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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion (at least in certain circles), Parasite Eve was a random little distraction of a game, with no real redeeming qualities of its own, which was bundled with a short demo movie of the unbelievably hotly anticipated Final Fantasy 8. One would assume that a decent number of people may also have passed it over due to the particularly unusual for the time ESRB rating of M for "Mature Sexual Themes."
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Parasite Eve was, by the standards of the time, excessively short for an RPG, easily polished off in under 20 hours. It also featured painfully slow movement of your character, and one rather counter intuitive mechanic (a gun with extra bullets fired per round actually divided the base damage amongst those shots, so what looks like a massive damage upgrade if moved to your favorite weapon actually just slowed you down). It also carried the burden of being based (loosely) on a Japanese horror novel (since made into an amusingly cheesy movie). It also hasn't particularly aged well, coming from the FF7 era of visuals, featuring vaguely clay-looking pre-rendered backgrounds and cutscenes, and rather harsh, sharp polygonal character models.
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Why I Like It Anyway: First off, and this is rather important for any RPG, Parasite Eve has a well-polished battle system. Essentially, we're taking the system used by Chrono Trigger (which, in turn, was a refinement of the Final Fantasy series' with the addition of attacks with areas of effect that actually took into account where on screen a given target or group thereof was), and adding the ability to move, and thus dodge attacks to the mix. It worked rather nicely, and stayed fresh throughout the length of the game (the relatively short length helping there of course).
Speaking of performing some additional tweaks on concepts introduced in Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve has a rather interesting take on the whole "New Game +" premise. Starting over, you are forced to start again at level 1, and lose the vast majority of your equipment, but you get to carry over a single weapon and piece of armor (which can be renamed while you're at it to whatever you want), and receive a massive bonus of improvement points to either spend on your own stats or those of your equipment, along with any points left over from the last pass through.
This brings us to another feature. Parasite Eve has a rather fun little weapon and armor customization system. Each piece of equipment has, on top of its base stats (damage, range, ammo, which can each be upgraded by spending improvement points gained from combat), some number of slots often containing special little extras. Using special one-shot items scattered throughout the game, you can move these from weapon to weapon, eventually building up to, for instance, a pistol that lets you act twice per round, does splash damage to nearby targets, can fire 50 shots without needing to reload, and do the same damage as, say, a rocket launcher. Always fun that.
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The setting is a bit of a nice change of pace too. The entire game is set in a fairly realistic, modern day Manhattan, in late December. As refreshing as it is to have recognizable environments over the standard caves and castles, we have an extra added bonus of evoking strong memories of Ghostbusters 2 throughout the game. Particularly when the big climactic showdown takes place in the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty, covered in pink slime.
Finally, for those still put off by the brevity of the game, we have one of the most daunting little extra challenges ever (for the time) in the form of the Chrystler Building. It more or less fills the role of the obligatory 100 floor randomly generated optional dungeon, but without technically being random (although it certainly looks the part), is a bit more forgiving than most about leaving to take a break, and rather than just recycling elements from earlier in the game as a distraction, we have a few unique boss fights on the way up, followed by the proper "good ending" of the game at the very top.
Oh, and as a little aside, after all these years, I really feel the need to discuss this little "Mature Sexual Themes" label on the back of the case. I have never understood the logic behind that one. Giving it an M, that makes sense. It's full of cutting edge pre-rendered cut scenes of people and animals melting into puddles, bursting into flame, and messily transforming into freakish monsters. The mouse from early in the game in particular stands out. It still looks great by today's standards, and an awful lot of progress was made in the intervening 10 years. Still, we don't have "M for Melting People" we have "M for Mature Sexual Themes." I suppose there's two things we could mean by that. We could mean there's nudity, but the closest we ever get to that is the last inset image we have here. Now, granted, we have what can pretty easily be called a pair of breasts on display here (actually, were this screen of higher quality you could probably count a good half dozen at least), but not only do they lack nipples (which is a major criterion for some reason), they aren't so much attached to a person as they are a big lumpy, veiny fleshy wall with all sorts of fertility idol evoking lumps, and arms, and the one relatively human head. Now, sure, in some circumstances, this would be a controversial sort of image, but this is the final boss of a mid-90s Japanese RPG final boss. This is par for the course. Not a lot of people remember it, but there was a period in time when every single game ended with the main villain (or the giant space flea from nowhere) turning into some sort of half-goopy-wall-half-naked-girl-in-a-suggestive-pose. None of the other dozens of games to do it ever got slapped with an M (and trust me, plenty were worse than this), so that can't be it. Besides, we're saying "suggestive themes" here, not "nudity" so that's barking up the wrong tree. Any scenes when two characters exchange some lewd innuendo? Not even close.
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I've had a good decade to mull this one over, and honestly, this is the best theory I can offer up. Near the end, there's this whole bit where the big nasty monster freak you're up against the whole time gets it into her head that her current body is eventually going to fall apart on it for somewhat convoluted reasons, and the only solution she can find to the problem is to have a kid. Going about this the traditional way wouldn't really work because anyone who gets within a certain range of her besides the main character bursts into flame, so she smashes her way into a fertility clinic to raid the sperm banks (off camera for what it's worth). Technically speaking, yeah, I suppose visiting a fertility clinic is something one could call a "mature sexual theme" but it's really not the sort of thing people mean when they use the term. It's either that, or it's all the promotional artwork of the main character in slutty poses out there.
So there you have it. I'm still not saying Parasite Eve is a fantastic game by any means, but if you ever spot a nice cheap used copy of it, it's fun enough to grab.
Oh yes, and a little word of warning. All this diamond in the rough talk of mine only applies to the original Parasite Eve. PE2 remains to this day the single most offensively terrible game I've ever had the displeasure of playing from a credible developer. Avoid at all costs.
