Aya Brea
Aya Brea is the main protagonist of the video game adaptations of the 1995 novel Parasite Eve by Square Enix. An original character created by producer Hironobu Sakaguchi for the 1998 role-playing video game Parasite Eve, she is an NYPD detective who faces off against Eve, a being created by sentient mitochondria wishing to conquer life on Earth. In the 1999 sequel Parasite Eve II, Aya, now working for the FBI, is investigating further activities involving mitochondria. In the 2010 game The 3rd Birthday, an amnesiac Aya is found by the Counter Twisted Investigation unit to fight against the "Twisted", mitochondria-spawned creatures that have gradually taken over the world.
Tetsuya Nomura was largely responsible for Aya's design after her original artist failed to realize Sakaguchi's vision for the character. Nomura ended up blending two different character designs to create her final appearance. He also returned to design her in subsequent sequels of Parasite Eve. Aya's depiction in The 3rd Birthday was meant to make her likeable for both men and women while retaining her sex appeal.
Aya Brea is an early example of a prominent female lead character in the video game industry who was notable for her down-to-earth qualities.
Creation and development
Aya Brea was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the producer for Parasite Eve, and designed by Tetsuya Nomura. Aya was originally being designed by another artist, but the sketches did not satisfy Sakaguchi, who had wanted a long-haired character like Aerith Gainsborough, a central character from Final Fantasy VII. At the time, Nomura was creating another unspecified character for a different project who sported short hair: he got confused while designing them and accidentally combined the two designs, creating the then-current Aya. The original concept for her was to have her as strong, sexy and "bewitching". Her design in Parasite Eve II was to have been handled by a different artist, using her original design as a template. Although most of the design was finalized, the designer quit halfway through the game's development. As the in-game model had already been created, Nomura had to step in to finalize the design and preserve what had already been done while adding touches of his own.Nomura returned to design both Aya and Eve Brea for the 2010 spin-off game The 3rd Birthday. Although he had originally only meant to design those two characters, he ended up designing the entire main cast. A challenge for the game's developers was to make her seem realistic when compared to her previous appearances, while retaining her established physical traits. Using this new realism, the team wanted to portray the fear felt by humans when faced with such threats through Aya. Another change introduced by Nomura was to make her less stocky than the original design, which Nomura was always uncomfortable about. Aya's alternate costumes include a knight, a maid, and an office worker. Her alternate costumes were not a high priority for the team, so their artists had high creative freedom. One of her outfits from The 3rd Birthday serves as an alternate outfit for Lightning in the fighting game Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, who is also portrayed by Aya's Japanese voice actress Maaya Sakamoto; in turn, one of Aya's own alternate costumes in The 3rd Birthday is Lightning's. Nomura indicate that some of Aya's alternate costumes is incorporated with different voice acting as a feature in order to showcase Aya's Japanese voice actress.
Aya's sex appeal became a central element to The 3rd Birthday. In terms of gameplay, Aya's clothes provides defensive value but will gradually degrade as she takes damage, ultimately reduced into rags that barely cover her body if not consistently repaired. Like Parasite Eve 2, The 3rd Birthday includes a scene which depicts Aya showering nude. Square Enix kept track of the number of views received by the scene, which is incorporated into the game as an unlockable feature. Commenting on the notion that the game portrays Aya to be "erotic and sexy", director Hajime Tabata and producer Yoshinori Kitase claimed that it was not intentional but rather incidental. Tabata explained in an interview that Aya's redesign is meant to make her appealing to both men and women while keeping her "sexiness" at the same time, and that the team had not anticipated that it would attract a lot of attention. Tabata emphasized that through the clothing destruction mechanic, the team wanted to "communicate the feeling of a fierce battleground". Kitase claimed that Aya Brea's clothes being gradually destroyed as she fights is "plausible and realistic", and was unconcerned if people were sexually aroused by it. Tabata provided conflicted responses in response to questions about Aya's destructible clothing mechanism for the playable demo of The 3rd Birthday at the Tokyo Game Show: he disclosed insight on how to reduce the amount of clothing on Aya's character model, but also implored players to "please play normally" and not linger at her state of undress.
Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski voiced Aya in the English localization of The 3rd Birthday. Strahovski was "immediately interested" when approached to play Aya Brea, as she considers herself to be a fan of the character. Having grown used to playing strong and confident female characters, Strahovski liked Aya's initial vulnerability and the emotional growth she had during the story. As she needed to convey these feelings during her performance, Strahovski found voicing Aya "fun and challenging". She also felt that people could relate to Aya as she was "normal" in most respects.
By the late 2010s, Square had expressed an interest in revisiting the Parasite Eve video game series in some form. Kitase said in a 2020 interview with professional wrestler Kenny Omega that the series' characters "are very deep and rich, especially Aya Brea," and that it would be a waste if their story arcs are not continued.
Appearances
According to the games' backstory, Aya Brea was born in Boston, Massachusetts on November 20, 1972. She is of mixed ethnicity, as her father was of European descent and her mother, Mariko, was Japanese. Due to this, she has Asian facial features, such as the shape of her face and eyes, while possessing blue eyes and fair blonde hair. Aya had a sister named Maya who, along with her mother, died in a car accident in December 1977. At a very young age, she and Maya were subjects of the evil experiments of Dr. Hans Klamp. After Maya's death, her organs were preserved, which allowed for one of her corneas to be transplanted into Aya in 1986. At the same time, one of Maya's kidneys was transplanted into a young girl named Melissa Pearce, who was also an experimental subject of Klamp, and Maya's malevolent mitochondria began changing Aya and Melissa's genetic structures. As a young woman, Aya studied criminology at the University of Virginia, and was involved in their ROTC program. She later became a detective with the NYPD's 17th Precinct., forming a sort of father/daughter relationship with her partner and mentor, a veteran NYPD detective Daniel "Bo" Dollis.Within the first six months of working at the precinct, Aya becomes deeply involved in a catastrophic event later known as the New York Blockade Incident. It begins on December 24, 1997, when she goes on a date to an opera performance at Carnegie Hall, which stars Melissa Pearce as the lead. During the performance, Maya's advanced mitochondria, which had lain dormant in Melissa for 11 years, awaken and transform her into Mitochondria Eve. As her first act against humankind, Eve kills everyone in Carnegie Hall via spontaneous human combustion, except for Aya who is immune to the effect. Over the next six days, Aya battles Eve and the creatures she spawned, known as Neo-Mitochondrial Creatures, all across Manhattan, greatly assisted by the strange powers that she starts to exhibit. Aya later discovers that she also possesses Maya's mitochondria, transferred to her body during the corneal transplantation, but it is unable to take control of her as it did of Melissa because of Aya's evolved cell nuclei. Aya joins forces with the U.S. Navy to destroy a strain of rapidly evolving mitochondria that threatens to enslave all humanity. Eventually, she engages and defeats Eve in a showdown on Liberty Island, and, with help from Daniel and Kunihiko Maeda, a Japanese scientist assisting them with advice in these matters, also manages to destroy the Ultimate Being that Eve gave birth to, becoming a hero among the government ranks. During the game's ending, Aya and her friends try to make up for a lost Christmas by going to the opera at Carnegie Hall once again. There, Aya communicates with the entire audience's mitochondria and their eyes begin to glow red, leaving the ending ambiguous. However, if the player goes through the Chrysler Building in EX mode and defeats the Purebred Eve, there is an alternate ending where Aya loses her mitochondrial powers.
Parasite Eve 2 reveals that a few months after Eve's rampage in New York, Aya leaves left the NYPD and joined a newly formed branch of the FBI known as MIST, based out of Los Angeles with a purpose to hunt down and destroy any remaining NMCs. During her time as a MIST agent, Aya always works alone due to the abnormality of her powers. However, though she chooses not to use them, she cannot truly hide them; she is never sick and appears younger than her biological age because of her awakened mitochondria that find a young, healthy host advantageous. These psychological factors have acted as a mental block on her abilities, rendering them much weaker as compared to the first game. In early September 2000, Aya is following a lead to a tiny town of Dryfield in the Mojave Desert, where she meets and forms a partnership with Kyle Madigan, a private investigator from Texas. With Kyle's co-operation, Aya soon discovers a shadow government facility called Neo-Ark, where scientists are using her DNA to breed Artificial Neo-Mitochondrial Creatures. To control the ANMCs, the Neo-Ark brainwashes a young girl named Eve, a clone of Aya. After discovering that Eve and the ANMCs were all made from her, Aya feels obligated to once again save humanity from an ominous fate which was ultimately the cause of her own physical existence. Following the destruction of the Neo-Ark facility, she leaves MIST and takes the young Eve in, forming a motherly/sisterly bond with her while her friend and the new director of MIST, Rupert Broderick, pulls some strings and creates a profile for Eve, saying that she is Aya's sister. Kyle Madigan, who disappeared after the Neo Ark events, meets with Aya and Eve in New York.
During The 3rd Birthday, despite being in her late thirties, Aya still appears to be much younger, due to the awakened mitochondria in her cells. Because of this, she is also the only applicable candidate viable for the Overdive System. Aya has lost her memories as a result of unknown circumstances, which has led to a drastic change in personality since the first two Parasite Eve games: she is shown to be more vulnerable, and fights for unknown reasons. With the ability to travel through time via the Overdive System, and also having gained the new ability to body swap, Aya is the secret weapon for the human race in the fight against the new life forms called Twisted. Using a machine built by the Counter Twisted Investigation team, Aya returns to two years in the past, when the Twisted first appeared. At the end of the game, it is revealed that the real Aya was destroyed by her own sister Eve at Time Zero, which took place during Aya's wedding to Kyle Madigan in 2010. It transpired that Eve had tried to save her but accidentally developed Overdive into Aya's body, causing Aya's soul to create the Twisted. Aya and Eve swap bodies, Eve then shoots Aya in order to prevent the twisted from being created. The game's ending shows Eve in Aya's body, meeting a mysterious woman with similar voice to Aya whose identity is left ambiguous. Kyle is also shown saying he is going to search to try and find Aya.