Why Heavy Rain is a good game and Final Fantasy XXXIIXMV is rubbish

The unlikley named Ethan Mars

Now I played both these games a few months ago and they both stuck in my mind, albeit for different reasons.

If you haven’t played these games the basics are these:

Heavy rain was a semi-original concept game based loosely on films like Se7en. It was filled with interesting and mostly realistic characters that you could identify with.

Final Fantasy over 9000 was a ridiculous colour fest filled with absolute morons and the sort of dialogue that could cause you to abandon the English language altogether.

For those who DID play the games here is a little test. Think about Ethan Mars the protagonist of Heavy Rain – what can you tell me about him?

· Crappy Parent

· Bit soppy

· Unlucky

· Eventually brave

· Loving

· Architect

· Lived in a house bought from IKEA

Now let’s look at Kurt Cobain from Final Fantasy – What can we remember about him?

· Beanie

Maybe I’m being a bit flippant here, I can remember one more thing about him, and he was a huge penis.

The other characters in Final Fantasy were equally bad. They were all standard JRPG caricatures but these ones grated especially badly. We had the wise cracking black fellow the angsty heart of gold woman the zany one the annoying child – and by god they were awful. It actually got to the point where I was letting them die just so I could see them collapse. In fact the only character I could relate to was the chocobo that lived in Lionel Ritchie’s hair. The mass chocobo slaughter was the point at which I refused to play the game anymore.

He deserves this for wearing sunglasses indoors

Heavy Rains cast grew on me to the point that I was so incredibly tense playing the game knowing that they could die at pretty much any moment that it wasn’t even fun anymore (Not fun in a good way). Every time there was a fight scene or it looked like something dodgy might be about to happen I’d just sit there for 5 minutes refusing to go any further. There are a few let downs like Scott Shelby the 45 year old overweight private detective suddenly going all Tony Montana and shooting up a villa filled with bad guys and the slightly needless sex scene between Ethan and Madison, but that aside it all made sense.

You might have noticed that I’ve been using Heavy Rains characters real names and naming Final Fantasies after people with whom they share a vague resemblance. That’s partly because I don’t remember their names and partly because the names I do remember are so incredibly stupid. All the names seem to be random nouns like Snow, Lightening and Hope. It makes me wonder if I’d played until the end I might have come across Fog, Horse and Xbox. The bad names aren’t confined to the people either – the world on which the game is set is called Pulse and the city is called Cocoon. Maybe these are bad translations from the Japanese version but that’s no excuse for the utterly made up words like L’Cie or Fal’Cie. The translation is pretty poor – after killing groups space pigs you are offered ‘spoils’ instead of loot. I mean ‘spoils’? Really? As in the ‘spoils of war’? Because I think ‘spoils’ is a rather grandiose term for some spacepig hair or another Beardoglion horn.

Heavy Rain has its language problems too but that’s more to do with the voice acting. The game was made over in France by French people but set in America. Now I’m not an expert on American accents but even I could tell Norman ‘Nomnom’ Jayden was clearly spending too much time holidaying in Europe. The best example is when you play as a child whose about 8 years old and grew up the the noir city the game is set in. He couldn’t have sounded more French if he’d started speaking it.

This is how miserable being in Final Fantasy can make you.

Ah! But Final Fantasy had amazing graphics I hear you cry! So did Heavy Rain I retort. And in fact Heavy Rains visuals were better and this is why – Its allot harder to make things look realistic and Heavy Rain looks realistic. Final Fantasy is just an orgy of colour and ridiculous lighting. That’s not hard that just wastes a lot of processing speed.

Heavy Rain isn’t totally original, it reminded me a bit of Shenmue (Now that’s how you do a JRPG) and it borrows heavily from the games that its company made before it (Nomad Soul/Fahrenheit) but it was original enough that it should be praised and celebrated. I think the stand out moment is when you are put into a situation where you have to chop of a part of your body. I didn’t realize this at the time but there are about 10 different ways to do it including refusing. I think everyone should be forced to play this scene as a sort of sick personality test. I myself went for the big knife and then used a heated iron rod to cauterize the wound, genius. My friend used some disinfectant and a saw, not genius.

I’m not even going to go into the more technical details of Final Fantasy such as the rubbish ‘crystalarium’ XP system or the fact the only thing you need to do in combat is mash the A button. Nor will I talk about how every mission is an overly long corridor that you will grow sick of after about 4 minutes. I won’t even mention how impenetrable the plot is. For the record I made an effort to understand it just in case I was missing something and read all of the 60 million text entries in the logbook. I wish I hadn’t. In fact that was probably the greatest mistake of my life – and that’s coming from someone who spent 15 years in prison.

I hadn’t played a Final Fantasy game since Final Fantasy 8 which I actually liked. Final Fantasy 13 was almost exactly the same but I hated it. It’s like a replica of a beautiful portrait which you then found out was painted by Hitler.

Basically Heavy Rain made me feel a lot of things. Final Fantasy made me feel one thing and that was that I wanted to pull out my eyeballs and use them as earplugs.

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