The Chrysler Building can go screw itself.
Here's the thing about the building: The intent is to play through the game multiple times and knock out a good dozen or so floors every once in a while. That's all well and good, since the game gives you a key for every ten floors you climb. This is all well and good, considering this particular dungeon is, for the most part, absolutely insane after each ten floors.
With a good equipment setup and plenty of bonus points [which you gain extra of at each chapter], you can get through most of the place with some ease. The boss battles are pretty epic, with the consideration that half of them are simply recolors of former boss battles [in other words, typical Square].
The one good thing about the final ten floors is how well everything sets up. Before this, all the stories look alike, with puzzle-piece screens that assemble the randomized maps, with no hope for a map or distinguishing marker. It's aggravating, tiring, and wears your patience down, especially if you're like me and take everything all at once instead of in bits and pieces as the developers somewhat intended.
Conversely, those last ten floors wipe all random encounters for the sake of prepping you for the final battle. You're given a very small map, a single screen, for each floor. The first of these final ten is fairly clean, looking like a presentational area like a museum. As you climb, you notice that orange ooze that was prevalent all throughout the main game. The further you climb, the more it takes over each floor, until any sight of the actual structure is completely absent in place of the mitochondrial goop.
This is the set piece for the final battle. It's basically the hardest boss in the entirety of the game, though you get the added benefit of actually defeating the final boss instead of running away from it as with the main game. The identity of the boss is essentially the very source of the events of Parasite Eve, both the book and game. After fighting through several forms [again, as is customary with Square], you're given one last dialog between Aya and the antagonist. From a story perspective, it's at least a fair deal better than the closure the main game gives you, but all you get is some brief animations all on the same screen as where you fought the boss, then credits. [In fact, you change discs just to see the credits if you were on disc one. Which I still have to scratch my head at.]
The game was definitely very memorable, but the endgame was a bit disappointing. I still pray this game gets put up on PSN, because more interest needs to be directed toward the series. Third Birthday will hopefully find its way to the States, and perhaps it will spawn further sequels, if warranted.
I'll be working on Parasite Eve 2 at some point, which is a drastic departure from Parasite Eve 1 in terms of both story and gameplay, taking on many of the Resident Evil cliches and infusing more action into the series, abandoning the ATB style pretty much entirely. Should be interesting.
