The Longest Journey: Adventure Game of the Year Edition

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Loved It!
Review: I love adventure games like Myst, Riven, Journeyman, and others. When I read the reviews of The Longest Journey, I knew I would enjoy it. What I found was a game that kept me in the seat for hours. I couldn't stop playing. I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys 3rd person adventure games and who loves the above titles!

Rating:
Summary: this game is so incredibly overrated
Review: It is incredible how I was suckered into buying this game from all the hype. Hell, it even comes as the "Game of the Year Edition"! What a joke.

Problem 1: Why is it that adventure games always seem to overlook the whole puzzle aspect and just make it a redundant 7 hour movie? The VERY few puzzles that are actually in the game, save one in the sea, are laughable.

Problem 2: I'm always up for a good story in a game to keep me captivated, but this is just rediculous. There was so much dialogue it was torture. Not only that, but there are very little twists or changes in the story that would keep you even remotely captivated. At one point I actually started skipping all of the dialogue all together and then reading the log book so it would go faster.

Problem 3: THE STORY SUCKS. Am I the only one who found the story to be pretty lame? It seemed kind of cool with the whole dark technological setting at first, but it was made really cheesy with the whole fantasy aspect. People think that just because it has swear words in it, it's a good story. The only interesting character was the dude in the floating wheelchair, and even he cops out and gets some cheesy lines when he meets his fate.

The only good point? The graphics of course, which are quite good and allow this review 2 stars.

Replay value? Fat chance. After watching the disappointing ending you will likely throw this game in the trash so you never have to hear any of the annoying characters yap their heads off for minutes at a time.

Rating:
Summary: Very Difficult game but I love it
Review: I am in the 3rd level "Friends and Enemies" and the truth is that I cannot leave the part in that April Ryan has to take out the policeman of beside the remains of the ship that you shatters, I don't find the solution somebody can help me to leave of there.
Outside of that I find the game wonderful.
My email is [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Some nice locations, but needs a good dialogue edit
Review: Adventure games are often criticised for being worlds which are beautiful but sterile, with little or no character interaction. In The Longest Journey, you visit many beautifully realised worlds - but although you're supposedly on an urgent quest to save the world, you spend hours - and I mean HOURS! - talking interminably to a whole slew of characters.

The basic story is fairly simple - you are April Ryan, and because of a special power you possess you can shift between Earth (or 'Stark'), a world where science prevails, and Arcadia, a world where magic prevails. These two worlds are in balance, but something is threatening that balance, and it is your job to save the world (or really, both worlds) from the forces of darkness.

On top of this base, however, are a number of crucial items to collect, and an enormous amount of backstory and lore. Someone has put an extraordinary amount of time constructing the story for this game, and it shows. Fortunately, key items of conversation are automatically recorded in a log which you can refer to rather than taking notes.

The size of the back story is compounded by the incredible amount of dialogue with non-player characters. Much of this is guff and waffle. A simple question from you can provoke a five minute diatribe, or a substantial exchange of meaningless banter. Much of this is put into the game to flesh out the characters, but after a while it becomes simply irritating.

Many of the puzzles are also contrived, although I found them to get easier and more straightforward as the game progressed. You amass a fairly substantial inventory during the game, although once an item has served its purpose it will usually disappear from the inventory. Making inventory management harder is the fact that some items contain important sub-items - like the eye of a doll - and some can only be used by combining two apparently unrelated inventory items and using them in a third location. The first few 'chapters' of the game involve a couple of really absurd puzzles that suffer in this way.

Another irritating aspect of the puzzles is that many tasks in the game must be accomplished in a certain order. You may already have worked out what you need to do, but won't be able to do it until you have talked to a certain person about it. For this reason you need to go through pretty much every conversation option with every character, just to ensure that you have triggered any necessary events. Where you have been visiting a series of locations looking for the way on, you may need to go back to the same location more than once in case, on the first occasion, you hadn't had a relevant conversation with someone somewhere else yet.

The game is divided into thirteen 'chapters', although some are extremely long and complicated whilst others are quite short. Nonetheless, the chapters help to break up the story and provide you with an impetus to take a much-needed break.

Graphics are reasonably good, although the animated avatars for April and the NPCs can look a bit chunky and unrealistic.

Rating:
Summary: No pause on the dialogue
Review: I was really looking forward to this game. The first hour was great... graphics are cool, April has witty, sharp biting things to say, then characters kept talking and talking and talking. And once they start you can't pause until they are done. I missed a big chunk of one explanation because the phone was ringing. (you can look in your dialogue log after) And the puzzles are way too easy. I wouldn't even call them puzzles, rather simple tasks to get you to the next long conversation. The story is pretty cool, I might keep playing just to see where it goes, but don't think of this as a game, think of it as a long movie where you get to click the mouse every once in a while.

Rating:
Summary: My suggestion - buy Syberia instead
Review: I didn't really like this game much. I found it rather too verbose, frustratingly verbose and boring. There is so much mindless blabber to wade your way through, and wade your way through you must as the clues are all in the speech.

But worst of all was the ending which made a complete mockery of the entire quest and left me feeling drained and depressed.

I say forget this game and buy Syberia instead, which I found so much more interesting and fun to play.

Rating:
Summary: Loooooonngest, most tedius Journey
Review: Cool graphics, but it's so tedious and contrived that it feels like it's taking forever! It takes a long time just to run back and forth between the locations only to sit and listen to a lot of babble. When it finally comes time to solve a puzzle, most of the puzzling is done for you!

Rating:
Summary: Too much dialogue
Review: The dialogue was too long and the storyline became complicated with too much material that did not appear to have anything to do with the plot. I found myself skipping through the dialogue towards the end. In addition, the puzzles were obscure. The graphics were good but APril was annoying and not attractive and her feminist ideas were too much! Also, there was too much profanity.
I prefer the kings quest series which were visually appealing and to the point.

Rating:
Summary: Not wholesome? Chill
Review: The individual from Provo gives TLJ just one star, claiming it "isn't wholesome." Leaving aside the fact that this is the best adventure game I've played in years, with great characters and a story worthy of the fantasy/sci-fi masters, I want to address this charge. I will certainly grant that there is profanity in the game, though not really all that much; more importantly, to say it isn't "wholesome" isn't to say it's immoral. After all, J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, but LOTR is far from "wholesome." I wouldn't put TLJ on a par with Tolkien's masterwork, but like LOTR, it offers a compelling portrait of both good and evil, and along the way it makes a strong case that the purpose of art is to communicate truth. This is a far higher and greater thing than the tame white-bread ambition to be "wholesome." As a gamer, I recommend this game without question or reservation, because it's fantastic; as a pastor, I also recommend it, because it will make you think.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best adventure games that I have played.
Review: It has been a long time since an adventure came of this caliber has been released. The Longest Journey contains one of the best settings that I could have ever been immersed in. The puzzles in the game were also put together rather well. They were challenging yet not obscure or difficult. My only complaint about the game is that it was so good, I have yet to play one that can compare.