Apart from the design flaws and mediocrity, in graphics, controls, camera, and gameplay. It's not that special to look at, it's not as easy to play as it should be, and the main part of the gameplay consists of something like Dance Dance Revolution, without the dancing. As an Adventure, the puzzles are excellent but there are hardly any of them, the dialogue system is limited, and the exploration is confined to doing everyday things in very small scenes. If you take out the Simon Says sequences, there isn't a whole lot of gameplay there, the game would be very short indeed.
If the story was transplanted into a movie and released with as much hype it would be panned
so much it would make Gigli look like the Shawshank Redemption. I'm all about the style, in my top 5 favourite movies, is Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. Fahrenheit has a murder scene in the beginning where the camera cuts back and forth between a mysterious figure and Lucas, and at the end the colours in the screen are inverted. Pretty sure Broken Sword 3 had this, minus the silly inverted colours which are tacky and don't communicate anything. I can name two games from the top of my head, Max Payne 2 and Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, both use the camera better. Let's not forget Half-Life 2, rarely leaves the first person perspective, but it does a fine job. Fahrenheit uses picture-in-picture to display threats and create urgency, like a little game called XIII, accept XIII intergrated this into the game a hell of a lot better.
Fahrenheit has raised the bar, for the adventure genre, outside Myst, half of the features you won't find in adventure games at all. For starters, the graphics and sound are so much better than Broken Sword 3, even if they're about on par with Max Payne 2's 3 year old graphics. The sound is also much improved. It's very arguable that Fahrenheit constitutes an Adventure. I thought most people thought The Longest Journey and Still Life were a bit thin, Fahrenheit takes the elements that are not Adventure, from the modern adventure game, and adds some wierd reflex arcade gameplay on top of it. In the same way some old RPGs look like RTS games, overhead, same mouse interface, same graphics, but doing very different things.
About the graphics being justified because of the requirements. Why don't we just stick with 2D, 640x480, 8bit, and go back to floppies? Also, the requirements for Half-Life 2 aren't that much different, Fahrenheit requires a better video card for one, and for all you who can't play HL2, but can play Fahrenheit, there are more who can't play either.
