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.
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.