![mitochondrial eve parasite eve mitochondrial eve parasite eve](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/parasiteeve/images/8/86/MelissaBurningStage.png)
She melts a clutch of concert goers into a single gelatinous mass that looks like King Kong if he were made out of SunnyD. The last time you ever see more than a handful of people in the city is when Eve assaults yet another crowd on Christmas Day. Unlike similar schlock like Darkman, though, the game just keeps mutating like one of Eve’s beasts, escalating into odder scenarios as Aya herself keeps getting more and more trapped in the city.Įve is actually the embodiment of a sentient, evolved group of mitochondria - the engine in living cells - that are trying to overthrow the tyrannical rule of the human nucleus.
![mitochondrial eve parasite eve mitochondrial eve parasite eve](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/parasiteeve/images/1/1c/Rat1.png)
Half urban isolation meets explosion fest like The Rock and half Clive Barker-ian body horror, it really does feel like a vintage piece of cheese pulled right off of USA’s Up All Night with Gilbert Gottfried. If it stopped there and Aya just had to track down Eve in New York, fighting off mutating creatures as she went, Parasite Eve would just be another eerie high concept action horror fitting of its era. If painter Patrick Nagel and The Babadook director Jennifer Kent were in charge of crafting the worst Freudian anxiety nightmare you’d ever have, it would still be less outlandish than the beginning of Parasite Eve. That’s also when the rats in the building start turning into hog-sized freaks with three-pronged whip tails that shoot fire. Her arms twist and extend into dark claws, her legs are replaced by a curving, coarse tail as she floats in mid-air ranting about how the mitochondria are starting a revolution. The singer then warps into Eve, our monster antagonist. This is one of Parasite Eve’s only scenes where New York is populated beyond Aya and her allies from the 17th Precinct and everyone happens to be on fire.
![mitochondrial eve parasite eve mitochondrial eve parasite eve](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K0l2OR0NEXo/TvW1JpQrgaI/AAAAAAAADM8/LHpVcAMgmGA/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/%25E0%25B8%25AA%25E0%25B8%25B9%25E0%25B8%2595%25E0%25B8%25A3%25E0%25B9%2580%25E0%25B8%2581%25E0%25B8%25A1+The+3rd+Birthday+PSP.png)
They arrive at Carnegie Hall for an opera, but as the show begins with a wailing, wordless song, everyone in the theater save Aya and the singer on stage starts to burn. On Christmas Eve in 1997, NYPD detective Aya Brea goes on a date with an overeager man who’s never named. In trying to make a shorter, more digestible delivery system for its technological prowess, Square produced something weirder than anything they’d made before. Parasite Eve was an attempt to streamline the concept of a role-playing game - strategic, evocative games that take dozens of hours to unfold their action and plot - so it could more seamlessly integrate with the lushly animated, Pixar short-style story sequences that Square was revolutionizing on the PS1. (Is it a movie? Is it one of those VHS board games? These were valid questions in the ‘90s and they still are unless you’re the sort of person that immediately understands what “RPG” stands for.) That awkward moniker was a mission statement. Square called it a “cinematic RPG,” a weird genre signifier that raises more questions than it answers. That’s the New York in Parasite Eve.ĭeveloped by SquareSoft and released in 1998 for the original PlayStation, Parasite Eve remains an eminently playable, bizarre experiment as beguiling as its setting. New York at rest feels like a dream space made flesh, a place both alien and familiar, isolating and enveloping. All the speed and fury of 8 million people pushing and yelling between the cars and the sirens falls away into a rumbling susurrus, half noise and half feeling. It’s eerie the first time you experience it, coming home in the small hours or walking out the door before the sun comes over the East River. Everything slows for a while, neighborhood by neighborhood, the city’s cardiovascular system easing down just like a human body at the end of the day. It rests fitfully, ready to rise at the crash of a car, the wail and fade of ambulance sirens mixing with the sharp bleat of drunk laughter filtering up from the sidewalk at 2 a.m., but it does in fact slumber. Parasite Eve knows the truth: New York sleeps.