Analysis of the Longest Journey and Dreamfall

Earlier I wrote a post discussing whether video games can be art or not. Now, I’m convinced they can.

Just this weekend, I finished playing The Longest Journey and it’s sequel Dreamfall. They’re both essentially point-and-click adventure games (my current favorite genre of video games), but Dreamfall has some lame combat/stealth segments tacked on to appease the console gamers. What stands out in both of them is the story and the writing.

I’m going to write up some of my thoughts on the two games — mainly character analysis. There’ll be a lot of spoilers ahead, so don’t read if you haven’t already played the games.

If you’re interested in my reviews of these games, they’ll be up on Anime Thoughts (my anime and video game review site) soon.

TLJ in particular has a very mature and multi-layered storyline that challenges the archetypes of the adventure genre. It eloquently tells the story of April Ryan, a very realistic and sympathetic character, who starts out as a regular 18 year old girl and is thrust into a new and confusing world. She struggles with having a “destiny” forced upon her, slowly starts to accept it, and finally enjoy it (or need it, depending on how you interpret it). Ultimately, she finds that the fate she was promised was false, and that she was never meant to be the new Guardian. She essentially realizes that she had made her own destiny all along, and in doing so saved the world. Much of what she had been told about fate was wrong, but she had managed to do it anyway. In the final chapter, she confronts her repressed feelings about her abusive childhood, and manages to restore the real Guardian to his normal state by giving him “chaos” (He had been split into two; a cold, calculating, selfish human, and a vortex of chaos. By combining these two parts, logic and chaos, he was made whole again. This is an interesting statement on humanity, about having a balance of logic and emotion, or at least that’s how I interpreted it). However, she had given up everything she had, and now that she cannot inherit her so-called fate, she has nothing left.

April’s quest in TLJ ends drastically differently than one would expect from a typical adventure story, but as a whole the ending is perfect. April’s character is stronger than just a heroic archetype; she’s human, and that means she can’t just fall into categories and stereotypes as we would expect. And the ending isn’t just surprising — in fact, IMO, it wasn’t surprising at all — it’s perfectly fitting. It challenges the very idea of fate, which had been the basis for much of the plot of the game.

She didn’t choose to go out and save the world, but given the ending, you can’t really say she was forced to by fate, as if it were some force that acts independently. She (and therefore the player) was the one doing everything along the way, and thus she saved the world, whether she was “meant” to or not. Hell, you could even say she was meant to do what she did, just no one knew; the point is the same — she didn’t fit into the destiny that was forced upon her, what was supposed to happen, and instead ended up doing what needed to be done. At least, that’s one way to interpret it.

There are many other aspects of TLJ deserving of attention, but I’m mainly interested in April herself. Besides her, though, one of the most interesting aspects of the game is the portrayal of the future. IMO, it’s more believable than that of Dreamfall and most other scifi — the future isn’t really a whole lot different than modern times, it just has certain parts exaggerated. The government is still largely a huge bureaucratic nightmare, the corporations basically control things and are willing to do anything for profit.

Continuing the story in Dreamfall, April’s character is older, darker and brooding. She’s confused about what her purpose in the world is. She was told she was destined for greatness, yet that fate was never realized. She’s told to “go live her life,” but doesn’t know how. She’s fighting against the Azadi empire, often taking on dangerous missions by herself rather than asking for help. It can be argued that she has a death wish, either unconsciously or consciously. She wants to fight her own battles, rather than those chosen by destiny. She kills in cold blood, showing no mercy.

A new main character, Zoë, is introduced. She has more concrete reasons for going on her quest (saving her boyfriend, as opposed to April’s more abstract motivation in TLJ), and generally is more transparent and simplistic than April. She eventually meets up with April, drawing April in on her quest. April then goes to meet the Guardian, hoping unconsciously that she is meant to play a part in this struggle to save the Balance. The Guardian, however, tells her that she is not the one to save the world this time; that she is “free.” This is what she claimed she wanted to hear, but it crushes her. She desperately wanted to be needed for something.

Ironically, the sort of life April wants is really one like Kian Alvane’s life; a life of purpose, with absolute certainty in right and wrong. As we see, however, April manages to shake Kian’s faith a bit, right before her “death.”

I don’t think April really died in Dreamfall. We know that she can breathe under water, because of the device she swallowed in TLJ when visiting the Maerum. Also, it’s somewhat implied that she is in fact the one telling the story at the beginning and end of TLJ (this is interesting, because it brings into question the validity of the facts presented in TLJ, since it was apparently told by April herself, but I’m not going to get into that).

I can’t wait for the third game in the series, but I worry it may be a while. Dreamfall basically ends with a cliffhanger, and a rather pessimistic one at that. The bad guys seem to have won, April appears to be dead and Zoë is in a coma. All this we learn, ironically, after Zoë’s speech about the importance of faith.

Dreamfall explores a number of other interesting themes, like totalitarian government and theocracy, as well as continuing with the social criticism of TLJ by portraying corporations as ridiculously powerful and omnipresent. There’s so much to think about in the games, in addition the overall beauty of the storytelling (even after being translated), and in Dreamfall, the visual beauty of the presentation and the environments. So far, the two combined are the best argument I’ve seen for games as an art form.

Well, that’s all I’ve got right now. This was mainly for me, so I could articulate my thoughts about the games. I doubt anyone has any interest in what I’m saying, especially given the disjointed way I’m saying it. This is all off the top of my head, and I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and left things out. Anyway, here’s hoping the next game comes out soon.