We get the "Why did they make the main character a girl this time?" question a lot. Not only in magazine interviews, but a lot of people ask the question here on the web page. To be honest, we don't really know why we did it. Under all the important planning, we never really gave thought to why it was a female. We would joke around and say things like "We're all sick of playing as some old guy." and pretend that was the true reason. Sure, they say the result of having a female lead makes the whole story a little complicated, but the story's origin came from this fact. In SH1 and SH2, the story took advantage of the lonely atmosphere, and people would feel empathy towards the 30-something year old male lead. When we decided the lead for SH3, this time, we wanted a character who was casual... a kind of "See ya around" type of lead, someone who would put up a fight in times of loss... The "Same-old same-old" kind of lead character would be terribly boring in this case. By all means, the atmosphere's still the same as it always was, but we were afraid the user would only be able to do trivial little things. Therefore, this time, we thought of changing things. At first, we thought along the line of on old person, like an aunt or something. We like an individualistic "I am Voshauski*" type, or a "strong-mother" type. And within all these things, a will to fight her enemies and concider all the circumstances... from all this our lead named Heather was born. Scenario 1 and 2 differ from each other, because we wanted to try a rude/positive lead. She would often be spouting cusses and jokes. All the differences are in these characters:

FINAL HEATHER

This is Heather's final design. "Short hair", as it was called during the game's production. The "Long Hair" would move beautifully, but it was eating up all the machine's processing power. Another reason this beat out "Long Hair" was the fact that it made the backgrounds nicer-looking, and we thought it would be better to be able to fit more enemies in the background. Heather's personality is also brought out better in with "Short Hair." Others seemed to agree. The "Easy-to-move-in dress" was also an absolute during the game's production progress. In order to enable her to run here and there, and fight the monsters.

THE HAPPY-LOOKING HEATHER IN THE BLACK VEST

Horror fans probably assume the name Heather came from the "The Exorcist"'s character: Heather Oak.** or "The Blair Witch Project"'s Heather Donahue. ....but, the truth is, the name is from the voice actor for Heather. This design's billowing flared skirt was another reason we dropped the "Long Hair" design. Furthermore, every design has the numerous breast pockets. Any vertan of the series should know why this is: to carry the flashlight.

THE HEATHER IN THE PURPLE CLOTHES

This was out very first idea for Heather. You'll notice it kind of resembles Maria's atmosphere. Though we were really pleased with it, the flaw was that it was really hard to move around in. Also, around this time, we were calling Heather "Hellen." The famous Ms. Hellen Keller... Only, it was pointed out that a name like "Hellen" was kind of hackneyed. So we changed it to Heather.

THE HEATHER IN THE BLACK VEST AND FLANNEL SKIRT

This one's pretty much the same as the final design. We were thinking of a lot of different colours for the jacket and the skirt. The black jacket was really, really nice, but we eventually changed our minds. The reason is simple: Black clothes DON'T STAND OUT. And in the game, you spend most of your time in the dark... That's why we changed it.