Time for story funtime.
Other M gets a lot of deserved flak for ruining Samus' character, and with good reason, but it has always had one defense it's always habitually been able to hide itself behind: that Samus had no characterization otherwise, with the exception of
Metroid Fusion's monologues and the official Manga (which was launched alongside
Zero Mission and only in Japan). For now, we're going to ignore the fact that
Other M's plot literally contradicts every other game in the series, and the fact that, even though a lot of people do not consider the Metroid Manga canon, it
was by all accounts (also an enjoyable read; feel free to read the translated version of it after
snagging it from my Box account). There is one character I know of, however, who was victimized infinitely worse than Samus Aran was by this sudden wave of a desire to portray previously-established-as-awesome female characters as vulnerable fragile snowflakes (I don't know who started this tendency, but it needs to go off into an alley someplace and
leave everyone else the fuck alone).
I speak, of course, of Aya Brea.
Since it came out some time in the late 90s,
Parasite Eve became an instant favorite with me, both for the strong characterization,
grotesque monster design, and combination of horror and RPG elements. The first game is good - not really a great game in and of itself, being intensely linear and highly exploitable for anyone who knows how to break the game's weapon-crafting system (or who has the time to farm), but still enjoyable, with excellent music and some really good overarching gameplay elements. The protagonist of this game was one Aya Brea, a New York police officer who winds up being one of the only survivors of a horrifying incident wherein a concert she attended suddenly has a rash of spontaneous human combustions of the audience. Aya herself, it turns out, has a reason she was spared from the effect that immolated pretty much everyone else. Without spoilering too much, Aya turns out to have a connection with the cause of the incident that gives her the ability to fight such creatures, and her coming to terms with that and what it portends whilst at the same time trying to control a fucking potential apocalypse before it can spread beyond Manhattan forms a major crux of the game.
It's
Parasite Eve 2, however, that is the better of the two - nicely getting into Aya's mindset and characterization far more deeply and intensely than in the first game. To this day, it's one of my favorite PS1 games, with graphics above and beyond what many titles were capable of and having far more depth and interesting ideas than your standard survival horror game. It even manages to be legitimately scary in spots - more so than PE1, at least.
But we're getting off-focus here, and that focus is miss Brea.
Aya herself, characterization-wise, was a great character overall - she was snarky, sarcastic, dangerously competent, willing to call bullshit when she saw it, and with a number of personal flaws that made her compelling. Her unique aspect of having bizarre freaky cell-related mitochondria powers gave her quite a few quirks, wherein she was hesitant to get close to people she didn't know well, and becoming somewhat withdrawn at times when coming to terms with her powers, not quite being able to shake the fear of what'd happen if she misfired or the abilities she had caused her to degrade into something wholly inhuman. By
Parasite Eve 2, she had holstered most of her fears, but her active attempts to "live normally," without using them, caused the majority of her mitochondrial powers to degrade - they were still usable, but she'd have to draw them back out through use, trial, and effort, like having to go through physical therapy. She was a really good example of how to balance badassery with vulnerability.
Parasite Eve 2 had several endings, but the best and most complete one had Aya having a family of her own of a sort (a "younger sister" that was actually a clone of Aya herself made by a group of supremely short-sighted rich assholes), and her meeting up with an old friend who had previously gone missing, which had strongly suggested some sort of interesting continuation of the story down the line. Fans were hopeful. And then, it happened.
Years later, we got
The Third Birthday.
This is Aya in
The Third Birthday:
This says a lot, but worry not, friends - it gets way worse.
Gone is Aya's characterization in
The Third Birthday, and indeed, so is the characterization of literally every returning character (Maeda, for example, from PE1 is metamorphed from a nerdy scientist who believes in luck charms to a full-on 2ch-esque creeper that acts all in the world like he needs a visit from Chris Hansen). The only character you immediately notice from PE2 in
The Third Birthday is Madigan, who Aya was kind of sweet on despite his being kind of a prick sometimes. But it's Aya herself who clearly got the worst end of the stick. She is a subdued, withdrawn, borderline-catatonic individual in this game, hardly responsive and rarely contributing more than a few lines throughout the entire game. One of the quintessential awesome female characters of the 90s, and she's now a gritty quiet introvert who barely responds and has her clothes torn up as you fight (which wouldn't be so bad if anything she wore were practical, but nein, torn blue jeans, a top like that one, and a light winter coat are perfect attire for roaming NY mid-winter).
The plot is a convoluted mess involving Time Travel (goodie), wherein some horrid entity from beyond known timespace have journeyed back in time to OMNOMNOM humanity.The bulk of the game relies on using a sort of temporal projection device to push events in humanity's favor so that we may yet get to fight another day, and yes, this convoluted mess of a plot gets even worse before it goes anywhere. Throughout the series, we're confronted constantly by characters we're obstenibly supposed to know and don't, and confronted by characters who act nothing like their previous incarnations. But the biggest punch in the dick, the biggest absolute, ridiculous, insulting pile of bullshit is yet to come, in the game's concluding chapters.
It's eventually revealed that this not-Aya we've been playing with all game long
isn't Aya at all. It's Eve, from PE2. Apparently, Aya's wedding (to Madigan, from PE2) was crashed by the government, when they decided that Aya, with all her freaky mitochondria power bullshit, was too dangerous to be left alive. Eve, in an effort to save Aya (who is the sarcastic, witty, badass Aya we've all come to know in love, not this introverted insult in her place), used her dive ability (the one we use throughout T3B to jump into the bodies of various soldiers and such in the aforementioned temporal projection), and the resulting trauma it caused killed Aya and caused the Twisted.... Somehow. It's not really explained. In order to make the timeline right and make the Twisted
not exist, we have to kill the actual Aya so that the Dive won't do it. All that time-travel nonsense, and we save the world by
shooting a beloved franchise character in the face. Eve herself is then left in Aya's body, wherein she's set to marry Madigan in her place, the latter (and other wedding party attendants) nonethewiser.
Eve was
sixteen at the time when this happened.
Eww.
.
