The Longest Journey

"Indeed the Journey is Long and Excessively Talky, But This is Good Stuff Folks"

Ragnar Tornquist's The Longest Journey may not have saved adventure games in the sense of bringing them back to the prominence they enjoyed in the 80's and 90's, but it did keep the genre's heart beating strong. It was a critical success, and a winner with adventure game fans all over the world. Publications that are normally harsh toward adventure games because they aren't fast paced enough or they don't have enough explosions or they aren't loud enough to show off a surround sound system or they have characters too intelligent to fit into the "shoot first, ask questions later" mold; surprisingly gave this game high marks. Somehow, The Longest Journey just...worked. For almost every kind of gamer it was a success. This achievement deserves to be applauded, but the game, as good as it is, has some flaws that hold it back from perfection.

The story isn't one of them. Though I do believe that there is far more plot, involving one too many objects and pendants and medallions and pieces of things, than there is characterization; it's still pretty effective storytelling. It tells of April Ryan, an 18 year old girl who attends a visual arts college in Venice, the most vibrant section of a futuristic city called Newport. As it turns out, April ran away from home to escape her father, and her mother as well for allowing him to be abusive. But Venice is where everything begins with a dream, like so many adventure games do. A dream starring a talking tree, a white dragon, a rather large egg, and a mass of evil called Chaos, no less. Either April has one hell of a nutty imagination, or something strange is going on. As she's leaving the boarding house she calls home, on her way to school to work on a painting that's due, she talks to a guy named Cortez. He drops a bomb on her basically, telling her she's important and what not; that she can help save the world and such. Of course she thinks he's insane at first, but it doesn't take her long to realize he's speaking the truth.

From this point the game becomes one of discovery that the world is not what it seems. There are, in fact, two worlds; Stark, the world of science where April resides, and Arcadia, the world of magic. It turns out that these worlds were once united, but then split in two when the unification became dangerous. April finds out that she is a Shifter, one of the chosen few who can "shift" between the two worlds, and that her dreams were more than she ever imagined. Her adventure will take her through both Stark and Arcadia, dealing with shady groups like the Vanguard who wish to reunite the two worlds, and travelling to all kinds of fantastic places, including an undersea kingdom. Can she succeed in preserving the survival of the twin worlds?

The Longest Journey features traditional Sierra or LucasArts style adventuring, and flourishes. The inventory is often stuffed with numerous items that can be examined or used or combined or what have you. Most of the solutions to the puzzles make sense, though a few are certainly far fetched. The game isn't all that difficult really, so even when things are confusing you'll probably come across the conclusion via dumb luck. There were a few times I got a bit annoyed by the problems thrown in my path as I played the game though. At times it seemed like some sequences were inserted simply to draw out the length of the game so it would live up to its title. For instance, you can't just walk into the police headquarters from the lobby, you have to distract the secretary. Before you can do that though, you have to see that the electric door to the back rooms is fixed, but the handymen are on lunch break. You have to talk to them for an incredible amount of time just to learn about a certain paperwork form that will get them off their butts. Then you have to get the form, take it to the handymen, find out it's the wrong form, go back and get the right form, and finally they will go back to work. And all is well right? Not quite. Now you have to get them away from where they are working (long story...) so you have to stage a fake phone call and tell them they are needed at the phone station. It's just too drawn out for its own good at times and this drags the game down a notch.

Speaking of talking for incredible amounts of time...that seems to be what everyone in this game wants to do. Every time you meet a new character you have to endure so much yapping it becomes a believable possibility that each conversation could take the place of four or five entire pages of small print Stephen King description. Worse yet, most of these characters have bizarre accents or annoying speech patterns or talk incredibly slow. Abnaxus is pure hell to talk to. Plus, more than most other games, it is incredibly obvious here when the same voice actors do various characters. As the game progressed, I found myself clicking through all conversation options as fast as I could, and then just reading the transcripts via the game menu. Even the attempts at humor in this game have a tendency to fall flat or seem out of character, and the swearing is beyond belief. This is the Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction of gaming, hands down. The difference is, those games were about the kinds of people who would talk with such foul mouths, so it's simply believable. But here, everyone swears just because they think it's cool or something. I haven't heard so much bad language since Eddie Murphy in the 80s. In short, one of the few flaws in this game is its Guinness Book of World Records worthy talkiness in all respects. The characters simply say too much (has Ragnar Tornquist never heard of subtlety?) or too vulgar, too often.

There is still one other element that strikes me as something of a flaw in this game. And that is: for all its length and epic grandeur it seemed to peter out toward the end. Granted, I liked the ending itself and the buildup and such, but as far as collecting all of the items needed to complete the quest (April must find the pieces of a disk and the stones that adorn it), many of them take so long to get, and I felt that I was still going to be playing for a long time. However, suddenly you find out at a point late in the game that the other pieces you don't have are already in possession of someone else...so they are all in the same place. For a game as big as The Longest Journey it's hard to say the team may have been rushed, but toward the end of the game I got the feeling of exactly that, whether it's true or not. Things just wrapped up much too quickly after a certain point, I felt. And this is not a game about character so much as it is about plot, which makes this a somewhat bigger issue. Syberia was a game about characters. That kind of depth is missing in The Longest Journey. When the game tries to get deep beyond its twin worlds and dragons and disks and stones, it fails. For instance, at one point the game attempts to humanize April's abusive father. This could have been a great moment, but it comes across as weak, hamfisted, and even cheesy. The plot is where The Longest Journey shines, not delving into the depths of the human soul.

Graphically, The Longest Journey is pleasing. It has very nice art direction despite some incredibly ugly, blocky looking character models. Musically, the game is satisfying as well. I would say the production values were tops across the board were it not for the models and a few lame animations here and there. In general, this is a very appealing game both visually and audibly, and it really does suck you into its world. From what has been shown of Dreamfall, the sequel to this game that's being made, I think that tradition will carry over extremely well to 3D.

In closing, I would like to quote critic Randy Sluganski from Just Adventure who awarded The Longest Journey with an A+ review. He says, "If this were a television show and you had just tuned in, you would think that I hated this game. And I realize that I have probably spent more time ranting and raving than I have praising The Longest Journey." I am well aware that my review probably comes across that same way. I really, really love The Longest Journey. I think it's a great adventure. I think it was worthy of the acclaim it received. The reason I spent so much time addressing its flaws is simply because they do hold it back from being a 9 or 10 rated game, and also because in a game this good, flaws of any kind are all the more magnified. This could have, and maybe should have, been a 9 or 10, that's why I addressed the flaws. Still, though it's imperfect, The Longest Journey is still an instant classic of the genre, especially since games of this caliber are rarely seen anymore in the adventure genre.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/28/04