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Should have been a book or a movie it would have been better that way!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: May 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game says its an action/adventure game but I say its adventure game emphasis on adventure. Some people say that its short but its long. It is called "dreamfall: the longest journey" for a reason. All I've done is "Talk to one person and talk to an other person, walk over here, walk over there, blah blah blah". In a game you should be playing it not just mindlessly moving a joystick. This should have been either a book or a movie 'cuz this is not worth a penny to be video game! But if you like adventure games you should get this 'cuz thats ALL IT IS!

Short, rushed, and unsatisfying

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: May 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is short, unsatisfying, and feels rushed. I rented the game from Blockbusters - it's a 1 week rental that I rented yesterday and just beat - the ending credits are scrolling as I write this review.

First, let's start with my biggest complaint - the story. A story has thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This game lacks synthesis. It has thesis up the wazoo. I just spent about the last half hour watching the game beat itself, repetitively stating "This had better not be the ending". The main plot does not conclude. The side plots do not conclude. Ultimately, the main characters fail at everything they attempt to accomplish. The game is obviously rushed. The last three chapters are a bad joke. Chapters 12 and 13 literally consist of "Move from point A to point B and watch the level's ending cutscene." Chapter 13, to be more precise, is "Move forward until cutscene". Chapter 14 isn't a chapter - It's just cutscenes. The way the game was ended was enough to send me straight here to write this review. I wasn't satisfied; I was angered. It's that bad.

Now, on to the gameplay. First of all, the traditional adventure game puzzles - problem solving through item collection, item use, and dialogue - are not challenging in the least and usually does not advance the plot in any way. In most cases, dialogue is irrelevant - no matter what you choose to say or do, the avatar makes your choices for you and you are left as an observer to their poor decision making abilities.

I think they tried to make up for the lack of challenge with the addition of stealth, combat, and timed matching games - all are poorly implemented. Thankfully, there is hardly any combat in the game. Kian, the "apostle", sees the most combat, which is no challenge since his weak attack damages enemies even when they are blocking. He's glitched. The enemy, for the most part, stands there and fails to block his attacks, with one or two swings in retaliation. Most stealth situations involve one or two patrolling enemies with small fields of vision, slow movement speed, and predictable patrols. A few situations result in instant death if you are seen. I've been shot through solid walls and somehow electricuted by the floor. I hid in plain sight while heading down a stairway because the pathing blockers on the edges of the downward staircase also, unrealistically, block line of sight. The matching puzzles were frustrating, though they were the most fun part of the end of the game. That's a bad thing.

Now, on to glitches and evidence that the game was either rushed, or done half-hearted. First, between several of the level maps, you can see into part of the next map as you approach the link. However, this lacks consistency. Several of the links show this as a flat plane with a low resolution texture that looks a bit like the next area, while others show this in 3D. Walking into a snowbank, I discovered a glitch where the player's avatar bounces from the ground to the top of the snowbank and back. Also, I managed to walk inside a pathing blocker and was unable to move from the position. I had to reload my last saved game to continue. Finally, although all three main characters have a journal that is used to guide the player to their current objective. The problem is that only one of the three main characters uses the journal.

To summarize - I've played a lot of adventure games, but this is the worst adventure game I've ever played. Adventure games rely heavily on story and puzzles to entertain. Dreamfall fails to entertain.

alright...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I think it is pretty good but not great. like someone else said theres not a ton of gameplay and so much talking. I luckily found out you can skip if you press B a lot, good story but can get tiring.

I guess it's a game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: July 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It's not really a game. It is more of a story you '
participate' in. The story was interesting, and I grew to like the characters, but it all seemed to mean nothing in the end.

The graphics are okay, The soundtrack is good, but there really is no game play. If you are looking for more of a movie or a story, then this is your game. If you are looking for an actual video game, then no.

Playing the game is like watching half a movie

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is the first game I played that made me feel I was merely turning the pages of a pre-programmed novel. There is nothing you can do out of order, nothing to build up (skills or inventory), nothing you can skip (maybe a little bit), no side quests, no rewarding fights.

What is worse, the story is too abstract, too complex. When the game ended, none of the loose ends were resolved.

In short, playing this game is like watching half a movie.

More like watching a movie than playing a game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I was really excited about this game coming out, and 20 hours of game play later I have to say I'm disappointed. The game has beautiful scenery and an interesting storyline, and is really easy to control. However, the game is at least 60% cut scenes, where there's no actual game play going on. Sometimes, the only involvement you have is making the character run up some stairs from one cut scene to the next. When you are playing the game, there's never any question of what you should do, because you can only interact with objects and people that are key to your mission/current objective. The fighting is clunky and slow, you can't explore the worlds on your own, and you have no freedom to make your own decisions.

All that said, I had fun playing the game, but was really disappointed in the ending. Plus, there's virtually no reason to replay this game, since nothing in it would be different.

I would recommend renting this game and playing it over the course of a week. It's easy and kind of a fun way to pass the time. But there's no reason to buy it.

I th

...and it was going so well

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

It's been six years since the original game, The Longest Journey, came out on the pc. I don't remember a whole lot about the game, except it featured a great character named April Ryan, had excellent voice acting, and an engaging storyline. But, since it was six years ago, I really don't remember a whole lot about the storyline except that there were two worlds, one being magical and the other technological, and that April could travel ("shift") between those worlds. And that once I finished it, I really, really, REALLY wanted a sequel to be made.

So along comes Dreamfall, the sequel to The Longest Journey. This game has been in development for over three years, and by reading previews on it the total gameplay was supposed to be somewhere in the thirty-plus hours range. There were supposed to be a lot of sidequests that you could go on, and so on. I really thought this was going to be a great game, and it just, well, fell way short.

Basically, in this game you don't control April Ryan (at least at first) as your main character, but rather a girl named Zoe Castillo. She has a delightful accent, and talks a lot. When her friend disappears, she sets off to find him. There are a lot of twists to the storyline, and I don't want to give them away. But, suffice it to say, the story is certainly engaging. The problem is, it's really the only strength to this game, and in the end it fails.

In The Longest Journey, there were a TON of puzzles. Some were ridiculously impossible (unless you're a REALLY good gamer), but there certainly were a lot. It took me a very long time to beat that game, and it lived up to its name. The puzzles in this game are unbelievably easy. There was never once in the game that I was even remotely confused as to what to do or where to go, which wouldn't necessarily be bad if there was more to the game than puzzle solving. Unfortunately, there really isn't. They've added 'combat' to this game, if you want to call it that. Basically, all you have to do is keep hitting the Attack button and you will win every fight. At one point you control a guy who has a sword, and he's supposed to be a 'legendary swordman', yet I wouldn't call him that--again, all you have to do is keep hitting attack. It's a clumsy fighting system, and the game certainly wouldn't be any worse if fighting was removed completely from it.

So then there's the story to talk about. It started out SO well. Seriously. It was engaging, and told through EXCELLENT voice acting. And then it just ended, with NO explanation. I would say that there are a lot of loose threads never tied up, but that would be an extreme understatement. The amount of questions left unanswered is ridiculous. I can appreciate a story that leaves a question or two for the sequel (or for pondering), but this isn't nearly the same thing. My theory on what happened is that although they worked on this game for three years, the developers ran out of time. So instead of requesting more time, they had to hit a deadline so they made the conclusion as cryptic and open-ended as possible. For more than half of the characters I have no idea if they're dead or not, including the main character. I have no idea about pretty much everything that happened at the end, and it's not one of those 'if you paid very close attention to everything you can figure it out' deals, either.

Then there's another problem with it. The developers of this game apparently knew its story was its only real strength, too, so they made it the biggest part of the game. Especially at the end, most of the game is dialogue. You'll sit for twenty minutes listening to a conversation, then you gain control of your character and bring them up a set of stairs and go through another half-hour of conversation. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. There's no final character you have to battle, nothing. You just sit there and watch for the longest time. Now, I like a good story just as much as the next person, but this got somewhat extreme. I'm reminded a bit of Final Fantasy X, where huge cutscenes would take a long time to get through, but at least in that game there was a lot of gameplay.

I finished this game in about 10-12 hours, and there's really no reason for replay. There were NO sidequests in the game whatsoever, unless I completely missed EVERY one of them. The story is completely linear. You do get opportunities in conversations to choose how you want to answer, if you want to be a jerk or a nice person. Maybe some of those options lead to sidequests, or changes in the story, but I doubt it. The game did do a couple of changes in point of view--you control three characters during the game, and at points they meet, and you control the conversation from both sides--which was interesting.

Some of the characters from The Longest Journey return in this game. I don't remember them all extremely well, but some of them were pretty funny in this game, especially toward the end. Probably the best character was Crow, who really was funny in a lot of the things he said. But he entered the game very close to the end, and although it seemed like he was going to be Zoe's companion for awhile, the game hit its sudden ending not very long afterward.

As far as graphics go, well, they're okay. I played this on the Xbox; I'd assume on the pc they'd be a little better. Essentially, though, although all of the environments have their own special feel, the graphics aren't going to astound you. The character models are only okay, although they do a very good job with the facial expressions. The characters' eyes move, they smile, they tilt their head--the way it's done goes along with how someone really would do those gestures. So give the developers some credit there, because it makes the characters more believable. Also, speech is synched up with the characters' lip movement very well. It's not perfect by any means (are there ANY games that are?), but it's one of the best jobs I've seen of that to date.

So, here's the deal. The voice acting is incredible; there's no question about that. The story started out very well, and fell VERY short at the end. The puzzles aren't engaging. There's little to the game OTHER than the story and dialogue. Is this game worth playing? I think it is, but with reservations. Obviously, with the way it was left off, a third game is going to be coming out in this series. I would assume that game will attempt to tie up all of the loose ends this game created. If you want to play this game, I'd suggest waiting until the next one in the series comes out. That way, when you get to the end and start cursing at how poorly it's done, you'll have the next game in the series to start right away, so you won't have to spend a long time confused. As it is, if it's going to be another six years before the next game comes out in this series, then it's just not worth it.

Maybe It was Just a Dream... A Long Beautiful Dream

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 22 / 24
Date: April 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is the sequel to a game entitled "The Longest Journey" for the PC. I'm ashamed to say I've yet to play this remarkable game, but when the sequel came around, I couldn't say no to it. In fact, because of its sequel I want the first one even more. This game has deep, interesting and convincing characters, along with a fantastic storyline. The game is, overall, a fantastic experience.

Zoe is a beautiful attractive woman who can't decide what she wants to do with her life anymore. She's dropped out of high school, she's broken up with her longtime boyfriend, and now she seems completely and utterly lost. Her ex boyfriend, however, is interested in doing a story, and he needs Zoe's help. This begins what is undeniably a fantastic game, full of fantastic story elements. It seems simple, but the story grows into something remarkably complex. It becomes somewhat of a fantastic journey the player never wants to end. There are moments, however, where the story throws a lot at you, and the game isn't long enough to bring every subplot to a satisfactory conclusion. This shouldn't suggest the storyline is bad. You'll just expect the game to be longer.

The story is played out through cinematic cutscenes. Most of the story is told in this fashion. However, unlike most games, the voice acting is top notch. It never losses hold. The dialogue is also fantastic, and flows smoothly. Put simple, these characters actually seem human as opposed to one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs. Not only does this help the characters seem human, but also helps them become instantly likeable. You'll also be given choices to make in some dialogue sequences. Your choice makes the outcome of some dialogue a little different, but you'll still end up in the same place regardless of your choice.

Dreamfall plays like an Action/Adventure game. Battling foes is pretty simple. It's not hard at all. The game is not much of a challenge, and even some puzzles are pretty simplistic. Despite how little of a challenge the game is, that shouldn't suggest the gameplay doesn't have its merits. There are some puzzles that really will boggle your mind. It's even better because there is no one basic solution to a puzzle. Several of the games puzzles are, in fact, open ended. Put simple, there's more than one way to solve various puzzles in the game. This works for replay value as well. If a puzzle is easy the first time, try to solve it in a more challenging and intellectual way the next time. It makes doing many of the games puzzles rather fun and interesting as opposed to being stale and repetative like some games out there. The only real problem with the gameplay is that there's not a whole lot of it. Most of the game consists of dialogue and exploring. So you won't fight that many enemies, or solve nearly as many puzzles as you might think. Rather, you'll be watching more of the game than actually playing it, and this is something that has plagued video games for a while now.

It's fun to explore many of the games areas. Especially considering it looks visually stunning. You won't just play as Zoe either, and each character has different reactions to certain things. So you might also want to go and explore the same area as another character. The game also isn't so huge that you'll get lost while exploring, which helps the game in more ways than one. And because the game is so beautiful, you can easily get lost in it. It really does look like a fantastic world. Especially because the characters also seem so real. They've got facial expressions and everything, making them seem a lot less like stone statues.

Even better is the audio. Video Games rarely sound as good as Dreamfall. The music is, in and of itself, dreamlike because it's so good. If the graphics don't absorb you into the world, the soundtrack sure as hell will. It's expertly composed, almost movielike in when the music starts as well. And, as I've noted, the voice acting is astonishing. Also close to being movie like. Perhaps some of the best voice talent in the entire video game industry, and I'm not overexaggerating.

The game is a little short, though, despite its long cutscenes. The game can easily be completed in less than ten hours if you try. However, with such an absorbing storyline (that does, I'm sorry to say, end too soon), it'll fly by. You'll have the game completed befre you know it. I really wish the game could've been longer.

You'll love Dreamfall. So many elements and themes woven into one game can't be bad. It's a fantastic gaming experience, one that so rarely comes about in the gaming world. Nearly everything about this game shines.

On the Positive Side
+Fantastic Graphics
+Some of the best music in gaming history
+A very involving and interesting storyline
+Lots of exploration to be done
+Great voice acting and dialogue
+Loveable characters

But on the bad side...
-There are a lot of subplots, not all of which, conclude in a satisfactory way
-The game is short
-Many moments of watching rather than playing
-The game isn't that challenging

Despite some of the cons, the game is fantastic and engaging experience.

Not a Button-Masher

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Dreamfall has an interesting and complex storyline and visually it's gorgeous. Before I bought this game I read a review that said it was almost more like watching a movie than playing a video game--and in some places, this is true.

This game is dialogue-intensive, with a few puzzles here and there that are mostly pretty easy. I enjoyed the various cities and worlds the main characters found themselves in, and the graphics and voice talent are amazingly good.

People who like high-action video games with lots of combat probably won't like this game, but those who like exploration, sophisticated storylines, and real-seeming characters will like Dreamfall a lot. In fact, combat is clunky and obviously not meant to be a major part of the game.

My only complaints: The overall story would have been even better if I'd played the first game (Dreamfall is a sequel); and the replay value is low, since I don't think you can play any different characters.

This is not a game.... but it was still very entertaining.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought this because I played the first one and loved it. The gamplay was superb, if extremly difficult at times. The story one of the best in a game ever. The sequal though I cant call a game, it is a c.g. movie with game elements added in just so they could call it a game. In all this product was about 10-15 hours but you actually only have at most 2 hours of gameplay, and that was poor at best. The story however was deep and engrossing, much like a good fantasy/sci-fi book. My only complaint with the story was the ending left every story thread unresolved. All of which were obviously meant to be continued in a sequal. Would I recommend it for purchase? Yes, but only if you want a good story and dont care about playing a game.

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