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Seeing as this is Japan, they might have just changed it for cultural reasons. The Japanese have always viewed themselves as a homogeneous country, with very little ethnic diversity. It's not true, but most of the immigrants in Japan are Asian, so the myth has always permeated. Because of that, some of the immigrants from other Asian countries still do pretend to be completely Japanese to avoid bullying. There's a xenophobic atmosphere, especially for African-descended people, where they actually face fear similar to Western nations prior to the mid to end of the 20th century. A lot of Japanese people there actually think that they are lesser, or even dirty because of the color of their skin. In addition, there has always been a view that ivory white skin is a goal to achieve, especially for women. So, even now, you have a huge market for skin bleach and you still can see women cover up on beaches because they don't want to get a tan. This too is improving somewhat, but the Japanese media and culture in general still enforce the toxic notion that only the women with an ivory complexion are desirable. It's getting better this century, as the first Japanese and African-American-descended woman won a beauty contest for the first time in 2015. Although, she still faces discrimination where even though she was born in Japan and speaks Japanese fluently with a Kansai accent, she still has to deal with reporters asking her what she feels about the Japanese, as though she isn't Japanese herself.

I always liked that MI2 didn’t have any of that stuff. No insult swordfighting, no crew-gathering and finding a ship. I was sad to see them return in Curse, not because they were bad puzzles but because until Curse did them they were “just something you did in the first game,” and not “essential parts of the franchise.” Curse turned them into a pattern, almost like Return of the Jedi deciding to do the Death Star again - now they’ve become a trope that keeps showing up instead of being just one idea in an ever-growing universe of ideas. This isn’t to say Curse’s versions of those puzzles were bad (they weren’t), but I would have liked to see something new there instead of further entrenching the idea that we’ve got to repeat a specific puzzle from the first game over and over for it to feel like Monkey Island. Monkey 2 showed its not necessary. Sorry that this probably sounds more curmudgeonly than I mean it to. I really like Curse of Monkey Island!

Yeah, I thought the insult sword fighting in Tales was a nice evolution of that puzzle, in the sense of making it three-way, complimenting one participant and insulting the other. But I don't know how much potential it would have beyond that puzzle given that it was pretty straightforward. The Insult Sword Fighting in SMI, while it could be tedious, did involve more trial and error due to the variations of insults/comebacks that were available, and CMI was pretty much the same puzzle just with rhyming. EMI's Insult Arm Wrestling was essentially the same puzzle but without the grinding of finding the insults first (and there is also an optional Insult Sword Fighting in Ozzie's house that you can never win due to his use "Australia-themed insults" which Guybrush can only respond with variations of "What?!" "I didn't get that" etc. which I enjoyed!) Maybe we'll have a callback in some form, but given how MI2 didn't repeat too much from SMI in terms of puzzles, storylines, etc. maybe ReMI will also move on and give us mostly new material, puzzles, etc. Something that takes advantage of Ron's new game engine would make it unique too. P.S. Go to 8:48 to get a vague idea of how much knowledge Ron still has on Insult Sword Fighting...

Instead of repeating themselves, I hope Ron and Dave come up with stuff that will be regarded equally as classic in 30 years.

I never had a problem with the mazes and I remember the swamp puzzle as one of the highlights of the otherwise very flawed EMI. Actually Lucre Island was pretty fun as a whole if I remember correctly. I can do without insult swordfighting (or any variation on it) in RMI. I enjoyed it in SMI and CMI, but it would feel stale if it turned up again.

Based on my recent experience, it's a game best left as scattered memories.

I don't particularly remember the swamp as a 'maze' puzzle, so much as I remember the neat mechanic of having to make things happen the same way when encountering your past/future self. It must have made an impression on me because the only things I can say I actually remember about EMI since I played it (3 times, when it came out) are: * That puzzle * Monkey Kombat * Murray is in it, but not particularly funny in it * Scumm Bar, which is later Lua Bar * Charles L Charles ... good times and free grog? * I guess you go back to Monkey Island * HT Marley * A diving competition? * Ending with giant monkey robot * Something about Planet Threepwood and Starbuccaneers And the only one of those things I remember in an unequivocally positive way is that swamp puzzle. Everything else I remember about the game is at best a mixed bag. Heh (Okay, I remember some other stuff, too, but my point is that my memories of the game are... scattered)

Oh my gosh, the maze puzzles are always the ones I struggle with the most but I strangely feel like they're maybe supposed to be that way? I was one hundred percent lost in MI2 but I liked how it was done in MI1 and in Tales, the "aha!" moment of knowing where you're going is kind of nice actually. The one thing I'd want if they decide to implement another maze-like puzzle is for it to have a "return to the entrance" button like Tales had, backtracking is never fun, especially when you're lost and you don't know where exactly you're supposed to go to get back to where you started.

Ah yes, the swamp. That reminds me of another Monkey Island (or adventure game) trope, which is bloody mazes. Specifically, forest mazes. I think CMI was the one game that managed to avoid these, actually.

To me the worst part of Monkey Kombat is that the sequence just went on a bit too long and they thought it was good enough to go back to it for the finale. One piece of praise I gave to EMI at the time which I stand by is that I appreciate its attempts to have unusual puzzles in the game, something I feel like CMI and even MI2 lacked in comparison to the first game which had a lot of puzzles which didn't have anything to do with 'use x with y' I think for a lot of people Monkey Kombat was -extra- boring because they treated it like insult fighting but you had to collect collections of eeks, oops and chees which were meaningless, and so not even funny. But what I think the puzzle really was (and it doesn't explain this too well) is a logic problem in which eventually once you find out enough you can deduce the correct combos, and I appreciated the ATTEMPT to do a type of puzzle Monkey Island hasn't had before even if it kind of fails on execution.

Maybe the "Mysts of Tyme" where Guybrush meets himself in the swamp? Guybrush initially thinks the "other him" is just Pegnose disguised as him again, but upon confirming that they're both thinking the same number, he believes they are one in the same. (You can also shoot the other Guybrush with the gun that he gives you! It causes a paradox later, but still, it's a fun easter egg!)

I know, I was joking What multiverse stuff was there in Escape? Because there isn't any in the picture I posted!

Just an update on the looping situation, I did some further testing and it seems as though every looping track loops to the wrong position (so all of woodtick is a bit of a mess). Fortunately, I believe I've detected the issue. Basically the tracks extracted using the MI Explorer have to then be converted into a format that XACT recognises, and during the conversion the tracks got extended and now don't match the timestamp of the original MT32 files. So now, I'm going in and putting each individual file into Sony Vegas and rendering them as a .wav to be 100% sure I'm getting the same files at the same length, then I'll rebuild the wavebank and report back. Also, during all this messing, I found that by editing some tracks I can get back previously lost transitions, such as the buildup and crescendo that hits when Largo says "Look out world! The most fearsome pirate of all time will soon sail the seas again!", smoothly transitioning into the Voodoo Lady's theme, rather than cutting to the Voodoo theme when largo says his line and missing out on that build which really added to the presentation of the scene in the original game. I have no idea how to bring back the little tune that plays when the coffin gets lifted up in the swamp though, it's part of a set of layered transitions that are meant to be event triggered, but without access to scripting or any real understanding of the MI2_MUSIC IMPLEMENTATION Excel file, I'm at a loss. UPDATE: Ok, so I did all that and it still doesn't loop correctly. I'm honestly not sure what the issue is. The tracks line up exactly, but it seems as though the game just doesn't want to obey any looping instructions when they're replaced with SE music. Idk, maybe I've done something wrong in XACT?

I enjoyed its appearance in CMI, but there's no getting around it was basically the same puzzle but with rhyming and ship combat. I preferred the way it was done in Tales, where it was just one puzzle, and it was a fresh take on the format by having to find the response to fit two pieces of dialogue at once. If it is revisited in this game I think it would be in some limited way like that.

Seeing Guybrush being sprayed root beer upon during the dream sequence reminded me of a crazy theory I had. Before spraying, LeChuck says he's about to destroy Guybrush's spiritual essence (as Guybrush did in MI1): we know that that dream isn't 100% a dream, because the notes Guybrush takes down are real, so what if LeChuck actually destroyed some part of Guybrush's spirit right there? I mean probably it's just a dream and there's no explanation for the bone dance notes being real after he wakes up, but still, if we went nitpicking on that sequence it's quite odd that no one but me ever mentioned it?

Here's something that many of you may not have realised: Monkey Island has always been explicitly set in a multiverse. 'Prime' Guybrush often meets and interacts with alternate universe versions of himself. Here are a just a few instances:

I have no idea what means. It could only have been more of a cliffhanger if Guybrush had been left hanging from a cliff. Ron also had this to say in the chat: I think ReMI is going to be a very interesting trip! I see we've gone right past the analysing the minutia of what we've seen and are now deep into "what if" territory... Soon enough someone will correctly guess what we're about to see (if it hasn't happened already). God, I hope they release more stuff soon!

Aww that's a shame. I really missed it in mi2 and Tales.