I’m currently on the longest ‘vacation’ I’ve ever taken from work (eight glorious days). I’ve only got a couple of days left, but I believe I’m slowly going stir crazy from being inside. Blame it on having to pay five weeks of rent this month, the heat rising above my tolerable 22°C or my genuine inability to make plans with my friends. I thought moving to the city would drown out the noise of cicadas, but instead it’s drowned out by the traffic and somehow taken all of my energy along with it.

So far, I’ve spent my time napping, flicking between streaming apps and replaying Parasite Eve II. It’s beginning to become a bit of a holiday tradition, since I finished it for the first time in the same stagnant heat during the January break earlier this year.

When the cicadas really started up in the last few weeks, I began reminisce about how I’d spend my summer holidays in high school. We didn’t have air conditioning, and the one floor fan in the house was permanently commandeered by my grandma — so I’d shut myself in my room and play PS1 games in the sweltering heat on my tiny, 14 inch CRT TV. I spent most holidays endlessly replaying Final Fantasy VIII, lazily wandering from one town to the next and interacting with every NPC I could.

When I finished high school and my grandma moved away, I was left to my own devices in a house far too large for a seventeen year old. I spent the summer of 06-07 dragging that one floor fan between the downstairs study and my bedroom, split between playing emulated SNES JRPGs and my seasonal tradition of FFVIII. There was something about the familiarity of Fisherman’s Horizon blaring through my TV’s tinny speakers and the constant cicadas outside that was very comforting about my most hated season.

As my my first year out of school dragged on and I became obsessed with Resident Evil, I spent more time out of my room and in the study, playing emulated versions with a keyboard since I didn’t own a gamepad. The weather grew colder, and my room was so cold that I decided to just sleep on the floor in front of the lounge room heater each night until spring. On weekends, I’d sometimes trek to Burwood to window shop instead of my local centre in North Ryde. It was a bit of a novelty for me, a treasure trove of Korean import accessory stores that I’d browse longingly, and filled with cafes that I was too self conscious to go to by myself.

It was here that I came across a used games store, Gametraders. Just right there, in a big shopping centre, not hidden away in a side-street like I thought such sacred places should be. I felt like an idiot for not searching for this place sooner, since I wasn’t shopping online at this point in time – how else did I expect to find used games, Vinnies?

(Actually…I still check the CD section of every Vinnies I go into, since sometimes games get put there by accident — it was how I came across my copies of Bust a Groove and Final Fantasy VII a few years later)

When I walked in initially, I had an instinct that I wanted to find any Resident Evil game on-disc, so I could finally use a controller. I asked the clerk at the counter if they had Resident Evil 3, to which he shook his head and said I could leave my details in case someone ever brought one in. Spoiler, I never got a call back.

The shelves were filled with plenty of games I neither recognised, nor owned the consoles they were for, and instead I headed to a small rack of PS1 games at the back of the store. I can’t remember exactly why I picked up Parasite Eve II, I had never heard or the series and what good would it do to skip the first game? I read the back, it sounded like a cool sci-fi RPG mix and the Squaresoft logo had me curious. It was also one of the cheaper games on the rack, at a measly $25. I was on spring break at this time, and had nothing else to do for the foreseeable future, so I was happy to part with my spending money for the fortnight.

The intro got me hooked right away and the catch-up during the opening credits roll seemed to fill me in on what the hell this game was meant to be about, so I was more than happy to jump right in.

How wrong I was. I was playing this game at the peak of my ‘grinding for hours is for wieners, gimme my sweet FMV cutscene already’ phase, meaning that I took the same approach to PEII as I did to FFVIII — waste your MP on fire offences (Pyrokinesis in PEII, Ifrit in FFVIII) and just continue running away from every non-essential encounter to get through the story.

The problem with PEII is that it has a quite a steep learning curve, as it presents itself as a standard action RPG with survival horror elements without fully explaining how the mechanics all work. The player character, Aya, does not level up normally and the only way to gain more HP is through armour or the elusive Protein Capsule item. It’s much the same with MP, though Aya will gain a few extra points every time a Parasite Energy is strengthened. It’s not uncommon to reach the end of the game and still only have 150 HP/160 MP at max. Unless particular armour is equipped, Aya’s MP doesn’t automatically regenerate after battles, and with a high level fire attack – Inferno – costing a whopping 30 MP each time it’s cast – the player has to maximise their armour attachments to get through longer battles effectively. This often comes down to a choice of stat boosting armour attachments (such as the Ofuda for a 50% perk on physical attacks) or MP and HP items to manage battles of attrition.

The more prudent player could probably solely rely on firearms, but what fun would that be? There’s certainly no shortage of guns (and unlockable Gunblade) available, and ammo is plentiful. Safe rooms throughout the game will often have infinite ammo cases where Aya can restock, or purchased from the a machine in the shelter’s armoury.

Parasite Energy is where the real fun is, Aya’s mitochondria allows her to attack or defend using the four elements — Fire, Air, Water and Earth. While Parasite Energy can be seen as a re-skinned magic system, the cold clinical approach to each skill’s effect really adds to the pseudo science theme of the game. You’re not just inflicting poison, you’re necrotizing the target’s bone cells.

When I first picked up PEII, I understood the basics of the battle system but since I was used to traditional survival horror games and hated random battles, I found it to be more of a hassle than a mechanic to master. So I relied on low level fire attacks and running wherever I could, and the game takes several steep difficulty spikes at the end of disc 1 and the beginning of disc 2 that would frustrate me to no end — there are no checkpoints or continues, my friend. This is a 90s survival horror game, after all.

I scraped through to disc 2 after attempting the Burner boss several times and then ran straight into another boss battle that made me put the game down for several months. This was pretty much par for the course, the game would gather dust on my shelf and every so often it would occur to me that I owned something that wasn’t a Resident Evil or Metal Gear title and I’d pop it back in…with no recollection of how poorly I’d planned ahead.

Here’s the real kicker about PEII, there are a finite number of enemies and respawns. For an RPG, this is ridiculous. Enemies only respawn after key story events, or upon collection of certain items. Some of these are very arbitrary triggers, such as reading a stone tablet that serves as part of a puzzle solution down the track. The problem with this is that unless you clear all infested areas before proceeding with the story, these remaining encounters can be overwritten by new ones or lost entirely. Considering that the only way to level up Parasite Energy is with EXP, every battle counts. So when I, lord of the idiots, waltzed into disc 2 with only 3-4 Parasite Energy skills invoked, I had a real bad time. It was enough to dump the game again for several years.

When I completed my semi-annual FFVIII replay on New Year’s Eve last year, I was in the mood to keep going through my small collection of PS games and dug out ol’ faithful. After quickly checking my save file stats against a walkthrough, it appeared that even though I had planned very poorly in the first disc, I could make it through the game if I made an effort to fight every single encounter going forward. So that’s what I did.

PEII really hits its unsettling stride once Aya discovers that the ANMCs running loose in the shelter were created from her DNA, and while the game doesn’t focus on this to a great deal, it delivers a Silent Hill 3 kind of ‘they look like monsters to you?’ gut punch that feels well before its time. It’s never really explained what happened to the researchers in the shelter, as there are only a few rooms that show signs of struggle and since this isn’t Resident Evil, there aren’t many diaries lying around – save for the one written by a researcher who was subsequently killed by a former colleague who opted into the ANMC program.

Aya descends further into the shelter only to find Neo Ark, an artificial greenhouse that simulates various environments to showcase the ANMCs to potential investors. It’s full blown Jurassic Park, with a cheery information panel at each enclosure that explains each ANMC breed to the visitor. Apart from some irritating backtracking, this location is one of my favourites in the game since it takes the genetic engineering theme beyond the generic spooky lab that so many other games solely rely on.

So little occurs in the first two thirds of the game that once Aya has explored Neo Ark, the story starts steamrolling towards a fairly decent conclusion with an SDI knock-off firing into the Mojave desert and rather unsurprisingly, awakening Brahman – the ultimate being. The penultimate boss of PEII is honestly more difficult than Eve, and it felt like it was intentionally designed to wipe out the player’s supply of MP boosts and ammo to leave them vulnerable for the final encounter. It initially took me several attempts to defeat Brahman, but only two to defeat Eve — even with my poor stats.

It may have taken over a decade, but I had finally finished a truly unique survival horror game that I had somehow picked up on a whim. Unfortunately it had spoiled me going back to the original Parasite Eve, where the often top-down camera angles and awful UI have made it difficult to get into, despite its more traditional horror roots.

My summer vacation may be coming to an end, but at least I finished my playthrough for the year. If you’ve got 12 hours and patience with tank controls or maybe just a hankering for an Evangelion and Jurassic Park mashup, I’d recommend you add it to your summer pile of shame.