The 3rd Birthday
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The 3rd Birthday Reviews
The 3rd Birthday
Back in 1999 (well, 1998 in Japan), the first Parasite Eve game was released. And it was a doozy; graphically, it was a step ahead for the PSOne, as it mixed in realistic locales with both classic turn-based gameplay reminiscent of Final Fantasy III/VI and some fun gun battles. It wasn't a shooter, but a horror-RPG with guns, and a damn cool one at that. And the main character Aya Brea - before characters like Jade from Beyond Good & Evil and Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 - proved that a female protagonist in the gaming world could be strong and realistic instead of the original Lara Croft, whose back should probably have snapped like a twig from being so top-heavy. Aya Brea started her career life as a New York cop (and the only one not to burst into flames while fighting her evil sister), but here she's a part of a group known as CTI: the Counter Twisted Investigation Team. See, the world Aya marches into is filled with the Twisted, which are essentially a race of biological monsters roaming loose in different areas of a nearly-destroyed New York City. What she does to stop them is go back in time using her ability to Overdive, which essentially possesses someone in the time period she needs to inhabit and blows the hell out of 'em with the biggest guns she can collect.
The 3rd Birthday
This is not Parasite Eve III. Yes, it looks a whole lot like Parasite Eve, it has nasty gooey Parasite Eve-looking monsters, it does the Parasite Eve action-game-meets-RPG thing, and it stars a leggy blonde named Aya Brea, just like Parasite Eve. But it is not Parasite Eve III, and the Square Enix legal department resents the implication. No matter what it’s called, this is a pretty decent 3D shooter, and there aren’t so many of those on the PSP. That singularity helps overshadow some of the game’s stranger little quirks. This maybe-sequel begins the same way Parasite Eve did, with giant nasty slime-beasts pulling a train into New York City. Then it takes off in a different direction—a year after the disaster, Aya is part of a shady campaign to retroactively save the city. By loading herself in a widget called “Overdive,” she can take over the bodies of people in the past and try to do a better job than they managed the first time around. In gameplay terms, this works like a cross between Gears of War and Omikron or Messiah. Aya can hop back and forth between any of the “divable” characters in her immediate area, who handily tend to be National Guard and Special Forces troops with lots of big monster-whacking guns.
The 3rd Birthday Review
Fans of Parasite Eve reserve a special place in their memory banks for Aya Brea. She's been the series' protagonist since a time when Square Enix was still two different entities. In the late '90s Square developed the series for PS1 based on novels of the same name. Aya took the lead role as an American detective at the centre of an outbreak caused by mutations in DNA, and later, in Parasite Eve II, joined a branch of the FBI dedicated to taking out the creatures that had spawned in the onslaught.3rd Birthday's Aya is a 39-year-old with a face so young it's like she's been hermetically sealed in an oxygen chamber for the last twelve years. In fact, her own "mitochondrial DNA" has stunted changes in her body and kept it preserved in its 20-year-old state. Also, it's unlocked new abilities within her. The resulting super-Aya is the reason the game is only superficially a fairly standard third-person shooter compared to the RPG focus of the original title.Yes, the crux of the action revolves around more gun-centric gameplay than either of the two preceding games.
GamePro
03/2011
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Review: The 3rd Birthday
It's a decent enough third-person shooter, but The 3rd Birthday's muddled multi-genre mechanics and convoluted story do little to make it a must-own. Have you ever, after consuming a piece of media -- be it book, music, movie, TV show, game, what-have-you -- found yourself wondering "just who was this made for?" Usually a creator has a specific audience in mind for their work, and they'll cater to this audience -- and if the work is of exceptional quality, it'll come to find additional appeal far outside its intended sphere. These days, however, marketing departments are so obsessed with wide demographic appeal that they will insist on additions and changes to a product to the point where it becomes a watered-down mess of half-baked elements that appeals to no one, much less its original audience. I mention this because The 3rd Birthday feels like a game designed entirely by the marketing committee at Square-Enix: a confused mishmash of popular genres, nostalgia, pandering, and trying to appeal to as many international game markets as possible. So hey, remember Parasite Eve?
The 3rd Birthday Review
The long-awaited return of Parasite Eve, ambiguously titled 'The 3rd Birthday', is a welcome one. The third title in the series, fans will get the most out of the smaller character cameos and setting details. New players shouldn't fret too much if you haven't played the previous games though; Square Enix provides a lot of optional background to pour over that plug the gaps. More critically though, each game features entirely different gameplay slants - with a dense RPG backbone blended with third-person action in this instalment. Manhattan just can't catch a break these days. Aya Brea, hero of the original titles and Square Enix cult-favourite from the PSOne era, is back in the Big Apple, which has been torn apart in a terrific CG opening sequence. As the game-proper begins, we discover a year has passed and humanity is in a dire state. Aya, pulled from the rubble and now without memory, is tasked with travelling back in time to prevent the outbreak spreading. The expanded universe of Parasite Eve now incorporates a strange new genetic threat – a gigantic infestation of heinous tentaclular beasts known as The Twisted – and Aya has a new ability at her disposal to stop them in their tracks -- and no, it's not her ability flash a lot of butt cheek.
The 3rd Birthday Review
The 3rd Birthday is a conflicted, confused game that can't seem to decide what, in fact, it actually is. Granted, it plays well; it looks gorgeous; and the soundtrack is exceptional. Look deeper, though, and you'll be hard-pressed to figure out exactly what 3rd Birthday is trying to accomplish. Is it a sequel or a new work entirely? Square Enix is downplaying its connections to the Parasite Eve games, and even the title gives no clue to The 3rd Birthday's lineage. Yet for all intents and purposes, it actually is a sequel, not a game that happens to star a familiar character. Maybe the lack of "Parasite Eve" in the title is a licensing issue (the original Parasite Eve was a Japanese novel), or maybe Square feared that prospective newcomers would be frightened away by the idea of a sequel to a series that hasn't been touched in a decade. Whatever the case, "The 3rd Birthday" as a name does a terrible job of communicating both the game's heritage and its content. It's better suited for a birthday cake-baking simulator for little girls, not an action-horror game that begins with a bunch of concertgoers being violently pulped like balloons filled with blood. Then again, maybe the game is best appreciated by people who have no familiarity with its predecessors.
The 3rd Birthday Really (Preview)
On Christmas Eve, I embarked on a quest to save New York City from horrible mutant monsters. In fact, my efforts encompassed three different Christmas Eves. Specifically, on Christmas Eve 2010, I began playing The 3rd Birthday (the PSP sequel to 1998 PlayStation classic Parasite Eve), a game that revolves around heroine Aya Brea's efforts on Christmas Eve 2013 to project her consciousness into the minds of people who witnessed an otherworldly invasion of NYC on Christmas Eve 2012. The multiple layers of parallel holidays isn't really important to the game experience, but it was a nice little touch that made playing The 3rd Birthday a little more memorable. Of course, this little bit of synchronicity only worked out for people playing the Japanese import of The 3rd Birthday; the game won't be released abroad until (presumably) sometime in March or so. So its initial release date was a trivial little touch that really only benefits the game's Japanese audience -- but in a way, that seems like a fitting metaphor for the game itself. Parasite Eve always came across as an attempt by Square to develop an RPG for American tastes.
The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
The Parasite Eve series has made a name for itself as a shape-shifter. The original title, released on the PlayStation in 1998, was rooted in the role-playing genre. Its sequel, Parasite Eve II, made a move towards action survival horror when it landed two years later. After an extended hiatus, this much-loved franchise is making its return, again in a new format. Originally developed as a game for mobile phones in Japan, the title has changed gear to find a new home on Sony's PlayStation Portable handheld and is being reborn as a third-person shooter with tactical elements. During a recent trip to Square Enix in Japan we got our hands on a chunk of the single-player campaign and took Aya Brea and friends for a spin around an infested New York city. It opens with a beautiful (and lengthy) cutscene introduction filling in some of the story gaps between games and setting the scene for the gameplay. We were blown away by the visual quality of the animation, and left wondering if this was a console game ported down to a handheld. Though the version we saw hadn't yet been localised for English, we had no trouble coming to terms with the basics as we were introduced to the action.
The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
After a ten year hiatus, tough NYPD cop turned FBI agent Aya Brea is back in a spinoff title within the Parasite Eve universe. Originally announced as a mobile game, The 3rd Birthday is still in the first stages of unveiling, and, as such, little is known about the narrative or the condition of the world Brea inhabits. What we do know is that an event unfolds in Manhattan, flooding the streets with creatures known as \"the Twisted.” A response team -- the CTI -- is formed to investigate the matter and dispose of the threat. Brea is brought on for her unique understanding of such situations, in addition to being the only means of opposition. A power awakens within her on her \"third birthday” that can be used as a weapon. In the first playable Japanese demo at TGS, the scene begins with Brea sandwiched amongst throngs of civilians at an indoor concert. Reminiscent of the event at the New York opera house that started Brea on this journey in the original Parasite Eve, a creature erupts from center stage, breaking a threshold that welcomes the Twisted to the Big Apple. The title moves significantly faster than the original game, dropping traditional survival horror and RPG tropes in favor of a more action-oriented approach.
The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
While The 3rd Birthday may be the third game in the Parasite Eve series, this action game has been described as a spin-off, with significant enough changes from the previous games to garner a new title. At the 2010 Tokyo Game Show, Square Enix released a new trailer and had a playable demo of The 3rd Birthday, where we could step into the shoes of Aya Brea (and others) to get a feel for how the game plays. The protagonist, Aya, is a CTI special agent in New York City who has the unique ability to use a system called "overdrive," which allows her to inhabit the body of someone else. The demo set us up in Episode One: The Past, where Aya is at a dance club right before an attack. It is December 24, 2012, and the enemy is known as the Twisted, an organic life-form that seems to spawn out of portals and come up from underground. Once the club cleared out, we were thrust into what seemed like a boss battle with one of the grotesque creatures from the trailer. At a glance, it looked like an overgrown piranha, but with long tentacles and a huge mouth that shoots harmful, spiked explosives. Thankfully, there are well-placed barricades in front of the stage during the fight, which you can press up against to shield yourself from harm.
The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
I don't think Square Enix has actually come out and said why they're not calling The 3rd Birthday a Parasite Eve game; presumably it has something to do with licensing. But a rose by any other name and all that. Call it what they will, The 3rd Birthday is absolutely the third entry in the Parasite Eve series in spirit. That much should probably be obvious from the fact that the heroine is Parasite Eve leading lady Aya Brea, and a brief test play at Tokyo Game Show 2010 drives that fact home with true finality. The 3rd Birthday demo features what appears to be the first mission of the game, and it's a deliberate echo of the original Parasite Eve's opening. At a concert, Aya finds herself embroiled in an otherworldly attack by freakish bio-monsters called the Twisted. Dispatching the beast with the aid of a military detachment, Aya makes her way through nightclubs, hallways, and banquet rooms that have been overrun by more Twisted. Eventually, she encounters a particularly deadly strain of Twisted -- the demo's boss -- and must put it down while avoiding its speedy attacks. Unlike its predecessors, The 3rd Birthday is a third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter.
The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
The way that Yoshinori Kitase refers to The 3rd Birthday as a "new series" at the start of our chat in Cologne, Germany, is interesting to me -- and I make it a point to have him explain how he views it in relation to the Parasite Eve series as a whole. While he's quick to state that Square Enix doesn't have anything officially in the works beyond The 3rd Birthday just yet, he could very well see the Parasite Eve series continuing on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the future -- in fact, you get the sense that he very much assumes it will. But for now, all of his attention is on Aya's 3rd Birthday, as it's called, which is the celebration of her return in a third game -- because after such a hiatus, it's significant enough to fans, and even to Square Enix, to see her back. What originally started as a small cell phone project two years ago has evolved into a full-blown PSP title, with many of Square's biggest talents on the project, including Kitase himself (though now he serves as producer on many other titles as well). Kitase demos the game for me, showing me some of the basics we'd seen in the past, and explaining to how this Parasite Eve game is far more action-oriented.
Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday (Preview)
The third entry in the Parasite Eve series -- simply titled "The 3rd Birthday" -- has had a long and rocky development cycle, like a lot of other Square Enix games. At least this game has a good reason for its slow arrival. About two years ago, it shifted platforms from mobile phones to PSP. You can certainly understand Square's thinking: 1998's Parasite Eve was a game designed to appeal to western audiences, and being launched on phones would have practically guaranteed failure in the U.S. and Europe. On PSP, it has a decent chance of success internationally. That being said, it's a huge relief to see the game in action, for real, at long last. After years of teaser trailers and full-motion video promos, sitting down with director Hajime Tabata and art director Isamu Kamikokuryo at E3 2010 for a guided tour of the game was a long-awaited chance to see what's next for series heroine Aya Brea. Though 3rd Birthday wasn't playable by anyone but its director (probably due to its wildly unbalanced difficulty; Tabata died several times in the course of the demo) and wasn't even shown publicly outside of a brief video in Square's booth reel, the game is running on PSP hardware and should be playable in a few months at Tokyo Game Show So how does 3rd Birthday play?
Prices
| Retailer | Information | Prices | |
|---|---|---|---|
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The 3rd Birthday | $13.83 | See it |
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The 3rd Birthday | $16.1 | See it |
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Video Games: The 3rd Birthday (PlayStation Portable) | $19.99 | See it |
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The 3rd Birthday Psp Video Game | $21.6 | See it |
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The 3rd Birthday (Ultimate Hits) [Japan Import] | $38.5 | See it |
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The 3rd Birthday [Japan Import] | $52.5 | See it |
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