Heavy Rain/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Villain: Arguably Shelby gets this sendoff if Ethan kills him at the Warehouse.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Sort of. The player characters can have varying personalities depending on your choices, but Ethan Mars takes the cake.
  • When you get into his backstory, it only further drives it home.
  • It is possible they're really looking to die.
• Abandon Shipping: Shelby and Lauren
• Non Sequitur Scene: Madison's dream.
• Complete Monster: This game's full of them.
  • Doctor Adrian Baker is a Mad Doctor who murders people via "surgery" while they're still alive and fully conscious.
  • And in the DLC "The Taxidermist," the titular taxidermist apparently kills young women, stuffs them taxidermy-style, dresses them up, and poses them in his bedroom.
• Counterpart Comparison: Jayden appears to be like Carla Valenti from Fahrenheit (2005 video game) as both of them are investigators who are addicted to their jobs that they can't get any sleep and don't have a love life.
  • Ethan has characteristics similar to Lucas Kane.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Painful Memories Gets especially gut-wrenching when doing CPR on Shaun as Ethan, Ethans's sobs and desperately telling Shaun not to leave him doesn't make it any better..
  • Ethan Mars' main theme.
  • Madison Paige's main theme.
  • Norman Jayden's main theme.
  • Scott Shelby's main theme.
  • Lauren Winter's main theme.
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Scott Shelby rescuing the suicidal mom and then taking care of her baby left many people rather misty.
• Dancing Bear: ARI. See Do Not Do This Cool Thing.
• Fan Disservice: The striptease in Sexy Girl may be this more than Fan Service because Madison is being forced to remove her clothes. However, non-consent is a fairly common fetish as well.
• Fridge Logic: Explored here.
• Good Bad Bugs: There's one where the nude model of Madison will be in place of a normal clothed one in certain parts of the game.
  • "Shaun?! Shawn! SHAWN!.
• Ho Yay: Jayden and Blake. So much. Just about counts as Foe Yay, considering how much they hate each other.
  • During "Shrinks and Punches", if you stop Blake from punching Dupre, he'll get very close to Jayden's face. A little too close.
    • "I wonder what hole Blake's crawled into."
    • "I better watch my back with that Blake guy."
    • Blake to Jayden: "Was that your first time?" Of course, he was referring to if Jayden shoots Nathaniel, but when taken out of context...
  • Don't forget when Jayden rescues Ethan from the interrogation room, he strokes his hair while helping him up.
• Iron Woobie: Ethan, depending on how you play him. Also, Madison.
• It Gets Better: Yahtzee described the game as getting good somewhere around "your second brain hemorrhage."
• Jerkass Woobie: Shelby.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Jayden, despite being the only protagonist without a canon love interest.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Origami Killer aka, Scott Shelby. Not only does he pretend to sympathize with the families of the victims, he succeeds in convincing everyone he's out to save the day.
  • And him actually having Lauren fall for him for his supposed determination in finding her son's killer, while he himself was the one who committed the deed.
• Memetic Mutation: Press 'X' to JASON. There's even a flash game!
• Moral Event Horizon: You might come to understand the Origami Killer's motivation, you might buy into his Freudian Excuse, you might feel sympathy for him, but at the end, when Ethan has succeeded in all his trials and found his son, and it appears that Shelby intends on shooting him and leaving Shaun to die anyway, all bets are off.
  • Note that the above is one possible scenario. In another, Scott allows Ethan to save his son and offers to let himself be shot.
    • His manipulation of Lauren certainly counts.

Lauren: "You killed my son, Scott. Were you thinking about that when you held me in your arms?"

• • Lt. Blake has two moments: beating Ethan up to know if he's the Origami Killer, and ordering his death.
• Player Punch: Goddammit, why did Shelby have to be the Origami Killer?
  • Depending on your actions, there could be several more. Made worse by the fact they're probably all your fault!
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Blayden for Blake and Jayden. .
  • Shethan.
• Strangled by the Red String: Potentially Ethan and Madison and Shelby and Lauren.
• Tear Jerker: Everything that involves a child dying.
• Signature Scene: The Lizard trial.
• Unfortunate Implications: The only two black characters of note are a a psychotic cop-murdering thug and a wise old gravedigger.
  • Madison, the only female main character, is used often and needlessly for Fan Service. Her first scene consists of her taking a shower, walking around her apartment in her underwear, then being being attacked and finding out it was All Just a Dream, and subsequent scenes involve her dancing provocatively at a night club (where she takes off even more of her clothing), getting tied up and almost raped (twice), and having a sex scene with another character. Her purpose in the story is to be a journalist, but very little of that journalism comes into play and is of little consequence to the story.
• The Woobie: Ethan.
  • Poor Norman also gets his fair share of woobie moments, with his jerkass colleagues constantly making life difficult, his drug/ARI addiction, and the number of times he gets the crap beaten out of him. The player can even make choices where they can make the increasingly stressed-out Norman look like a complete moron in front of his peers. The poor guy doesn't even catch a break in most of his possible endings.
    • When Jayden investigates the scene at the nightclub, one of his thoughts just emphasizes his woobieness:

Jayden: I am sick and tired of getting the shit kicked out of me on this investigation!

• • There's also Lauren, a mother mourning the loss of her only child. And there really is no happy ending in store for her: she either dies over the course of the game, or survives only to find out that the sweet private detective she's grown attached to while trying to track down her son's killer together is actually the killer in question. Ouch.
    • Lauren does get a somewhat positive ending, where she kills the Origami Killer herself to exact her revenge.