The Longest Journey
What is it?
April: Cliché or not, it's our only hope.
Tobias: You do this often, then, save worlds?
The Longest Journey is not a 3D-adventure like Kings Quest: Mask of Eternity or Gabriel Knight 3 or Ultima IX: Ascension, where you get to explore a more or less seamless world. It looks, feels and plays a lot like a classical Sierra or LucasArts adventure, but features real-time rendered characters over pre-rendered backgrounds, the way Alone in the Dark and Final Fantasy VII did.
The Longest Journey feels a lot like an RPG, more than any other adventure game I've played, even Circuit's Edge. It starts with the main quest: To save the world—or, in this case, worlds—has been the traditional task of RPG heroes. Adventure games usually aren't that epic and have been content with exploring haunted mansions, investigating murder cases or trying to get laid.
To collect the scattered parts of a broken-up artefact is a typical RPG quest. Finally the game has a couple of fine boss fights all laid out; since it is an adventure game, not an RPG, these are of course solved in other ways. One of them might even have rendered a floating castle, potentially an ideal vehicle/headquarter.
Had it been an RPG, The Longest Journey would definitely have been one of the Japanese flavor. The parallel worlds, the magical races, the underwater sequences are all elements we know from Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. This is not really astonishing for a European game. On the whole, European game designers have gravitated more towards Japan than towards the US.
While I did enjoy playing The Longest Journey as it is, I can't help thinking what a great RPG it would have been. But then I guess I'm biased, I just prefer RPGs over, there are probably lots of people out there who would have liked Fallout more had it been an adventure game.
When installing on XP, you get a warning that The Longest Journey is meant for 95 or 98 and may not run on NT. So far I have not encountered any real problems. You just have to start the game directly with game.exe, not launcher.exe, where the shortcuts created during installation point to.
The game tends to crash at certain cut scenes. A way to prevent this is to turn off hardware acceleration before the scene in question. For one particularily notorious scene there is a patch by Funcom; there is also a gameplay way to avoid it altogether.
There seems to be no in-game way to take screenshots, but the standard Windows way (press PrintScreen, then paste the clipboard into some graphics utility) worked well for me. When you alt-tab out of the game, the cursor is sometimes locked into the top left 640×480 pixel area of your desktop, which can be annoying.
All in all, TLJ is a masterpiece and one of the best Adventures to be released during the past few years. (Unfortunately it should be avoided by people who are violently repelled, for themselves or their offspring, by some extremely crude language.)
The primary reason for its spellbinding effect is that the game is built around a contemporary young heroine whom you can immediately relate to. And she is caught up in a powerful story that will hold your interest and keep you guessing until the very end.
The Longest Journey feels like a breath of fresh air among the Myst-style games of recent days. I have decided to award this masterpiece with our highest score. Having said that, I really hope Funcom won't leave it with this. I think I am getting withdrawal symptoms…
The Longest Journey begins as a small, little-known game and develops into a full-fledged epic with truly realistic characters to whom you will find yourself relating. There are minor flaws, and they can sometimes be a hindrance, but not enough to stop The Longest Journey from being one of the best games I've ever played, and definitely my choice so far for game of the year. Some may disagree and some may agree, but that is the nature of the world and, as The Longest Journey professes, ultimately, this duality is one and the same, so get off your ass and get this game!
If you are accustomed to games that provide action and mayhem, you will probably be frustrated by the slower pace, and by the puzzles, which are occasionally whimsical, and often intricate. But, if you enjoy a good story, dislike excessive violence, and like puzzles that demand careful thinking and patience—and especially if you're a student, dealing with the same problems April faces back in the "real world"—then The Longest Journey may be just the thing to give you hours of entertainment, mystery, and maybe just a little bit of inspiration.
This is a must have for anyone serious about adventure games. The fact that someone has developed a very serious storyline and still put in the time to give it some real puzzles. April has been well done and is quite believable as a young woman who must accept that the fate of two worlds rests on her. You want to know more about her friend Charlie and what is Cortez's fate?
