HEAVY RAIN REVIEW

story by Mike Gas

This is hands down the best way to play the game. It doesn’t have to be Japanese, it could be Spanish, it could be Portuguese, just play the game in a language other than English and you’ll get to enjoy the most novel fun Heavy Rain has to offer.

What you'll experience is a densely layered triple translation: David Cage himself is a French man, who if you’ve listened to any of the dialogue he’s written, let's be honest, is a writer who obviously speaks English as a second language, yet so confidently believes that he understands how Americans talk and interact with each other.

That dialogue is then passed onto the localization team of your choice, keep in mind that this team not only has to interpret this French man’s two-thousand page English script into their tongues, but they also have to figure out how to convert the Cageisms present in the game, all the weird, fucked-up dialogue, and turn it into something that makes coherent sense in their language while at the same time maintaining a consistent balance between style, accuracy, and cohesion through the entire game.

The end result is a fascinating window into American life and culture from the eyes of an emotionally volatile and egotistical French man, told from the perspective and world view of, in my case, a Japanese guy locked in a basement at Sony Interactive who's probably being paid pennies for such a hurculean task.

The fact that David Cage paints in such broad strokes, always relying on pathos and pathos alone, is the double edged sword that makes his scripts the perfect canvas for localization. Every single scene in Heavy Rain feels so hamfisted, you can almost hear David Cage’s pencil going down the checklist of each story beat trying to figure out how he's going to justify showing you a ten year old drowning. Let’s take the opening chapter of the game for example.