Game review: The Longest Journey (1999) - Part 2

Studio: Funcom
Designer(s): Ragnar Tørnquist
Part of series: The Longest Journey
Release: November 18, 1999
St. George’s Games: Complete playthrough, parts 1-17 (17 hours 20 mins.)

[Continued over from Part 1].

Technical features

Graphics

And this is where we come to the tragic part. Oh, if only The Longest Journey had been designed three or four years later, when 3D graphics had reached a certain acceptable condition... or three or four years earlier, when 3D was not yet really a thing and they might have considered embracing a 2D cartoon style instead. But it was released in 1999, when everybody was supposed to go 3D — at a time when properly handling the art of turning polygons into human beings was the prerogative of the few lucky wizards, such as Valve, for instance. And who could expect a technological miracle from a small, peripheral studio in Norway, of all places?

This is not to say that Funcom lacked artistic talent. Creative and even visionary digital artists can arise anywhere, and Didrik Tollefsen, who was in charge of the art department of the project, made sure that at least the painted backdrops would reflect Ragnar’s fantasy as loyally as possible. Be it the rusty, post-industrial wastescapes of Venice, or the classically influenced architectural interiors of Marcuria, or the wild, overgrown jungle of Alais Island, the basic art for The Longest Journey is... well, maybe not stunning, at least not superficially (I’d say the overall color palette is a bit too brown-grayish for that), but certainly sufficient to maintain a constant feel of immersion. The amount of detail, in particular, is first-rate for a more-than-20 year old game: it really makes one mad that you cannot open most of those doors and windows or even get detailed verbal descriptions of the depicted objects — all the clocks, contraptions, grotesqueries, weird plants, mysterious statues, etc. There are only but a few screens depicting the underwater kingdom of the Maerum, but nobody had managed to depict underwater environment in such a kaleidoscopic fashion prior to this game.

The work on shades and colors has to be commended as well — for instance, when April finally embarks on her sea journey, you begin with a picture of the captain’s deck at dusk, capturing a gorgeous sunset with highly realistic rolling waves; once the ship is hit by the storm, the same picture changes to a darker-blueish tint, with the waves reflecting the dark-blue tint of the sky, as well as being animated in a far more aggressive pattern (and remember how goshdarn hard it was to make realistic 3D depictions of water in the late 1990s? not even Half-Life did that properly).

Yet for all the great work done on the backdrop renders and on bringing them to animated life, the team somehow managed to absolutely fall flat on their faces when it came to generating and animating character sprites. My latest playthrough of the game involved greatly beautifying it by installing the excellent Longest Journey HD mod, whose creator(s) succeeded in thoroughly depixelating the original graphics without ruining the game’s feel. However, not even a full-scale HD mod can do anything with the fact that the 3D characters in the game look and move like crude cardboard cutouts, with ridiculously deformed, smoothed-out body parts and facial features that, at best, look painted-on and, at worst, are non-existent. This is truly discomforting because sometimes the images are at odds with the narrative — for instance, Cortez, April’s first and most important guide into the world of the supernatural, is commonly referred to as an old, unattractive guy, but you could never even begin to tell his age (in fact, you might not even be able to tell his sex) while watching his lanky sprite stretched out on a bench or huddled in the back of the movie theater.

Worst of all, I am not entirely convinced that all of the blame should be laid squarely on technology. Gabriel Knight 3, for instance, which came out in the same year and was dependent even more heavily on 3D (it actually had a rotating camera instead of pre-rendered backdrops), did a far better job in making at least the characters’ faces (if not necessarily their limbs or their hair) somewhat more realistic and more emotional. It was not entirely a matter of low resolution, either: perhaps the most deplorable graphic moments in the game are the (thankfully, few) cutscenes in which the usually small-scale sprites are enlarged and you actually get to see the faces of the characters in close-up — you’d think they could rise up to the challenge at least on this occasion, but... well, here is the first really large close-up of April’s face you get to see in the game:

Now it is definitely commendable that Ragnar always tries to avoid sexualizing his lead female characters (although it does not quite agree with the observation that he really likes showing them off in their underwear, or that April’s butt seems to be, uh, fairly disproportionate to the rest of her body), but come on, there are quite a few options in between Rita Hayworth and Mary Ann Bevan — and given that April would eventually earn a far more handsome look in the games that followed, I can hardly believe that this depiction was in any way intentional. Most likely, they just couldn’t handle their own 3D engine and ran out of time and money before they could come up with a better solution.

Then again, some of the game’s bonus content does suggest that there was, after all, a tremendous decrease in quality during the transition from storyboard to game video — here, for instance, is the comparison between Cortez as originally depicted (left), where  you can clearly estimate not only his age, but his ethnicity as well, and Cortez as actually seen in one of the cutscenes (right), where he makes a nice male pair with April as the happy couple who have just broken out of a mental ward. If it was all done just for the sake of having smoother and less resource-consuming animations, I would honestly have been much happier with just a series of stills, mayhaps in comic-book fashion or something.

The bad news is that for many people, this quality of the graphics results in an automatic turn-off — even I notice that I have to make a strong effort of will to distance myself from these visual images and «mod them» appropriately in my own brain in order to keep the experience wholesome and enjoyable. In a just and fair brotherhood and sisterhood of men, The Longest Journey would not simply be upgraded to HD quality by a bunch of independent fans, but remade by its own creators, with the character sprites and cutscenes completely redrawn, while leaving everything else intact. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one; I hope some day the world... aw, who am I kidding? The world is too busy playing Fortnite anyway to give a piss about some shitty 3D animations from more than twenty years ago.

Sound

Although there are certainly no hard feelings about the game’s musical soundtrack, as opposed to some of its visuals, it is not likely that it will pass on into legend or anything. For one thing, about 90% of the game features no music at all — just the ambient sound effects (water, wind, whirling fans, crowd noises, etc.) and the voicing — and I have no problem with that: given how much Ragnar wants you to focus on the sound and meaning of the long-winded conversations, it makes perfect sense that music, especially well-composed music, would only distract from the necessary experience (the way it actually does in, say, Grim Fandango, where sometimes you have to make a quick painful choice about whether you want to be delighted by that loud brass riff or the latest Glottis joke).

For another thing, once the music does start, it rarely advances past the acceptable and relatively predictable levels of a high budget Hollywood fantasy movie. The main theme, which is probably the most memorable one because you always have to go through with it while loading up the game, is cozily Hogwarts-like, if a bit darker due to the organs and cellos, and most of the rest are moody neo-classical ambient-ish pieces that do certainly contribute to the atmosphere but, so it seems to me, rarely have a strong emotional pull of their own. At least the good news is that the entire soundtrack, written by local guy Bjørn Arve Lagim (not much else in his portfolio), is instrumental — for the next games Ragnar, whom I respect immensely but who, like most non-musical artists, has shit taste in music, would drag in some pathetically sentimental crap artists with their indie hearts on their sleeves, which would sometimes dangerously elevate the soap-opera levels. The Longest Journey only moves close to soap opera on a very few occasions, and most of these have more to do with April going on another clichéd I’M NOT WORTHY rant than with the music.

So enough about the music and on to what might be the game’s single tastiest attraction — the voice cast. If I understand correctly, despite the game being produced in Norway, its primary localization was still English: at least, all of the dialog does look as if it were initially written in proper English, rather than translated. And as a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Ragnar seems to have had plenty of friends and acquaintances with the proper credentials to help him with the voicing — at the very least, the fact that Sarah Hamilton also attended the same school could hardly be a coincidence. Not surprisingly, the majority of the actors cast in the production were no big stars: in fact, for most of them their roles in The Longest Journey were their first (and for quite a few, also the last) experiences in this line of work. It is all the more amazing, consequently, just how much Ragnar managed to get out of them — maybe his musical tastes leave a lot to be desired, but he definitely has a good, sensitive ear for the human voice.

Let us begin with a simple statement of fact: Sarah Hamilton’s performance as April Ryan in The Longest Journey is the single greatest vocal tour-de-force in the history of plot-based videogames, period. And even if there are still plenty of plot-based videogames I have never played (or heard, for that matter), that statement still stands, because there is absolutely no way a living human being of flesh and blood (and we do have to assume that Sarah Hamilton is a human being of flesh and blood) can deliver a finer, more nuanced performance than Sarah does. She can do it all — April as a moody teenager, April as a pensive wannabe-adult, sarcastic April, scared April, compassionate April, intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) April, dumb April, dominant April, submissive April, rebellious April, forgiving April, heck, even an April imitating an Italian accent when trying to ruse her way inside her enemies’ headquarters with a box of pizzas. If, at the end of the game, we still remain a little perplexed with the character, unsure how to characterize her psychotype and emotionality, this is entirely the merit of Sarah Hamilton and her many hours spent behind the mike at Funcom. Yes, there are lines in the game — like there are in every video game ever made — that make me cringe ("I can’t do it! I’m not who you think I am" blah blah blah), but it is all the fault of the writer; Sarah does her best to rescue and redeem even the cringiest ones, and succeeds more often than not. Simply put, I know of no better example of a voice actor so totally and utterly immersed into her character in each and every environment and situation imaginable. And that voice tone — oh my God. You know you’re staring in the eyes of greatness if you ask your character to look at the shelves in her room, and all she says is "Shelves", and then you do it again, and she says "Still just shelves", and you know you could do it again and again and again, just to keep you happy for an indeterminate amount of time. That’s right. All it takes is one word. Shelves. Try it yourself, you’ll never sound as good as Sarah Hamilton.

She would later return to voice April — a completely reinvented April, this time — for 2006’s sequel Dreamfall, and still later, in 2014, for Dreamfall Chapters (where she only has a few episodic snippets), but this was probably due to her own sentimental attachment to the role and / or Ragnar’s personal request, because she has long since quit her acting ambitions in order to concentrate on battling various illnesses, «life coaching» and other stuff (her Youtube channel is more than a little weird and slightly disturbing); I suspect that she’d always had plenty of inner demons, and that, somehow, they at least did her one good service by agreeing to fire up the virtual character of April Ryan, providing her with no less than a legendary alter ego in the process. In between the two, Ragnar and Sarah managed to show us all what the proverbial «strong female character» should really mean — not simply the ability to kick mucho ass and show the dumb males their place (though she is capable of doing that, too, whenever fate calls), but, first and foremost, realism and multi-dimensionality (which so many Tough Girl writers comfortably forget about). Oh, and plenty of humor, as well.

Next to Sarah’s amazing (yes, I do not throw that word around idly) turn as April, everybody else inevitably retires into the background; however, the majority of performances rank from passable to solid, which is, once again, quite a feat for a cast of virtual unknowns. One major fan favorite is Roger Raines as April’s sidekick Crow: I would not call his work too outstanding, as he faithfully follows in the steps of Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and other comedy greats without developing too much of an individual personality — but his diction, phrasing, and subtle twists of intonation are beyond reproach. Ralph Byers, a TV veteran, does a pretty hilarious «evil alchemist» in his portrayal of Roper Klacks; but in all honesty, I think that the best comic roles in the game are voiced by Madison Arnold, who brings to life the totally superfluous, but so-glad-he’s-here sleazy Italian detective Minelli, the down-on-his-luck Stickman Woody ("you’re a bulldozer with a brain, lady! you’re an accident waiting to happen!"), and the story-telling old sailor ("ever consider doing a book?" – "aye, but the agents in Marcuria be bloodthirsty vampires with no thought but to milk your life’s blood" – "oh, so they take an outrageous commission?" — "no, they actually be bloodthirsty vampires with a penchant for biting your neck when you ain’t be looking!"). Sorry for slipping into dialogue-quoting mode again, but it’s just so hard to resist...

Note that some of the characters might easily offend sensitive ears — the almighty hacker Burns Flipper, voiced by Andrew Donnelly, was probably written by Ragnar after one too many hours spent on a late 1990s Internet forum, as one of those bulldozing edgelords whose social skills were blown to smithereens by the digital revolution, and it does not help that Andrew embraces the role with such gusto that I have no idea how he never ended up in South Park. Personally, my ears would rather be offended by the single obviously miscalculated vocal performance — Kevin Merritt as Gordon Halloway, the Vanguard’s personal anti-Christ and April’s arch-nemesis. The idea was to portray him as a completely de-emotionalized human being, the quintessence of pure cold logic, but while trying to avoid sounding sympathetic, like Data, he adopts an oddly cadaverous tone and pacing which make him sound more retarded than creepy or terrifying, and I think they clearly miscalculated. Ralph Byers does a much more credible job as his mentor, Jacob McAllen.

In any case, if we agree to call the overall cast of The Longest Journey «quasi-amateurish», implying that for many of these guys this was their first professional experience in voice acting (or even acting in general), then this is unquestionably one of the greatest amateurish performances in videogame history — and many serious thanks must go to Ragnar (who is actually credited as Voice Director) for making all the actors believe in his universe and, consequently, turn out realistic and fully believable performances all the way through. And if you have just completed the game, be sure to visit the «Book of Secrets» bonus section for some hilarious vocal outtakes: to the best of my knowledge, this was the first time ever that a game actually included a collection of recording bloopers as a gift to the players — and not only is it silly fun to hear Sarah struggle with the pronunciation of words like ‘Changagriel’ or hear Abnaxus’ voice artist go "She gave birth to our three female children, Abratha, Abelexe, and you-gotta-be-kiddin’", but it is generally intriguing and instructive to get this intimate access to the holy-of-holies, the recording studio, if only for a few minutes of fun.

Interface

One area in which Tørnquist clearly felt there was not much left to do was the base mechanics of the gameplay — most of which was copied straightaway from recent LucasArts games. Thankfully, he did not find it necessary to borrow the idea of the «tank controls», favored by Tim Schaefer — despite the 3D mechanics, you use the same good old mouse, rather than the keyboard, to control April on PC, and she is perfectly willing to rotate around her axis and head off wherever you wish her to go, so at least in that particular department, Funcom’s game engine was superior to LucasArts. They did borrow the walk-vs.-  run mechanics of Grim Fandango, though (single-click to make April walk slowly, double-click to make her run, which most certainly helps whenever you have to waste time on backtracking).

Predictably, each screen is loaded with hotspots which animate your cursor when it lands on them; the hotspots themselves are divided into «passive» ones (which can only be looked upon, usually for a bit of trivia or humor) and «active», clicking on which opens a small, nicely stylized submenu of choices (usually just «look» and «operate» or «talk»). All dialogue is also structured precisely the LucasArts way — there is a selection of choices at the bottom of the screen, some of which are simple questions that yield information and clues about how to proceed, and some are mutually exclusive in order to let you build up your own sub-personality for April (more or less polite, more or less sarcastic, that kind of thing — personally, I think that polite and courteous choices are boring as heck, and always prefer my April to roast her interlocutors, but Sarah Hamilton can easily satisfy supporters of both approaches).

Travel through Stark and Arcadia is managed by means of a special map window, though you cannot just open it at will: in Venice, you are obliged to go to the trouble of always taking the subway and waiting for a train, while in Arcadia you have to leave a certain area in order to be able to hop on to another. Since the areas can be relatively large, backtracking sometimes becomes a pain in the ass (running from the subway station through what feels like miles of wasteland to Flipper Burns’ hideout is a particularly irritating memory), but I guess it’s sort of an inevitable pain in the ass if you do not want the game to feel like a frickin’ visual novel or something. As usual, it really only becomes a problem when you’re stuck and desperately running from place to place to see which particular clue you might have missed.

Like the absolute majority of adventure game designers before him, Ragnar also felt it necessary to break up the alleged monotonousness of object manipulation-based puzzles with a variety of «non-standard» puzzles, which are predictably hit-and-miss. Some, like putting the Disc together by placing its various pieces into the appropriate slots of the magic circle, are annoying, but simple; some, like putting together a «telephone line» for Q’aman on the Alais Isle, are actually inventive and fun to solve; and some are just plain horrid — like the clamp puzzle early in the game, which is actually a sub-puzzle of the abovementioned Rubber Duck disaster: in all honesty, I still cannot quite figure out how the water pressure system works, and I think I either solved it through blind trial and error or checked a walkthrough, don’t really remember which. In any case, it is clear that Ragnar is no Charles Cecil when it comes to designing those sorts of challenges, which is hardly surprising: who can be equally good at building up a complex, lore-rich multi-verse based on separation of magic and science, and at constructing a switch-based puzzle to help you remove a clamp from a pressurized water pipe?

One useful feature of the game is April’s journal, in which she painstakingly transcribes all of the latest events — nice to have because of occasional information overload (Ragnar does take his lore seriously), and fun to read because everything is indeed logged diary-style, as bits of original artistic prose; I would have been much more happy if they had Sarah voice all of the content, but I guess she had quite a grueling amount of work to do as it was, let alone the fact that Funcom would probably end in financial ruin if they had to pay her for all that overtime. The journal feature, by the way, might be one of the few influencing echoes of Gabriel Knight in the game, what with Grace Nakimura having kept her own diary in The Beast Within (which she did voice in its entirety, but I guess Sierra’s budget in 1995 was far more impressive than Funcom’s in 1999) — of course, journals were already commonplace in RPGs at the time, serving a purely pragmatic purpose of keeping you up to date on all the miriads of quests that kept you hanging, but they were still a relative novelty for adventure games.

Finally, the game offers a few nifty extras, packed together into the nicely titled «Book of Secrets» — such as the already mentioned collection of voice recording «bloopers»; some additional music pieces that did not make it into the game, for one reason or other (including a non-essential, but funny "April Dub", based around a sample of Sarah saying "weird things have been happening lately"); and a collection of pre-production graphic art, which is really sad to look upon because it shows just how much more beautiful the game could have been if not for the unfortunate premature decision to deliver it in 3D format (see the image of Cortez in the Graphics section above). Nothing too exciting, but each of the bonuses is actually worth taking at least a quick look, and that’s already impressive as far as videogame bonuses are concerned.

Overall, I don’t think I have any serious complaints about how the game works, since it is quite content to follow the best of the pre-existing recipes rather than experiment for experimentation’s sake. The single most difficult thing about it today is to get it to run properly on modern computers — which is why, once again, I have to recommend the HD mod (which has to work in conjunction with the ResidualVM emulator, originally developed for LucasArts games such as Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, released in the same time period as The Longest Journey) for both better quality graphics and smooth functioning. It will require a bit of patience, though — those early Windows games are so much more of a bitch to run with modern software and hardware than the classic DOS stuff, it’s not even funny.

Verdict: Easily the first (and best) adventure game to strive for, and attain, ACME (Academically Certified Modern Epic) status.

It wasn’t broke, and Ragnar Tørnquist, of all people, was not in the least intending to fix it. There is not a single thing about The Longest Journey that I can think of which would improve on any of the formal aspects of the adventure game genre as we knew it in the mid-to-late 1990s — for all I know, nothing short of a return of a corrected and diversified text parser model instead of the intellectually limited point-and-click interface could provide such an improvement. Instead, Tørnquist turned his attention to substance, setting himself the challenge of overriding the typical limitations of previous adventure games — simplistic plots, laconic dialogue, insufficient character personalization, and lack of social and personal relevance. More than anything else, he wanted his game to have the artistic value of a good movie or a decent novel — something that games like Gabriel Knight and Grim Fandango were already approaching in a close-but-no-cigar fashion.

So, does The Longest Journey get the cigar? No, it does not. Nothing gets the cigar (which is not that bad, really — I believe that the cigar is at least theoretically «gettable», and, consequently, that there is at least theoretical hope for the future). There are too many stale tropes in Tørnquist’s narrative, too many moments when his sharp and witty sense of irony seems to turn into a cover-up for lapses of imagination... and then there’s the Rubber Duck puzzle, too, which is like a symbolic blinking light for all those who insist that a point-and-click adventure game cannot make logical sense by definition (ah, but maybe if you brought back the text parser... sorry, I’ll shut up now). But there can be no denying that the game was a huge substantial step forward all the same. For each of its flaws, there is an overriding virtue — for each of its cringy moments, there are long minutes, if not hours, of sheer intellectual and aural delight.

I already mentioned that one of the most startling things about The Longest Journey is that it is, in fact, the single longest adventure game up to that point — approximately twice as long as any of the Gabriel Knight games, let alone others. Some might complain that most of the length is simply due to the unnecessarily long-winded dialogues, but the main reason is that Ragnar had two distinct universes to introduce and endear to the player. In the process, he created a genuine epic tale — something that, for better or worse, did not really exist in the adventure game genre before him. LucasArts wrote comedies; Sierra put out small-scale dramas with relatively small concern for lore, detail, or character development (only Gabriel Knight came close to a true epic, but still lacked the necessary sprawl to qualify). Next to all those protagonists that came before her, April Ryan was the Luke Skywalker, the Frodo Baggins, the Harry Potter, the Siegfried, the Till Eulenspiegel, the Ulysses of the adventure game — and what’s more, I bet you a sealed copy of the game that none of those guys could say "Still just shelves" with the same force of expression as she did.

Because of this, it does not really matter all that much if the epic in question was flawed — most epics, particularly the fantasy ones produced in recent times by individual authors, tend to be flawed in one way or another. What matters is that Tørnquist showed us all the right way to go... and nobody really went there. The Longest Journey could have been the start of something really big; instead, it kind of brought the adventure game genre to a sort of massive peak which nobody could properly top, so they all just went elsewhere. There would still be excellent point-and-click adventure titles released throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but this sort of epic vision would not be found within them — instead, it would be relegated to various RPGs and action adventure games. Not even Tørnquist himself, with two more sequels under his belt, could beat his own achievement (I have a soft spot in my heart for both Dreamfall and Dreamfall Chapters, but neither of the two games scales the heights of Journey, which is something I will expand on in more detail in their own reviews).

In that sense, The Longest Journey was its own beginning and its own end — the closest analogy in my other favorite world, that of rock’n’roll music, would probably be the Who’s Quadrophenia, an epic concept album that sounds or, more properly, feels like nothing else done before or since and sort of begs to be imitated without dropping any good clues as to how it should be imitated. Similarly, The Longest Journey simply benefited from a lucky, once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars, never to be repeated again. But maybe somebody, some day, might still give it a spin and get influenced by it the very same way that Ragnar himself was influenced by Gabriel Knight — and then, who knows, we might yet encounter an adventure game protagonist who will be even more relevant to the young, neurotic, idealistic gamer than April Ryan in her underwear, trying to save a dragon egg for fear of suffering seven years of bad karma.