Characters / Winter Voices

Main Characters

The Heroine

The Player Character, a 24-year-old woman who leaves her village after her father's death. The player decides her appearance, personality, background and occupation.

• Action Girl: Not as first, though she eventually becomes one. And if you chose the Huntress class, she already was.
• Ambiguous Disorder: At first, but in Episode 4, a Volva and healer diagnoses her with schizofrenia and tells her simply to learn to live with the condition. Her father is also implied to have suffered from it.
• Animal Motifs: Clever Crows.
• Audience Surrogate: She's a blank slate for the player to project onto.
• Awesome, but Impractical/Blessed with Suck: A high Memory means that she is more fragile, but gains more XP after battles.
• Black Comedy: Her specialty.
• Boyish Short Hair: A hairstyle option.
• Butch Lesbian/Lipstick Lesbian/Straight Gay: The player can claim to prefer women, though whether or not they choose to lie is also an option.
• The Chew Toy: Regardless of how you play her, The Heroine has had a very tragic life, and the game's events after are only her beginning to come to terms with it.
• Cloudcuckoolander: When asking what a boat is. Indeed, she comes off as this quite often.
  "Is it like a cart, but in the river... pulled by fish?"
• Daddy's Girl: Can admit to being one.
• Deadpan Snarker: The undisputed master of it in a game full of it, though only if the player is so inclined.
• Fanservice: A few of her portraits can be this, though are always tasteful as the rule of thumb.
• Fetishized Abuser: A subtle version with Ven, if you decide to play as a Jerkass and raise his Romance score.
• Foreshadowing: The Beast and him claiming The Princess's kingdom are both relevant, though not until Episode 4.
• Generation Xerox: With her father.
  "It was in my nature. It was in your mother's nature."
• Ghost Memory: Being on a reverse of her father's own journey, some of the shadows she comes across claim to have met her father, or know things about him that she doesn't or only she would know.
• Housewife: The Weaver class.
• Made of Iron: Survives quite a lot of situations that would kill an ordinary person.
• Misery Builds Character: Deconstructed and subverted. Her rape heavily scarred and destroyed her as a person, though her subsequent leaving of her village and finding her own home among the ruins of the burnt village give her a bigger sense of being.
• Motif: Fire, crows, and vomit are all used to describe her and her father, and it's often played for Squick.
• Jerkass: Can choose to be, and most dialogue options using the Humor stat have shades of this.
• Player Character: From start to finish.
• Playing with Fire: She eventually gains the Pyre Princess mode, which allows her to destroy enemies.
• Power of the Void: The Oblivion and Absence skills. Oblivion allows The Heroine to hide and reduce incoming damage or remove enough PP and MP that it leaves most enemies with none, whereas the Absence skills allow The Heroine to summon flames that cast Void Walk, which passively removes PP from nearby enemies.
• Prim and Proper Bun: A hairstyle option.
• Outdoorsy Gal: The Huntress class has a much better time surviving in the wilderness, and is said to enjoy the lifestyle for its novelty. The Weaver and the Volva, not so much.
• Rape as Backstory: Which she has suppressed the memories of.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: A few portraits, as well a dark-haired skin.
• Sanity Slippage: Her hallucinations get worse as the game goes on, eventually bringing up forgotten memories and details from her past that unsettle her.
• Seers: The Volva class.
• Shrinking Violet: You get an achievement for sniffling, crying, or bursting into tears 20 times. Seriously.
• Stepford Smiler/Stepford Snarker: If you decide not to be the above, though you'll get called out for it regardless.
  • Also a gameplay mechanic in the form of the Humor stat. A high Humor allows you to shrug off weaker attacks entirely, but is ultimately The Heroine denying the shadows' claims.
• Strong Family Resemblance: We never see her mother, though quite a few portraits resemble her father.
• Took a Level in Badass: A massive one.
• Trauma Button: Her father's death causes suppressed memories to come back to her and other peoples' memories to haunt her dreams.
• Quirky Bard: The Volva class, again. Lampshaded by Inkeri the Volva, who tells the player that poems and stories will not be useful is she were to be attacked by a bear. Despite this, the Volva is the hardest class in the game, but also the best due to the increased amount of skill points and attributes the player will have due to their extremely high level. By Episode 4, a Weaver of a Huntress will be around Level 17, and that's if the player completes as many battles as they can. A Volva, on the other hand, will be in their mid 20's at the lowest.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Though entirely by choice when she realizes that they never truly lived among the village, but instead simply watched from afar.

Companions

The Crow

A small black crow who latches onto The Heroine's shoulder as she leaves her village. He is noted to be extremely brave and intelligent, but quite annoying and troublesome.

• Clever Crows: Has a Divine Memory.
• The Dreaded: Played for Laughs when The Heroine notes that he terrifies the birds on the river.
• Interspecies Romance: His Romance score is worryingly easy to raise.
• The Load: He doesn't help in any specific way, though he proves useful in combat.
• The Millstone: Having him increases your Memory, which lowers you Mitigation (a higher Mitigation means that you take less damage - for example, a Mitigation of 25% means that you will only 3 quarters of damage from any attack, whereas a negative of the same number means that you take 1 quarter more damage than you ordinarily would). However, the fact that he helps with Energy regeneration can be seen as balancing out these effects.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Quite a few descriptions of him are downright adorable.

Ven

A young traveler on the road, The Heroine meets him at the end of the mountain ruins. He is the Traveler.

• All Men Are Perverts: He warns The Heroine not to tease him or other men, because he believes that men are capable of very disgusting things. Considering the traumatic things that happen not soon afterwards, he's right.
• Amazon Chaser: Jokes about liking dominant, protective women. While he may be kidding, initiating this response raises his Romance score, so there could be an element of truth to it.
• Artificial Stupidity: At first, his pathfinding is poor, to say the least. It improves as the Episodes go on, though he still has a habit of getting stuck on things.
• Brainy Brunette: Has an interest in story telling and history, and has dark brown hair.
• Break the Cutie: Though he feels rather selfish for it, though ruining the wooden village's old volva's reputation makes him so disgusted with The Heroine that he leaves at the end of Episode 3.
• Foil: To The Heroine.
• Imaginary Friend: May be.
• Living Emotional Crutch: To The Heroine, and vice versa.
• Nice Guy: His biography notes that he's one of the few people you meet who don't unnerve or scare you.
• Playing with Fire: His active skill, Pyre, increases the player's Intuition by 50 and reduces close-range damage they suffer by 5% for the whole battle, whether or not its buff is active.
• The Pollyanna: A male example. Unless you antagonize him in Episode 3, he's always very cheerful.
• Support Party Member: The Crow has an ability that removes 2 PP from enemies, which is quite useful in conjunction with skills such as Waiting. Ven, on the other hand, has a skill that increases your Intuition.

Chichi

A fisherwoman living on the road to the Sapphire Bay, and also a wife - though likely widow - of a traveler who left a decade before The Heroine meets her. She may join The Heroine for the last stretch of her journey.

• Animal Motifs: Fish.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Nurses The Heroine back to health after she nearly dies by the river.
• The Heart: Somewhat.
• Imaginary Friend: May be.
• I Will Wait for You: If she decides not to go with The Heroine
  • I Will Find You: Played with. If she decides to go with The Heroine, she mentions that it's unlikely she'll ever see her husband again but jokes that nothing's impossible.
• Nice Girl: The other person The Heroine feels comfortable around.
• The Pollyanna: Even more than Ven. Having her in the party at all passively increases your Humor by 30.