The 3rd Birthday - a rant

To start this off, I have a love/hate relationship with this game.  On the one hand, it’s a fun, kinetic and challenging little action/RPG hybrid.  Even on the normal difficulty, the game is extremely unforgiving with a decent learning curve, leading to a frustrating, but rewarding experience.  Top off the sleek action and presentation with a relatively deep customization system and you’ve got one hell of a game on your hands.  I’ve played through it about four times now and still, the game is as cathartic and interesting as when I first booted it up.  On the other hand though, this game is a complete fucking asshole and practically goes out of its way to ruin the legacy of a character and franchise I cared very much about.

Before we get to what pisses me off about the game, let’s get the stuff I love and the basics of the gameplay out of the way.  “The 3^rd Birthday” is just fucking great.  The combat is fast-paced and fluid, never really getting dull despite being repetitive as all hell.  Granted, if you’re going to play this game, I suggest picking up the digital version on the Vita rather than the PSP original.  The original game, while still entertaining, has some issues that pop up due to the original PPS’s limitations.  First off, is the camera.  All manual camera movement is dedicated to the D-pad, given that the PSP system has no right analog stick.  This is fine, but the game’s auto-camera is a fidgety mess and occasionally requires some fixing.  The D-pad also doubles as your quick target button, allowing you to quickly jump from target to target.  Problem is, in order to move the camera or acquire a target, you have to stand still in order to do so.  In a game like “Resident Evil” this would be fine, but “The 3^rd Birthday” is an extremely hectic and fast paced action/RPG hybrid and the slightest delay in movement can really screw the player over.  Given that the Vita allows you to bind the right-stick, this allows you to give yourself more freedom with the camera and the ability to continue moving freely, while acquiring targets.

Old PSP issues aside, the game essentially plays out like most modern shooters.  You go into an area, shoot the shit out of enemies and then move on.  However, “The 3^rd Birthday” is all about style and presentation.  Rather than just running and gunning, Aya has dodges and abilities at her disposal that really keep the game staying fast and fun.  Every engagement is fluid and responsive and the speed at which they’re played and the locked arenas makes the game feel more like a third-person "Painkiller" with some fancy dodges and specials, rather than something like “Gears of War”.

Outside of just shooting monsters with your guns, you’ve got other options at your disposal for monster killing.  There’s Crossfire, which is a synchronized attack on a single enemy.  Basically, you lock-on to a monster for a few seconds, then have your team unleash a barrage of bullets.  Depending on what kind of stat boosts you have, using Crossfire grants the player a chance to heal or to boost the damage rate that you and your teammates can dish-out during a Crossfire.  There’s also Overdive Kill which allows Aya to jump into the body of an enemy, (after it’s been weakened to a certain degree) imploding it from the inside.  Overdive Kill especially lends to the game’s fast and flowing action.  Diving into an enemy, then jumping back out and timing Aya’s recovery correctly is especially entertaining and makes the player feel like a legit badass, just towering through enemies.  Aside from Overdive Kill, there’s also just standard Overdive, which allows you to jump from teammate to teammate, allowing you to swiftly flank enemies and open up more tactical opportunities to exploit.  There are also certain upgrades that give Aya extra advantages or abilities during gameplay, such as a short power boost, an invincibility barrier or the ability to slow down time for a short while after using an Overdive Kill.

The big power though is Liberation.  Similar to other power boosters in games, Aya is given a limited boost called Liberation, which heavily increases Aya’s damage output and speed and, through “heightened reflexes” allows her to automatically dodge attacks without player input.  Liberation, like most temporary power boosts, requires the player fill a gauge before using, once activated the gauge drains and needs to be filled again for future use.  As stated, Aya’s damage output is much greater during Liberation, which opens up more opportunities to use Overdive Kill on enemies.  Like Overdive Kill, Aya’s fast movements and overall damage output during Liberation, really adds to the game’s combat and empowers the player in ways that most third person shooters just do not.  Outside of combat, there’s a basic weapon upgrade system.  You can purchase new weapons, upgrade magazine capacities, damage output, boost your chance for triggering Overdive Kill, y’know, the same basic upgrades we've been working with for billions of years now.

As for the lite-RPG elements, the game’s primary character customization comes in the Over Energy system.  What these are, are little boosts that are added to three by three grids called DNA Boards.  You mix and match certain Over Energy Chips to boost Aya’s abilities and stats.  Mixing two abilities of different types may also unlock other abilities you may not get otherwise.  Basic abilities are obtained through Overdive Kills, though the occasional rare type can be found through higher level enemies.  Each OE Chip has varying levels and the more you stack together, the stronger the ability will be.  For instance, you may get a passive ability that grants Aya a chance for a short invincibility boost if she takes damage.  The higher the level, the greater the chance for the boost.   You can also link single abilities together across two or three grids.  By doing this, you increase the level of individual abilities as they add to each other.  For instance, if you have three of one ability linked together, and each individual ability is at Level 3, the overall level of said ability will add up to Level 9.

It’s complicated, but once you get the system down, it offers a nice amount of experimentation thanks to its overall depth.  I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a similar system used in more action/RPG hybrids, as it adds a greater level of personal customization and doesn't just feel like useless stat-boosts.  Plus, the system is overall deeper and more rewarding than the obligatory upgrades found in most action games today.  

Like I said earlier, the game is also challenging and very unforgiving.  Even on the standard Normal difficulty, you'll find yourself met with a steep challenge, especially on the later levels, that's all at once frustrating and entirely rewarding. The game kicks your ass, it kicks your ass in all directions, but it never quite feels unfair.  There are a couple occasions where it's just bullshit, but in most instances, it's due to some bad on-the-spot planning or some kind of misstep on your part.  What's most glorious though, is leveling up and returning to spots that, were at one point, a major challenge that you only got through by the skin of your teeth.  Like a great many RPGs, there's few things that feel better than going back to a trouble area, knowing that you have vastly improved since that time and breezing through it with no trouble.  To keep with the game's love of challenge, there are a number of unlockable challenge codes that further limit Aya's abilities and which add to the game's replay value. Such challenge codes include: locking Aya at level one, taking invulnerability assist out of the evasion roll, disabling DNA Boards, limiting Aya to only the default handgun, one-hit-deaths or a constantly draining life bar.  There's also the Insane/Genocide difficulty, which completely changes the way the game is played, removing several key features found it other modes, it also activates certain challenge codes, helping drastically change the way the game is played, forcing new approaches to combat. I've not tried any of these challenges or the difficulty yet, but I may in the near future once I hit level-cap and need that extra challenge.  If not, the options are there for the masochists.

Another mild note in reference to this game's awesome is the soundtrack.  Like the original "Parasite Eve", the soundtrack is just killer.  It's loaded with nice atmospheric tunes, nice call backs to the score of the original game and loads of pulse pounding battle tunes that, really add to the game's atmosphere.  On top of some cool pulse pounding electronica infused tunes, the music does a great job raising the tension during combat.  For this, the standout for me would be "Into the Babel", which has this pulsing drum rhythm over some increasingly frantic choral chanting.  The level itself is probably the most challenging in the game and its most difficult moments (notably holding out against an endless hoard of enemies as you wait for armoered backup to arrive) are made that much more desperate as the chorus rises during combat.  The game and the music work together to create desperate moments that make your hard earned victories feel that much more satisfying.

All that goodness aside, take away the gameplay, and what we’ve got is a convoluted mess of a story, bursting with the same JRPG clichés you’d come to expect from a post-FFVII Square.  The game is chock full of manipulative, shallow, overwritten and overacted melodramatic Otaku bullshit.  And that’s not the worst part of the game, oh no, the anime clichés are just the cherry on this cake of fuck.

Not only are we expected to put up with this melodramatic anime bullshit, but whoever wrote the game apparently has no grasp of pacing or plot structure.  Maybe it’s just a limitation of the game being released on PSP or something, but the story makes absolutely no fucking sense and jumps around so much without any reason or explanation.  Characters drop in and out of the narrative on a whim and you’re left to wonder what the fuck.   Sure, the game tries to cover its narrative failings with a myriad of data files that you can read at your leisure, but, aside from expanding the universe and characters, they do little to actually help you understand the events of the story.  At one moment the evil bad guy is gassing all your homies, culminating in a random boss fight with an eldritch abomination, who also happens to be your friend.  After this, you and your comrades are suddenly all fine and there’s no mention of what the hell happened to the evil bad man and how everything sorted itself out.  It just completely skips ahead in time for no reason.  This happens wearily often and confuses the motivations of the characters.  It tries to get away with this with having Aya re-set time, but it still confuses motivations and renders entire sequences pointless, as they're just retconned seconds after happening. 

It’s so bad that David Cage’s terribly confused and jumbled “Beyond: Two Souls” looks reasonable and well written and that game had a fuck disjointed narrative that dropped you into random sections with no context or reason.  It’s like whoever wrote “3^rd Birthday” watched some David Lynch flicks and decided to emulate the disjointed narrative style.  Problem is, they’re actually trying to tell a fleshed out story here, there’s never any indication throughout the game that it’s intended to be a surreal experience like a Lynch film.

The sad thing is, there’s actually a lot of potential for this to be a kick-ass science fantasy story.  All the pieces are there, the overall concept is pretty killer actually.  You (Aya) travel to the past via some Matrix machine, possessing the bodies of military personnel who lived these events, in an attempt to change the future.  There’s also this little bit about understanding why Aya can do what she can and what exactly these “Twisted” (the aforementioned eldritch abominations) are and where they come from, but, instead, of getting a cool, fleshed-out story that lives up to the concept, we’re treated to a nonsensical narrative with almost zero context and confused character motivations.  It’s like eating a delicious apple pie, only to find out that the chef forgot to include the apples.  Sure, the gooey cinnamon sauce is nice and tasty, but the actual meat of it is missing, leaving you disappointed.

Alas, the disjointed, random as fuck narrative isn’t what really hurts the game.  It definitely docks it some points, but that’s nothing compared to what the game does to the “Parasite Eve” franchise and its main protagonist.  First off, the original “Parasite Eve” was purely science fiction, it told its story in a similar fashion a writer like Michael Crichton would.  It has a ridiculous premise, but uses technobabble and actual science to lend the narrative some credibility.  “The 3^rd Birthday”, on the other hand, completely abandons any pretense of science fiction and jumps right on into supernatural fantasy.  Instead of some kind of mild scientific explanation for the mutated creatures running around and the crazy eldritch horrors, the game opts to go the fantasy route by saying, to quote the wiki because I just wasn’t arsed enough to watch the custscene again “the Twisted were born from the shattered fragments of the real Aya Brea's consciousness, which was destroyed during "Time Zero". The Twisted can be interpreted as unstable yet "evil" incarnations of Aya's lost consciousness in time space.”  In other words, the explanation is really fucking stupid.

And that’s not all, it doesn’t just abandon the scientific underpinnings of the original game, oh no, it has to do worse than that.  Pissing all over the charred remains of its predecessor wasn’t enough, oh no, they had to take it one step further and turn Aya Brea, arguably one of the most badass female characters of the PSX generation and one of my personal favorite protagonists, into a whimpering and weak bullshit protagonist.  Gone is the complicated, no bullshit ass kicker, who took a few cues from the hardboiled archetype.  Instead, we get “Stock JRPG Protagonist #1265”, also known as the “Unsure Amnesiac with a Great Destiny”.  Granted, they save themselves a bit with the ending twist, wherein we learn that Eve transferred her soul to Aya, destroying the real Aya in the process.  But, they piss all over that save when the game literally forces you to kill the real Aya, which is just a little extra salt for the old wound.

Because Aya needed
a sexy bunny costume

And still, this change in character wasn’t enough.  We all know what happens when we get demure and unsure female characters in anime don't we?  That’s right, good old gratuitous fanservice.  From her standard clothing, to promotional art, Square makes sure that Aya shows some skin and takes a few sexy poses while she’s at it.  Top that off with a damage system that shows Aya’s clothes deteriorate over time as she takes damage.  Her clothing is torn and ripped, slowly exposing more and more of Aya, until you’re down to her bra and panties.  If that wasn’t enough, the game also comes packed with extra fetish costumes, which can be unlocked after the player meets specific requirements.  Such costumes include: a sexy French Maid, a sexy secretary/business outfit, a sexy Santa costume and a goddamned leather Playboy Bunny costume.  No more inelegant Aya and her leather jacket and ill fitted plain white shirt.  Now it’s all fetish costumes, leather halter-tops and ripped jeans.

Part of what made Aya so great in the original game is that her appeal didn’t come from showing skin or from sexy poses.  She may be attractive, but it’s not in the same way as a character like Lara Croft or Bayonetta or, for better comparison, Aya circa “3^rd Birthday.”  It was her personality that lent her appeal and her overall lack of obvious sexuality.  It’s also what made her, and continues to make her such a fresh character.  She’s not a sex symbol and was never meant to be, she’s a no-nonsense working woman who isn’t interested in satisfying the male gaze.  Even when wearing a flattering dress that shows off her legs, she’s out of her element.  She makes it known that she’s not comfortable primping herself up, instead preferring the casual jacket, shirt and jeans she spends majority of the game wearing.

Oh and Square also threw in an unnecessary unlockable shower scene, which adds nothing to the experience, aside from further degrading and sexualizing a once great character.  And it’s complete with soft, sexual moans too, y’know, just to make 100% sure they killed whatever dignity Aya may have had left.

In short, the game takes a cool concept that could’ve made for an awesome story and completely butchers it thanks to the inept writing and direction of a moron.  It further pisses on one of my all-time favorite videogames by changing almost everything about it, to the point that it barely qualifies as a sequel and worse, it takes one of my all-time favorite protagonists and turns her into a whimpering loser with a proclivity for wearing sexy fetish outfits.  Yet, in spite of all this, I enjoy it.  With its challenging and rewarding gameplay, depth of customization and a super slick presentation, “The 3^rd Birthday” somehow, manages to do everything right and everything wrong all at once.  It’s like cognitive dissonance made manifest, a living contradiction.