Right. I've finished Dreamfall, and now I feel the need to subject you lot to my general opinion (naturally, there will be spoilers).
Overall, I was quite disappointed by the whole affair. The story was a complete and utter mess, and the cliffhanger ending did it no favours in that regard. Zoe was just a clone of young April (young woman with no real direction in her life finds out she has special powers and has to save the world), April had some potential, but not developed enough and Kian was a main character in name only, considering how little screen time and development he got. Whenever the story tries to be emotive, it only succeeds in being hammy and pretentious (the overly sappy music during "sad" and "romantic" scenes, for example).
The stuff going on in both Stark and Arcadia is barely even hinted at being connected in any way (the only connection I can think of is the Azadi tower is supposed to be the Arcadian equivalent of Dreamcore, as evidenced by that cave underneath it that April somehow knows is called "the Cave of Dreams" and there's some entity that's controlling both), much less explained and properly resolved. It just makes Zoe's trips to Arcadia feel completely artificial and not at all something that would believably happen to this character. I know there's the whole Faith and her "save April Ryan" arc, but it really doesn't help the coherency of the story, seeing as all she ends up doing is watch April get stabbed from a distant platform, and is then declared successful. Are we supposed to assume that Zoe being in the same general area reactivated April's shifting abilities? But that wouldn't work, because we clearly saw her get run through and then fall into the swamp, so what exactly is achieved by Zoe just standing nearby while all this is going down? Again, standing on that platform and watching April get gutted was supposedly the whole purpose of Zoe's little excursions to Arcadia, and yet she did nothing to alter the course of events, so why exactly did Zoe ever need to go to Arcadia in the first place? Most would be forgiven for thinking that the April and Kian story arcs would've run their course just fine if Zoe had remained in Stark throughout the whole game.
The way the story is told is not exactly stellar either. Take Zoe's rescue from Friar's Keep by April. First off, we just hear April being told about it. Why could we at least see a cutscene of Zoe arriving in Arcadia and being subsequently hauled off to prison? The cardinal rule of any sort of writing is "don't say it, show it", no? Then there's the matter of April's motivation. Why would she be so willing to rescue Zoe in the first place? They met just once, very briefly. They're certainly not friends and barely even acquaintances. Oh, right, because "she's got nobody else to turn to" or something. Then what about everyone else in Friar's Keep? It's pretty well established that it's used only for political prisoners, so why is April only interested in rescuing Zoe?
Then of course, there's a few little discrepancies that annoyed me. Take the way clothes worked in The Longest Journey. April's outfit of the time was always as it was for some practical purpose. During the opening dream sequence, she was in her underwear. That's because she actually sleeps in her underwear. In Dreamfall, Zoe's in her underwear during the dream sequences, yet every single time, she went to sleep fully clothed. It's not just dream sequences that are guilty of this. In the Longest Journey, when April went to Arcadia, she actually had to go out of her way to acquire and put her Arcadia outfit. In Zoe's case, she's just wearing her Arcadia clothes as soon as she arrives. It's that sort of attention to detail that we got in The Longest Journey that's sadly missing from Dreamfall.
I do wonder though if perhaps the garbled ending is the result of financial troubles rather than just bad writing. The final scenes of the game feel quite rushed to say the least. I wonder if it's simply a case of running out of money before they could resolve everything?
Anyway, that's just a few examples of why this game was quite disappointing to me. I'm sure I could come up with more if I were inclined to put together a full review, but I figure this post is long enough as is. I must say, it's quite a shame that a franchise that started so strongly had to end on such an unflattering note (barring the unlikely event of Dreamfall Chapters ever seeing the light of day).