I was thinking about games like Beyond Good and Evil and Ico, and wondering what other games Ive played that it seemed like no one else did. I came up with this one.

Parasite Eve



This is one of my favorite games of all time, but it seems like me and 1 of my friends are the only people who have ever played it. This is the game that made me think twice about selling games, because for some reason when I finished it I thought I would be done with it forever, but I have bought it at least 5 times from multiple places. Every so often I just get the urge to play this game, and am wholly satisfied every time I do. It had one of my favorite story lines OF ALL TIME, and it was really very very simple - Mitochondria are fighting against the creatures they are in. Its one of the few games that can actually teach a little bit about a real scholastic subject other than military tactics or economics.

The gameplay was slightly more than that of a turn based RPG. You would run around in a small area on the screen(designated for battle, takes much less time to come up then loading a whole new "battle area". While you ran around dodging enemy attacks and ATB guage would fill. Then, when you chose to use your turn, the game would temporarily pause while you selected an action and a target, but would be in real time as you fired, so if you chose at the wrong time, you could still be hurt by an enemies attack. You also had a magic guage(Parasite Energy guage) for magic like attacks. There is also a range system built into the game, which adds a little bit more to the avoid/attack system and give a little bit more strategy in what weapon to use when, etc.

There is a slight RPG-like system where you have a few things to choose to improve as you level up. A slightly abnormal aspect of the level up system though, is that you can choose to give a bonus to either yourself, your weapon or your armor. And this is a game where you are changing weapons and armor just rarely enough to make it a decent idea. You can also synthesize the most powerful weapons in the game by collecting 300 pieces of "junk" and talking to the weapons guy in the Police Station.
You also gain new powers as you level up, though its not a choice which powers to get when.

The game was only about 9 hours long(if I remember correctly), but it had a couple of different ways of making you want to play more. The first was that at the end of the game you can engrave something into 1 weapon and 1 armor, it doesn't tell you at the time, but you get to use these to start the game in the "EX mode". And the second was that a new area was unlocked in the city, the Chrysler Building. This was an impossibly difficult area if done at the wrong time. This led you to essentially have to beat the game more than once to be able to get to the top(by leveling up your weapon that you kept instead of yourself, then leveling up in your third game to actually get to the top of the building.

Overall I pretty much liked everything about this game. Its a game by SquareSOFT, oddly enough to me, as I didn't think it felt like a Square game, but it seemed very realistically done(for a game where you have powers and fight reanimated dinosaurs) and it seemed like its gameplay was much better than that of the standard turn based RPG. I liked the incentives they used to add replay, I liked the story, I liked the battle system, I liked the enemies and I liked the characters. I pretty much just loved this game.

So, there you have it, one of my favorite games ever, and it seemed like no one else heard of it. Chime in and mention one of yours.