There used to be words to describe this, but they were imperfect. They were abstract ideas, loosely gathered, that served as a way through. Before the words I needed became the words wielded as blades in headlines and discourse, they were something beautiful but weird and alarming. They were Parasite Eve.
I bought Parasite Eve in September 1998 at a new-and-used video game store in Whitehorse, Yukon. I can’t recall the name of it anymore, but like all things in a small town, I can still picture it through the memory of all the landmarks that led me there: up the street from the SAAN store and the mall that isn’t really a mall, around the corner from the record store that isn’t there anymore, and across the road from the store that sold Hummel figurines of blank-faced children casting forlorn glances at an unseen God and discount copies of the King James Bible.
Parasite Eve was given prominence on the shelf by the pedigree of its publisher Squaresoft (now Square Enix) and was displayed in conversation with its brethren. Final Fantasy 7, released by Squaresoft in January of 1997, was the catalyst for sculpting Playstation devotees from children raised by parents who called all video games “Nintendos”. While FF7 remained an insistent pleasure, catalogued by my well-worn and dog-eared copy of the official Prima strategy guide, I was hungry for something more as its secrets and mysteries waned.
A Parasite Eve ad in Electronic Gaming Monthly lingered in my mind: Portraits of two women’s faces, crafted by polygons, with the tagline “the worst foe lies within”. The ad claimed Parasite Eve was “the cinematic RPG” and promised the game would come with a collectors CD containing playable demos of Xenogears, Bushido Blade 2, Brave Fencer Musashi, and, notably, Final Fantasy VIII. I knew little about what Parasite Eve was going to be, but in my mind it was going to be everything, with a free demo of FF8 to boot. I can always be tantalized with the promise of a free taste of my lasting desires.
Every lunch break from work, I would walk up to the video game store and ask if Parasite Eve was out yet, until the day that it was, and then its secrets were mine to take home and unravel. When I bought it, the guy warned me that it was a Girl Game. “Just wanted to make sure you know”, he said. I said I wanted it mostly for the FF8 demo, and left quickly with my lies in tow. I finished the rest of the workday, sped home, burrowed into the basement where the good TV sat alone in the dark, snapped the first disc into the flimsy Playstation spindle, and went to the Opera.
RPGs were still a new sensation for me, and while their meandering opening minutes are familiar to me now, at the time it felt like a challenge. In the opening of FF7, Cloud Strife leaps from the roof of a moving train to fight a whole mess of nameless Shinra guys, but in Parasite Eve, protagonist Aya Brea opens her story tepidly, reluctantly taking a dud on a pity date to opening night at Carnegie Hall.
My desire to keep going wavered at this moment, the clerk claiming this was a Girl Game taunting my heart. I was already struggling to weave the tender threads of my identity into some perfect tapestry of masculinity; I was afraid of being perceived by anyone, including myself, as anything other than status quo. I had questions about myself that had no clear answer: No words to describe how I felt at odds with my body, how I desired a change that I could not name or seek out. All this worry, all the careful upkeep of a lie, piled on and ran slipshod through the hallways of my anxious mind when Eve, Parasite Eve’s antagonist, emerged on stage piloting the body of a struggling New York actress and set the theatre on fire.
I had to know more. The ad in EGM had promised a cinematic RPG and here it was coming true, seamlessly moving between otherworldly cutscenes and action I was able to control. Given free rein of Aya Brea’s movement, albeit with the clunky tank controls Resident Evil was just beginning to popularize. Aya rushed the stage, and for the first time in a video game I questioned the outfit choices of my avatar. I wondered how she could run in the heels she wore with her black cocktail dress, where she had stashed the gun she pulled on Eve. I wanted to know where Aya kept her secret things, and how she managed to pull it all together with ease.
I wanted words to describe the secrets of my body. A framework to develop a skeleton upon which to lay sinew and skin, to run blood that felt like my own through my veins. Cloud’s brief dalliance with crossing the boundaries of gender at the Honey Bee Inn in FF7 had opened a window, but the door remained closed.
I wanted to stumble upon change in the wild and have it happen to me without having to ask. I wanted there to be words I never had to seek out. I wanted it to be easy, because I always wanted it to be easy. I wanted Cloud to point through the screen and demand my attention as he recited the words that could describe a body severed from its heart. I wanted words like ‘transgender” and “dysphoria” to materialize, even though I didn’t know they were real.
On Parasite Eve’s stage, as Aya has her gun trained on the fire-conjuring opera singer, Eve monologues about the cells in the body, how they call out in desperate communication. Then I’m controlling the action; I let Aya shoot Eve in the chest for very little damage. Eve laughs, and Aya wonders what is changing in her. “My Body!…It’s…! It’s getting hot!”
As Aya’s latent Parasite Energy came alive in her, my mind cried out with desire for questions it never knew were real. Eve says, “Just what I thought”, but gives no explanation why.
Parasite Eve plays with formula. Engage in combat and the game becomes a blend of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy. Aya moves freely within the environment, able to sidestep attacks and wait for her action meter to build. She is like me, waiting to be ready. Throughout the game, Aya has a gun, then a club, then another, bigger gun. She has armour and stats and levels up. You can freely move about the battlefield, stopping only to select commands to attack, use items, or take control of Aya’s Parasite Energy. There are early shades of what would become the active battle mechanics of the overwrought remakes of Final Fantasy 7, but here it’s pared down, with no party to control or broader magic system. It’s streamlined, beautiful in its simplicity. It’s a game that puts you into its world so completely that you might never return.
After Aya defeats her on the stage, Eve flees into the basement of Carnegie Hall like the Phantom lurking below the world. You can choose to jump down and give chase, or you can choose to forget it. I have only ever jumped down immediately. When you land, a mysterious child awaits you, and Aya gives chase into the stone hallways of the basement. A rat mutates before her eyes, its monstrous transformation triggered by changing cells in its body. It becomes a grotesque version of its former self, and then in death it becomes nothing.
In dressing rooms, bodies lay charred and dying on the floor, one of whom mutters the name “Melissa” as it succumbs. A diary in another room tells me that Melissa is the body that Eve has grown inside of, taken over and turned into something more. Something evil, but something aware of who they are. Melissa writes in her diary about the life she wants for herself and how she would make a deal with the devil to have it, even just for a moment.
The words in Melissa’s diary are familiar desires for desperate change. She knows there is something in her, something dangerous maybe, that she cannot find words to describe. Her desires have a name she doesn’t know for a change she cannot imagine. I remember my own hands clasped in desperate prayer for whatever God or devil might change me, and the fear that whatever I was hiding in my body might destroy everything I know. How afraid I was to admit I was willing to take the risk.
When Aya eventually finds Eve once more, she tells her of the mitochondria in the body she can manipulate and control, how she can turn anyone and anything into whatever she sees fit. Anyone save Aya, with whom she shares a secret bond, and is immune to the transformations happening around them. Aya fights more rats, a mutated parrot, and Eve again. Out of combat, the game returns the tank controls and clunky movement to my hands and I bid Aya to move. As she runs, I can hear the click-clack of her steps on the floor, and I worry about her feet in those heels.
The monstrous change Eve brings about in the lives she destroys should be terrifying, but it lights a fire of possibility in my chest all the same. I never tell anyone I want to know how it feels to be made so wholly new. In the game it’s grotesque, but that’s just pixels telling a story. I wonder how it would feel for my own bones to grow and reform into the beautiful vision of a body hidden in my mind.
The day after the Carnegie Hall incident, Aya dons her civilian attire: blue jeans, white shirt, leather jacket. Effortlessly cool but no less alluring. I move Aya through New York City as Eve turns people into goop and animals into monsters. We fight at the zoo, at the natural history museum. We battle on a carriage pulled at breakneck speed by a horse on fire. With each encounter, Eve begs Aya to join with her, become one with her. The body is hot, and desperate, and yearning. Aya defies Eve’s call, but questions herself all the same. Someone different from her peers, seeking to understand who she is becoming without hiding from the power challenging her perception of the truth of her body.
The idea of representation has changed in the years since I searched for words and phrases in places they would never appear. I built ideas out of imperfect texts, and found sanctuary where none was slated to be built. Now, when the words appear, they are focused, honed like a blade. Cyberpunk 2077 has a trans bartender who street races with a truck emblazoned with a trans flag. The ghost in Paper Mario is canonically trans. There are flags and phrases hidden among the digital bric-a-brac of the world. This is all a net positive, but building a name for myself from grotesque and beautiful hints made transness an idea that never really needed the right words in order to build an altar to limitless potential. I need the answer of transness less than I needed the possibility of the questions it begged me to ask, of who I was and what I could build of myself by challenging an easy narrative.
There were no words to describe who I really wanted to be, but there were hints and allegations, and they were alive in Parasite Eve. I played it all without ever once turning the Playstation off, and when it was over I played it again, searching for the secrets that might yet reveal themselves to me.
