The Longest Post: Re-visiting The Longest Journey saga
[This blog entry was originally published on Cohost in April 2024. Following the site’s demise (RIP), I re-printed it here for archival purposes]
Among my seemingly endless backlog list, one of the oldest entries is Dreamfall: Chapters. It's the third part of The Longest Journey saga, the original game of which was near and dear to my heart. But due to a variety of reasons it took me a long time after the release of Chapters to even approach it - among other reasons (which I'll touch upon later), it also dates from that awkward period where "episodic gaming" was the new in-thing and like all episodic games, there were schedule slips, awkward waits and an eventual final release that brought everything together with fixes and updates. When I did finally get around buying it, I stopped playing it quite soon after first starting; I can't quite recall why, but chances are I just wasn't as absorbed in the world and and characters that are integral to even begin to understand the game (the idea that this is meant to be just as easy for newcomers to start with is quite frankly nonsense). And from thereon in there it then just remained, in that limbo.
The original The Longest Journey, by the Norwegian developer Funcom and the passion project of its director Ragnar Tørnquist, is one of my all-time favourite click and point adventure games and I've replayed it plenty of times over the years, though it had been a while since I had last touched it. So big is my love for the original game that it actively bothered me that I had never got that closure of the grand story arc and I knew that as part of this Backlog Project, it should be one of my priorities. The problem is, of course, that I didn't want to repeat history and be repelled from it because I wouldn't remember certain details or events from the previous games.
The answer, naturally, was the only obvious one: play through the entire trilogy, in order.
I could have made this into a series of separate entries but I specifically began writing this properly only after I had completed all three games, because I wanted to treat this partly as a whole experience and not simply a series of individual games. Breaking those connecting notions apart into separate posts would be awkward and also... this is my chosting space and I eggbug how I want to. So the below post will be long, though I've broken down my thoughts into "chapters" per each game. I'm keeping this mostly free of any major spoilers should anyone want to play these themselves, but I've included a couple of addendums in the end and one of those will be the designated spoiler zone - just skip the last bit if you don't want to read me think about some of the overarching points without any restrictions.
Chapter 1: Undertaking The Longest Journey for the longest time
There is this... not a genre, nor a trope, but a feel perhaps, that I default to calling the ~Grand Adventure~. The Grand Adventure is your classic story of a young, plucky no-one important soon finding themselves in the middle of something larger than life, discovering the whole vast world beyond their imagination and setting on a quest that takes them from one end of the realm to the other, in the process becoming Someone. It's the classic hero's journey tale that most stories in the world tell in their own words, but the difference between them and a Grand Adventure lies in a certain kind of je ne sais quoi atmosphere of it all. That the heroism is almost incidental to the journey of self-discovery and how you see the world that the protagonist and their confidants take in the process of quite literally travelling from one corner of the world to the other and beyond. I, primarily, associate this with the fantasy genre: Lord of the Rings is an obvious pick here, but my favourite example of that feel being nailed perfectly is Final Fantasy 9. That, and The Longest Journey.
The Longest Journey is the tale of the young art student April Ryan who discovers not only that beyond her year 2200-something Earth lies the fantasy realm of Arcadia, but that these two worlds used to be the one and the same before being split in half and that she has a prophesied role to play in ensuring that the balance between the two remains in place while a secretive organisation moves to tilt the game in their favour. It is, also, is a wonderfully well crafted Grand Adventure. April's haphazard search to understand why all these weird things are happening around her soon opens up to an epic tale that takes her from cyberpunk hellscapes to underwater cities and space stations to enchanted castles, and the more you spend time in the twin worlds the more grippingly fascinating they become. Both Stark (our world) and Arcadia are beautifully designed and rich in detail, and the major characters in them are excellently written (and often also brilliantly acted though the standard slips randomly here and there). April herself is a main character who you latch onto almost immediately, and the change in her her demeanour and personality over the chapters due to everything she's seen and heard feels realistic and engaging; she also keeps a very wordy journal which ranges from quaint attempts at comedy to genuinely adding new shades to what April experiences. Tørnquist's writing and world building knows when to introduce elements with a lighter touch and when things need to be focused on with more serious intent, and the balance (and the world is indeed so much about Balance) is executed so well that whatever tone the game takes, it feels like the right one.
The Longest Journey was already familiar to me and what I especially loved playing it through this time around is that its strengths aren't just in rose-tinted nostalgia. The last time I replayed The Longest Journey was back when I was still installing the game from CD-ROMs (it was a four disc game!), though this time I opted for a simple GOG download instead as - coincidentally - the game happened to be on sale at the time (it was fate!). So it has been a while and in the eons between I had either forgotten more than I thought I had, or I simply didn't get all the nuances when I was younger - but whatever the case, I felt like the story and the world felt even deeper and more nuanced this tiem around. You begin to care about the places and the characters so much that you just want to spend more time with the game, and though not everything has perhaps aged perfectly (the game lightly tackles sexism on account of April's gender in a very masculine world, but it's handled with all the nuance of an adult male videogame writer imagining how his fantasy witty young female videogame protagonist would clap back at such things) the strengths more than make up for it. Arcadia in particular is a joy to learn more about and there's a tangible passion in how its different cultures, traditions and extended histories are portrayed - and how the game very nicely avoids forcefeeding it all so that the discovery feels genuine and not like an exposition dump.
Outside its narrative and design, The Longest Journey is a click 'n' point adventure game and it's mostly a really well done one. It suffers from a few obtuse puzzles, most infamously the inflatable duck puzzle which has a Reputation with the fans of the genre (and which the sequels enjoy lightly ripping into), and there's a few puzzles where a relatively simple task is made a lot trickier to decipher thanks to how they're presented moreso because of what the ask actually is - but generally speaking there's a logic to what the game tries to coax the player to go through and there's some enjoyable Checkov's Gunning going around in both the world and the items the player carries (some which can take up space in the player's endless inventory for several chapters - make sure you hold onto that wholly optional plastic leaf from chapter 1 until you find a suitable garden patch...) which feel particularly satisfying to tackle when the time comes. The only real grumbles I have primarily come from where it's clear the original vision had to be streamlined in order to ship the game in time: when you finally stumble onto the much foreshadowed underwater city you're restricted to a single room and a few exterior locations despite the vast towers visible in the horizon, and it feels genuinely awkward how April cracks the long-forgotten secret history of the city's denizens by simply removing some seaweed from a cavern couple of minutes away from the city walls. Likewise, after spending so much time getting two of the macguffins she needs, the game literally hands her the remaining two in the space of ten minutes. Though April's journal acknowledges it as well (in what feels like a mea culpa from the writers), it takes away from the epic sense of adventure that the game is otherwise so good at delivering.
But in the wider sense those are very minor qualms which the player easily forgets once the next big part of the plot kicks in, and the achingly bittersweet ending closes off the game in such a poignant way that it sticks with you and removes any memory of what other complaints you might have had. The only real bother I had during my playthrough was the weird glitch where the game wouldn't always recognise my mouse clicks when trying to use the interaction menu (my poor mouse L1 button must feel hammered). Spending a few days again with this game overall felt like seeing an old friend again for the first time in years, still instantly familiar yet intriguingly changed. I was in love with this world again. And so it was time to take the more uncertain dip into the waters of the next chapter.
Chapter 2: I've fallen and I can't get up
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was released in 2006, a good seven years after the original game and into a very different gaming landscape. Classic click 'n' point adventures games had sung their formal swansong years earlier and now only existed in the dreams of random central-European bedroom developers, and the world was still several years away from both the genre's transformation into more narrative and choice-focused stories and the Kickstarter revival of the genre's old conventions. The gaming market in general had shifted its focus to consoles and attracting mass markets and so developing a PC-only adventure game was basically a guaranteed commercial suicide at this point. In all honesty and sympathy Funcom didn't have an easy task ahead of them after they finally felt ready to revisit the story. They had to reinvent the basic gameplay loop to make it more marketable, adapt it into an entirely different 3D-based and gamepad-oriented standard, and narratively pull something out of the bag that would not just act as a satisfactory continuation for the old fans who were desperate to return to Stark and Arcadia, but which would also attract any newcomers who had in all likelihood never even heard of The Longest Journey.
In what is an incredible hat trick move for the ages, Dreamfall stumbles with each and every aspect of the above, and replaying it has only made it more obvious.
The most glaring problem Dreamfall has is that it simply isn't exciting or fun to play. Rather than solving puzzles by clicking around in a 2D scenery, you now control your character (one of three protagonists - I'll get to that) directly through a 3rd person perspective in a 3D environment, and at first everything seems OK and familiar even if it looks different: you've still got an inventory, the primary character Zoë has a journal like April did and games like Gabriel Knight 3 and Grim Fandango had proven that the genre could not only translate to a 3D environment well but take advantage of the new dimension as well, the former in its freewheeling camera that made detective work more detective-y and the latter embracing its blocky 1998 3D aesthetics to create one of the most memorable worlds in the genre. Dreamfall doesn't do anything like that and it doesn't even attempt to: despite the new possibilities, Funcom strip down gameplay elements and this makes the game so linear that it's actually frustrating to play. The puzzles are perfunctory and roughly 95% of them boil down to the player interacting with an environmental object in one room, going to an adjacent room to pick up an item, and then using that item on the object. They take about 30 seconds to complete and feel like needless busywork to give the illusion that Dreamfall is an old-school puzzler; sometimes you even get to combine items (woo!), but even the separate parts can typically be found literally next to one another and so your job is to simply spend a few seconds in the menu before you can advance. The puzzles are so simple that halfway through I actually wished they weren't there to begin with, because all they do is slow down the narrative for no real reason - tasks to tick on a chore list before you get to play the game, highlighting the difference between easy puzzles and needless admin. Outside the """puzzles""" the gameplay consists of running around from one screen to the next, finding the next piece of spelled-out busywork to process or the next dialogue tree to navigate. The tedium is sometimes broken by minigames, one for lockpicking (actually decent) and hacking (as tedious as its narrative justification is contrived), everyone's favourite trend stealth sections (awkward and frustrating) and - in what is the most baffling decision - actual combat sequences. The infrequent brawling in the game feels like a precisely engineered dictionary example of a forced action mechanic that has been included purely for marketing purposes, forced by a publisher because of a hypothetical market increase. It is quite possibly the worst tacked-on combat element I've ever seen in a game but on the bright side it's also so easy thanks to its mindnumbing simplicity and bad AI that the only thing slowing the player down is waiting for the next wave to start.
You can also tell that Funcom were struggling with the development of the game in general. The mid-2000s were a particularly awkward time for PC gaming because of the demands set by the the massively expanded console market, and the hardware and control limitations of the Playstation and XBox compared to the PC could really mess with gaming studios who had formerly only ever developed with the PC audience in mind. At the time this was called consolitis and though the term reeks of PC gaming master race subreddits, behind the unfortunate name lies a genuine phenomenon describing botched attempts of concept and design streamlining when dealing with perhaps unexpected technical restrictions. Dreamfall may as well be the shining example of the consolitis era (together with Deus Ex: Invisible War) given how full it is of the traditional hallmarks of the syndrome. The already cramped gameplay areas are segmented to countless small zones where you spend as much time staring at loading screens as you do on travelsal, there's minimal interactivity within the environment itself that leads to an eery feeling of ghost towns and meaningless NPCs, and the menus are all super-sized yet at the same time lacking in actual information. The grand fantasy metropolis of Marcuria feels smaller in this game than it did in TLJ despite the possibilities the extra dimension could allow because it's been split into claustrophobic corridors full of artificial blocks, all its small sectors coming across hollow and devoid of life. The aforementioned journal that Zoë keeps is more of a microblog with a strict character limit and the emotional resonance of "Hello Twitter, today I ate eggs for breakfast" posting, which is simply lacklustre compared to April's lengthy journal rambles about her experiences in TLJ."
In summary, if The Longest Journey was an epic adventure that felt larger than life and conjured the most incredible vistas and scenes, Dreamfall behaves like you are walking the same three corridors each day and occasionally hearing someone in another room talk about the rest of the building, which you can't access because the stairways are blocked with ankle-high boxes, all the doors are locked and you're chained to the handrail.
This could be saved by the plot - after all, there are many great hyperlinear narrative adventures where you don't even detect the restrictions because the story is so captivating. To Funcom's credit, Dreamfall starts out very well and despite the gameplay interruptions, the game's initial narrative is a decent hook. Rather than directly continuing April Ryan's story, Dreamfall mostly starts from scratch and takes place some years after and introduces the recently ex-boyfriended university dropout Zoë Castillo who struggles to find meaning and focus in her life (and my gods is she going through textbook depression but the game very nicely doesn't awkwardly hammer this in so the player definitely gets it). Zoë's story arc starts small but despite some contrivances (her hacker friend is way too convenient and one-dimensional to ever feel like anything more than a gameplay proxy), her stumbling onto something far bigger than she can at first even comprehend soon begins to weave old familiar themes (and worlds and people) and new ideas together in a manner that compells, even on a replay (though I had forgotten some of the detail, once more). That is, at least, if you're a TLJ veteran, which is the perspective I'm coming from: the writing doesn't do a particularly good job of treating newcomers as well as it does veterans, and particular aspects (primarily most things Arcadia and some of the major characters and themes of April's original story) are never explained thoroughly enough so that someone new to the series could have a full grasp of what's happening and why.
Then things start falling apart little by little. The further you dwell in the (mostly) Stark-side plot with Zoë the more it becomes a sequence of conspiracy clichés and seemingly random curveballs that are barely explained: there's ghost girls, corporate espionage action sequences, global conspiracies, secret pasts, corrupt megacorps etc. Eventually you lose track of what you're meant to actually pay attention on, and Zoë's character (and acting) seems to get less engaged the more you play and the more Zoë is meant to be focused on finding the answers to all the questions around her. While Zoë gets to visit Arcadia a couple of times, most of the time spent in the world of magic is split between the other two characters. April returns and after a decade wandering without meaning both mentally and physically following the events of TLJ, her initial gruff but still recognisably April demeanour transforms into a one-note, out-of-character nihilistic angst that torpedoes any dialogue she engages in. The third character, the religious zealot Kian who represents the foreign military might who has occupied Marcuria and which acts as the game's main antagonist faction, begins to appear more prominently from halfway point onwards and represents the lowest of the game's lows. He has the personality, presence and acting of a balsa wood chair, his story sequences feature the most action sequences out of all the characters and even though you can predict every single story beat of his arc the journey through it is still executed so haphazardly that it feels completely illogical and pulled out of thin air. Sometimes the wider issues of the game even end up affecting the narrative, as the different characters find themselves in the same recycled environments in Arcadia over and over again in what feels like contrivance dictated by asset reusage over any real narrative reason.
Much like TLJ Dreamfall does build to an emotional gut punch ending, which I vividly remembered completely throwing me off emotionally when I was younger and which haunted my mind for several days after the game finished. Without saying much more, it is still in some ways a very moving ending - but I didn't find it so powerful this time around because all I kept thinking is how badly the narrative ends if this is the only entry you'll ever play. Dreamfall is the middle part of a trilogy and like all the worst middle parts, it fires off oh so many cliffhangers and raises oh so many questions in the final stretches towards its credits roll, all of which are left unanswered and which leaves a bad taste in the mouth even as the game cranks up the emotional heft of the narrative in its last chapters. The power of the poignant ending is left dulled and dampened when you realise just how many central elements of the entire game so far had been left completely blank, when for half the game you don't know why you're doing something or what it is you're even doing to begin.
This is probably the third time I've played Dreamfall and each time I come away from it with more hesitations. Once the novelty - the return to the familiar things from the first game (particularly powerful if you had been aware of the original since 1999), experiencing the new plot for the first time, etc - has worn off, you start paying attention to everything else and you begin to see the holes. The plot and the characters are inconsistent and the gameplay is subpar, and once those start jumping on your face it's hard to pay attention to the good parts. Dreamfall straddles the fine line between bad and boring - it's an honestly middling gameplay experience and ultimately unsuccessful in most of its goals. It's a game that's going through a major identity crisis in so many ways, by developers who seemed to be second guessing what they wanted to achieve with this entry while also planning threads towards the next one, before they could even confirm there was ever going to be a third part. In my books, Dreamfall is one of the worst stumbles in quality within a series, the likes of which are rare to find to this extent.
Which left me with a slight sense of unease as I prepared to enter the final chapter. Or chapters (guffaw).
Chapter 3: Making choices
Dreamfall: Chapters (2014-2016) is a redemption arc. The game takes a little bit of time to kick in, keeping in the series' tradition of slow starts that patiently put the pieces in motion before the game pulls the rug from under the characters' feet, but once the plot gets going and the further you advance, the more you can detect a clear intent to course-correct the series after Dreamfall's rough landing. Funcom had become distracted by their MMO The Secret World but undoubtedly this world that Ragnar and team had so lovingly crafted - and the absolute state they had left the plot in - kept nagging in their heads and when they finally moved forward with it (with the help of a crowdfunding scheme), they were determined to do it right. Dreamfall: Chapters (from hereon in just 'Chapters') has the aura of a pure passion project, brought into reality because of the love for the material rather than aiming to make a profit.
Fair play to them. I genuinely had a great time with Chapters, far better than I would have ever expected.
From screenshots alone Chapters doesn't look too different from Dreamfall beyond the graphics, but once again the world had moved on in the decade since the previous game. In the mid-2010s adventure games had become trendy once more after Telltale hit a gold mine with The Walking Dead episodic game, seeing the most popular face of the genre shift to a primarily narrative- and character-based experiences where the player's Choices Matteredâ„¢. Chapters adopts this concept wholesale - while the player is presented with a fully traversable 3D world (no more being trapped in corridors, as cities feel like cities again), the key focus is on the various moments of character interaction that takes place. Everything from minor dialogue choices to approaching certain characters in certain places can trigger little UI alerts telling you that your choice of action has been remembered for later purposes: the biggest choices are even given an ominous interface of their own which may or may not be timed for dramatic effect. Like Telltale's gaming mini-series, Chapters too was released originally in five different episodes ("Books") across a couple of years and though the segments have been compiled together seamlessly in the version you can now buy on Steam etc, the chapter summaries have been retained at the end of each book, listing the key choices you made and ominously teasing the potential impact it may or may not have. You can even sign up online to link yourself to the wider community and see how many people picked what you did, if that's your thing. I turned the feature off immediately, wanting not to be peer pressured by my fellow players.
Turning the game into a choice-based story game makes perfect sense given where the series was heading, and how even back in TLJ the game spent so much time on worldbuilding and character interactions. There are still some puzzles, minor bits of inventory management and environmental exploration to pace out all the talking, and though they're obviously all more restricted than in the click 'n' point days, never do they feel insultingly simplified or completely pointless like they did in Dreamfall. The game could probably survive just fine without the inventory and the ability to rotate the 3D models of the items you carry in the view mode is very underutilised and only comes up a couple of times (and one is just for an achievement), but I never felt like the brief moments of tinkering around with my pockets was a complete waste of my time like it was in Dreamfall. Similarly, moving around the (much wider) areas now has a purpose as the player characters can interact with so many different things all over the place. The majority of the time all you get is just a little monologue piece, but they're well written, establish little elements about the characters and patient clickers are rewarded with new lines on the same objects. None of this is light years away from Dreamfall, but Chapters shows the results of approaching the new world of adventure gaming with focus and vision.
The story itself is also really good, and it's supported by superb acting and writing which are both absolutely top notch as well (Kian is... a good character now? I actually grew to really like him over the course of the game which is quite frankly mad when you consider his portrayal in Dreamfall). The game is now roughly split 50/50 between Zoë and Kian: the former is piecing her life back together in Stark and soon realising that not everything is what it seems as she begins to realise the true extent of her role in the story, while Kian finds himself part of the rebellion against his former countrymen and unravels the depths of the conspiracy and lies around him. The two are kept almost comically apart and so their stories are largely isolated, but work in tandem to the knowing player. While the actual major beats of the story aren't necessarily the most creative or coherent, the way the characters have been written really sells everything and gets you engaged. I cared about these characters and what they were doing - and thanks to the choice system I did feel a little bit more personally attached to what was going on. Having played a number of choice-based narratives I can easily see where the seams are between the choices and how they affect your overall experience, but certainly the path I took felt so consistent that it could easily have worked as a fully linear story.
The story is also completely impenetrable if you haven't played either The Longest Journey or Dreamfall. The Steam description calls this a "standalone story" and it's about one of the biggest lies told in the entire storefront, despite the meager attempts to give new players an idea of what's going on: there's a "story so far" summary in the main menu, you unlock character encyclopedia entries as you progress to bring you up to date and Zoë's initial chapters find her elaborating about her thoughts and events in her journal (a proper journal this time, which is eventually abandoned as the story escalates), but if you haven't played the first two games you are going be very confused why anything or anyone matters. And though the story itself is a direct continuation from Dreamfall with another quick time skip to justify any changes, you're going to be especially locked out of the continuity because so much of Chapters feels like a big apology for the fans of the first game who Dreamfall sidelined almost completely. Chapters is littered with callbacks, references and outright narrative continuations to the first game, so much so that the heftiest emotional moments of the last few chapters and the epilogue are practically designed for those who've been here since April Ryan first woke up in her cramped boarding house flat all those years ago. Some of it could almost be classed as pandering - and I'm honestly completely fine with that and I assume most people who backed Chapters in the first place were too - but it also serves the point of tying the events of the first game more closely to the wider story that began with Dreamfall. So much of Chapters is about bringing closure - from revisiting old faces and places once more to answering all those questions left behind and literally closing the story, but also in how it makes sure that the start and end actually come to a shared close despite the distance in-between.
It's a great closure - not a perfect one but I'll get around to some of my reservations around it in the spoiler section, but it certainly manages to act as closure. The Longest Journey will always be my special favourite of the entire series, but Chapters is a close second. Despite the differences it carries the magic and spirit of the first game, and not just that but it also retroactively makes Dreamfall look a little better because the majority of those plot threads finally turn out to have some meaning - and it downright rescues Kian and to some extent Zoë from their trappings in the previous game. At the end of it all it manages to find a way to neatly tie up the saga and make this series of games - released across several years, different design trends and shifting playstyles - stick together. And it's a series which I didn't even realise how much I cared about until I began this project of playing through all of them in a row, through the ups and the downs. Whilst the second game is a clear clunker, I can't recommend this series heartily enough if any of the above sounds in any way promising.
There are a few additional things I want to talk about that I couldn't quite fit in with the above, so now it's time for the post-scriptums.
Addendum 1: Everyone's best friend
If you've played the TLJ/Dreamfall saga, you might have found yourself wondering while reading the above why I have never brought up Crow, the trusty avian sidekick (who is not, in fact, a crow) who sticks by the side of all the protagonists of the saga across all three games.
This is because Crow is quite frankly the best goddamn boy and deserves his own section.
Crow is my favourite character in the entire series. Crow is also Ragnar Tørnquist's favourite character and quite frankly Crow is everyone's favourite character. Underneath his snarky, sassy and endlessly know-it-all surface personality lies a gentle emotional soul who's become so used to being alone that he genuinely values the friendships he forms with everyone. The arrival of Crow always marks the turning point for each game, the sound of his flapping wings and familiar voice suddenly yelping off screen acting as a herald of when things get really good (or decent in the case of Dreamfall). That's because in this lonely world full of strange people and creatures you never know when to trust, you now find yourself in the company of a genuine friend and an immediately affable sidekick who sees the world in such a different way and isn't afraid to share his opinion. He may be a comedic foil to the the player character(s), but the relationships he forms with everyone (most of all April) is the secret beating heart of the games. Crow's companionship and the conversations you can hold with him are always the high point of each game, and much of the credit for that belongs to Roger Raines' brilliant voice acting performance (across all three games which is quite frankly incredible given the massive time span in real life years), which is so full of nuance and who nails both the self-aware comedic jerk charm as well as the sudden moments of introspection: when Crow gets serious, you know your heartstrings are going to get tugged.
Crow is one of the all-time great video game sidekicks and sometimes it feels like experiencing his companionship is a reason enough for anyone to play these games.
Addendum 2: Here be dragons (spoilers)
So while my overall thoughts on the series are primarily positive and I think Chapters especially does a great job in giving the trilogy a genuinely great ending, I do think that there are some slightly more critical aspects that come to my mind now that I've played all three games in a row. These particularly started to come to my mind as Chapters was wrapping up and whilst they by no means let the trilogy (or Chapters specifically) down, I do think certain narrative decisions weren't perhaps quite as successful as others.
The main aspect of the series' narrative progression that I disagree with is the decision to distance the majority of the narrative after the first game away from April's initial adventure. Now part of this is admittedly because I'm a TLJ truther and the first long journey between April and Crow is always going to be my favourite... but in general I think some of the unique charm of the first entry is lost in the way. The Arcadia of The Longest Journey in particular is a really interesting place that operates a little bit on its own logic and makes it feel suitably different, and in return it makes it a fascinating place to visit, and much of the mythos around it has the potential to pull off something really fascinating if expanded upon. Instead though, Dreamfall and Chapters largely brush it off to focus on a more grounded take on the world and building it with a heavier hand. The Azadi occupation of Dreamfall and Chapters and the thinly-veiled allegory around magical creatures and racism is already worn-out the moment it's introduced and though they try, they never manage to make the Azadi or the deeper secret behind them anything genuinely interesting or multi-dimensional. The most interesting aspects of the last two games revolve primarily around Zoë's adventures in Stark, and the heavy lifter for the Arcadia sections in Chapters especially is the pure strength of the characters (including Kian! What a glow-up!) and their interactions. Besides some things simply being glaring in their absence - the dragons who were such a huge part of the first game, primarily - it also has the added side effect of making TLJ feel like an outsider in the series it started, but this is where I have to commend Chapters for the great efforts it takes to bring elements from the first game back.
The one element that isn't brought back though is April, even though everyone after Dreamfall expected her to have survived her brush with death (given the lack of a body) - and I do think the games lose a lot for removing her from the wider narrative. Zoë is a great protagonist herself and more than stands up for herself, but she lacks April's wide-eyed wander and genuine growth as a protagonist - and that was always so deeply close to the emotional soul of the first game, particularly with the gorgeously emotionally ambiguous ending where the whole Chosen One scenario is deconstructed in a genuinely unique way that hits you in the guts simply because of how much it hits April in the guts. The void left behind by her is never really replaced, especially as April's (metaphorical) ghost continues to linger around, especially in every single conversation with Crow who never really gets over April's character derailment in Dreamfall and her eventual death. That hole in the emotional tapestry is highlighted by how the two greatest emotional hits of Chapters revolve around April, specifically the moment when she and Crow reunite in the space between and then pass to the afterlife together (honestly almost wept here) and the epilogue that brings back the seemingly random intermission from TLJ and injects a huge amount of gravitas into it. Maybe it's just I never got over April either, and I always wished I could have spent more time with her across the several hours of gameplay.
he final little complaint I've got lies around Saga, the secret third protagonist of Chapters. The episodes spend a lot of time building her up as we see her literally grow in years across the interlude segments, each time dropping more and more hints around her wider role and how she ties into April as her maybe-probably reincarnation. But after all that, her primary role in the final chapter is to simply act as an abrupt know-it-all deus ex machina who saves the day and then flatly tells all the main characters how their story will go before taking the spotlight for the final ending. The thing is, for all her massive importance in the story and more practically with how Kian and Zoë end up saving the day through her interference, she never really gets established as a character and so it's a little strange for this sudden practical stranger to gain so much agency in the last dramatic spots of the game. The issue I guess I have is that she is an obvious April expy - but everything she does and the place she holds in the narrative would be so much better suited for April herself to begin with, and that makes both Saga feel rather superfluous and April's death wholly unnecessary. This is further hammered in by the generally really beautiful epilogue that I really enjoyed - but it's odd that the last parting words we have with Crow are with a character who only really appears within the past hour from that moment."
None of the above really crash the train - I have to emphasise that I still think Chapters' ending is generally great and I overall loved the game. I also think that all this is probably the best way the writing team could save the situation without looking like they were rowing without oars when it came time to begin work on Chapters. My theory here is that Ragnar and team wrote themselves into a corner with Dreamfall's ending where April dies and Zoë falls into a coma, but failed to realise it until the story of Chapters started to be fleshed out beyond their initial drafting stage. They had effectively pushed out a major narrative force out of the picture entirely for dramatic effect, but then realised that they still needed it (her) for the actual finale of the entire story to have the weight that the long-time fans expected. So, Saga gets the uncomfortable role of trying to bear that weight and remind the player of who she should be. The actual truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and once again I have to commend that the writing team did manage to at least make their chosen path feel unforced, even if it doesn't sit perfectly.