Thankfull its over.

[tom147]

That last chapter was welllll Bad. No interaction really , No real puzzles at all. . . Verrrry short. Very watererd down , easy out storyline. I see all the credits at the end and wonder how so many people can make such a poor ending.Chapter4 had me interested and hanging a bit. Chapter 5 was empty with no real substance. Just my views tho. Some folks probably loved it I guess.

[Joy_Maxed]

I feel your pain. Honestly I really wanted to like this game but it just does not hold a candle to the longest journey. I wish there had been more locations in the game like how in The longest journey you would visit multiple locations in both Stark and Arcadia. Although I'm sure that the creator did their best in making this game, like you I feel that it was very watered down not to mention there are still questions left unanswered.

[casualsailor]

Well lets think about your criticizm for a moment. From a purely gaming standpoint you have a point. There was very little gameplay and what little there was consisted mostly of "Move to the end of the only place you can walk and click the only hotspot available to view the next cut scene."

And it would appear that much of the story was cut for time. I'm thinking about Hanna in particular or was she not instructed to help Zöe?

Book 5 did wrap up the major threads. And it did throw a few bones to TLJ fans.

But it did feel rushed and its clear they had enough material for at least one more book if not two more (thinking about Hanna again.)

[oniric.sound]

I'm going to go ahead and say this is probably due to the fact they also re-worked other parts of the game (definitely book 1, which I haven't played yet).

There is not a lot of gameplay, true, but although in general I would look down on this, in the end I didn't.
I think DFC tried to be interactive but ultimately failed on this aspect. Most of the puzzles to me are either confusing, pointless, convoluted or even "gross". They send you on errand that made people compare this game to a walking simulator on more than one site.
SFC shines (like all TLJ games) on story and conversations...and there's lots of those two in book 5! I don't need more puzzles in book 5 except maybe a tad more with crow in the core section, before being interrupted.

My opinion is it could have had some scenes cut and other scenes inserted, but in the end I think I'm ok with how it is. It reached its peak.

[The Doctor / Varda]

I understand you. Up to chapter 3 game was great, chapter 4 was too short and 5, well is just follow the storyline and nothing else. Also the Deux Ex Machina, I mean Saga, is like "OK I have to fit in".
Btw, I liked the game.

[lancelot]

I was disappointed too. Most of the gameplay of Chapter 5 consisted of finding the next hotspot to click. And one puzzle that was just absurd (getting the wine).

Plus some of the tiniest and most claustrophobic locations in the whole game. With camera very close behind the character and objects jumping into the field of view and immediately disappearing, very awkward. After all the talk about the capabilities of Unity 5.

And no new interesting characters; I think those had been one of the main strengths of the game (like The Mole).

The script was all over the place, as always. When a character in a game says something as if to himself ("I suppose I could do X if I had Y"), that's reasonable. But when Kian says "It's a wall. Yes, really, it's a wall!", whom is he addressing? If that's an attempt to break the fourth wall (I'm surprised they didn't make some horrible pun out of that too), it's a very lame attempt. To me almost every single joke in DC felt strained. At least they didn't have any more of Rooster & Kitten. That joke was meh the first time, but then in total I think they repeated it about ten times. That's not how jokes work.

Now I'm not sure if I want to replay the game. I don't know if they improved what had been shown on their forum, but this[i.imgur.com] vs. this[i.imgur.com] doesn't look promising. Bricks look like they're made of plastic. The details on the cart are busted, the lighting on the grass looks totally unnatural. I've noticed some similar things in Chapter 5, such as shiny reflections from clothes. Everyone is wearing silk, apparently. Too bad those graphics are shiny only in the most literal sense of the word.

Plus the removed puzzles. Even if a puzzle is suboptimal, should it be tweaked? Should some hints be added, in the form of something that Zoe says or in some more subtle ways? Nah, why bother.

TL;DR: +1.

[mysticfall]

Originally posted by lancelot:

And no new interesting characters; I think those had been one of the main strengths of the game (like The Mole).

While I do agree with most of points you mentioned, I have to beg to differ on this one. Actually, I think it would have been much better if they cut down the number of characters in this game.

Not only players have to split their time with two main protagonists throughout the game, they mostly acted in their own respective spheres, which means we don't see almost zero interactions between the main characters until the very end.

In this situation, the role of supporting characters is crucial in helping us understand the personalities of the main characters.

But in Dreamfall Chapters, there are simply too many such characters who do little before they got abandoned to make room for the next character.

Dreamfall Chapters introduced so many potentially memorable characters: Enu, Anna, Bip, Mira, Sully, Reza, Baruti, Nela, The Mole, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and so many others. But the game never have let them stay long enough for the player to feel attached to them.

It feels like they just have thrown bunch of prototype characters from their drawing board as soon as they were created without much consideration.

Enu is an awkward feline girl with cute wriggling ears, Anna is a mysterious red hair with a crush on Kian, and so on, but they never had more than couple of chances to talk with Kian until the very end, so these brief descriptions are all we can say about those characters.

If they had restrained themselves and limited the number of supporting characters in this game, so allowing them more time to interact with the player, I suppose playing the main characters wouldn't have felt so isolated and hollow compared to how it was in the previous games.

[dhraiden]

Agreed, in terms of "gameplay", it was nearly non-existent. We were playing an on-rails semi-interactive cinematic, like a ride. You can slow down the ride, pause and look around at things, but ultimately it's all going one place and there's no real choice or consequence involved for the last Chapter. But it was meant to wrap everything up very neatly.

[Hobbes]

I really enjoyed it; I think it did have a fair amount of gameplay parts, at least at the beginning. Towards the end...I'm not sure, it felt a tiny bit...maybe a little rushed? I think it was around the part that Saga opened the portal between the worlds for Kian and Zoe things felt like they just kept...happening? For me at least anyway.

To address other things mentioned here, I think one thing that dragged the game down for me in the final chapter was the integration of more minor characters. It was all very dramatic and all I suppose, it did keep things moving at a nice pace and kept you in a certain mindset but I was still felt a little empty without them. I wanted to see more of Likho, Enu, Bip, Mira, Sully etc etc in the build-up, within the actual meat of the story.

For example, towards the end when you talk to Mira…it would have been nice to actually....talk to her. I know it was meant to be a tense situation, but at least let her give a little remark. We got an Anna quip; can we trade that for her instead? Haha. Speaking of Anna, I thought her whole character was rather redundant. She just wasn't that interesting, she seemed to be introduced to be this mysterious character, but in the end amounted to not being much of anything?

Overall though I did enjoy the game. Like others have said, they did a pretty good job of wrapping up most major loose ends and that isn't an easy thing to do. I suppose they didn't want to introduce too many choices so they could focus on what we already had. Although if I'm honest, I'm not entirely sure what effects my choices had if any, at the moment (I'll have to look into that).

[Oberon70]

Personally, I think they over stretched themselves. They cut development of each chapter down due to the huge delays with changing game engines. I won't be backing any future kickstarter for them.

[KriKitBoNeZ]

Originally posted by nepenthe:

Originally posted by Oberon70:

Personally, I think they over stretched themselves.

http://s1347.photobucket.com/user/ambrosia0/media/Best%20laid%20plans_zpsiyl33gqw.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0

Wow...photobucket! Do you have a Geocities site that links to Myspace?

[Genzer]

Originally posted by Oberon70:

Personally, I think they over stretched themselves. They cut development of each chapter down due to the huge delays with changing game engines. I won't be backing any future kickstarter for them.

Just wanted to chime in and say we didn't cut anything.
We've altered some aspects of the game (i.e. Book One changes as mentioned) because they're not the best ways of conveying the story and what's going on to the players (especially new players).

New Book releases have been delayed along the way, yes, but we haven't cut anything from the original design/story because of delays. :)

[King DaMuncha]

Was Saga supposed to be the Goddess? She just turns up to save the day because, well its allready written in story time. I thought those interludes about her were odd and didnt fit in the story well.

[tom147]

Im not agreeing with the "they wraped things up nicely" approach. They wraped things up yes. But in a very predictable and very common way. There were no surprises. No "AHA!" moments. The interactive moments were so easy as to be childish. Id rather have no interaction then go here go there.The devs simply took the easy way out.

[oniric.sound]

There was one moment of surprise for me: mother Utana. It wasn't a pleasant surprise at all.
I must admit when all is done and she still wants to continue killing magicals I bursted out in a "seriously? R u f***ing kidding me?"

[KriKitBoNeZ]

I was hoping Saga would step through my screen and start doing my dishes or something. That would have been a cool surprise.