There is no question that The Longest Journey is ambitious. It is massive in length, and it's story spans a vast array of settings. The sheer number of animations, cutscenes, backgrounds, puzzles and lines of dialogue is staggering. Despite this, I can't say I enjoyed this game. The puzzles were poorly explained, and it was often impossible to know why you were doing things until they were done. It contains far too much filler dialogue. April, the main character, speaks almost exclusively in paragraphs, and not in sentences. And graphically, the game hasn't aged well. Let's start with the puzzles. This game commits almost every sin possible in adventure game design. Puzzles devolve into a long sequences, where the end outcome is frequently arbitrary. Sometimes there is no causality between action X and event Y, but you still must do X before Y occurs. For instance, at one stage in the game you must give a character a map to analyze, before a random pedestrian on the other side of the city drops a pizza box in a bin. It is almost on the same scale of implausibility as a butterfly flapping it's wings to cause a thunderstorm in China. And the game is full of these! Worse, is when you must repeat an action twice or more to do something. And the endless pixel hunts really drag. This is a great pity, as there are some genuinely well designed puzzles in this game, but they are the exception rather than the rule. When you compare the graphics of this game to the likes of Escape from Monkey Island, or Grim Fandango, it's plain to see they haven't aged nearly as well. Backgrounds lack consistent style and are sometimes poorly laid out to allow navigation. The 3D models are ugly, but I find this more acceptable considering the age of the game. However, I can't forgive the subpar animations the game is filled with. I can't count the number of times I sat waiting for an extremely slow animation to play out. And the speed of April's walking over those massive scenes, even when she was sprinting, was monotonous. okay to extremely bad. I can understand why the quality control on this was low, as there was a massive volume of dialogue and characters needing to be voiced. I especially despised the wise cracking side kick 'crow'. There is too much dialogue in this game. I know most adventure gamers love reading, and so do I. But I can only take so many overlong superfluous dialogue exchanges before my mind starts to wander. They could have halved almost every line spoken in this game, and not lost a thing. The story was okay. The variety of settings was interesting, the over arching epic plot was alright, but there were too many inconsequential subplots which could have been cut. Overall, I was fairly disappointed by this game. I'm a firm believer that less is more. If this was a quarter of it's current length, the production team could have spent much more time focusing on quality artwork, design and voice acting. Instead, they stretched the plot out too far, and the game suffered because of it.
