anything to do with gameplay aside from interrupting it: Holy shit Square, what the hell? The transforming rat clip is absolute nightmare fuel and whoever came up with that needs a psych eval stat.
Okay, I feel better, let's continue.
Once you wrap your head around the fact that this game doesn't have the time to hold your hand--and in fact would happily leave you in the middle of a crowded mall unattended--you'll instinctively go into shields-up mode and begin to play this game the way it was intended...like a survivor. The more I played, the more I noticed the trappings of a survival/horror experience. Now the limited save locations made sense not only in a stingy RPG aspect, but in a survivalist "I'm-not-sure-when-I'm-gonna-see-one-of-these-again" way. You realize after 3 pre-scripted enemy encounters against hideous and frustrating frog/snake abominations, 2 CGI interludes, and cascades of ellipses-riddled exposition text, you'd eat live cockroaches for a save point. In many cases, I'd willingly backtrack several minutes to a phone to ensure I saved the game after some boss-event or particularly grueling section of scrubby enemies. The survival mechanics also feel at home in the limited inventory, where you only have so many slots for stuff, and said stuff is never nearly as much as you'd like. More than once already I've found myself in the middle of an intense encounter only to suddenly run out of ammo and be forced to switch to a club. This same scenario is very likely to happen to you as well...Hopefully you didn't stash your club in a chest at the beginning of the game, because if so, you're going to learn the true meaning of backtracking. Also, yes...I've beaten bosses to death with a police baton, anyone else who has played PE is nodding their heads in silent agreement. If nothing else can be said about the main character Aya, at least she can beat unholy genetic monsters to death with a stick. That is worth a golf-clap in my opinion.
Thanks to woefully limited quantities of death-pellets and medicines, every encounter becomes a bit more dire, and within the trappings of the devil-may-care gameplay, every "Game Over" screen might as well read "Eat Me" instead. Despite that, once you get the hang of things and fall into a steady groove, the game will begin to reward you with some of the strangest situations you've ever been a party to. For one, Aya jumps down more holes in this game than Ron Jeremy did in his prime, and none of them lead any place you'd want to go. Pretty much everywhere you do go, you'll have an encounter with the titular character, she'll kick your ass a bit, and then she'll vanish behind a loading screen and leave a rather nasty looking hole. Each time this happens you are given the choice to either "Jump in the hole" or "Forget it", which as far as choice goes, is tantamount to "Jump in the hole" or "Go save the game before you jump in the death hole full of terrible things anyway." Progression is slow and arduous, because that's essentially the point; the game takes a fundamental glee in watching you recoil against a punishing hit and frantically take cover to administer some first aid, which you will do often. It should be noted that the first special power you gain in the game is essentially a healing spell, because the game knows you're going to need the shit out of it. Well, okay, the game doesn't know anything, it's a game...a jumbled set of instructions...all the same, as I play PE, I can't shake the feeling the game is actively trying to crush me, both in-game, and in spirit. This, I think, is an earmark of good game design, when the game engine comes alive and peeks out at you from behind the window-dressing and draws a finger across it's throat. Unfortunately, in this game's case, the engine is a little broken here and there. So instead of subtly pushing you closer and closer to a death wall, it inadvertently shoves you and apologizes by shoving even harder. This is most evident as you draw closer to the conclusion of the game, where the difficulty spikes faster than the heart rate of a teenager at an illegal rave. This section--which also includes a boss rush--may very well cause certain people to raise an extremely intense middle finger to the game over screen and never play again. I'm not speaking in personal terms, I'm just hearing anecdotal stories of such things occurring across the storied history of this game's existence. Of course, all the gamers out there who love the taste of Itagaki's Homemade Oatmeal Cookies might just love this game for that reason alone.
So, I know we are both reading all those squiggles above and thinking I'm pretty much trashing the gameplay, which means the game is--to coin a phrase--gobshite. This is only partially true. While I do think the game-workings are unwieldy, I don't believe it's bad enough to completely derail the experience, and also because the game is genuinely worth playing. Allow me to elaborate.
Graphics/Sound
Many games on the old PSX are...very not pretty...and even some AAA titles of the time have not aged well. Many games relied too heavily on utilizing stock graphics libraries, while others looked like pixel soup with all the muddy textures clashing into each other at odd angles. Parasite Eve is one of the games that got Square's CGI treatment, employing pre-rendered 2D backgrounds brought to life with strategic use of polygonal objects and characters. With the ability to paint any picture they like to use as a backdrop, the immersion is fleshed out in a much broader sense, all while avoiding many of the graphical pitfalls of the era. It's not to say that the characters onscreen don't look like they're being viewed through a serious heat shimmer, because they do, but as in FFVII, the pre-rendered graphics have managed to stand the test of time, and are still pretty to look at. The CGI scenes, despite all the poop I flung at them above, are truly engaging and highly detailed. When you consider that Square now has several feature-length CG animated movies under their belt, it's obvious the PSX era was a way for them to begin stretching their legs. The game has still done some aging though, and the low-resolution polygon characters and repetitive enemies take the experience down a peg or two. Especially when you consider strange, out of place touches such as the "negative exposure" effect that happens when you fall into battle, you realize Parasite Eve is still a nearly 20-year-old game with 20-year-old limitations. All things considered, its ability to pull you in and evoke so many emotions (mostly apprehension, panic, and rage-quitting) via the graphical atmosphere is classic Square. The environments themselves are nicely varied, encompassing a wide range of both indoor and outdoor locales. Camera angles are carefully selected to ensure the greatest cinematic gain, and this aesthetic routinely clashes with playability. Seeing as how this game reaches at the horror genre, many of the camera angles are extreme top-down or oblique shots. This effect is intended to paint a more tense or dramatic scene, but unfortunately, only serves to disorient the player scene-to-scene and make exits and pathways harder to discern. Unfortunately, unlike in FFVII, there are no indicator arrows to show you where exits and other cues are, leading you explore the dark, intentionally shadowy areas unaided. The "eek-factor" is always going to be diminished somewhat if the participant is wishing there were more lights in a scene; not because they're scared, but because they can't tell if they're trying to walk through a door, or a really dark painting. Aside from a few times where this was an issue, for the most part, the levels in the game were hauntingly gorgeous. More than a few times I was physically uneasy about entering a locale based on nothing more than the entrance before me, and for that to be accomplished with a mostly static image is quite a feat.
The music similarly works hard to pull the player into the atmosphere using a score that soars most of the time, but, due to technical limitations, falls flat every once in a while. The music has a distinctly gothic vibe, which counterpoints the modern-day setting of the game nicely. Unfortunately, when designers have to choose between CG animation and Redbook audio in a game like this, music usually takes a backseat to the fireworks. As is the case here, the haunting operatic melodies are undercut by the obvious fact they are poorly mixed synth samples, and the tension in the scene has occasion to be marred by the 90's equivalent of autotune. As you read through an in-game cut-scene, the music warbles forth, cutting itself off with each note change. The end effect is--and bear in mind I'm trying to communicate this sound through my mastery of the written word--"Waaaaaaah- Waaah- Waaaaaaaaa- Wa- Wa- Waaa- Waaaaaaaahhhhhh- Woooooooooooooh- Waa- Waa- Waaaaaa..." The funny thing to me is that people who haven't played this game are reading this thinking "What is this? I don't even..." whereas people who have spent any time at all with PE are either laughing maniacally or facepalming. Such is the magic of this game's musical score. If nothing else, it serves as an illustration that, just as in pop music and fashion taste, if you're sufficiently mediocre, you can still be memorable. Of course, as I mentioned above, I'm picking on one, specific, glaring example, and honestly, most of the time the score is epic, sweeping, and notches in perfectly with the rest of the game. The music is highly versatile, able to adopt high-energy rock themes that accompany fight scenes as easily as it can underscore a touching moment with a delicate ballad. While I wouldn't call the music earth shattering, it is certainly able to get the job done, and with a fair bit of panache to boot. The sound effects are much less overtly stated, but are nicely selected for their ability to signify when something good or bad has happened ingame. Gunshots, the healing jingle, monster death grunts, and picking up a phone receiver are all wonderful sounds. Monster attacks, the heartbeat noise, empty gun clicky-clicky noises, and especially Eve's laugh are all very, very bad sounds. Whether it was intentional or not, the laugh that feels like a cotton swab went in your ear too far is perfectly suited to Eve, a character you would hate even if she was mute. The laugh adds a layer of crackling hot hateglaze that makes even the most punishing boss-rush worth the price of defeating her. I call that good sound.
Story
Like many recent Squeenix titles, the game hinges on a grandiose tale that is propped open with maybe-yes-maybe-no gameplay. The fact that the game begins in an opera house that is immediately engulfed in flames should be one's first clue in this regard. As the scene--complete with late-90's CG animation--unfolded before me, my first thought was "Okay, an opera house completely awash in fire is something I can get behind." SquareSoft has always been known for stories which are both all-encompassing as well as completely confusing. Again, FFVII is a superlative example of this phenomenon, as is PE, where you will get into a battle with an unholy horror while riding a speeding horse-drawn carriage. No, I'm not kidding. I can only imagine how the horses must feel. The beauty in many of Square's stories--particularly earlier ones such as this--is the fact that all the over-the-top nonsense that gets spewed at the player eventually begins to coalesce into an interesting narrative. The true fun, just as in any good story, is watching the pieces fall into place. While Parasite Eve's story is rather linear and short-lived, watching the pieces fall into place in this universe is a grotesque treat. As mentioned above, much of the story is communicated through CGI cutscenes, and while grainy, low-res, and at times gratuitous, they are extremely well made and work to accentuate and enhance the best parts of the plot. They also help to flesh out the "science" of the story, allowing the player an intrascopic view of such lovely happenings as spontaneous human combustion and turning into orange paste.
The truly nice thing about the story in PE is that it eschews the medieval/fantasy setting so many Square-born games seem to reach for, and instead adopts a gritty modern setting. As opposed to some fanciful utopia where a mysterious dark blight threatens to eat happiness or ponies or whatever, Parasite Eve is set in an already overwhelmed modern-day New York where there is already an absence of happiness and ponies. Characters in the game are predominantly occupied with their own lives, which breathes life into them and causes events that happen to them to have a greater impact. While the story only really has time to focus in on the four or five principal characters, it weaves enough of a thread between them to pull everyone together, strengthening the story. While the RPG elements are competent, the horror elements are in full swing and you will witness things that would certainly have gotten you grounded at 15 if your parents had walked in on you playing this. Such things include, but are not limited to maybe-spoilers such as: pregnant monsters, scantily clad female-ish monsters, baby monsters, almost-but-not-quite-tentacle monsters, rivers of human Tang, and any of the other dozens of deformed, lurching abominations this game pits you against. Also, many, many people die in ways that frankly make me cringe, and much of the game's imagery is outright disturbing. In almost every regard, this game is not afraid to go there--not only visually, but thematically--and as a result, only strong constitutions need apply. Luckily, for those willing to take the plunge into the stormy gameplay, the grounded setting paired with jaw-dropping violence make for a wonderfully fun story, and as a result, become a principal reason to play this game. Few games have a story pulpy enough to warrant wading through average gameplay, and this is one of those few. If you enjoy losing yourself in a ridiculous, horrifying, tense tale for a few hours, Parasite Eve is sure to please. If nothing else, it's shorter than a Stephen King novel.
Beer
I'm not going to be nice here. Watching the endless proliferation of "hard" sodas invade the market today is akin to being the unlucky guy living on the westernmost beach in Hawaii back in 1941. Each passing day, another brewery drops their payload of misery on an unsuspecting shelf, forever changing the beer landscape. The novelty was kicked off by the quite good Not Your Father's Root Beer, and as more companies entered the fray, the overall market quality plummeted faster than a Dairy Queen run by high schoolers. Before anyone realized what had happened, the beer aisle had been taken over by Willy Wonka, and every other 6-pack now needs a warning label telling kids that this is daddy's soda, and if you drink it, he'll sell you to those people Liam Neeson fought in Taken. Not that that's really a problem, because if your father drinks 90% of the hard sodas on offer today, you'll have a better life taking your chances on the human black market. Henry's entry into the fray is unfortunately much too late to look like anything but a "me-too" product, and while it fortunately isn't outright terrible, it isn't something I'd order for people I liked either. Being an alcoholic ginger ale, you have already essentially drawn up the Venn diagram where the overlap in the middle is labelled "underage drinkers" who, as a species has a taste for anything with alcohol in it. If a rumor gained traction on social media that skunk musk would get you wasted and was easily available over the counter, I would bet money on the chances that teens everywhere would start turning up with faces that smelled like a Pepe Le Pew mustache ride. While Henry's isn't quite skunk musk, it is still within the "carbonated ballsweat" tier of hard sodas. What else would you expect from a beverage that tells its customers to live life hard-ish?Smell
The smell is basically the first step into an existence you will learn to hate. The odor is what you would get if plants needed to shower all the time but refused. The sickly sweet malt alcohol fuses with the cane sugar and the ginger flavoring to create the olfactory approximation of agent orange. The ginger is most pronounced, but is curled up at the edges by the alcohol and sugar, as if it's been singed by chemical fire. The sugar prickles the nose, and leaves the door open for the malt alcohol to slither in last, where it completes the experience and lurks under all the odors like a fart at a barbeque. There is certainly a turned odor that can't be escaped, and in fact gets deeper as more of the drink is consumed. This is a problem that plagues the drink through its very core, as there is a comparable experience to be had in the taste, feel, and intoxication categories as well. From what it seems, everything on this drink was turned up to eleven, and then sheepishly turned back down to a 7-1/2 right before the party started. This just may be my opinion, but I think it stems in part because this drink is coming from a brewery best known for hoppy IPAs. While Henry Weinhardt may have hipster juice on lock in Oregon, it seems like cheer beer is still a bit of a reach. On a completely unrelated note, "hard" is actually a part of the original brand name, so technically, they have more of a right to use the hotly contested marketing term than anyone else, too bad they can't do anything good with it.
Taste
Remember above where I talked about chemical fire? I hope your tastebuds were paying attention. The first taste is straight-up sugar. I realize that last sentence, while concise and to the point, lacks a certain descriptive flair, so I've come up with a little exercise readers can do at home to more fully illustrate my point: 1. Get a big bag of sugar. 2. Eat it as fast as you can. If you follow those two steps up by sucking on an unwashed ginger root, you have pretty much summed up the taste of Henry's Hard Ginger Ale. Interestingly enough, any truly discernible alcohol taste is absent thanks to the tidal wave of sugar and bitter ginger. The aftertaste is simply a slow, agonizing abatement of the strangely metallic combination, with a very pronounced saccharine bolt right through the center of it, making a follow up drink more of a risk assessment than anything else. The truly unfortunate thing is that this is not uncommon by any means. This is the rule as opposed to the exception, and that is a problem when you actually see how many bottles of these cheap, designer alcohols there are. Everyone is making them, and very few, if any are actually attempting to refine the method. While the current trend is hard soda, it hit previously with mixers, breezers, wine coolers, and Zima. Remember Zima? This is pretty much Zima. Remember the last time you were at a party, holding a Smirnoff Ice and making fun of Zima? Now you do...now you do.
Intoxication
If you're any larger than Kristin Chenoweth, Henry's Ginger Ale will not get you wasted unless you have lots of time and an empty bladder. Unfortunately for pretty much everyone, 4.2% abv is barely enough to get a newborn kitten drunk, much less a full grown sorority girl. This drink is created for people who like to drink, but don't like to get drunk, but also don't like to be picked on for drinking O'Douls...so...sorority girls. What will happen with this drink as more bottles are consumed is a worn-out feeling, accompanied by a lack of enthusiasm for pretty much anything. Instead of getting you drunk, the soda seems to be stealing your soul, and in my opinion, this is the only remotely ginger-like thing about this drink. Otherwise, if you foolishly take this drink barhopping, you'll quickly notice that your energy is winding down like a toy monkey and before long, you'll be spacing out to a commercial about motor oil in a bar that only gets two stars on Yelp. This is the rocky, shame-ridden path Henry's Ginger Ale will take you on. If you insist on traversing the path, you'll begin to feel your concentration fuzz out before your coordination follows suit. The horrifying thing is the slowness at which these changes take place. The alcohol creeps in on you steadily, and instead of being fun to watch, it's like being waist deep in a pond that is quickly freezing around you. Any interest you may have in the process is replaced by discomfort, and the longer you watch, the more you realize the entire situation is endangering you and your livelihood. Tragically, much like the freezing pond, once you come to terms with what's going on, you're already too far gone to do anything about it.
Feel
The feelings this drink brings are equal parts boredom and regret; boredom going down, and regret all the way through until the next morning. The drink is carbonated, but just barely, and the noticeable lack of bubbles makes the entire affair of drinking completely about the taste. With no refreshing zip to keep the drink mixing in your mouth, the liquid hits your tongue and simply rests there like a lazy panhandler. Because of this, the drink is syrupy and cloying, quickly fatiguing the tastebuds and making the thought of drinking a second bottle of this a shortlived one. About the time you're considering that second round, the first bottle of Henry's has found its way into your gut, regrouped, and launched a campaign of steady unease against you that will last well into the evening. This is the massive amounts of sugar and the malt liquor essentially decorating their new home and deciding on where to hang your new ulcer. Now, there is no argument that alcohol in any form is pretty bad for you, there are no "fortified" beers, and with good reason. I don't believe that anyone honestly drinks beer, wine, or liquor with the impression that they are doing right by their bodies. That being said, I doubt anyone goes to the bars on Saturday with the express purpose of hating life on Sunday. Unfortunately, a poor choice in drinks usually translates to poor choices in life, and catching any one of your friends with a Henry's Hard anything in their hands is a testament to both. Then again, if their boyfriend's name happens to be Henry, there's not much to be done in that case but to apologize while staring at the floor and seeing yourself out.
The Matchup
In this review, I looked at two items which are both very challenging to their user, but for completely different reasons. While Parasite Eve aims to prod and poke the player, spurring them onto greater feats and coaxing them into a story that is dark and rewarding, Henry's is little more than a toxicity test. Parasite Eve and Henry's both like to take a cheap shot or two at you, but the difference is that PE will reward your tenacity whereas Henry's will continue punching until you either pass out, or stop caring. A properly motivated gamer can eventually overcome Parasite Eve, pushing steadfastly through the legions of mutated nastiness. On the other hand, the only way to overcome the blight that is Henry's is to stay as far away from that section of the cooler as possible. I've certainly learned my lesson.
Cheers/Game on.