The Cinematic Nature of Parasite Eve

Square's theatrical RPG was a bizarre evolutionary dead end in video game storytelling.

Parasite Eve is, after fifteen years, a forgotten footnote in the great video game canon. Yoko Shimomura's soundtrack endures lo these many years later, but otherwise it's just another of those wacky experiments from Squaresoft's golden age; a piece of trivia for RPG fetishists and PS1 buffs. Failure is the game's greatest legacy. Not as a game -- it's actually pretty great to play, even now -- but as a model for telling stories in games. Director Takashi Tokita and his team called their game a "cinematic RPG," an explicit attempt to meld the flash of film with what was at the time video game's best storytelling tools. It didn't work, but it was a necessary evolutionary step, fitting for a game that is itself all about evolution.

The common complaint about most story-based video games goes like this: I'd like the game if it wasn't for all the cut-scenes. As video games scrambled tooth and nail to tell stories, they naturally turned to the language of film for creating human drama. How else would you get two people in the game to talk to each other naturally? If you leave the player in control while the characters around them speak naturally, the scene loses its dramatic impact. Think about poor Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2 trying to have a serious chat about the miseries of life under the combine as Gordon Freeman spastically spins in circles, crowbarring everything in sight as he roots around for ammo like a pig for truffles. So the formula has gone like this: play a little game, stop for a brief cinema while the characters talk or there's a big action set piece impossible within the parameters of the game, play some more, watch a long cinema at the end. Technology has improved the formula, smoothing the transition by keeping the game's characters and models consistent across cut-scenes and play, but it's been largely the same since 1998 benchmarks like Metal Gear Solid.
Parasite Eve, another alumni of 1998, saw a different path. The story: On Christmas Eve in 1997, the mitochondria in the cells of New York City's citizens revolt, possessing an opera singer, taking the name Eve, and mutating people into freaky monsters or orange goo. The mysterious cop Aya Brea is the only one who can stop her from ending civilization/ruining Christmas.

Square's other games, particularly director Tokita's previous works like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV, had proven that movie-style scenes complete with spoken dialogue and dramatic staging weren't necessary to make a great game story. Simple, static backgrounds, text dialogue, music, and simple blocking were enough to hook players. Consider scenes from Chrono Trigger like when hero Crono is placed on trial. It's an impressionistic sequence, with slower pacing and simpler dialogue than you'd find in a movie or television, but it works marvelously.
Rather than throw out that storytelling style, Squaresoft kept the format in Parasite Eve. Most scenes with NYPD Detective Aya Brea, her partner Daniel Dollis, and the sinister Eve show characters moving in simple, exaggerated gestures with text dialogue. Instead of using the PlayStation technology to do voiced dialogue sequences, Square added drama to these scenes by adding small touches of animation and flare to highly detailed static backgrounds. These were the same sort of pre-rendered backgrounds seen in Square's recent hit Final Fantasy VII, but rather than massive vistas, these were smaller, more intimate places. One early scene has Brea and Dollis driving in a police cruiser to a crime scene, and the flashing police lights and blurred background mimicking a city streets rushing by add a dramatic flare while maintaining the slower pace of RPG stories.
Eve borrows the scenery activity of film, but not the human element. When Aya is exploring the New York on foot, fighting genetic mutations, most of the backgrounds are completely static. Chinatown, the Brooklyn Bridge, all of them look like frozen paintings with Aya running over them. Had Square kept a consistent presentation, throughout, Eve's silent story might have been more effective.
Consistent presentation wasn't really the point, though, as the other half of Eve's storytelling style demonstrates. Also borrowed from Final Fantasy VII are Eve's approximately 20 minutes of pre-rendered cut-scenes, action sequences drawn in a more advanced graphical style than the in-game characters and locales. Unlike Final Fantasy, Parasite Eve tried peppered these big payoff moments more liberally throughout the game. The intended effect was to have more dramatic peaks and valleys more often, over the course of the game's roughly seven-hour run time. Even with text-based dialogue and mostly still sets, the effect would be a film-like pace filtered through the lens of a familiar role-playing game.
Parasite Eve's little movies don't wow like they did fifteen years ago, but there is a strange beauty about them now. Something about the smooth-lined characters and jerky, rubbery monsters has an otherworldly effect that brings out the personality of the rough polygonal characters you see while you're playing, not unlike Yoshitaka Amano's delicate concept art did for the original Final Fantasy games. No matter how appealing they are, though, they ultimately don't fit in with the actual pace of the game. In the field, Aya, the game's strategic fights, and the pace through would-be "dungeons" like central park and the subway system are all simply too slow to be relied on to keep up a dramatic pace. The game's most cinematic elements, its CG movies, take away from the more subtle cinematic qualities of the animation in dialogue scenes.
So Parasite Eve was an evolutionary dead end as far as storytelling methods go, and Square seemed to realize it quickly as Parasite Eve 2 was paced more like the old Resident Evil games than its predecessor. The game shouldn't stay forgotten, though. Freed of technological restrictions, there's something to be said for a style of game that switches wildly between presentations like Parasite Eve does between its CG cut-scenes, slightly-animated story scenes, and its slow play. Games, after all, aren't movies. Tools that aren't effective when trying to mimic movies could be used to tell stories unique to video games if used correctly. Why else do people still love the way Blizzard builds CG cinemas into games like Diablo III? Square may never revisit these ideas, but today's game makers would do well to re-examine the peculiar failure that was Parasite Eve.