Parasite Eve's subtitles are strange
I started playing some Parasite Eve a couple weeks ago and one thing that’s stuck out to me is how it presents dialog. Parasite Eve displays text at the bottom of the screen like you would subtitles for film and television, or really any kind of voiced dialog. In almost any other context, I wouldn’t give it any thought – that’s the natural place for them, after all! But in the context of Parasite Eve, a game without any voice acting, it feels strange.
It stands out because of how often Parasite Eve is silent. The very first scene sees Aya pulling up to an opera, and apart from the sound of the vehicle pulling to a stop, there’s basically no sound to speak of. No music plays in the background. It’s just the sound of footsteps as Aya and her date step forward, eyes fixed to the bottom of the screen to read the next line of dialog. Advancing dialog one line at a time is weird when it reads as traditional subtitles. I keep expecting it auto-advance after a beat than wait for me to press a button summon the next line.
Squaresoft games at the time would use text boxes that would appear near the character speaking, much the same way speech bubbles might in a comic. Pop-ups would appear across the screen and vanish just as quickly, their presence drawing the eyes both to the dialog and the character speaking. The presentation feels appropriate for the medium, a way to work the dialog into the action of the scene and make it feel dynamic in a way a static placement might not.
I think of the ways text boxes layer on top of each other to illustrate people talking over one another or steadily populate the screen as more voices speak up in an overwhelming cacophony. Little tricks like that provide character and make a scene memorable for how they work around the limits they’ve imposed, how they can capture the essence of a vocal performance through text alone. Parasite Eve in ditching the text boxes for traditional subtitles feels odd in that context. It can’t do anything but display the dialog dryly. The absence is felt through its presentation.
I expected if I wrote anything about Parasite Eve it would be how it tries to marry survival horror resource management with random encounters powered by the Final Fantasy ATB system. But the dialog and how its displayed that I keep turning over in my head.