Lightning Reviews

(Originally written on March 7, 2010.)

Before I begin my review, I want to explain something to you all by use of Muppets. In my recording of the famous "Mahna Mahna" song, it ends with the Hecklers saying, "That was great! That was wonderful! Well, it was alright. It was pretty good. It was okay. I didn't really like it. There were some parts that could have been better… I didn't like it. It was awful! It was bad! It was terrible! Boo!"

I am very much like the hecklers in this song. Something is really good while I'm playing or watching it, but then, soon enough, I'm thinking over it and noticing the flaws. Within 24 hours, I know for sure whether or not something I've finished playing or watching is actually good or just really bad. (Sometimes, absence doesn't always make the heart grow fonder.)

So, how did I feel about Heavy Rain?

When I first started playing Heavy Rain, I loved it. I found the controls to be amazing, intuitive, and unique. The graphics are top notch, seriously. In a crowd of hundreds of people, every person has a detailed face - and crowd scenes happen at least three times in the game. Objects look amazing, rooms are detailed and look real, and people move and breathe and blink all like real human beings. The rain falls beautifully, water flows well (except in one scene, where I found the flow of water to be a little hokey). The only problem I had with the graphics was the unrealistic and oftentimes boxy flow of clothing. Characters would pick up a piece of clothing from the floor to put it on and the clothing would look like it had been starched, having the same shape as a piece of clothing sitting on somebody's body. This happened three or four times in the game.

Besides these two small flaws, the graphics of Heavy Rain are nothing to complain about. The controls were also, as I mentioned previously, done well. The game is composed of simplified controls - you guide the character around a world and interact with it. Pressing L2 offers you a way to listen to your character's thoughts as various subjects float around your character and you press the corresponding button in order to hear your character's thoughts on that subject. This is also the same system used to select dialogue responses. My only problem with this system was that at times the writing would be so small that I couldn't read it. The button to push to select the topic was also difficult to discern, causing me to answer incorrectly to a number of conversations. (The button choices, instead of having a straight square or circle or X to push, would be the symbol, already really small, surrounded by another circle - making even EVEN SMALLER.) I couldn't help but feel that I needed a much, much, much larger television to even begin to always know which button to push to select the correct response in a conversation tree, and I already own a 32" HDTV. This isn't HUGE, but I shouldn't need a certain sized TV to be able to read my character's conversation options when the subtitles are crisp, clear, and very, very easy to read. I couldn't help but wonder why the conversation/thought options often looked like they had the opacity turned down to 50%. Because all interactions in the game are timed, it feels like a race against time to discern what the topic you want to say is and what the hell button it's on before the game gives up and picks one for you.

The sound was just alright. Anybody who has the game can vouch for the terrible sound glitches that happen, where the sound will either cut out for a moment or get ahead of the video, causing a clusterfuck until both video and audio can get re-synced. I have no idea if this is being worked on with a downloadable patch or not. The voice acting itself was a mixed bag - at times I found it to be convincing and well done, while other times, it was weak and laughable. For the most part, the main, playable characters had good voices - with the exception of Ethan's voice in the opening scenes, which is terrible. (The way he calls "Jason" is laughable.) The music in the game is actually quite good. At times, it's very clear that the game was made by a foreign company - grammatical errors and strange phrasing abound in this game, and I frequently wondered why in the world a voice actor wouldn't come out and say, "Look, this is just wrong, I'm not going to speak the line as it's written because this is incorrect". Even this doesn't lose Heavy Rain too many points, though.

In fact, the number one thing that Heavy Rain falls short in is its story. From the word go, the game indulges in plot holes so magnificent that the audience is left in conjecture, confusion, and spinning back story in order to satisfactorily fill them in, only to finally play through the end of the game and meet the most gaping, inexplicable hole of them all. Sometimes, the audience is anticipating a scene which for some reason never arrives. Other times, because of the way the game can go in almost any direction due to what you choose for the characters, the game sort of says "Fuck it, you figure it out".

The point of the entire game is to discover who the Origami Killer is, and all the scenes within the game lead up to the final discovery. Like a thriller movie, the player naturally uses cues within the game to piece together their own theory on who the killer is before the main characters come to the end. In movies, plot devices such as twist endings have been created and used in order to keep the audience on their feet and guessing until the final reveal, however, in a game where you play as four different main characters whose thoughts are an open book to you (accessible with a press of the L2 button at any time), one would think that a twist ending wherein one of the main characters is the killer would be nigh-impossible (barring a sort of "alternate personality Hide and Seek" type twist). From the beginning, the game attempts to convince us that this is in fact the case, setting up a scenario within the first hour of the game in which Ethan Mars, one of the main characters, has a blackout and loses hours of his life, only to "wake up" and come to his senses in the middle of a street in the rain, holding a paper origami figure long before he should naturally have one. This occurs two or three more times in the game. A normal person would think, "Well, he's got to be the killer," followed quickly by "But he can't be, the game wouldn't give it to us this early on, that would just be crazy", followed by "If he's the Origami Killer, I'm going to be seriously pissed off, so he'd better not be", followed by "I'm sure they'll eventually explain these random black-out-wake-up-holding-a-random-origami-figure sequences eventually if I just keep playing". Unfortunately, Ethan isn't the Origami Killer, and the above-mentioned sequences are never explained. Ever.

I say "unfortunately Ethan isn't the Origami Killer" because, although it's true that the player would be pissed off to find out that Ethan is after being spoon-fed direct evidence only an hour into the game, it would, honestly, be worlds better than the alternative the game reveals to us. Heavy Rain, in its final moments, serves up the twist ending to top all twist endings - and this is not a compliment in the slightest. The answer they give us to the "Who is the Origami Killer" question is so completely impossible it's almost laughable. When the "killer" is revealed, the player almost thinks, "No, that can't possibly be true, I'm sure there will be an explanation for this and the real killer will be revealed", but no. Heavy Rain stands by its impossible and ridiculous solution so steadfastly that the player feels cheated out of the story they just helped to create by playing the game.

If you've played the game, please feel free to continue on by highlighting the white text below, but if you haven't, please scroll past and continue reading at the conclusion and glitches sections.

There is absolutely no way in hell the Origami Killer could possibly by Scott Shelby. Here are the reasons why:

1. The game states multiple times that John Shepperd has been dead for "twenty years". In the flashback sequences where you play as John's brother and John meets his end, how old do those children look? Between eight and ten? Now, how old does Scott Shelby look? Not 28-30, that's for damn sure. The man looks closer to 45-50 in my opinion, and, in fact, I read somewhere that his age is canonically listed to be 48. The children in that flashback where in no way eighteen years old. Not. At. All. (Not to mention? The kids in the flashback have accents, accents that sound vaguely Hispanic, accents that Scott Shelby is lacking. A lot. Sure, the kid could have lost his accent over twenty years and a new foster family, but… I don't know.

2. When you're playing as Madison in the Geriatric's Ward and attempting to communicate with John's mother, she finally tells you the name of John's brother (the killer). She forces Madison to lean in to hear it, and Madison does, inclining her head so the woman can impart her secret. The whispered name is kept from the audience in order to build suspense and maintain secrecy, but Madison's reaction to the name - her eyes widening, her lips parting - makes absolutely no sense whatsoever if the killer is Scott. Who would react that way to a name they had no familiarity with? It makes a million times more sense for the name to be "Ethan" - and for Madison to interpret this to mean Ethan Mars, when in reality, the old woman is talking about Ethan Blake, the police officer. This ties into my next point, too…

3. The gold watch. Shelby does not wear this gold watch anywhere else in the game. Not in any scenes where you play as him, and not even in the scene where he takes his coat off and you can clearly see both wrists at the golf course. Why is he magically wearing it in the Blue Lagoon, just conveniently enough that Jayden's ARI can pick up on it? Does this not make more sense for it to be Ethan Blake, the police officer, a man who also has the same watch?

4. Listen, you sons of bitches, I was playing as Shelby in the scene in the clock shop. He didn't go back there and kill the guy with a typewriter, okay? I think I would have noticed, considering I was playing as him. I'm sorry, but this is the one that gets me the most. I WAS PLAYING AS THE GUY. HE DIDN'T DO SHIT I DIDN'T TELL HIM TO DO.

There are other things wrong with the plot besides the big reveal - plot holes that gape and cause wonder, ranging from "Why is Madison, a supposedly experienced journalist, giving out her real name in potentially dangerous situations where she should know better" to "When the hell did Madison get Jayden's phone number, much less ever meet him?" to "Why do these people have all this random left over evidence, shouldn't the police have that stuff?" and more and more and more pile up the longer you think over the game.

All in all, though, Heavy Rain isn't a bad experience. Somehow, the graphics and neat controls almost make up for the laughably bad plot and uhg-inducing voice acting in places, and it's a good game to play if only to see how many more plot holes you can uncover with each subsequent playthrough. Because the game can change in so many different ways, it has wonderful replay value, as well. I'm just not certain it's worth $60.

Verdict: C+ (Rent before you buy.)


GLITCHES I HAVE EXPERIENCED WHILE PLAYING "HEAVY RAIN".
Whether mentioned above or not, these deserve their own section.

• Sound glitch 1: The sound will cut out randomly, lasting about 1-3 seconds.


• Sound glitch 2: The sound will jump ahead of the video, leaving the video and sound out of sync. The video will lag, and then sound will then suddenly cut out as the video strains to catch up. These usually last between 10-15 seconds and happened to me in my playthrough about five times, more often as the game approached the end.


• In the prologue chapter when Ethan is looking for Jason in the downstairs of the mall, he checks another boy in a green shirt holding a red balloon, thinking he's Jason. In my first playthrough, the scene played out as it should. In my second, the video "skipped", there was an awkward sort of pause, Ethan made a strange jerking motion, there was no spoken dialogue of the scene and the kid stood there but then suddenly his head kind of turned around. It was like something out of the fucking Exorcist, and had I not previously seen the scene correctly I would have had no idea what the hell had happened.


• In the scene where Scott, the detective character, goes to see Hassan in the convenience store, I attempted to get the robber to calm down and leave without subduing him. Unfortunately, I paused at an inopportune time and the game thought I'd put my hands down, causing the robber to freak out and start to attack. A small QTE sequence followed, which I did not do perfectly. A shot went off - but did it hit me, or Hassan? A bizarre sequence followed in which Hassan kept blinking in and out, the robber turned and left after looking horrified at what he'd done, but then came back, but then left, but then came back, and Hassan was dead, but then he wasn't, but then a sequence followed where he gave me a shoebox, but then Scott had been shot, but then he hadn't, but then he had, and finally when Scott turned to leave the store it showed a sequence both of Hassan waving goodbye and saying "I thought there was no good to be found in this world" and then suddenly it flashed and he was dead on the floor. So. I have, uh, no idea what the hell happened in that scene, but I know I didn't get my trophy for calming the robber down. Son of a bitch. (This happened in my second playthrough.)


• This will be updated as I continue playthrough #2.