Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing at best
Review: I can usually approach media with the sense that it comes from a certain time or period. But when I bought The Longest Journey based on the positively glowing reviews, I expected to be wowed regardless of technical limitations. I expected not just one of the best adventure games ever, but "one of the best games ever."
I have played other games in the adventure genre and what I found reassuring, I suppose, is that it would give you gentle guidance on where to go and what to do. Even if it ended up killing you, you would be able to eliminate one possibility.
The case is not so with The Longest Journey, and this was what I found to be merely one of the very frustrating aspects to the game. In each new area I would become stuck, knowing exactly what I was *supposed* to be doing, but not knowing what to do in order to trigger the event. Eventually I learned that I had to talk to characters an inordinate amount of times to trigger everything that I was supposed to. This took away from the flow of the game by forcing me to backtrack often, and to listen to a lot of text 5 minutes long that could really be simplified into 5 sentences.
It's not that I don't enjoy dialogue, either. I love hearing the characters come to life through inflection, but I need something more than a bare wall to stare at while I'm listening. All of the character faces are animated, I can see them moving as the characters speak, but we never are close enough to see them. This seems like an especially poor decision to always distance the player from the people involved. That is also why I put in a recommendation for Knights of the Old Republic instead of this game. KOTOR manages to spend the majority of the time talking, and still not seem boring about it. It's not that I'm a slave to graphics, either. Blade Runner managed to be an excellent adventure game in all its pixellated goodness, and Bad Mojo is one of my favorite adventure games of all time. But all these games shared a deep connection with the characters involved, which brings me to my next point.
The story, supposedly the selling point of most adventure games, seemed lackluster and very, very anticlimactic to me in this game. Often there would be characters that would be introduced or placed in danger, and I knew I was expected to feel some sort of response for that, but the encounters between characters were often either too short or not focused on the characters themselves, leaving me confused why they were placed in the game at all except as a deus ex machina, a vehicle to conveniently push the character forward. Furthermore this left me confused as to why the lead character, April, should care so much about people she had just met, and made it very hard for me to relate to her.
Next, the puzzles, supposed to be the secondary focus of adventure games, were sometimes very easy (inventory items and on-screen hotspots accounted for most of this) or much too obscure. (Maerum temple, anyone?)
I was never given any indication of how to solve any of the puzzles, although most of them I figured out through a bit of foresight and some tedious errand girl running back and forth. To me that doesn't make a very "fun" game. That makes a frustratiing and needlessly nitpicky game.
Finally, and I realize this is a bit of a cheap call, but the ending was pretty lame in my opinion. It answered no questions, gave no excuses, and seemed altogether too sure of itself. It seemed to me as if the screen faded to credits, and the developers turned to the player to say "See? Wasn't that *amazing*?"
The game was at its best when it first introduced a new area or character, because it was then that I was filled with that sense of wonder and anticipation characteristic of many adventure gaes, but I was consistently disappointed with the results due to a lack of technical prowess and an insanely disappointing lack of intuitive gameplay.
I would suggest looking at other games first, most especially KOTOR, but even something as moderately entertaining as "Primal" on PS2 has this game beat, I'm afraid.
With some hope, the sequel, an action-adventure hybrid, will feature a more close relationship with its main characters, not to mention a better concentration on contextual rather than incidental storytelling.
Rating: 
Summary: Profanity and pro-homosexual propoganda
Review: I bought this game because the reviews I read were glowing and it looked like it had good graphics.
When I got home and loaded it (it took forever to install) I discovered that the game was 95% just walking around and talking to various characters. Some of the characters are homo-sexual and the language was terrible. I don't want to listen to profanity or some gay woman telling me about her sexual life. I just wanted to play an adventure game. I didn't want to hear all the gay talk. After about a half an hour I had had enough of this game.
This game was totally boring with reguards to gameplay.
The content was vial.
The profanity was plentiful and totally uncalled for.
I give this game my lowest rating.
Rating:
Summary: Could the story get any more immoral?
Review: Most people have found the long dialogues the worst part of the game, but that's probably because they didn't listen. The premise of the game is so revolting and immoral that I find it surprizing that nobody has commented on it. You see, the game is about the "balance" of science and magic, or, as the game frequently emphasises, between rationality and chaos. This is bad enough in itself, being similar to saying that you should balance health and disease, happiness and suffering, and life and death. What depth of depravity must a man sink to before he would put a rationality, the very cause of the western civilization's prosperity and happiness, on equal footing with the aimless bumbling of a corner lout that is instead the cause of all its ills and misfortunes? But the game does not stop there. It continues to deride rational thought and insinuate the view that one must be irrational to be good, or to be happy. For example, the Vanguard makes its evil Guardian of the Balance by separating him into his rational and irrational counterparts, the rational man being evil and hated. He is then made "whole" at the end, reunited with his irrational part, and thus made "good". Even the main character, April Ryan, is shown to progress from being a mostly rational human being into a mystic, rejecting her science and logic in the end. I would suggest you think twice before buying this game for your kids or even your adult friends. First consider whether they would understand the message and recoil from it, like any rational person would at the sight of a direct threat to his mind, or whether they would just let it come into their "open mind" and reinforce their beliefs that thinking is evil, wishing is a substitute for action, and science is their enemy.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll play it over and over!
Review: The Longest Journey is an absolutely wonderful game, and golly, do you get your money's worth! While the Myst series is satisfied with five ages and perhaps one character to interact with, Longest Journey serves up over 100 locations (!!) and more than 50 characters!
And the locations are wonderfully realized and amazingly diverse, taking you from the realm of science to the realm of magic, from an apartment building to an art school, from a modern bar to a medieval pub, from an undersea kingdom to a mountaintop city of flying storytellers, from a mall clothing store to a merchant ship, from an office lobby to a wizard's laboratory, even from a subway to a space station!
And the characters...fully believable people, people you like and admire, people you come to know as friends, and people you miss when the game is over. As the lead character, April Ryan, becomes swept up in important events, you see her grow and change as a person, from a college student on her own, full of self-doubt, to a courageous defender of what she believes in.
A few persons have criticized the adult level of some of its language. Even though that's a minor, even trivial part of the game, the game doesn't compromise by talking down to you. April is a bright, normal college student and she talks like a college student. Nothing she says is surprising or unusual considering her character or the circumstances.
The Longest Journey has been been criticized for being "talky," and there are a lot of times when you have to listen carefully as characters converse. This isn't an FPS; it can require a little patience while you learn about the people and places you visit. But your patience is well rewarded with richly drawn locales and fascinating characters.
The only thing that prevents me from giving it five stars is that the talkiness takes over at the end. The game has one of the few truly complete adventure game endings, where all of the storylines are wrapped up in interesting and entertaining ways (Riven just stopped, for example, and with URU, you don't know when it's over; you just wander around and finally figure out that there's nothing left to do), but too much of the ending involves listening to other characters talking instead of interacting yourself with the game's story.
Considering the vastness of the game, however, criticizing the talkiness of the ending is a mere quibble. You'll love this game, you'll become friends with the characters, you'll be sorry to see it end, and you'll play it again and again.
Rating: 
Summary: Its some sort of talking software.. or like a ex-girlfriend.
Review: The game has some good graphics, decent animation. Mainly, this software is some sort of a dialogue-talking-software-something, I suppose this software could be considered a game, but this game sure talks, talks and talks. Theres not a whole lot of action, but theres a lot of long durations of dialogue. I did notice something about this game, the main character cannot be killed, even on purpose. In fact, other characters cannot be killed by April Ryan. Too bad. It would make the game more interesting and definitely add "more plot" twists. Imagine grabbing that guy thats waiting for the train and shoving him in front of it. Or letting that thing eat April for dinner. Or ripping off that paraplegic by stealing his hoverchair and riding off with it. That'd be cool. Well,..no action because its a talking game. I finished playing it. To me, this game has no replay value, because it will play the same dialogue again and again. No actual different choices or actions, the game will play exactly the same. Okay...
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the best adventure game ever.
Review: I am not joking. No, this game is not particularly innovative like King's Quest (which basically put the genre on the map), but I would consider it to be the culmination of all that is good in adventure gaming. The main character, April Ryan, is very sympathetic and well-rounded; the supporting cast, even the characters who aren't on-screen for very long, are all vivid and well characterized; the environments are simply incredible; the plot is incredibly engaging; and, most importantly, when you finish this game, you will be left with a lot to honestly THINK about.The gameplay itself is actually pretty average; it's a point-and-click interface (pretty standard for the genre), though some of the artwork used in the interface is highly amusing. The game itself has a very quirky sense of humor which is usually experienced by touching and looking at everything you can. Overall, I would recommend this to any fan of the adventure game genre, and also to fans of RPGs with long, involved, and thought-provoking plots. Even though there is little branching, the replay value is rather high simply because the characters are that compelling (and because you'll notice details on further play-throughs which make the plot really come together).
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