Parasite Eve II

The threat returns.

A sequel to Parasite Eve (which was itself a sequel to the novel of the same name), also appearing on the PlayStation. This game features an interface closer to Resident Evil, being more of a Survival Horror game with RPG Elements than vice-versa like the first game.

The plot has Aya as an agent for an FBI group whose assignment is to destroy mitochondrial creatures, which turn out to have been created from her own cells by a Nietzsche Wannabe cult.

It has a sequel on the PlayStation Portable titled The 3rd Birthday.

It can also be found on the Playstation Network.

Tropes used in Parasite Eve II include:

• Apocalyptic Log: A few are found, in particular one left by a researcher over a couple of days describing the evil Dr. Bowman who eventually turned into an ANMC. The second-to-last entry is of her writing about how she let him out of his cage because he wouldn't stop complaining, and noting that he's now over nine feet tall. The final entry is by someone else, noting how the researcher was (unsurprisingly) eaten by Bowman.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Dryfield is attacked by a giant NMC called the Burner near the end of Disc 1, also the first stage of the final boss.
  • You also run into a giant-sized version of a Brain Stinger.
• Awesome Yet Practical: The Wind line of Parasite Energies. They have lower damage output than the Fire line, but they can inflict some very useful negative ailments. Apobiosis is arguably the most devastating, as it can damage everything and any surviving enemies are left paralyzed for a long duration. Very few enemies are immune to the paralysis and the icing on the cake is the stun effect works on the final boss' 2nd form.
• Badass Abnormal: Aya. Most of her combat is with guns, but she's got deadly magic to back herself up with.
• Badass Army: The Marines.
• Badass Normal: Rupert. He's pretty much a One-Scene Wonder. He saves Aya from an ambush early in the game and unloads a ton of lead into the first Stranger, but sadly, he's wounded and out of commission for most of the rest of the game.
• Bag of Spilling: Justified. Aya doesn't want to live forever, but her mitochondria maintain her body at twenty; this freaks her out so much that she can't use her powers effectively without a damned good excuse - like being caught in another mitochondria-based conspiracy. And her guns? Justifiable as being considered police property and therefore returned to her old precinct after she left.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Close-up analysis of PE2's "Stranger" NMCs indicates that nipples may just be considered a disadvantageous evolutionary feature. This may, of course, be due to the fact that the "Suckler" NMCs detonate their own craniums as a self-defense mechanism, making breastfeeding quite the chore.
• Bishonen Line: The final boss after absorbing Eve.
• BFG: The Hypervelocity Rail Cannon (an unlockable weapon).
• BFS: The unlockable Gunblade as well, which operates in the same fashion from its original game and is possibly stronger than the Hypervelocity Rail Cannon when loaded with R. Slug ammo.
• Bizarre Human Biology: The protagonist Aya possesses a more benign/passive form of the "evolved" strain of mitochondria serving as the franchise's Big Bad, which are not only a self-aware Hive Mind that can hijack their "hosts" and act like The Virus, they possess actual superpowers, which include spontaneous combustion and Body Horror transformations!
• Black Best Friend: Rupert. Unfortunately, despite his Establishing Character Moment being a badass with a huge Hand Cannon, he's out of the picture for most of the game. He's probably a Hero of Another Story.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Equipping armor may grant you some passive bonuses, and some have more attachment slots than others, but the main function of it is to raise your total HP or MP.
• Button Mashing: Used to wiggle out of an enemy's grip or to shake off the effect of paralysis.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Berserker status increases Aya's weapon power and levels up her parasite powers, but at the cost of chipping away at her HP.
• The Cavalry: The US military eventually intervenes, somewhat more competently than in the first game this time.
• Chekhovs Kill Sat: The orbital Hypervelocity Gun shown in the opening cinematic.
• Cloning Blues
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: They return as a New Game+ bonus (or Bad Ending crutch) in 2.
• Deadpan Snarker: Aya, mostly when you have her examine something several times. "Do I have to look in there again?" is her comment if you keep trying to make her look into a dirty toilet.
• Door to Before: A few of them, including a very big one leading back to Dryfield from the underground shelter's sewer tunnel. In fact, it's so close that it's a wonder that you had to drive to the shelter in the first place; it's basically right underneath Dryfield.
• Double Agent: Kyle Madigan, a Private Investigator, is actually a government agent sent to infiltrate the Ark organization, which in turn sends him to gain Aya's trust and manipulate her.
• Down in the Dumps: Aya needs to escape a sterilization room in the shelter by leaping into a dust chute into the underground dump. Almost immediately afterwards she's attacked by a giant vacuum-suction-mouthed garbage monster that formed in the trash heap and wants to add her to its stomach.
  • Just Eat Him: Said garbage monster's vacuum mouth attack is an instant game over if Aya gets too close.
  • Advancing Boss of Doom: The creature keeps slowly and implacably moving closer and closer, leaving you with less and less room to run away from it.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Number Nine is the closest we have to a main antagonist, but he's not actually in charge of the big plan, just following it out. Whoever orchestrated it is long gone, either killed or turned into an ANMC.
• Escort Mission: PE2's Kyle Madigan is one of those few escortees that can actually hold his own in a firefight (and often comes with some sort of overpowered firearm or another to offset being unable to heal).
  • This trope also comes into effect when you have to escape the secret underground lab with Eve. While no enemies are present, Eve will start to cough from the gas filling the room and lose HP.
• Extremely Short Timespan: After fighting through the Acropolis, Aya's adventures in Dryfield and the underground shelter last about 24 hours, going by the day/night cycle.
• Fight Woosh: A quick inversion of colors, accompanied by a heartbeat sound effect.
• Flavor Text: A striking amount of it, and you usually have to examine a background object several times to see it all. Many of Aya's inner thoughts are discovered this way, as well as background information on herself and others.
• Functional Magic: Aya's parasite energies in this game are based around Fire, Wind, Water, and Earth.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Averted in the lengthy cut scene that takes place before the Final Battle. Aya winds up being shot in the leg and when you regain control of her, her remaining HP has been lowered to reflect her gunshot wound.
• Global Currency: Bounty Points (BP) are used primarily by the FBI's MIST unit, which gives them more goodies according to the number of monsters they kill (tracked by special contact lenses). However, they're also applicable to Dryfield's landlord Gary Douglas (justified, as the FBI said they would reimburse him for allowing Aya to use BP to buy stuff from his Wall of Weapons), the Neo-Ark Armory (A Chekhov's Gun lampshaded by Aya when her contact lens registers on the machine - Her boss is part of the conspiracy!), and soldiers operating out of the back of Army supply trucks (handwavable for the same reason as Douglas, since they're with the military).
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: The Hunter Goggles makes Aya immune to Blind status when equipped.
• Guide Dang It: About one-fifth of the gameplay. Of course, after a few repeat playthroughs, you'll be too strong to care.
  • A particularly nasty one is the four-part riddle you find scrawled in spots in Dryfield. One is written in glowing ink and can only be viewed if you don't turn on the lights in a dark cellar. One is written in a corner in a dusty antechamber before a boss fight, and immediately after that boss fight, it's night out and you can't read that riddle fragment ever again.
  • Many of the unlockable items require a very high score whenever you complete the game, but what the game doesn't tell you that A) NOT using the items you find and hoarding them instead gives points, B) playing on a harder mode like Bounty Mode gives you a bonus multiplier to your overall score and C) triggering certain events in the game gives you bonus points too.
• Hailfire Peaks: There are a number of different artificial environments right next to each other, including a jungle and a desert.
• Happily Adopted: Eve in the True Ending.
• Harder Than Hard: Nightmare Mode.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Number Nine is eaten by the very giant monster he was breeding, after finishing his Just Between You and Me speech and getting shot by Kyle.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Zig-zagged: In battle, Aya does not have access to her entire inventory, just what she has equipped to her belt pouches on her body armor, which is fair. However, one item still takes up the same amount of slots whether it's a can of coca-cola, a bunch of bullets, or a grenade launcher.
• Infinity+1 Sword: The Hypervelocity Gun and Gunblade.
• Infinity-1 Sword: The Mongoose, M249, and the MM1.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Twenty items max, limited external storage besides, and you can only use stuff that you've loaded onto your current armor beforehand in battle. At least key items no longer counting towards this total helps buffer needing to carry around multiple ammo types.
• Inner Monologue: Examining objects multiple times often reveals quite a lot of Aya's inner thoughts, some of which are actually pretty insightful.
• Invisible President: The President is either viewed from behind his seat, or obscured by the Holy Backlight from the Oval Office's window.
• It Can Think: The "stringer" ANMC we first meet is the mutated Dr. Bowman, and it talks. We never really find out how sentient the other ANMCs are or aren't; a bit of lore states that their individual minds are being suppressed by an implant that was supposed to be removed but never actually was.
• Kill Sat: The "SDI Project - Hypervelocity Gun", as shown in the opening credits.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Certain armors like the Chicken Plate will have this ability.
• Lost Forever: Some items can't be found if you progress too far, mostly the Acropolis stuff, since it's the one place you can never backtrack to. There's also a weird case of a clue being lost forever. Four mysterious riddles are written throughout Dryfield, each giving you a number and telling you where the next clue is (the prize is the safe combination with a rare item in it). One of these four riddles, though, is in a very easy-to-miss spot (a window looking out on the desert) which is right before a local boss fight, after which it becomes night and you can't see the riddle anymore. Dang it!
• Magikarp Power: The P08 is the lowest priced gun of all the weapons, but it's weak, slow, and has a small clip. Yet if you keep it in your inventory to the point when Aya can explore Dryfield's underground, checking the gun rack in the game room a few times will net Aya the "Snail Magazine". When used on the P08 its strength and clip increases and has an absurdly high critical hit rate.
• Metal Slime: The Bounty and Nightmare Modes turn the Golems and other Elite Mooks into scripted versions of these, without the running away part.
• Mono-Gender Monsters: For some reason, all the Strangers we see are female, either in human form or out of it.
• More Dakka: The 100-bullet full-auto pistol (among less readily available conventional machine guns)...
• Multiple Endings: The game has three of them, depending on a few actions that you took. The standard ending has the President talking to his aide about what to do with the mess at the faculty (this is all done in pure text behind a black screen). The better ending expands upon the previous scene and adds more details to the plot without a black screen. The best ending shows even more details of the plot and shows that Aya adopted Eve as her sister. A year later, they go to a museum where they encounter a man who is presumed to be Kyle.
• Mysterious Waif: The Eve, Aya's clone, who doesn't talk until near the end. Aya ends up adopting her as a sister afterward.
• Mythology Gag: The targets that Aya is shooting at in the intro are illustrations of the monsters of the first game.
• New Game+: Done more extravagantly in the sequel where you can literally buy back your powers from the previous cleared game (seriously, they're little blood vials with the mitochondria tied to each power), get stronger guns early, or play on different modes that change Aya's statistics and/or enemies.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The Golems, cyborg zombie Super Soldier Elite Mooks with ape-like qualities, some types of which have optical stealth, ninja-esque speeds, the ability to cause Standard Status Effects, lay sneak attacks, some have grenade launchers and others have light-saber-esque weapon. The US Army makes quick work of them, though, as soon as they are caught in broad daylight.
• No Body Left Behind: The monsters all melt when they die, but the cyborg Golems do not. Not even if you change rooms and come back later, which is especially surprising for a Playstation game.
• Non-Action Guy: Pierce Carradine, MIST's Playful Hacker, who gets himself into trouble while trying to help Aya out. Whether he survives or not depends on the player's actions. And whether you have a damn clue how to take those actions.
• Noob Cave: The shooting range in the MIST HQ, although you can skip it entirely if you wish. Tackling all the challenges and scoring high will net you some nifty items. The highest leveled challenge will cause damage to Aya but the challenge is automatically stopped if her HP gets too low with Pierce commenting "Now if this were real, you'd be dead."
• Not Using the Zed Word: For clones.
• Nuke'Em: The government resorts to this in both games. Even though the soldiers in the second were actually quite successful in containing the threat, the President still decides (albeit hesitantly) to go ahead with it, while his troops are still on site.

General: "They'll be buried in Arlington. Proud heroes of the country."

• Older Than They Look: Aya is chronologically 28, but still looks like she's in her early twenties. This is explained in that, since her evolved mitochondria have opted to work with her rather than against her (which is the defining difference between Aya and the various monsters around her), they've decided that keeping their host healthy and young is more advantageous to them than allowing her to age.
• Product Placement: Aya can drink cans of Coca-Cola to recover her HP and MP. A magnet (in the shape of a Coke bottle cap) is needed for a puzzle. Prominent Coke vending machines are placed throughout the game as well. Strikingly, these have been kept for the PSN rerelease.
• Rare Candy: Protein Capsules, which recovers all HP and boosts max HP by 5. Lipstick increases maximum MP by 1.
• Scenery Porn: For the time in which it was made, Parasite Eve 2's backgrounds are amazingly detailed. They were all pre-rendered and still-shots were used as the backgrounds, similar to how most Resident Evil games worked, but with much more work put into them. These places look like places where people worked, ate and lived; a lot of thought went into them and thus it brings a lot of verisimilitude.
  • Most bits of scenery can also be examined, prodding several different lines of description from Aya. That is easily more detail than most old-school adventure games have.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The nature of several New Game+ modes. You don't get access to any of the unlocked weapons goodies, enemies are tougher, and resources are often limited.
• Semper Fi
• Shooting Gallery: The target range in MIST HQ, which also acts as a short tutorial on fighting.
• Shout-Out:
  • In Dryfield's bar, there's an "Einhander" pinball machine (referring to an early Playstation shooter that Square produced).
  • Another is the "Gunblade" from Final Fantasy VIII, which is an unlockable weapon.
  • A completely different game series gets a nod in one of the Escort Missions: try going through the wrong door enough times with Kyle in tow and he'll warn that you might be eaten by a Grue.
  • Aya lampshades her boss' nickname being taken from "Hal" the psycho computer from 2001. It turns out to be quite meaningful when he's revealed to be The Mole.
  • There's a Shout Out to Wizards of the Coast in the Game Room in the well. If prompted long enough, Aya will comment that Pierce keeps going on about "Whotsee" (WOTC obviously being the company's acronym) and "Caves & Creatures".
  • Aya named her car Carrie.
  • Cloud and Aerith from Final Fantasy VII are name-dropped, appearing as an computer antivirus and a magazine with a clue on how to enter the files of a computer in the Shelter.
  • Looking at a mirror in her room will cause Aya to reference Casablanca and Indiana Jones.
  • In their first encounter, No.9 attacks Aya with a machete while wearing what looks like a hockey mask.
• Shower Scene
• Spoiler Opening: The opening cinematic shows parts of the Cutscene where the US military storms the Ark facility and easily dispatches the Elite Mooks that you've had difficulty killing upon their release, not to mention the big Kill Sat scene just before the final bosses.
• Toilet Humor: With actual toilets in fact. Look at enough of them and Aya will say she needs to get out more.
• Treacherous Advisor: Aya's boss, Eric Baldwin.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Strangers can mimic their original human form, but only for a short time.
• Wall of Weapons: Dryfield's only inhabitant is an old man who's surrounded much of the town with booby traps and has a miniature arsenal in his shed. He becomes your main weapon vendor for the first half of the game.
• Was Once a Man: Most of the monsters in the first game are mutated animals. Most of the monsters in this game, however, are mutated humans.
• You Are Number Six: The Big Bad is a Gunblade-slinging rooftop-hopping ape-like zombie cyborg supersoldier called Number Nine.