Overview:

A Japanese RPG from 1997 which has unique combat, for the time, as well as a unique, for the time, setting of New York City. On Christmas, the main character, Bya [in my playthrough], attends an opera which turns into a massacre as the main singer causes everyone to spontaneously combust. It is then a cat and mouse chase as you go through many famous NYC locales trying to find this fiend and prevent Eve from destroying all of humanity with some pretty grotesque monster creations. It’s like a combination of The Thing and The Relic.

Visuals:

You can tell when Square made this it was trying to figure out how to make the characters of FF8 look more realistic. What I mean by this is that all the characters look like normal humans, albeit with anime features. They’re tall and slender instead of looking like Popeye characters. The backgrounds are static images which allow the characters to stand out. The main draw are the creature designs. All of them just look so gross and amazing.

Audio:

All of the sounds in this game are pretty top notch. The opera scene is very well done [although the singing is midi] and all the other music through many of the locations is pretty evocative for what’s going on. When the creatures come out you have some pretty disgusting noises going on with all of them sounding like racoons.

Completion:

I FINISHED THIS GAME! It took me quite a while and many sit throughs but, after almost 30 years, I finished it. I used to never really get that much further than the opera scene but this time I hunkered down and did it. The combat just gets better and better while the story goes in some pretty depressing places. The animatics are wonderful and everything gets wrapped up pretty nice. There is also a kind of new game plus thing in an EX mode so enjoy that too! Also, on the last fight, I had a game over and had to do about 30 minutes all over again cause I forgot to save.