So I noticed that you can play the Heavy Rain demo in French.  Turns out that the voice acting is just different in the French.  I didn't play the whole demo again in French, but for example, the prostitute is characterized much differently in the French than the English.  In the English her tone is more of that, "I'm a tough seen-it-all woman (cigarette drag), what the %#&@ do you want."  In the French she is clearly a young woman who lost her child, more frightened, demure.  This makes you ask a lot of questions, like whether or not this woman was always selling herself.  Maybe the death of her son sent her into a downward spiral.  The American woman sounds like the type who would keep a gun by the door and not put up with that dude busting into her apartment.  
 
I'm no dubbing purist.   But I think I might be playing Heavy Rain in French with subtitles.

That's interesting. I'm intrigued now; I might try it as well.

I don't know what the French voice acting sounds like but I thought the English voice acting was pretty mediocre in the demo. I may do that myself though, playing the game in French. Won't let those French classes go to waste.

Played the demo in French and it sounded a lot more natural which made things more intriguing.

I thought the French sounded just as bad as the English VO.

They're french people trying to talk "like Americans" so everybody is probably more brash when doing their English counter parts.

I speak french and I thought it sounded good, I'll probably play it that way as I prefer french 

" I thought the French sounded just as bad as the English VO. "

Just to clarify, I was saying that the intonation of the characters was different in the French than in the English, making them sound like the actors were going for different characterizations.  So like compare the voices of the Bob Hoskins Mario with the Chris Martinet Mario.  Totally different interpretations of Mario.  I was not saying that the translation was off or anything like that.

Hmm...I'll try it here in a minute.
 
Now I do not know French but it seems better.  I can't say for sure though as it's like people who do not know Japanese preferring anime or games in its original Japanese language.  It sounds fine but you are not sure if the acting is fine.
 
I'll play the game once through in English so that I do not get distracted on reading the subtitles.  Then second time through I'll do it through French.

Well this game IS made by a french studio so of course the true way to play it would be in french, just like an FF should be played in japanese.
 
Now since im a french cahadian, this is a piece of info i havent thought of until now, up here, we're used to play stuff in english even though its avaiable in french because it sounds more real. For once its gonna be the other way around.

Just played through the first half of the demo with the French audio, and I have to say I'm not all that impressed. I took two years of French in high school, which was a long while ago. But the speech (as is typical in French) is rushed at times, so you can't pick up on individual words as easily as you can in English. Plus the French voice for the cop doesn't really fit him, it sounds too young. His English voice works best out of all other characters in the demo.

I won't be playing in French. I usually don't play games with subtitles on, and with this style of game, I don't want to be reading text all the time. If it was an RPG or something I wouldn't have as much of a problem.

" Well this game IS made by a french studio so of course the true way to play it would be in french, just like an FF should be played in japanese.  Now since im a french cahadian, this is a piece of info i havent thought of until now, up here, we're used to play stuff in english even though its avaiable in french because it sounds more real. For once its gonna be the other way around. "

I took it as she was always a prostitute because she said that her sons friends would call her a whore or something along those lines.

@LiquidPrince: Exactly. The OP's overinterpreting.

The actors simply aren't Americans or Brits. In some cases it works - like the doc in the trailer, the whore or Shelby, sometimes it doesn't sound well, like with the portier in the trailer or Norman.

interesting...

So for a native french-speaker, it would be better to play it in French... That just seems odd... I've never done that... You'd think that speaking French, I would do that all the time, but I hate the way French voice-actors usually sound. I'll check it out come launch which one sounds better, but color me intrigued...
 
If it changes so much when it comes to the nature of the characters, it makes me wonder.. which one was the intended result? Or which one would provide the most benefit to the story? It just feels weird hearing French in a game that is set in the US... Also, the website kinda looks like crap when I choose French, but I guess that's just the web-team, so it says nothing about the game.
 
 Decisions, decisions, decisions...

French and American cinema is very different.  Both equally awesome but I suppose this game lends itself more to French speaking and English subtitles.  I'm no purist either way so that'll be my route one.

It's quite possible that the English translations were made to suit the "western" audience more. Hence, the disparity between the French and English voice overs.

i think that girls mouth is fucked up

" It's quite possible that the English translations were made to suit the "western" audience more. Hence, the disparity between the French and English voice overs. "

  I played the demo 3 times now, in English, German and Russian , and as a speaker of all 3 I though that the voice acting was done pretty excellently. It didn't simply translate word for word, but made a sincere effort to cater for the subtleties of each individual language. Surprisingly, I found the english voice acting to be somewhat worse than all the others, mostly because it was clear that it was europeans mimicking a US vernacular. The other two versions were slick, stylish, and never had an awkward, split-second pause that broke that portion of the experience. I think that I'll forego playing in english, at least the first time round, in the real thing. The accuracy of the russian voice-over astounded me, personally. Mad props to the developers who made the game's voice acting pretty damn immersive in so many languages (assuming the versions that I have not played hold up). A bit of a niggle of mine is that they didn't translate the floating-thought-face-button-text into russian, so it stayed in english, however it was translated into german.

" They're french people trying to talk "like Americans" so everybody is probably more brash when doing their English counter parts. "

" It's quite possible that the English translations were made to suit the "western" audience more. Hence, the disparity between the French and English voice overs. "