Conociendo poco o nada de la saga y únicamente terminado el prólogo del primer juego, me aventuré a probar estar entrega y sinceramente, fue una decisión muy acertada. La historia es definitivamente confusa e innecesariamente rebuscada y desconociendo si cierra fielmente los juegos anteriores, realmente eso queda en un segundo plano ante la jugabilidad, que acarrea hermosamente el juego. Todo lo que se puede hacer es un deleite y la manera en la que se hace lo es más, desde disparar y hasta hacer la inmersión, todo los aspectos individuales forman un todo que como conjunto hace que este juego sea realmente bueno, lo que con su dificultad desafiante (algunas veces injusta, pero sin exagerar) y su apartado gráfico que no parece de PSP, lo vuelve un indispensable del catálago y un juego que muy probablemente revisitare en un futuro.

This game truly was a travesty, cannot remember the last time a game infuriated me this much. More like the 3rd bullet to seal the deal for putting this great franchise in the grave. Looks like the whole budget just went straight to all the cgi cutscenes. They should have just made this a movie like Advent Children. Why do my clothes have to fall off when I take too much damage as well? I was struggling through the repetitive shitty rooms while running around in my undies for like 2 hours. Cannot believe after many frustrations and raging I managed to complete the game. Please bring Parasite Eve back, but make sure it is nothing like this! Also, why did they give Maeda different accents when speaking? In one part he sounds like Jeff Goldblum, then he sounds like Goldman from House of the dead, and then just sounds like a text-to-speech program.

I have absolutely no fucking idea what the story of this game was. First two games were pretty generic horror setups but this game goes off the rails with time travel and body swapping and I don't even know what. Putting all that aside though I rather liked the gameplay, felt like a natural evolution of the 2nd game making it a more actiony shooter, and a lot of the guns were fun with decent variety for the game length. The costume mechanic in particular was amusing, even if I am for sure not beating this game 10 times.

Pior aniversário que já participei da minha vida.

Cara, graficamente falando esse jogo aqui é perfeito e muito bem equilibrado em tudo, sem dúvidas ele tem um dos visuais mais interessantes e bem construídos do PSP.. porém, não se faz um jogo bom só por gráfico

Tirando o gráfico e a jogabilidade que é bem funcional, isso aqui é HORRIVEL, a forma de contar a história é confusa você se perde muitas vezes no que ta acontecendo, a construção de cenários é confusa e o jogo todo é MUIITO repetitivo, é só tiro tiro tiro e tu começa a adquirir tendinite de tanto ficar apertando no botão L e R do PSP

Enfim não joguem 3rd Birthday se estiverem esperando uma sequência braba de Parasite Eve ou tiverem esperando um jogo TPS bomzao, ele não se sai bem em nada citado acimaKKKKKKKK

One of, if not the worst shooter I’ve ever played. The game Is a bullet sponge fest with no player feedback, as In enemies don’t react to your damage at all, you might as well be shooting a wall that happens to have a health bar. The bosses are especially egregious because they’re like RPG superbosses and have 4+ health bars that you’re gonna be endlessly shooting at. The game does that shit where they don’t allow the protagonist to talk because they previously didn’t have a VA so Aya walks around grunting to everything while people talk to her like a regular person that’s supposed to respond back, she’s not even a mute protagonist cause she talks in text boxes??? So why Is the game like this????

Only good things about the game are the visuals and music but thats been a consistent staple regarding Square Enix games anyways. Oh and I found the battle damage cool, seeing your character get more bruised up and their clothes torn up over time Is something I wish more games did. Dogshit game.

It was 2010. It wasn't my 3rd birthday, and I didn't know this game existed.
Now it's 2023 and I know it does exist. The simpler times are long gone and while no cakes were harmed or birthdays were ruined during the making of this game and the writing of this review (but certainly could be if you gifted this to someone for their birthday), this was overall pretty bad.

To begin with the positives, I like the music and the graphics (compared to most things on the PSP) are among the handheld's best. That's pretty much it.

The story is weird and not in a good way. From what I could gather, you don't need to play Parasite Eve 1 and 2 to understand it, but nevertheless, it's confusing and paced like a Rick and Morty episode. It's all over the place and you never get a good explanation for much of it until the very end of the game.
You can read stuff concerning characters before the beginning of a mission (or as they're called in-game - episode), but it feels lazy that they went with this route rather than incorporating it into the gameplay and cutscenes.

The body switching mechanic (called Overdive) is a cool idea, but everything surrounding it brings it down. Beyond giving the AI orders to focus on one target, you can't really tell them what to do, so a lot of strategy and depth which would've benefitted the game is not there. The friendly AI itself kinda stands there and just shoots. It's not well designed and you have to really try to go out of your way to keep it alive.

The worst thing, however, are the controls. At times they make Shaq Fu look like a masterpiece. There's a clunkiness to them that makes you feel like you're walking on a wet floor. The camera doesn't help, and oftentimes adds to that feeling. At least they added an auto-aim for most weapons, which is nice. Be prepared for a lot of frustration even with that, as enemies even on normal difficulty don't show much mercy and can quickly kill you, on top of also being bullet sponges.

The game would've been fine on the gameplay side of things if it was initially designed for PC/PS3/XBOX360. The PSP was a bad choice for this type of shooter. Considering the first two games of the series, it would've been best if this was an RPG like them.
The story, preferably, also needs an overhaul.
The 3rd Birthday, more like The 3rd Disappointment, am I right? :P
Yeah, in its current state, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

The follow up to the excellent Parasite Eve duology, and the very thing that killed it so badly it'll likely never come back.

Which is a real shame, because the PE games are incredibly fun and unique, and are perhaps one of the earliest, if not THE earliest, official examples of the extremely rare Survival Horror JRPG fusion genre. Worse still is that the gameplay ideas and enemy design is actually not too shabby (I actually really like the design of "the Twisted"), but the story, core gameplay execution, and intentional design of the characters and scenarios tear up what little good will this game has. Especially the story, which is a wet SHART of a time travel mess with an exceptionally insulting ending to boot.

Let's put away the fact the story is terrible for now, and talk about what it was as a game and why it was almost worth trying to enjoy, up until it showed it really wasn't worth the effort. The game more or less does away with the Survival Horror JRPG root the first two games have and opt for a much more third person shooter perspective, with the twist of body hopping to dart around the battlefield and potion for "focus fire" or reach harder to reach locations. This is bad enough, as the survival horror elements with JRPG mechanics really gave the series it's identity (even if the second one is more action oriented), but, It gets worse and more difficult to enjoy when the soldiers you are stuck with tend to die off due to the staggering and ever ascending difficulty spike after the first major time loop. This isn't even getting into the fact that the core gameplay very quickly boils down to keeping as much distance as possible from foes and "focus fire as much as possible" on singular targets and very slowly move forward, with very little desire to engage in larger groups or one-on-one encounters. While I understand the idea of the concept, trying to crate a squad based approach in a psudo-tactical RPG, its execution is nothing more than a repetitive slog with very little room for experimentation.

This game honestly irritates me. Every now and then, I have the very strange desire to give it a go again, because something deep inside keeps saying "No, Parasite Eve was amazing. Just give '3rd' a chance. it may be better than you think", and like having a piece of candy corn once every Halloween, I'm very swiftly reminded that doing THAT was a mistake. I so, SO badly wanted to like this game. Especially since its release prompted me to try and get the first two games (out of a genuine interest and of irritation). Yeah, 3rd Birthday was my first PE game. Laugh all you want, but at least I learned to travel back in time and play something better. Can't wait to play Parasite Eve once again at the end of this year. Maybe I'll make a fresh file this time.

Really liked the combat and thought the overdive mechanic was neat, but not being able to rotate the camera freely really killed the fun and made running away from enemies or trying to focus on enemies really frustrating. (I guess it's because the PSP only had ONE analog nub and they needed to use it for character MOVEMENT instead of camera control. 😤)

The storyline was a pile of crap and Aya Brea didn't deserve to be done dirty like this.

If they (highly unlikely) ever decide to remake a Parasite Eve game, I hope to god it's not this one.

I really tried to like this game. I was a big fan of the Parasite Eve series though I still tried to keep an open mind while playing this, which means I didn't let nostalgia ruin my experience. But this is just a really bad game overall. Part of it can be blamed on the system it was made, the PSP, due to lacking the right analog stick which made the controls very clunky. Although even if it had better controls, the gameplay is still very frustrating and RNG dependent and makes which it so bad to play. I really don't know what they were thinking when making this game.

A redeeming quality of this game is that the Body Switching mechanic is fun and unique to it. And the graphics are great for a PSP game, I suppose. But it ends there.

So for the bad things:
The enemies can one or two shot you even at normal difficulty making the game very frustrating, if it had good controls it would be a little bearable but it doesn't have that. And good luck dying! Because you're retrying that 10 to 15 minute level from your last checkpoint.

Passive skills also have RNG activations which makes them useless at tough situations. Seriously, a skill can sometimes only activate once in an entire chapter even at level 25 (the max level of it)!

The AI allies are so dumb that you have to body switch to them just to keep them alive and helping. And when you run out of AI allies, sometimes reinforcements will arrive after some time and there are times that there will be no reinforcements at all. But there's nothing that indicates that! So yeah, good luck waiting for that reinforcement whenever it'll come.

The camera is also really bad. It doesn't show what's directly above you. So if there's a flying enemy above Aya's head, the camera will look up but you won't see where the enemy is. The game also likes to throw homing missiles at you but they're so hard to dodge because the camera won't let you see where they're coming from.

I don't really want to comment on stuff like the characters and story because then, I'll be comparing it to its predecessors (and I will be trashing this game a lot more) which I don't want to do. This review is only about The 3rd Birthday as a standalone game.

This is not a full review, but since I cannot see myself finishing this game right now, I really just want a space to share my thoughts.

First, the positives. This is a very technically impressive game; the action is silky smooth and the models are all great quality for the PSP. The menus and UI have a very clean and well designed look to them. However it really doesn't feel like there's a whole lot of originality to the visuals, the monster designs just kind of a gnarled mess and the character designs aren't anything to write home about. Even Aya herself has been downgraded from her older design, I feel.

And then the gameplay is... frustrating. I like the concept of it's core mechanic, the Overdive system. You have the ability to switch between the bodies of nearby allies to give yourself an advantage over enemies. Sometimes, it does offer a bit of strategic thinking. But I just, don't think it really works in practice?

The other mechanics are all really just, not enjoyable. Sometimes you just have to, target an enemy without shooting it and wait for a bar to fill, then you can order your squad to shoot it all at the same time. It feels weird to just, have to stop what you're doing, stop shooting, and wait.

And the cover system is just so awful. The little blocks you hide behind break all the time, and thing is, when you're reloading, you don't duck behind cover like you think you would. That would make too much sense. You just, stand up, out of cover, and the enemy can just, go to town on you. And levels last way too long, even at the beginning. And when you keep dying because the enemies have way too big of an advantage over you, it just makes it go on even longer.

Not knowing the whole story, I can't comment on all of it, but I can tell it's probably not going to be a winning narrative, when the game expects you to do read files just to learn about what is actually happening in the story. I'm not saying the game should tell you, but it should s h o w you and give you bits and pieces through the cutscenes. But after two levels I honestly just, didn't really have much interest in seeing where things would go.

There's just no soul to the story so far, and you're told things that were probably supposed to have some sort of emotional weight, but I just don't really feel anything because the story so poorly sets up who it's characters are, what they're like and what is even going on. If you didn't read the in-game lore encyclopedia, then you wouldn't have a single clue. A fucking codex shouldn't be required reading for the basic understanding of a story.

I haven't played the original Parasite Eve, or it's sequel, yet. But after giving this a try, I feel like my time would be much better invested in those games, instead of this.