Les Miserables: The video game!

Les Miserables has been a novel, a musical, it's been adapted into many films and even a Japanese anime series. But there’s one medium in which I never thought I’d see it made into. A video game!

I discovered this piece of “merchandise” on Ebay; it cost me £5.99 and believe me that’s far more than it’s worth! I read some reviews of it on Amazon.co.uk before I purchased it and they all said the same thing, that it was a boring, pointless game obviously rushed out to make some money of the recent film adaptation. I should have listened to those reviews and not wasted my money! But I was curious so I bought it anyway, if nothing else I thought it would make a good topic for this blog.

I think my main problem with it has to be the fact that out of all the characters in Les Mis they could have based a game on, they based it on Cosette. WHY??? Why base it on the least interesting character in the entire novel???  Someone had a choice out of characters like Valjean, Javert, Eponine, Enjolras and his mates and the story of the June rebellion, but they decided to base a game around the orphan kid who does absolutely nothing In the entire story! That’s mind boggling! Fuck even Gavroche would have been a better choice!
And don't get me wrong, I love Cosette, I really do. But if you've read this blog I'm sure you realise that i'm the first to admit that she really doesn't do anything in Les Mis, there's many many characters that would have made a better game.

At least the graphics were good in it, I couldn’t fault it there. The designers did a good job making little Cosette look like she does in the novel. Although I’m curious why they appear to have used Paris Hilton as the model for grown up Cosette??

Really though, this game didn’t even have anything to do with Cosette, it's just one of those basic hidden object games which I have played dozens of before. If you go into any branch of Game you’ll find tons of these kind of games and they’re all the same, they give you a list of things to find, you find them, there’ll be some text on the screen and then you find more things. This game didn’t even attempt to add any kind of challenge to it either, they could have at least added a time limit to the levels to make it harder, or made the objects in some way harder to find! This was really one of the easiest games I’ve ever played.

It wasn’t even fun, and that’s kind of the first thing I want out of a game. It has to be fun! I should have known this game was gonna suck just from the very first screen that popped up. Check this crap out…

Notice anything wrong with that text? Yeah OK you might not be as obsessed with Les Mis as I am, but that date is completely wrong, I’m pretty sure Fantine was already dead by 1826! Why did I even continue after this? This says to me that someone thought it would be a good idea to make a game based on Les Miserables but they didn’t think it was a good idea to do a simple bit of fucking research beforehand! This is just laziness! 

In fact that’s the best way I can describe this game, lazy! Imagine the possibilities there could be if someone made a real attempt at a Les Mis game, there are so many better characters that could make a really interesting game. How cool would it be to play an adventure based game where you played as Jean Valjean? That’s a potentially interesting idea, not this bullshit where all you do is find hidden objects!

This really was one of the crappiest things ever to have the name Les Miserables on it, I don’t even think it’s worthy enough to bear the Les Mis name, I don’t know what they were thinking when they came up with this idea. It could have been fun if they’d put just a little more effort into it, maybe actually given the player something more to do than just click on things. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played, but it definitely could have been better.

I suppose there was one thing I did like about it though, there were these random glowing butterflies hidden in the game and if you clicked one you got given a Les Mis fact. That was kind of entertaining. I already knew most of them but it was a nice addition to the game.

If you happen to come across this game I cant recommend you buy it, if you're a hardcore Les Mis fan and want to own everything that's related to it then go ahead but I assure you it's a real waste of time.

(Oh and one more thing, the box claimed this game had 8+ hours of gameplay! Yeah, I managed it in less than 2 hours, and that’s including the time I took making screenshots for this blog and bathroom breaks. Seriously….. 8 hours??? Who would play this for 8 hours)