Leaderboard

There are a few hidden interactions in the game (ie. things you can do that have no UI clue/mouseover tip whatsoever), which makes me think there might be even more. I wonder if you guys have found some. Here are a the ones I know of: Mele Island (3): Taking Guybrush on the map where Meathook island, Fetuccini brothers' Circus (clearing) and the House were located in Monkey 1 will trigger Guybrush comments LeShip (1): Wally's shackles on the deck High Street end game (2): Positionning Guybrush behind the photocall stand will add yet another nice photo to your collection. Placing Guybrush at the church entrance and he'll ask Elaine if they could renew their vows and she says "maybe another time". There has to be more!

I appreciate the effort the person that captured those videos went through, thanks! But I also wanted to see the stingers in-game, and I don't have the patience to sit through the credits every time. Luckily I was looking for an excuse to use my MonkeyPack program for something useful, and I found the credit files. So I hereby present a mod that shortens the credits to just a few seconds. Since I feel guilty about removing all the names, this mod makes the credits instead show a reminder to only use the mod to see the stingers, and not all the time, because a lot of people worked very hard on the game, and they deserve their names listed. It should work for all included languages too, though my reminder message is in English for all of them. Just place the attached file in the 'Return To Monkey Island' game folder (which can be found on Steam by right-clicking the game, going to 'Manage', and clicking 'Browse local files'). It doesn't override any existing files, and the mod can be removed by simply deleting the file again. Weird.ggpack1f

1. Revenge 2. Secret 3. Curse 4. Return 5. Escape 6. Tales Revenge is without a doubt my favorite. It takes the already brilliant Secret and makes it more of everything in all the right ways, and it just resonates with me. Guybrush's evolution from a nice wannabe to an experienced pirate who becomes full of himself to his own detriment becomes more and more brilliant every time I experience it. It has its flaws for sure, especially with some unfair puzzles and tedious backtracking, but these things are annoying once, the whole rest of the game keeps on giving on every replay, discussion and listen to the soundtrack. Secret in second because it is the original and an eternal classic. It is the giant from whose shoulders Revenge leaped even higher. CMI is so close to tying with Secret. It is in my opinion a perfect point and click. Just that Revenge and Secret hit my personal tastes better, but Curse is a fine entry point to the series. These three will likely always stay this way for me. The other three each have their own issues but like with pizza, even the worst Monkey Island games are still amazing. Return didn't quite reach my hopes and dreams but it is a perfect love letter to the series as a whole and is Ron's official blessing for the fans to accept all Monkey Island games before and after it as canon regardless of the team. EMI suffered most from its controls but was otherwise very Curse-y to me. It jumped the shark in the end by trying to connect everything with everything - Herman, and the Robot - but you know what? Back then I found that awesome. And I liked Monkey Kombat Tales is last on this list, but as said, to be the worst MI game is still no slouch (and as said the bottom three constantly change for me). I didn't care much for the Telltale formular overall, and it was the height of the "casualification" era, which alienated oldschool fans who wanted hard puzzles in favor of expanding the audience and saving the genre. And while many games from that time weren't for me, I believe they achieved that and I'm grateful for it.

Could this be related to the star map on Cogg island?

In the end-game screen you can also place Guybrush at the church entrance and he'll ask Elaine if they could renew their vows and she says "maybe another time".

Mulling on this further... I know Ron's said that Guybrush sitting on the bench at the end is channeling how he feels, and there's a genuine sadness to it. A weight has been lifted after all these years, but at what cost? Guybrush can't go and start the next adventure with Elaine because the magic is gone. I'll be interested to see if Ron does come back to make more, where he goes from here, because despite what people have said, there was a pretty clear finality to that ending. How can there be any more suspension of disbelief now?

This one particulary is bugging me, seeing how polished it is. Is it in the game somewhere? I went diving so many times to try to find it.. Is it a submarine? spaceship? other game/pop culture reference? I don't get it...

I love the art style but I definitely wouldn’t want every monkey island thing to look like that forever, just like I wouldn’t want it to be pixel art or 3D forever. But i would *love* a T shirt with this style pleaaaaseeeee. And, to be honest, the only part of the game where I felt like the vibes were *absolutely perfect* was on LeShip.

This wins the award for most reductive comment. Well done!

Hello, I'd just like to inform you that I have uploaded the maps, and some other interesting visual content, from Return to Monkey Island, to my archive. Even some pre-release/concept maps are present, in nice resolution. Enjoy!

For 2 a good rule of thumb is that Land composed Scabb, McConnell composed Booty and Bajakian composed Phatt. But there are probably exceptions to this and some level of collaboration on all of it. I think I heard Largo's theme was a group effort which is plausible but it wouldn't surprise me if McConnell was the driving force behind that as it containst a lot of his fingerprints. Compare that theme for example to Swanky Maximino from Grim Fandango (which incidentally was a tune originally written from Monkey 2, which they couldn't find a use for)

On the Guybrush / Elaine relationship, my feeling on it is this: Monkey 1, the relationship reflects the author's relationships: young guys who are chasing hot women and don't know what to do with them. Monkey 2, the relationship is more distant, more like she has matured, but he hasn't yet Return, both are now older and more mature, Elaine has come to accept Guybrush for who he is, and he no longer chases after her like a overgrown teenager I guess basically what I'm saying is that I think their relationship is probably also reflective of the author's feelings toward their partners at the time of writing. Their relationships in Monkey 3 and 4 feel more cartoonish (to me at least) because they're just a parody of the "true" feelings of the original authors rather than something which was being sincerely expressed.

First post, finished the game yesterday and loved it but also really confused by it. I'm not sure how to take the ending, none of them actually makes sense to me. If the stories take place in a theme park, the fact that it ends in a theme park is actually not an endig. It's just a child being interrupted while playing games. Or if grown up Guybrush was just imagining it (since this one didn't end with Guybrush being a child again), that's just weird. In that case, he has a severe case of split personality disorder, and I seriously doubt that's what they were going for. I don't think the ending has a logical explaination, and it was perhaps made that way, so that every possible ending works and doesn't work at the same time. That's either genius or very lazy. The only problem I have with that is that if I pretend one ending is the true ending, there's always something else that contradicts it. If the whole series is just Guybrush telling stories to his son, then that means we haven't been playing as Guybrush, but his son all along. But that doesn't explain why it ends in a theme park, even less so twice. It means that all the stories are fake, made up by a very creative father (Guybrush), and reenacted by his son. But if so, why the need for the father to actually be Guybrush? Why not just one of Guybrush's parents? Who is the one with the vivid imagination here? The boy or the father? The more I think about wrapping my head around the ending, the more confused I get. Because while the ending to Monkey2 was a shock, there were much less variables and easier to theorize about. RTMI has a ton of variables and everything contradicts something else, and, there are several endings that ends up not really making any sense without a huge amount of suspension of disbeliefe and ignoring all the signs that points to something else. RTMI seems less a Monkey Island game, and almost more a commentary on the Monkey Island series and its aging fandom. It seems to exist on a higher level than the others.

Except that was I think what we already had. Saying it is for sure all Guybrush tellings stories doesn't add anything to previous games, and the ending here I don't think adds much at all to this one. Him telling stories to his kid is a new addition here, and not much is done with it. It desperately wants to be Princess Bride but there is a fine line to walk when you are the unreliable narrator writer. MI2 I think handled it as best it could, but left enough ambiguity to really make it work. But if these are all just theme parks, then I don't see that as much of an expansion unless we decide to go more and more into the real life of Guybrush, which also seems to be against the point of what this game is trying for. If they aren't they don't much expand the world at all beyond what could already be done in previous games. I hated the monkey mech too, but there is a tried and true rule of fiction when writing in a series ignore the crap that didn't work if it wasn't important, gloss over it if it was, and fix it if there is no other choice. But I've never seen a story that goes full MAKE YOUR OWN CANON ever really work. Might be forgetting something, but yeah. And that is why I think the ending tried for its themes, but never really connected with them. "It is an amusement park! BUT WAIT! It isn't! Maybe, which do you prefer. Pick one. One is clearly the one I the writer like, but you know... eh... whatever." just doesn't resonate much and isn't really great storytelling. It's like the difference between the Director's Cut of Blade Runner and the Final Cut, one friggen scene removes the ambiguity, and suddenly the ending becomes a lot worse because you KNOW what the director wants you to think.

Here’s a shot I took the Photo Booth and an extremely Part 5-appropriate look behind it featuring @Dmnkly

I love the end-credit music. Or at least I used to. Now I need to relearn to love again.

For me it's never not been Monkey Island 2. The only thing that has fluctuated in my mind is how thin the margin is. The original is an undisputed classic, the game that showed off the true potential of a SCUMM adventure game and more or less represents the best of a genre and the halcyon days of LucasArts as a spirit. I don't think the series ever really did fully recapture that kind of Princess Bride storybook flavor it had going here. I can't imagine arguing with anybody who would rank it first, though I find it hard to find any new way to sing its praises at this point. Monkey 2 feels like it builds on the first game and offers a deeper, richer, more ambitious experience. It ups the ante in every way, and to this day you can pit the Four Map Pieces segment against pretty much anything the genre has produced since. Again, three decades worth of discussion sort of leaves me at a loss to come up with some kind of original take on the thing, but for me this is still my favorite game. CMI is an undeniable departure from the first two in overall feeling for reasons both unavoidable (major technology gap, different creative personell) and chosen, and it probably honors the template of the original a little too much in the first half (get ship and crew, insult sword fighting) but it's just such a well-made adventure game top to bottom, with stupid good production values, that I doubt a convincing, objective argument could be made for it representing any kind of misstep from a strict quality standpoint. It's another installment where I can't object to it being ranked first. It is also as influential as the first game in a certain sense as it seems to have spawned, or at least been released at the right time to soak up, that initial burst of online fandom. Many people seem to have met the series through CMI. EMI is the least of the games, but I think it deserves reappraisal in terms of what that really means. What I see is a satisfying, rock solid adventure game with a lot of funny moments, good animation and very possibly the best voice acting in an LEC game -- and that's really saying something. On the other hand it delivers a somewhat off brand story for a Monkey Island installment, it comes dangerously close to making the world feel too small (that Tri-Island Area map: hilarious) and it unquestionably fails its pedigree on the graphics front (both because using GrimE to create a cartoony-yet-lush 3D world with the target specs of the average turn-of-the-century Windows user isn't setting yourself up for success, and because Chris Miles, by all accounts a talented animator, probably wasn't the guy to sit in the Art Director chair for the series' delicate transition to 3D.) But visuals aside I think it's held up reasonably well, and I would like to think its status as a kind of "side trip" story will gain some appreciation/perspecitve now that it is a middle installment and not the last game, which admittedly was not a good look for it. Monkey Island is an exceptionally good series, and in this case being the worst of five great games still leaves you: a really good game. TMI is a bit of a rebound that to a large extent feels like a course correction or return to form, especially in terms of a moody atmosphere and a general sense of captivating piratey-ness (both of which were a bit lacking in EMI as a consequence of its story), and the Telltale engine really upped the ante on the "performances" in my opinion, allowing the installment to go into some new emotional territory. On the downside, the decision to develop the episode with WiiWare in mind and general corner-cutting absolutely and unnecessarily hurt the production values. The art direction is good, but the 3D is up against limitations it should not be up against, and it is kind of funny how the Xerox-character-designs-for-background-NPCs strategy never really improved on Monkey 1. And while the MIDI score has a certain nostalgic feel that I like, it is kind of shameful that Michael Land's excellent compositions were not given the respect of a proper production, which might well have resulted in something that could have usurped the CMI score. The game's qualities more than overwhelm these drawbacks, it's just frustrating that they feel so self-inflicted. On the quibbles front, the equal-sized chapters necessitated by the episodic structure made me weirdly sad, I object to the absence of Alt+W, and the abruptness of the last moment felt like the one real shortcoming of CMI wasn't learned from. Short version: All these games are great, and I question the value of rankings, but I give the crown to MI2 if coronating one is a life or death matter. And I look forward to buying them all yet again in what promises to be a truly absurd anthology package in October.