Mircalla sounds like someone I used to know. Someone very dear. But that's beside the point.
I think Heavy Rain might perhaps be a bit of a late bloomer, and definitely isn't deserving of every accolade in the land. It's not even the most innovative AG (if one can dare to call it such, which I often do because I'm mean like that). However, it's high profile, it's story-before-gameplay, and it's fully animated with sound and 3-D rendering and such, which visual novels can't afford to do with any competence. It raises the bar and shifts the goalposts for what can be done with graphical adventures, and is a solid entry into high-end interactive storytelling, whatever its shortcomings may be.
Heavy Rain isn't the game I've been waiting my life to play. In fact, I'm not a PS3 owner, and almost certainly will never be, so the likelihood of me getting to play this game is remote. What I like is the IDEA of Heavy Rain and what it's trying to do for interactive storytelling as a budding medium. And if there's one thing that can convince people that something entertaining can be art, it's money, which will only come if we make more popular pieces of interactive storytelling. So Heavy Rain has its place in the grand scheme of things, whether it's as brilliant as The Last Express or as immersive as Myst III: Exile or as emotionally riveting as The Longest Journey (YMMV), it's still a dandy piece of video game, and it's not a FPS or a strategy game or RPG or MMO. It might not even be an Adventure Game, but it's close enough for my tastes, and gets closer to where I think AGs are inevitably going, anyway.
My two cents. Ta.
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