3rd Birthday Features Damage-Related Disrobing

Â

Good news for perverts: Aya Brea’s clothes fall off throughout the course of upcoming Parasite Eve sequel The 3rd Birthday. This fact has been known for some time by those keeping up with the game’s details. But the functionality is now fully built-in and ready for, ahh, display. So to speak. The TGS demo will show it at work.

It was previously assumed that Aya’s clothing would simply become more and more tattered as her HP dropped. But given the game’s central premise of “possessing” soldiers, this wouldn’t have made sense. Possessing a new soldier with full life would have to make her clothes come back then. And that’s just crazy talk.

Aya’s clothes apparently come off as she is “downed”, rather than with general damage. Perhaps this means knocked to the floor. Perhaps it means dropping to critical HP. It’s not entirely clear yet. Hopefully after some footage from the TGS demo has done the rounds, it’ll make a bit more sense.

Director Hajime Tabata appears to be in two minds about showing off this feature in the demo. He firstly wrote on the game’sTwitter page to admonish anyone planning on playing with impure thoughts.

“For those who plan on playing the game at TGS,” he wrote, “it’s a valuable demo opportunity, so please don’t just play in order to make Aya’s clothes get destroyed.”

However, he also shared the advice that using grenades on Aya five times will cause her clothing to drop down one “level”. Just in case anyone wanted to know. For whatever reason. He then quickly followed up by saying “However, please play normally” and went on to explain the intricacies of the new green waypoint arrow in the corner of the screen.

This news shouldn’t be a surprise to fans of the series. Promotional material showing Aya has always been borderline risqué, with a lot of leg usually on display. Is this sort of thing really necessary? Sure, Aya’s a hottie. And grenading oneself in reality would probably, at the very least, cause some degree of distress to clothing. So it’s realistic. Sort of. Possession aside, of course. And damage to bodily appendages too, of course.

But it depends how the whole thing is handled. There’s a very real danger of this coming across as an unnecessarily smutty feature. A feature designed to get sexually-frustrated young men to play the game. Badly.

Parasite Eve has always been an interesting and unconventional sort of game. So is this an artistic decision, or a shallow attempt to increase sales?

Perhaps judgement should be reserved until everyone’s played the game a bit more.