P
arasite 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.
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