Resuming the journey again...

since I got nothing better to do after the exam, I resumed playing The Longest Journey. undoubtedly the BEST adventure game I've ever had in my entire life (Sierra's classic 'Quest' games notwithstanding). Hell, I think it's the best adventure game EVER MADE! I really can't tell you guys how... ('cool'? nah, that's a juvenile word) fantastic this game is. The artworks are gorgeous, the characters are mesmerizing, the writing is brilliant and perfectly-executed, and its made by Europeans! :P It's a 1997 game, not too old, if you ask me. It's only been... holy cow! Nearly 10 years?! And this year I just turned 24! Damn I'm old!

But I digress. Good adventure games are truly rare nowadays. The sequel to this game, Dreamfall, has an epic and really engrossing story, and I just can't wait what happens in the next game. It's one of those sci-fi games with cliffhanger endings that left you wanting more so badly. The downside is, like most sequels, it's not as good as the first one. There's barely any puzzles, too much time is spent looking at the characters talking to each other, and you can finish the game with hardly an effort in under 20 hours. But my biggest disappointment with Dreamfall is the lack of personality in the dialogues. In TLJ, the dialogues are longer, witty, hilarious, but captivating, even without facial animations and with only limited character animations. Also, TLJ is much more puzzle-oriented. It probably has, oh, around 50 times more puzzles than Dreamfall. Dreamfall's story is great, true, but you've gotta give the gamers something more to do besides walking from point A to B, initiate a dialogue (mostly non-interactive), then walk some more to point C to see another dialogue.

I'm worried because this is usually the case with Japanese games. Japanese games have good stories, but there's rarely any puzzle (or at all) in them (read: not challenging). Hopefully, the next game in this fascinating series will be much more of a game than a movie than the second one.