The Longest Journey (Review)
Or maybe the longest, most arduous, most painful, most distressing journey.
On two different adventure gaming boards recently, the subject has come up, the subject of the classic computer game The Longest Journey. No, I don’t want to call it a classic. But to be fair, it’s only a year younger than Grim Fandango, which is a classic, or destined to be one.
In any case, given that people are newly praising The Longest Journey—not everybody, but many whose memories are perhaps deceiving them—and others are asking whether they should play it now, I dug out some of my notes and comments from half a decade ago, and I’m posting my own review of The Longest Journey here, so you all can call me a carping snob. Though I’d prefer if you just called me “story geek.”
If you haven’t figured it out, I wasn’t crazy about The Longest Journey. Released in December 1999 to much fanfare throughout the adventure gaming industry as one of the best story games ever, garnering accolades from every reviewer, it was and still is an epic story, one with much promise.
But promise is all it showed. As a story critic, I thought the game was mediocre at best.
Playing The Longest Journey, I was bedazzled by the sights and sounds. The artwork and soundtrack, in particular, blew me away. The game had all of the technical glitches I expected, including the infamous stuttering problem and the poor inventory interface. (This was five years ago, and I don’t know whether there are bug fixes or improvements available for these things today.)
Mostly, I was disappointed with the story. It’s a superb story—or could be—but the way the game tells the story annoyed me more than it engaged me. And this is because the writers neglected the fundamentals of storytelling. Referring to “Three Things to Make Your Audience Adore You,” The Longest Journey violated my #1 rule: Introduce us to complex characters who experience the extraordinary and will never be the same again.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function tweetmeme() in /home/timk/bethestory.com/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 3 |