Undeniable masterpiece, albeit a flawed one.
There are moments in the game when it actually shows.
The story is, on one hand, very well crafted and involving - but as I moved through the game I found it not as original as it could be. One of the major problems it's suffering from are the dialogues - they game wouldn't lose much if they were a little bit shorter. Then the story is your average quest, with the protagonist having to assemble pieces of an artifact/a set of artifacts and stop the Evil. Been there, done that. A number of times.
Then there's the ending.
Actually it seems as if the designers were flooded with plenty of good ideas as they moved towards it, but they were clueless when they had to piece them together, and - in result - "The Longest Journey" ends leaving you with plenty of unanswered questions. That's not the way stories are meant to be told, Funcom.
Overall "TLJ" is not as big a pain as long as you can look past its obvious flaws. It has some absurd puzzles that will have you looking through the Internet for solution, but fortunately their number is small. Both of the worlds are a sight to behold, even if they are a bit cliched - Stark, or the world of science, is your typical cyberpunkish dark future, a battleground between powerful corporations and the hackers underground, while Arcadia - the world of magic - is a distorted, magical reflection of our own reality. There are few extremely well-done, cinematic moments though, when April actually faces some enemies - even though they're only an imitation of actual action scenes, they're quite decent.
Tu summarise this review: if you like adventure games, play TLJ. If you like cliched fantasy tales, play TLJ. If you want to see a game that makes full use of the artistic potential of the medium, stay away.