Borrowed Memory and Empty Silhouette
Genuinely, what the f*ck was The 3rd Birthday about?
The PSP has always been a somewhat distant part of my life. I knew it through Crisis Core, Monster Hunter, Liberty City Stories, God of War - games I watched over my friends’ shoulders as an eight-year-old whose parents thought it was too expensive a “toy.” All I have had over these years is just the memory of others playing on it, borrowed, half-formed, and slightly filled with envy. A few months ago, though, I finally managed to track one down in my city. I’m decades late to this party, and the console has long stopped being anyone’s latest and greatest. But I’m here now. It’s a lot smaller than I remember. Strange, as I never really held one as a kid.
Memory, I think, has a strange effect on gaming in particular. You see it all the time: Given a few years, disappointments suddenly become hidden gems, rough edges become cute little quirks, and ambition outweighs execution. Sometimes it is just nostalgia playing its dirty hand; sometimes it's disappointment with the present state of gaming; and very rarely, it’s because a game genuinely deserves a second shot. The search for a game from that last category led me to The 3rd Birthday. Supposedly one of the best-looking games the console ever produced, ambitious in ideas but limping in execution. A hidden gem in the truest of senses, I was told.
I practically knew nothing about the Parasite Eve series going into this game. I’d heard the name Aya Brea affectionately, but only in passing years ago, and that was about it. So I went in blind, and yeah, “ambitious” is absolutely the word that comes to mind when the opening FMV starts. An organ groans ominously as we see our protagonist bruised and battered. A looping guitar riff follows as we are promised eldritch monsters, ghosts from the past, melodrama, and, uh, the woman is going into other people’s bodies and taking control over them…? Sure, I guess. A strong opening, though, so I kept playing.
The PSP doesn’t feel like a system designed for third-person shooters since the genre evolved around the use of twin analogue sticks and stacked shoulder buttons on both sides. And yet, here is Square, which looked at this tiny machine and decided to make a third-person shooter for it, one that looks and plays exactly like a PS2 title. It’s a strong and stubborn choice, one that, in a way, fulfils the very prophecy of this system, and I can’t help but respect it. That said, the combat is a mess more often than it isn’t. Enemies soak insane amounts of damage as if we’re playing with Nerf guns. And you fight the camera, the lock-on system, and your own thumb cramps more than the monsters by the end of each session. But despite how each idea was going for each other’s throats all the time, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike the game as a whole. Even at its jankiest and most frustrating, there was an earnestness to it all, as though something genuine was trying to emerge from the infighting.
That something, for me, was the game’s Overdive system. It’s a mechanic that lets Aya switch out of a dying body and jump into another one at any point in the game. Instead of playing it like any other third-person shooter, relying on cover mechanics to get by, you can simply abandon your body and jump into another until the job is done. It’s a genuinely novel mechanic, and even now I can’t think of many games that have tried something similar. But the longer I used this system, the more uncomfortable it made me feel. Not mechanically, but for what it represented.
Overdrive and the way the levels are designed encourage you to be as aggressive as you can with the system. Play this game long enough, and you’ll stop seeing soldiers as soldiers. They simply become health bars, ammunition, and spawn points. One guy dies, and you jump into another. The second one falls, and you jump again. If you’re out of soldiers, just run around like a maniac until a new group arrives. Resources to be discarded and replaced. Human beings, a mobility option. Flesh, the true ammunition. The game gives these resources names and rewards you for keeping them alive. None of it matters, of course. You are a person for as long as it’s useful, and then you’re someone else in the blink of an eye.
I kept waiting for the game to wrestle with this. Early on, a character warns you that Aya isn’t stable enough to engage with this system. It promises a payoff - give me the find out to my fuck around. A breakdown, a reckoning, an ending that gives us the cost of our dehumanising expenditure. Fuck it, give me my “push through ghosts as I trudge my way through rain and river” MGS3 style. But nothing ever comes.
This absence, as I realised it, turns out to be the whole game in miniature for me. Ideas and ponderings that could individually support a whole game get thrown in your face one after another. All of them are abandoned at a breakneck speed. Nothing resolves, nothing even accumulates. As I kept playing, I became less interested in the story and more fascinated by my own patience and wait. Every new chapter brought a new idea, and every new reveal was another piece of the puzzle being moved into place. I was driven by my curiosity. Surely there had to be a reason these ideas kept appearing, surely there was some larger point connecting all this together, surely none of this is stupid in a way that will make my head hurt for days.
Now, as mentioned earlier, I was playing this game with no prior knowledge of Parasite Eve. Hell, I didn’t even realise, several hours in, that this was the third entry in this series. I’d assumed that it was fine. “This game is a soft reboot, a rebirth of sorts for Aya Brea, bringing her back into mainstream gaming”, I’d been told. So, I wasn’t worried about missing a few references here and there. What I didn’t expect and wasn’t prepared for was how… wrong(?) the woman I was playing felt. From reputation and others' impressions, I held the impression that Aya was a hard-headed, focused, decisive, and quite an inspiring character. The person I was playing as was stilted, distant, and constantly a step behind her own life. It’s as though someone was trying very hard to occupy a space that wasn’t originally built for them.
I assumed this was just the result of the devs trying to follow the amnesiac-protagonist trope in their own way, or my own unfamiliarity with the character. So, I began the waiting game again, waiting for the supposed “rebirth” and for her to maybe become the character I’d heard about. But then I killed the game's final boss, and the last cutscene began. The person we were playing as was never Aya. Her name is Eve, a child (or a god, don’t fucking ask me), and she has been inhabiting Aya's body while also believing herself to be Aya. It’s confusing, I know. The legend herself also appears, and when she does, you finally go “Oh, there she is!” Certainty in every line and move, she has the presence of someone who has already survived the impossible. More real in ninety seconds than what Eve could manage across the whole game. Okay, yes! All of this makes perfect sense! For a moment, everything clicks into place.
But only for a moment. If the girl I’d spent nearly twenty-five hours with wasn’t Aya, who was this game trying to bring back? The entire game, every scene and every dialogue, was in preparation to tell me that Aya wasn’t ever here, while dressing up a literal child in Aya’s body and sexualising every aspect of the character. All of that, for what? The real Aya fucking dies not even a minute afterwards, and we, as Eve, kill her.
I think the game got exactly the Aya it wanted. Not the woman, only the silhouette. The gun. The pretty face. The reputation. Only an image standing in for a person. Eve, now actually, properly, Aya, prepares to live out the rest of her life as the latter. A child who has already lost her memories, her body, her name, is now being written to offer up whatever was left of herself, too. This doesn’t happen, thankfully, and one trusted adult in the game tells her to go live her own life instead. The story spent its entire length erasing Aya, then Eve tried to erase herself too, only to be told to go live her own life. What life? All that’s waiting for the poor kid is an existential and identity crisis.
Is this the point of the 3rd Birthday? That nobody can simply be themselves, or that the idea of a person in our heads is good enough? It makes the same mistake that its story tries, and, in my opinion, fails to warn against - reviving something dead as a name, a poster, a marketing beat, while abandoning almost everything that made the original worth remembering.
Underneath the jank, the unfinished ideas, and the shitty fan-service, I was still left with a feeling, a question. What happens when you copy someone else’s identity or memories instead of building your own? I got myself a PSP based on my and other people's memories, but after enough time with it, those memories stopped mattering. The experiences became mine. In a way, I wanted the same thing to happen with The 3rd Birthday. I came to it carrying other people's impressions of Aya, of Parasite Eve. But it never gets to take the next step. Square Enix doesn’t want to take the next step. The game forcefully inherited all the expectations that came with its past and never quite figured out what it wants to be when the time to prove itself finally came.
A legacy preserved only as an image isn't a legacy that survived. And I suppose remembering someone isn’t the same as bringing them back either. I finished this game having never known Aya Brea, and I still felt her absence by the end. I mourn for what we lost, not the series or The 3rd Birthday - I’ve come to terms with the fact that, thanks to this game and where its developers went, it’s borderline impossible for this series to return. I only wish to mourn for Aya. How strange - I mourn for someone I never really got to meet, whose only real appearance in this game was in the minute right before she died. This may be the only inheritance, the only legacy The 3rd Birthday can ever truly leave behind, and it fucking sucks, man. It fucking sucks.
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Thank you for reading. When the idea for this piece came to mind, I knew it meant making choices about what to leave out. It may not seem like it, but I genuinely admire some things in this game. The soundtrack is my jam, the game looks remarkably good for a PSP title, and some parts of the game defo stayed with me long after the credits rolled. For all its uh...problems, this was clearly a project filled with ambition, and I am no one to take that away from it and its fans. If you enjoyed reading this piece, I'd really appreciate an updoot.
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