The Longest Journey

The Good
(In order to illustrate critical points, this review contains some spoilers for portions of The Longest Journey. You have been warned.)

The Longest Journey is an innovative approach to a genre that desperately needs a breath of fresh air. It's a story about storytelling itself, and more specifically about the very genre of adventure, with a clever device (April's diary) that allows the game to get away with using most of the old adventure cliches (saving the world, collecting a set of jewels, always running errands for everyone), while simultaneously poking good-natured fun at them.

From an audiovisual standpoint, TLJ is a beautiful piece of software. The story is rich, detailed, and LONG, with many conversations spanning as much twenty or thirty minutes. Opinions on this vary, and it will definitely bore players who hate conversation-driven games (not to mention looking at the same screen for any length of time), but I personally felt the extra time and attention to detail in April's world, and the people she knows, created emotional involvement that paid off big-time in the game's second half. The fantasy landscapes are gorgeous to look at, and give something to take in as you're listening to the characters talking. Also, all the conversation delivers a long play time, without forcing players to spend it all solving puzzles and constantly getting stuck.

As an adventure protagonist, April shines. She's extremely easy to like, funny and friendly, and pleasant to listen to (a absolute must since she carries the bulk of the game's dialogue). Not to mention she's a lot more... how I say?... realistically proportioned than, for instance, Lara Croft.

The game is easy to get running, even on older machines. There are no big system-limitation problems, no 64MB AGP accelerators required, and you have the ability to turn off the fancier features and still be able to enjoy the game. (I definitely recommend doing the full 1GB install, though, if you can afford the space.)

The Bad
(LAST CHANCE to avoid the spoilers!)

The rest of the voice acting is good overall, never stiff, but sometimes the game's situations give the canned responses an awkward feel. For instance, when Emily gets shot and April escapes the clutches of the Vanguard, she doesn't know whether her best friend is dead or alive. It should be a very emotional moment, but have April examine her clothes at this point and she points out how, "ARRRRRR, matey!" she looks like a real sailor. Also you still get the "identical voice" effect from having a small cast playing a large number of characters, to the extent that some of them sound very much alike. (Toward the end, with each new character that was introduced, I was able to easily identify the other voices played by the same actor.)

Some of the puzzles and situations are thoroughly contrived, and this doesn't mesh well at all with a story that tries so hard to be original and serious. Take the police station in Stark, for instance: April manages to get into a restricted area because the electronic doors JUST HAPPEN to be broken that day. Then she's able to bypass the retinal scanner because one of the cops on the force JUST HAPPENS to have an artificial eye. Then she's able to get his password because she finds out it's based on his wife's birthday, and she's able to bring up the subject because it JUST HAPPENS to be the very next day. Yrrrrghhh...

The interface itself is occasionally inconsistent. Sometimes you get all the info you need when you examine something the first time, and sometimes it takes you two looks before you see what's really important. To give an item to a character, sometimes you click the item then click it on them, and sometimes you have to talk to the character and choose the line of dialogue that indicates you have the item. In the case of Crow, you click on HIM, then click him on the object you want to use him with. It wouldn't have been so hard to implement multiple methods of achieving the same end. There are also a couple of Myst-ish puzzles, Ancient Mysterious Objects (TM) that must be manipulated in the right way to accomplish something. I've never enjoyed this sort of puzzle, personally.

Inevitably, as with all adventure games, there are points where you run out of options, get stuck, and resort to the "click everything on everything else" method to find the one thing that works that you somehow missed. And this means not understanding the solution until after you've arrived at it. Case in point: I tied the clothesline to the clamp and attached the inflatable duck with no idea why I was doing it, except that the game was letting me. It's only after I noticed the key in the subway that I suddenly had a use for the previously purposeless contraption I'd constructed.

Worst of all, TLJ still suffers from the adventure gaming "broken record": You can talk to characters as many times as you want, and if you've exhausted all conversational possibilities you'll still continue to get the same "Hi"-"Bye" exchange. If you don't get a timing-related puzzle right on the first try, the game makes the event occur over and over until you do. The biggest offenses here are in the case of Officer Minelli dropping and picking up his synthetic eye before you can grab it, and, even worse, "escaping" the Gribbler in the forest. The Gribbler "attacks" April initially, but never chases her beyond that. She can hide behind the table as long as you let her, and the Gribbler never tries to run around and grab her. Once you realize this, any hope of tension is POOF, gone, and the game's urgent music becomes ludicrous. (On the other hand, I do realize that "dying" in an adventure is politically incorrect these days, that people hate "save-and-restore" puzzles. I have yet to see a game that walks this thin line successfully.)

And, once you're completely finished, the game doesn't have much replay value. While the lengthy dialogues weren't hard to sit and listen for me, I currently have no desire to back through any of it, and probably won't for a very long time.

The Bottom Line
Hmm, reading back through the above, it seems to give the impression that I didn't like The Longest Journey. On the contrary, I found it stylish, compelling, and a definite must-play for any adventure fan, though still flawed. Though its story is a solid piece of fiction, I felt it was lacking a few things that would have made a truly great GAME. While certainly the best commercial adventure game in recent years (since Grim Fandango), The Longest Journey still doesn't do much game-wise that's truly innovative, or to revive the fading genre of pure adventure as a whole. But it should give adventure holdouts faith to keep waiting for the next great game (possibly the just-announced sequel), and maybe that one will succeed.

The Good
The Longest Journey (1999) was released during an era where many companies were either giving up on graphic adventure gaming entirely or attempting, with mixed results, to resemble the more action based play mechanics of Tomb Raider or Resident Evil. This is why everything about this game is not only amazing, but, for many older gamers, a retro ride down memory lane. The game features incredible animation, graphics, sound and music. The point n' click interface is easy to use and other user-friendly touches are added, like the ability to replay video sequences or toggle between text and or voice. The look and feel of the game shows influences of Blade Runner and Final Fantasy while adding its own creative perspective. Not many other graphic adventure games have been able to smoothly blend science fiction and fantasy as this game does. Nor do many games feature a strong female hero or positive depictions of gay and lesbian people. The game does feature some adult content, but it's used to help further the storyline and not simply to cover up the game's flaws or to push people's buttons.

The Bad
If I had a complaint about the adult content, it would probably be the suggestion that, as a child, April was abused by her drunken father. While it is handled well and helps define April, it is rebuked near the end of the game. Some of the attempts at comedy, seem a bit odd. For example, it does not really make sense that, in the distant future, rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur is hanging out in police station or that one of the most popular television shows is MacGyver 2200. The game also has a few, mostly fixable, bugs.

The Bottom Line
The Longest Journey is one of the last, great point n' click graphic adventure games. It combines some of the best science fiction and fantasy themes with its own original ideas. Its graphics, music, sound, voice talents, control and comedy are all praise worthy. The game deals with some interesting and thought provoking concepts related to art, philosophy, time, history, personal identity, cultural diversity, social class, sexism, sexual orientation, coming of age, child abuse, drug addiction, and human right. It's not a game for kids or adults who are uncomfortable dealing with these sorts of concepts in a game.

The Good
This game is regarded as a minor classic. It put its then-young designer on the map, and became one of the bestselling adventure titles of its era. It certainly has great production values, an epic story, plenty of conversation and plenty to do. Other reviewers do a great job heaping praise on it, so I'll just skip to the next part.

The Bad
The three basic elements that arguably make an adventure game tick are story, characters and atmosphere. So let's see a rundown.

Story: 'The Thirteenth Floor' and 'The Matrix', two films with a similar basic idea both came out about a year before the game was released, but the 'parallel universes' premise was already considered age-old in the 80's ('Labyrinth', 'Ultima 1-6' etc.). This game turns out to be yet another variation on the theme. Nothing groundbreaking.

Characters and Dialogs: this is a biggie. In terms of classic adventure games, it apparently takes a Ron Gilbert or a Jane Jensen to dream up memorable heroes and supporting players, and this game simply doesn't have what it takes. The characters and their dialogs are either lifeless or even worse. In fact, April Ryan of The Longest Journey may well be the single most irritating protagonist in a major adventure game ever. For me anyway. The author clearly made a grave mistake by turning her both 18 and a bland partygirl. Her incessant cries and whines of 'Duh!' or 'That is so... uncool.' along with her overemphasized hipster attitude were probably designed to appeal to, well, fellow hipsters I guess. Monkey Island 1-2 or Gabriel Knight did not resort to similar gimmicks and still drew in quite a fanbase. Guybrush Threepwood in particular was 19 without being annoying. Gabriel Knight was a brooding charmer. Zak McKracken was something of a lonely young bachelor. My point is that if you can't grow attached to the protagonist in an adventure game, your experience goes downhill quick. That's what happened to me here. April Ryan is the kind of vapid-girl-in-tight-pants that I wouldn't want as a steady girlfriend -- and even less so as a heroine in an epic adventure game I intend to play through to the end. She does write a diary throughout the story but the things she writes in it read like bits of throwaway chitchat from some high school party. The diary feature adds no layer of much-needed depth to the proceedings, because April has no layer of depth. In turn, none of her friends or associates are fleshed out either: we get two run-of-the-mill best friends who have nothing substantial to say or contribute at all.

Atmosphere: starts great, goes downhill once I realized the earlier points. In other words, the combined lack of a tight, original story and that of full-blooded, endearing characters result an inevitable lack of a strong atmosphere.

The Bottom Line
I wanted to like this game, as fans of elaborate and serious-minded old-school adventure games are not exactly spoiled since the late 80's to mid 90's boom of those great LucasArts, Sierra and Legend titles. I think The Longest Journey was a nice try, but I couldn't warm up to its semi-recycled story and especially to its blasé hipster heroine. So it's purely up to personal taste. Your mileage may vary, especially if you regard yourself a hipster, I suppose. Deck tassel, cronkite.