Kara - Quantic Dream's (Heavy Rain) newest tech demo

[dyeager]

While some of the individual scenes had inevitable conclusions regardless of what you did, there were a ton of different endings in that game and consequences for what you did. In the backward driving scene if you fail, you don't get the clue. There are other ways around missing clues but it was still a consequence.

The overall ending of the game differed wildly based on all those things. I do see what you are saying - you are kind of on rails for some of the individual sequences in Heavy Rain - but everything does eventually add up. Not necessarily in a coherent way. :-)

The only point I was making with Heavy Rain vs Mass Effect is that both I believe are guilty of some serious narrative problems, but for some reason Heavy Rain tends to get crushed for its narrative more often than Mass Effect. The salient point has been made that Heavy Rain relies more... uh... heavily on its narrative as the reason to play than Mass Effect, and that's a fair point, but it doesn't change the existence of plot holes and narrative wackiness in both stories. Mass Effect does have more replayability IMO since it has more compelling gameplay overall, but I'm just talking about narrative by itself here - Mass Effect always seems to get a pass for some reason for the same type of narrative mistakes that other games get crushed for.

[Dice]

I enjoyed Heavy Rain enough, but it's way more linear than it seems to be. There's not nearly enough alternate outcomes for a game that prides itself on choice. During the backwards driving scene, you could mess up every single outcome, and he still won't die. The opening is completely out of your hands. By and large, the ending stays the same.

Growlanser II handled freedom of choice better than Heavy Rain did. Many events in the game can change entirely based on the smallest decisions(like Charlone not attending the Unicorn Knight training just because the main character got poisoned, if you opt to stay behind).

I thought they did an admirable enough job there though.  For characters dying and personal choice, there's only so many ending you can make before they turn half-ass (like Star Ocean 2's 100+ "endings" which too often was left at Character 1 + Character 2 having a quick chat together) or essentially there would be way too much work to reflect the way it turns out in real life (by that I mean an endless array of possible outcomes).

I remember a friend complaining, thinking, "I was hoping the killer would change in different endings" -- I thought an idea like that would be stupid and ruin the credence of who the killer actually was and his reasoning behind it.  Some things need to go a certain way.
If you're gonna complain about endings, complain about ME3's style of "different" endings.

[Dincrest]

The subtlety is what I liked in Heavy Rain.

[Yoda]

So many fucking games to play and Heavy Rain is one of them.

Is that a short game? Should I get the director's cut?

Sincerely,
Deluged in Chicago

[MeshGearFox]

Omikron 2 or gtfo

(I got Shenmue last weekend. I heard it's similar).