The Longest Journey

The Good
The biggest boon of The Longest Journey is its world and lore. The story is about two parallel worlds - Stark, the world of science, and Arcadia, the world of chaos - which in itself is not the most original story idea. However, Ragnar Tørnquist obviously spent a lot of time working out every little detail, which makes even the most long-winded exposition dump a delight to hear. I especially like Arcadia, which manages to avoid most usual Tolkien/D&D tropes and offers original races and aspects.

The dialogue writing is only serviceable - they are way too wordy and exposition-heavy - but the characters are still interesting and likeable (at least the ones which are supposed to be). The plot itself is also not especially innovative if you cut out the fluff, but thanks to the lore and characters it always stays fascinating until the surprisingly heart-warming ending. The protagonist April Ryan is not very interesting, but fortunately her excellent voice actor saves the day.

The Bad
The title The Longest Journey is well-chosen: even for 2000 standards, this is a very long adventure game. Unfortunately for all the wrong reasons. There are various endless long animations which have to be endured over and over again. For example, at one time the player needs to read multiple lore books in a library and the librarian takes almost a full minute to retrieve a book from the shelf. Many people speak very slowly and overemphasize every single sentence because they are supposed to be profound.
The game is full of useless screens which are only present to watch April walk through them frequently. Very slowly of course - and this refers to her running speed. This makes the game a chore to play, even when using the escape key to skip many animations (which has to be enabled in the game options and can skip important sequences if not used carefully).

I usually don't talk about graphics in my reviews, but boy is this game ugly. The backgrounds are pretty, but the characters look like they were directly taken from a grotesque horror movie. Especially the rendered cutscenes are bad, with questionable animations and horrible faces - April looks more like The Nameless One than a teenage girl.

The puzzle design is atrocious. I don't think I need to repeat the famous tale of the rubber duck which proudly even beats the cat mustache in infamy. However, this is only the most prominent example; the whole game is full of stupid puzzles. They make no sense, they don't fit the world and their only purpose is to slow down the game even more.

The Bottom Line
I loved The Longest Journey back in the day, I really did. I started my replay with the expectation to write a glowing review for one of my favorite adventures of all times. It is a shame it is held down by bad gameplay and its slowness, because the world, the lore and the characters are among the most interesting in adventure game history. Unfortunately I believe this is a game which is only digestible for people who enjoyed it close to its original release and those should probably not ruin their good memories by playing it again.

The Good
Adventure game fans rejoice! The genre isn't dead!

The Longest Journey certain is the "longest" journey I've played. badum-chink! Ahem.

The game is played through a point-and-click method with a pre-rendered background. Similar to Grim Fandango, in many ways, as well as a number of other adventure games dating back to Sierra's golden age in the early 90s, there's nothing so new to the interface that will leave anyone confused.

The graphics are beautiful, especially the pre-rendered backgrounds. There is amazing scenery throughout the game, from the beautiful areas in the near-future Venice to the colorful island with the snoring giant, to outer space, every part of the game you visit is eye candy. The character models aren't that bad, either.

The story I didn't care for - I'll explain why in the "bad" part - but the setting of the human world I love. It's a solid setting. It's in the near-future, with flying cars and other cliche'd sci-fi elements, but it's not so overly done to the point where it's not at all believable.

You'll fall in love with the characters in this game. My favorite part about the "adventure" game genre is that it's less of a game and more of an interactive movie. The characters in this game are all great, with great voice-acting and unique personalities. April, the talking crow, the sailor, the guy at the cafe, each character, those that had a large part and those that didn't, have a place in the story and I'll miss'em.

The game is four discs long, and it is a loooooong journey. Depending how much you like the game, you'll be spending a long time with it. The puzzles are pretty hard, and can take some work to solve.

The game is filled with lots of humor, and after you beat it you can access outtakes and other extras. THAT is a great thing, and more games should do that.

The Bad
Allright, the story is just dumb. The premise of the story - girl dreams of a world, finds out the world is real, goes and saves the universe - has been done before, but it's still a nice idea. Unfortunately, like far too many games of every genre, you can't progress anywhere in the story until you finish running errands for EVERYBODY. It's not the case in every part of the game. In fact, most of the things you do in the game have to do with the story - like placing the monkey in the garbage to fool the guard so you can sneak into the building or something - but there are way too many times when you have to get help from a certain character, but they won't help you until you do them a favor, which leads to another, and another, and another, and another until you've almost forgotten why you needed the guy's help in the first place.

Some of the puzzles aren't very practical at all. Also like most adventure games, every puzzle has but one sollution and there's no other way around it. It's up to you to solve the puzzle, but you can't do it in a practical way. Like, say, you have to fix a broken electrical wire in the subway. Call a technician? No, you have to use a rubber duck (this is actually a part of the game, though I can't remember exactly how it went about). How do you get the rubber duck? You throw gum out the window...maybe in the end, the idea works (use the rubber to ground the electricity or something), but who would ever think to do the things that get it done in the first place?!

At one point of the game, you have to hear a bunch of stories. Allright, now I'm fine with playing a long game that has a lot of different stories to be told, but I'm not up for sitting down and waiting for an hour while a bunch of bird-people tell me about their history. It's a vital part of the story to hear these stories, too.

The entire story of the game, while executed poorly, was good enough to get you by until the very end. Toward the end, the story just went "kaplooey" and left me pretty damned confused.

April is too ditsy to really be taken seriously. Ever. I wouldn't trust her to take care of my cat, let alone two universes.

The FMV cinematics are awful. The in-game characters looked more realistic than April did. In the cinematics, she looks like she has two black eyes and just got beat up. The animation doesn't seem as good as the in-game animation, either, which is pretty dumb. The FMV is there for dramatic effect, but with a little less effect and better animation, it could have been done in-game and produce the same thing.

There's a race in the game that doesn't live on the same "plane of time". Oh shut up. If it could tell the future, it would have been useful to tell me how I end up solving the damned puzzles.

The Bottom Line
Despite my ranting, as an adventure game it is fun. The story's kind of annoying, but the characters - especially the crow - are great. The graphics are wonderful and you'll spend hours and hours in this game. If you're an adventure fan, get it. If not, save yourself the aggrivation.

The Good
Gee, where to start? The Longest Journey is a great game, its overflowing with creativity and originality, its got a great epic storyline and it's got tremendous production values. Graphically speaking the game is stunning, even on a 16-bit video card the game looks amazing, with some gorgeously drawn backgrounds with very well blended polygonal characters on top. Great sound and music complement the artwork, and the fmv cut scenes are no slouches either (tough the character animation there is somewhat awkward).

Technically the game is great, but it's the creative side of things that make it a winner. The story is great, rivaling the "epicness" of the Final Fantasy games, and without the need to add cheap melodramas. But the characters are outstanding, the entire cast is excellently developed and backed by a superb voice acting , especially April. And speaking of April, she has got to be the best female character ever to grace a videogame, bar none. She's neither the kick-ass babe/femme fatale type that is so popular nowadays on PC games (Tanya, Lara, etc.) nor the "Touching" type so popular in console games (Square, hello??). She's a complex yet down to earth and genuinely interesting character, with a very cynical personality. In fact, she's almost like a more humbler, less-stereotyped version of Daria, and I found myself laughing and smirking at April's sarcastic and often feminist remarks and observations. A feat I am unable to perform when watching MTV's snobbish/ stereotyped female star.

The interface too is refined with a nice pop-up menu for actions and a feature that makes your pointer blink whenever the action you want to perform (with an item) is possible, saving you the hassle of going through those annoying "can't do this" messages.

A great story and characters coupled with tremendous production values! You couldn't possibly go wrong here, could you?? well...

The Bad
I have a series of gripes with this game, first of all it's buggy, something which I cannot understand given the "on-tracks" linear nature of adventure games, seriously, I suffered it all on this game, even the dreaded Police Station bug (tough thankfully there's a patch for this one).

Second and more important: dialogue. Oh god the dialogue! it's so good, and so well acted....yet it's made sooooo utterly looong and booooring. You watch the characters talk and talk from the same static faaaaaar view every single time. Why was this made so? couldn't they at least make some close-ups pop up with a generic background? I'm not expecting a cinematic treatment like in Gabriel Knight 3, since there is no 3D environment here, but c'mon! Plus it's made more boring by the lack of interaction, Planescape: Torment is a game with at least twice as much dialogue as this one (and not voiced-over mind you) but it's never made boring because the dialogue is selected by YOU, even if to just say ok, or a-ha. On TLJ you select your dialogue too, but just the starting subject/query, so you click on an option and Wham! 1-2 minutes of conversation go by without any involvement of your part at all.

This has a bigger impact on game play than you think, since a lot of the puzzles in the game are simply talked trough. That's right, you'll find as you advance the game that the ratio of item/logic-puzzles vs. talking "puzzles" goes down, and hits an all time low on say...the Alatien village. Picture this: you have to prove to a guard that you are the "Windbringer" and to do so you must prove your knowledge of 4 ancient stories. What do you do? you embark on a quest to find the stories? you face a deduction puzzle were you have to make up the stories? nope. You just go around the village and ask the villagers to tell you the stories. yup. And yes, they are LOOOOOOOOONG, and you must listen through 5 minutes each (at least, tough they seem like 30-40 minutes each actually) just so you get the right options to answer when you are questioned by the guard.

This also brings me to another thing: the game's too easy. Period. The few puzzles around are rather easy to figure and most of the time involve Fed-Ex puzzles, and as you can see from the example above much of the game's bulk is made of knowing when to talk to the right person.

The Bottom Line
Essentially The Longest Journey is a tremendous gaming experience, but not a memorable adventure game. When I think of TLJ in terms of the story and characters, I think of it as a masterpiece of creativity, but when I think of it as a game all I can think of is of an easy adventure which required a LOT of stamina to endure.