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Parasite Eve: The Third Birthday TGS hands-on impression
By Heath | September 20, 2010 at 7:07 am
Aya Brea is back in her long-awaited third game, The Third Birthday. While not technically going under the Parasite Eve moniker, let’s be honest, everyone knows that’s what this is.
The controls took some time to get used to, perhaps because I’d had played like 400 other PSP games that day. As an action RPG set in New York City, the most basic actions in The Third Birthday are aiming and shooting firearms, and Aya will be doing lots of both. At any given time in the demo, she was carrying four different guns and some hand grenades. The weapon variety was good, and some certain situations definitely called for one gun over the others. She had a shotgun, a machine gun, a pistol, and I’ll tell ya straight up kids, I forget that fourth gun. She’d aim with R and fire with square, or lob a grenade by holding O. Changing weapons was done with L + the face button representing the desired new weapon.
When in danger, the best survival tool for Aya was “overdive.” Not “overdrive” like a car; no, it’s called “overdive” like when you try to impress your friends at the pool but end up doing a bellyflop. With this, Aya searches for a new body to take control of, and sends life force into him/her, and the player basically has a new Aya. The player does not take control of the actual person whom Aya is inhabiting, but rather the same Aya Brea with the same aesthetics and inventory as before. The subjects of Aya’s body borrowing were most often ally soliders — guys who looked like they were from some kind of special forces unit. These guys were providing handy backup fire, but monsters could also kill them, which is somewhat uncommon for NPC allies in RPGs. Here, it came as a welcome curveball.
The visuals were good, as it was one of only a handful of PSP games I could comfortably play while looking at the TV screen instead of the PSP screen. (With Danboru [Tiny Battlers], for example, I had to look at the PSP screen because the upper screen just did not look right. With The Third Birthday, I could look at either, comfortably.) There were some rough edges, however. Most things in the environment and on Aya looked great, but sometimes there were those pixelated, jaggy edges that occasionally plague games.
There wasn’t much story shown in the parts of the playable demo I got to tackle, but the trailer that accompanied it showed some pretty serious stuff going down.
The Third Birthday was an overall fun game with a decent bit of potential. It comes out this December in Japan.
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Topics: Parasite Eve: The Third Birthday, Previews, Tokyo Game Show 2010