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Could the story get any more immoral?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 73
Date: December 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

No Journey

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 13
Date: January 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Will only half way install. 2 nd copy received as a gift and still does not play.load or anything. Save yourself the frustration and take a pass

The 100 Years War was also long . . . and about as fun

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 12
Date: August 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Is it a game? No, not really. That would imply some meaningful interaction from you, the player. But instead, you are principally called upon to hit the return key, as you select line after line of inane dialogue. (Don't worry about choosing the question to ask or the comment to make . . . you have to choose all of them. Then you have to listen to all of them.) The structure is painfully linear, sometimes senselessly so.

Is it good interactive fiction? No. The characters are unappealing, and all of them go off into pages of needless exposition. ("How did I come here, you ask? Let me tell you from the beginning . . ." "ARRGH!!!" we scream, stuffing our hair in our ears.) Sometimes the dialogue is even offensive, presenting a sophomoric idea of relationships between men and women that we had hoped gaming had left behind, and giving us keen (but unwanted) insights into the social lives of the game designers.

The one star is for truly awesome graphics. By the end of the game -- and the journey WAS long, as we were painfully aware -- we felt a maternal pity for the graphics team. We hope that they will soon find gainful employment with a game company -- that is, a company that knows how to design a game.

Profanity and pro-homosexual propoganda

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 79
Date: December 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

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.

Defective Product

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 15
Date: October 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I ordered this game and was anticipating it's arrival. However when I attempted to install it I kept getting "error" messages saying that "XXXX\xxx\00\00\xarc data could not be moved" and other similar messages. Thinking my CD-R could be dirty I cleaned it thoroughly but kept getting the same message. Attempts to install in another similar system gave the same messages. The replacement arrived and, again, I kept getting error messages stating data could not be moved. I am now in the process of getting a third copy. We'll see how it works. In both instances I wrote to FunCom's tech support and have never received any reply as of 10/9/01. I would be hesitant to order this game until the mfr. corrects the defective product.

listen up, it does a body good

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 6
Date: December 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The end was awful...I'm sorry to spoil it for those of you playing as we speak and expecting some sort of fantabulous conclusion, but I feel that you ought to know that the end and pretty much most of the "action" sequences were less than satisfactory. If all you want are mind-boggling (and super irritating) puzzles and an incomplete storyline, yeah, sure, get this game, all you have to lose is (your money), bah...good luck, though, yeah?

"The Longest Journey" that I didn't get to finish!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: April 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Apparently I have the DVD version of the game. When I got to the 13th chapter (which is the final) the disc went bad. I was very disappointed. I still haven't seen the ending and am afraid to buy another copy.

Beware! Game crashes constantly. Expect no support from FUNCOM

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 07, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Buyer beware! The game crashes constantly and locks-up my PC. I've tried it on two different PCs, and it crashes and locks-up both. Expect no support whatsoever from FUNCOM, the company that sells it. If you don't believe it, just try to contact the company. The forum is basically dead. You can post questions and requests for support, but expect no reply. Do a Google search for these words: funcom no support

See what you find. Don't say you were not warned.

A linear adventure game...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: December 20, 2000
Author: Amazon User

After playing this game to completion, I have a few comments on the good, bad and ugly that this game contains:

The Good: The storyline is very engaging, with a deep plot that unravels as you continue on your journey. Each NPC is unique in appearance, mannerisms, and voice, creating a more realistic set of worlds that you will explore. The graphic detail and musical score are both first-rate, adding to the realistic and deep worlds that the designers are attempting to convey to the audience.

The Bad: The dialog "sessions" with NPCs are tiring. You can actually eat lunch during some of the exchanges, periodically having to click on a response. I found that the dialog choices I made were inconsequential to extrapolating all the needed information from each NPC, although I would sometimes have to bug the NPC a second or third time if I chose a nasty comment. This is not an RPG, so your character's decisions do not have an affect on the game, except to waste more of your time as noted above. The "M" rating on the game was appropriate because of the language, but why was the spasely lewd language even included in the game? This would be a better game (without the profanity) for the younger teenager who is willing to endure dialog and hasn't dealt with many puzzle games.

The Ugly: The puzzles were simple to figure out, and did not seem to have that "logic of the environment" feel that Myst provided to its puzzles. The shame is that, if you did not want to solve a particular puzzle, you would not have any other paths (or other puzzles) to explore. So, you are faced with either getting past the particular puzzle, or exiting the game to read a book. As good as the environment looks in each world, most of it is backdrop, leaving only a few select spots for you to enter. Since the storyline controls your character, you do not control travelling between worlds. This leaves the gameplay flat and restricts player creativity so treasured in non-linear RPGs.

I guess I've been spoiled by non-linear RPGs that earn an "M" rating. Only buy this game if you've never played Quake, Fallout/Fallout2, and Myst before. And, make sure your spacebar is in good operation to skip all that dialog.

Longest Indeed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: August 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The short take: save your money--the journey may be The Longest but it's certainly not a very compelling one. I'm an occasional gamer, not a hard-core devotee, but I will from time to time play an adventure game if I have reason to expect--via recommendations, reviews, word-of-mouth--that the storyteller's art will draw me into a strong narrative current. My points of comparison are those games I've loved, primarily the Gabriel Knight series, Myst, and Riven. If you enjoyed these, I cannot imagine that you'll be very satisfied with TLJ. (My circumstances of purchase: new computer, lots of bells and whistles, looking for something entertaining to exploit new power, taken in by the hype, here on Amazon and elsewhere--"masterpiece!" "one of the best!" "reawakening the genre!" etc. Feh!) I give TLJ two stars for its technical merits, its depth, and its generally interesting voice-acting. That said, I disqualify TLJ--okay, the bar is high here--for failing to weave a sufficiently hypnotic spell. My standard setters, the Sierra and MYST games, waste little time in hooking the player. For me, though, TLJ never connected. Yeah, I finished it, but simply to "see what comes next" and to "use up" what I had purchased, admittedly hoping all the while that, at some point, I'd finally be "captured" by the story and the predicaments of its characters. Never happened. (And of course, because I--as April Ryan--couldn't die [no game-buster here: it's disclosed in the documentation], I could not but succeed in saving The Universe, could I?) Like other reviewers, I also fault TLJ for its long stretches of tedious, meaningless, stupefying dialogue, numbing lectures, and reeling disquisitions that induce ennui, inflict meaningless detail, and transform player into masochist, plodding, plodding, plodding on, despite and still. (Why not a few flashback or other narrative conventions that move the story while retaining visual interest?) One unhappy result of the infoglut is a lot of lost threads at the end of the day. But I for one certainly didn't mind: I was simply happy to have completed the ordeal. Moreover, TLJ's puzzles alternated between the utterly jejune and the absolutely stupid--the most absurd impossibilities imaginable, some "solutions" being so illogical as to defy natural law. And even the highly vaunted graphics sometimes seemed so ineptly edited into the narrative structure that, rather than weaving a spell, they jarred me out of the game, disrupting the "waking dream" so essential to narrative fiction. Greater use of dissolves, wipes, or other transitions would in my view have been preferable to the illogical jump-cuts that characterized transitions from cinema sequences to the game itself. Yes, it was pretty. Yes, it was rich. But all in the service of an excruciating Bataan-like march to an inevitable conclusion. Skip it.

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