The Longest Journey review
Introduction
After many people telling me what a good adventure game The Longest Journey is I finally got around to buy the game and play it. Playing as April Ryan, the young female heroine, you walk around in two fictitious worlds, one futuristic and one medieval. You start the game with a dream and curious as you are you begin to investigate it and the story evolves. The rest is up to you (if you play it, that is).
Gameplay
The interface of The Longest Journey is very simple and quite similar to that of Curse of Monkey Island, that is you can take three different actions: eye, mouth and hand. In some places I think there are a mouse-click or two too much though. A nice thing introduced in TLJ is dialog logging, which in my opinion is a very good thing so that you can go back and see what different people said to you.
Another thing implemented is the diary where the heroine writes her comments of the events that she encounters. This has some good and bad sides, it gives some nice views of what April Ryan thinks of what she encounters. On the other hand new diary entries showed up at strange times, for example when you are in the middle of a fight with an evil monster making you think when she had the time to write all this. It also disrupts the game flow quite a bit. A nice solution to this would be to read the diary after you have finished the game as some sort of resume. But if you choose the right time to read it, it will be a minor problem.
The plot
The Longest Journey isn't the most original game I've played and the game creators are obviously aware of this as they make some jokes about it in the game. Apart form that it is a very good story that will take you to many interesting places and creatures. The overall story is one of these "save the worlds" and it actually makes you feel concerned with the worlds you shall save. It would be nice though to get some adventure games that doesn't involve saving the world/girlfriend. It has been a lot of that in adventure games.
Puzzles
Sometimes when you play you wonder if really is a game or if it really is a movie with some interrupts for you to move the mouse. There are a lot of dialog and there are not that many puzzles, but must of the puzzles in the game are very good. They are not tough, rather on the edge to be easy, but they are really well-made and you do most of the puzzles without thinking that they are puzzles.
Script
The dialog and texts of The Longest Journey is of varied quality. Sometimes it is very good and sometimes it below the quality mark making you feel that soap operas are literary milestones in comparison. This is a major concern in my opinion. Adventure games has to have the same quality in the scripts as movies and theaters to be spread as wide as they should.
Acting
The voice acting is generally pretty average. It is not bad (except one or two actors in my Swedish translation) nor is it very good. Sometimes they seem to have been in a hurry when recording and sometimes it is rather good. Monologues seem to have higher quality than dialogs for some reason.
Acting consists, as you know, not only of the voice but of the body movements too. Why is it so hard for the animators to make the characters act for real, not just wavering their arms and walk around and why is everyone so stiff it seems like they are made of wood. When they finally do act a little they seem to do it in slow motion. This together with the dialog has to be vastly improve to come up to the standards of movies and books.
Music and graphics
Backgrounds and movie clips look really good and there are many memorable places to visit. What I didn't like was that I didn't think April looked alike in the movie clips and in the normal game play. The first movie clip I didn't recognize that it was April at all. I discovered that in the next clip.
The music of the game is good, it does what it is made for and that is to help create the mood of the scenes, helping the player to get into the game.
Conclusion
Though it would be much better with good acting and an improved script, it is one of the best games I've played. That says more about where the gaming industry is today than of the game itself. The gaming industry is young compared to other media such as film, TV and literature. It takes time to find the good game concepts and that area doesn't follow Moore's Law together with the technical aspects of the games (faster processor, bigger hard disks etc.).
Concluding the conclusion: Buy The Longest Journey if you want to play a long and fine adventure game.