3rd Birthday really, really doesn’t even count. Objectively, the name alone isn’t Parasite Eve 3, meaning it’s just a random terrible game with a fanfic level story worse than most of the worst fanfics ever written. Subjectively, the game is so blatantly and deliberately insulting toward both Parasite Eve and Aya Brea that it doesn’t deserve to be called part of the Parasite Eve franchise even if Squeenix says it is.
It’s like if all new writers are given permission to write Lord of the Rings books, radically changing characters in ways Tolkien clearly would’ve hated, but people insisted that those new books count. Yeah, in a very technical sense they might, but realistically they really don’t and shouldn’t count as LotR books.
People who have the rights to work on something using that opportunity to deliberately ruin the source material shouldn’t be given the false legitimacy of people saying what they did is valid. It should be called and treated as exactly what it is, a bad fanfic game that has no bearing on the actual canon.
This is stream of consciousness, open and direct jotting down of things I’ve said multiple times. I might miss some important details, or even get some of my facts wrong because of how much time has passed, so please verify anything that sounds off (and probably even things that don’t). This thing goes long and has pictures and videos, so enter my rant at your peril!
I complain a lot about 3rd Birthday. It’s the biggest complaint I level about Squeenix, every single time. Many people don’t know why it’s such a big deal to me, and the ones that do think I talk about it way too much to the point of annoyance.
I need to give a lot of important background. This is Aya Brea.
Aya Brea was a badass. As a tough, smart cop, she didn’t shy away from a fight, and she didn’t need anyone to force her into it. She saw a problem, she went after it. Her own innate drive brought her to risk her life and do the right thing, saving the whole world in the process. Not only that, she cared enough to take in a clone of herself in as her own daughter when she could’ve just left her. Aya Brea was one of the best, coolest, most badass female protagonists of the PS1 era.
This is “Aya Brea” according to 3rd Birthday.
That is not Aya Brea. 3rd Birthday went out of its way to not only overly sexualize and fetishize her in the design, it also went out of its way to infantilize her in the story. And I’m about to elaborate on exactly how.
There’s a hell of a lot more to how Aya was sexualized and fetishized than shown here. 3rd Birthday comes with a “clothes-ripping-off” mechanic. When this mechanic became a scandal, the producer, Yoshinori Kitase, claimed the mechanic was there to be “plausible and realistic.” One problem: according to the game’s story, Aya is possessing various soldiers on the field. What the player sees is just her “ghost.” There is absolutely no reason for the mechanic to exist other than sex appeal.
As for that maid costume up there, it is one of many costumes, some more sexualized than others. There are two important details about those costumes to cover. First, Famitsu preview spreads leading up to 3rd Birthday’s release in Japan made whatever new fetish outfit they wanted to highlight that month into the central piece of each article. This was after Kitase’s claim about the “clothes-ripping-off” mechanic. Second, the voices and movements change depending on costume in the Japanese version. Sounds pretty cool, right? Yeah, it loses its coolness factor when it involves Aya saying incredibly submissive lines while dressed as a maid.
Last piece on the sexualization bracket, just to round it out: months before 3rd Birthday’s release, the team claimed there would be no shower scene. Then, shortly before the game hit stores in Japan…. they added it. And this is the shower scene they added.
That is literally verging on softcore porn. The gratuitous angles and shots, the grunts, the foggy shower door, it’s literally nothing but reducing Aya to fap fuel. Compare that with the Parasite Eve II shower scene for yourselves.
That’s just one half of the equation. Let’s get to the other: infantilization.
From the start, 3rd Birthday “Aya” is not allowed to be her own independent woman. She’s operating under the thumb of a man named Hyde Bohr, a man who it turns out was manipulating an amnesiac “Aya” quite easily given how submissive she is to command. When she goes into combat, she’s absolutely terrified about having to face monsters. That is not Aya. The badass Aya faced down the likes of Mitochondria Eve without batting an eye, even when the whole concept of mutated beasts was new to her. This “Aya” can’t even look at a monster without cowering in fear.
It doesn’t just stop there. When people lord authority over her at the start, she takes it. When people around her say sexually harassing remarks, she says and does nothing about it. One of the worst bits of 3rd Birthday’s script involves Maeda from the first game rewritten into the sort of guy that literally talks about how he wants to taste Aya’s tears. The character is written to say this as if it’s not incredibly fucking wrong and creepy.
Now, here’s where I point out something a lot of people that know about the game are bound to point out: “Aya” in 3rd Birthday was actually Eve Brea. The story of the game has it that they switched bodies, and that’s why “Aya” acts so unlike herself, because she really isn’t Aya.
But that doesn’t absolve the problem. It just adds more.
First of all, having Aya and Eve swap bodies is 1) saying Aya only matters for her body, and 2) trying to turn a cool mature woman into a much younger girl. Aya doesn’t even get her body back in the end; the real Aya dies, Eve remains in her body.
Second, that story turn does nothing to change the marketing or what that marketing said. If you didn’t play the game all the way to the end or hear about it from someone, then according to 3rd Birthday’s marketing and the story up to that reveal, Eve in Aya’s body is really Aya. The marketing and story up to that point send the message that Aya is innately submissive, terrified by combat, lets people sexually harass her and really doesn’t mind the idea of wearing fetish outfits into battle. The marketing alone sends a message that Aya is a sex object to be ogled and drooled over and nothing more.
It doesn’t matter if she “gets stronger” as the story progresses. None of that changes that Aya Brea from Parasite Eve would not do such things in the first place.
My final thoughts. If 3rd Birthday and its idea of “Aya Brea” were an entirely new IP, with an entirely new character, I wouldn’t haven given a shit. It could’ve done anything it wanted and I would’ve shrugged it off, or at worst mocked it. Hell, I might have even bought it in spite of the problems I cited above if that was the case.
It’s the way Squeenix utterly butchered Parasite Eve and Aya Brea and has absolutely no sense of decency to fix the mistake they made with 3rd Birthday that pisses me off. Before 3rd Birthday, Squeenix was touting how they planned to revive Parasite Eve as a full-fledged franchise again. After 3rd Birthday, all that talk stopped. They haven’t said or done anything with Parasite Eve since. They know they fucked up. They know how shitty 3rd Birthday was, how wrong it was, but instead of making up for it, they want to sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.
For me, Squeenix is the symbol of everything wrong with Squeenix. There are many things they’ve fucked up over the past decade, but none of them are as horrible and perfectly symbolic as 3rd Birthday. They ruined an amazing franchise and character by trying to exploit it at the lowest common denominator. They lied about their intentions with the game, both with the “clothes-ripping-away” mechanic and with Motomu Toriyama claiming he was going to write a “cool, mature woman” with Aya. And when all was said and done, instead of doing the right thing and trying to make up for 3rd Birthday, they decided they should act like Parasite Eve and Aya Brea don’t even exist.
That is why I focus so much on 3rd Birthday, and why I refuse to buy Squeenix products until they make a Parasite Eve 3 starring Aya Brea where 3rd Birthday never even happened. They need to show me they give a damn about their IPs and consumers as more than something to exploit, and as the worst thing Squeenix has ever done, 3rd Birthday is where it counts. If they’re not ready to fix that mistake, then I’m not ready to trust them with my money.
salarta 