Jake

"Never pay less than 50 bucks for a Van Winslow dating sim with FPS elements."

Thank you for clarifying, for my own sanity!! There’s a too-common trend online of people pulling a “that thing you like? my friend, bad news, it is a trope,” as if it’s some sage-like ultra-wise own, to the point that I am now basically triggered by anyone dropping a TV Tropes link without context 😬🤷‍♂️

@BaronGrackle can you elaborate on this post? When people just hard link to TV Tropes without actually including their opinion or the relevance, I don’t know what to make of it. (Specifically, I think simply noticing a trope isn’t criticism, and it can also come across as condescending when someone says they like something, and another person in the community replies by simply observing that it is a trope. I don’t think that’s what you meant by it though.) IMO I think moments like that, even if they’re a trope* have different value in a game when you’re a participant and not a viewer. *ugh

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I think this slow turn starts from the very very beginning even if it doesn’t seem like it. The prologue reveal of Boybrush seems like it’s one thing (I’m Guybrush as a kid in the carnival!), then you’re filled with increasing uncertainty (wait who am I? where is this? is this even the game?), then the ground comes in underneath you when you meet Guybrush (I’m guybrush’s kid playing around reliving one of his old stories). That arc is not exactly what the main game does, but it tells you immediately that it’s a game where you should brace for the unexpected, but also embrace the unexpected. Then the voodoo lady gets into it as well, including revealing her name and pointing out that maybe learning it is less fun than not knowing. Then all the meta storytelling stuff with the Chums. I think the ideas “this story is going to rattle itself apart, don’t trust it, but enjoy the ride” was reiterated enough times that I was ready to be upended by the time I reached the end of the game. I don’t think everyone was, or even if they were they resented that the game made them do that, but personally I was ready for it. In a way I wasn’t with Thimbleweed. (Thimbleweed ending discussion below) With Return, I have seen a handful of traditional endings at this point and didn’t need more of it. Curse was extremely clean, simple, romantic. Escape was bombastic and comedic, almost a send up of itself. Tales was (intending to be) epic, cinematic, full of voodoo and lore. With Return, as the game went on and I got closer and closer to the end, I found myself not knowing what I wanted to see specifically, but hoping whatever it was would be a pressure release on all the parts of the game and story that hadn’t been retread in all the sequels, and that’s almost entirely what the focus was on. I was ready for it to get meta and bizarre, to rattle itself apart and leave me wondering what I just saw, and was really happy when it happened. I don’t think, though, that I was expecting the conversation on the bench afterwards, or the little final conversation with Elaine, or the note in the scrapbook. That slowly closing epilogue was a secret earnest closer on the story that ended up exceeding and subverting my expectations. I had braced for an ending that wouldn’t be about the characters and would just be pure meta, and was so relieved when it didn’t.

Well, the score is fantastic, and you can’t be blamed for wanting even more of it!

I think we just disagree here. I already said hearing that track specifically in that context was a surprisingly big high for me in the game. Maybe an original track would have done the same thing, maybe it wouldn’t have - I don’t know the answer to that hypothetical - but what is actually in the game made me happy enough that it’s one of the things I used to kick off the details of Return thread 🤷‍♂️. Could something better exist? Sure maybe, probably, but since I already loved what’s there I don’t really care. (My thoughts on the MI2 special edition’s Woodtick music is that it’s wonderfully done in a technical way, but is missing the warmth I experienced from the original midis, so while I appreciate and respect it, I don’t love it like some other arrangements. I wouldn’t personally call it a most perfect arrangement. Again I think we just disagree on this so it probably won’t be worth hashing out much further in this thread since 1: no minds will be changed and 2: lol it’s a conversation about the subtleties of two instances of the Woodtick themes in a return to monkey island thread 😎)

Dude I know. I, uh, was very happy with how things played out in Return on this front.

This is sort of a boring sounding answer but I think the composers probably just liked it a lot and wanted it to be in the game. Even with that aside, I know it was a low point for Laserschwert but it was a huge high point for me. Woodtick has always felt like a backwater pirates paradise, and the music has always had the feeling of a sea chanty. It makes sense that you’d hear some sailor playing it when out on the sea or docked at a port. The whole vibe of the island hopping was very low key and shaggy, honestly more “cozy” than any of the other games, in a way I really liked. The Woodtick music felt right for me in those moments, more than the very epic and high adventure sailing themes from Curse would have. apologies for the small rant here. I just loved hearing that cue on the map and feel the need to defend it.

I read that a lot more positively: the thing they actually love doing together is going on adventures! The Secret is just absolutely not something they share and Elaine sees it as a self destructive fixation that Guybrush should drop. Guybrush in the early games is plagued by this quantum state of believing in himself against all the doubters, and the insane amount of insecurity that comes with it. The Secret (and his relationship with LeChuck) are framed in this game as almost regressive fixations Guybrush has — things that feel like once they enter his field of vision, they blind him from everything else he has accomplished. He finally gets away from LeChuck (for better or worse, due to his pursuit of the Secret) then finds the secret and (literally and figuratively) wakes up and looks around him and the mess he’s made, and has some clarity about what his situation is. I read finding the Secret almost as bottoming out. Elaine warned him on the walk to the monkey head that maybe he was about to bottom out, and all he can really do is make mild to wild excuses for it (while never fully copping to any of her points or the larger unspoken warning/concern). But a few minutes later it hits, and I think hits hard, and the wake-up moment isn’t far behind. But the part where Elaine and Guybrush are traipsing around the world getting embroiled in absolutely weird adventures or helping people solve their very complicated problems, that seems legitimately like things they have in common and is why they work well on screen together when they do. The sort of secretly-shared “I found some awesome map!” moment plays as that to me: the secret is long in their rear view mirror and now they’re off being their best selves, doing what they love. Yes I realize this is a cynicism-free read of the wraparound frame story! Anyway I feel like I’ve repeated myself in here too many times so I will stop until I have a better post. 😛

When you finally learn the Secret of Monkey Island

They’re all Wally branded! but yeah Cogg specially looks like a theme park land to me.

They’re posting patch notes on Steam. This is the second patch it seems (1.2 also had patch notes) https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2060130/view/3310732036320199259

Like you, I consider the amount of things they DID do with this game to be just staggeringly impressive. I see many people say they wished for a big in-universe climax to LeChuck and Guybrush, and while I can understand that, I also think we already got that in all five of the preceding games, to a bigger and bigger scale each time*. The whole final act of the last chapter of Tales is a huge showdown with LeChuck that spans across the world of the living and the afterlife, in attempt to bind his living and undead forms, etc etc. It’s huge and full of lore. I feel like Guybrush (and the game) avoiding repeating that confrontation entirely in Return is more powerful than litigating it yet again. The way that happens is messy and imperfect in my opinion, but I’m still glad that that’s how it went down. Guybrush getting enough closure for himself and leaving, making it out of the cycle while LeChuck is stuck in his loop of grinding himself down in pursuit of this thing that may or may not exist. * Monkey Kombat asterisk here Wow this is very different from anything I’d considered, but is an awesome read. Thanks for sharing it in here.

To be clear, in the text you quoted I was specifically talking about the bridge from the end of MI2 to whatever the next game was, as feeling like an unsettling record skip. (I also don’t find the ending to Return to be anticlimactic, or stinging, but that’s almost not worth pointing out since it’s just a fundamental point of disagreement, which rarely goes anywhere in a forum thread.)

I read that as the Secret was created in 1989, not that it was taking place then. More a fourth wall break and confirmation to the players that yes you are seeing the bonafide original secret. The frame story doesn’t seem to be set in the 20th century unless everyone is a larper or something, which seems unlikely, but who knows? I guess where I’ve landed is, the game exists in its own anachronistic alternate reality, basically a pastiche of a bunch of pirate legends and modern interpretations of them (theme parks, movies, etc), and within that world people DO have amazing adventures but also tell each other stories about them. The stories all have a bit of fish story to them, because they’re told by pirates to each other to puff up their legends, but that ends up almost folding back into the tapestry of the world and enriching it further, since it’s already a world built out of this patchwork quilt of legend and lore and what you imagine it’s like to be a pirate. I know that doesn’t make any literal sense, but it’s how things feel to me. Honestly that’s always kind of how the games have felt to me (that they exist in their own anachronistic pastiche reality, more than there being some big secret) and Return went really hard on it.

I still believe that, to some degree, Ron has been more consistent than it seems. For example if the original idea was that LeChuck gets worse and worse, and goes down these paths of increasingly dangerous voodoo as Guybrush chases at his coattails the whole way, and if the secret of monkey island is that it’s a gateway to hell itself that gives you more and more access to this power, that’s enough of an outline to know vaguely the tone and shape you might want the third act to take, even if you haven’t figured out what it is yet. I don’t know what it would have actually been - that vague thing above is something I made up just now to fit that hypothetical - but I don’t believe you need to actually have something plotted out and fully broken down, to know if the shape of the story feels right.

He’s said recently that his “plans” were more a few ideas and a vibe, than anything concrete. It seems like they wanted to go to the afterlife/hell (and Stan would be there), and LeChuck would become the Demon Pirate LeChuck as his final form, and beyond that they were trusting they’d figure it out as they went once they started working. Starting work turned out to take over two decades, and at this point the afterlife was in Tales and the demon pirate was in Curse. The end of this game does say the carnival is the original Secret, so I have to assume an “original vision” version of the game would have had some version of doubling down on the amusement park still being a meta layer that runs below the surface of the story. You’re right that Elaine relationship and Boybrush stuff is surely not what we would have seen in a 1993 MI3, and I don’t think we’ll ever know what that would have been, because I don’t think they figured out what that transition out of the end of MI2 would be when they wrote it. The sense I get now is, they wrote that ending and knew they didn’t know how to write themselves out of it yet, but knew it would be a fun challenge to tackle once it was time to do so. I bet whatever we got in 1993 would have had the same feeling as Return, of an unsettling and thrilling record skipping the groove before settling in again, but all the details would be different.

Amazing. I think I’m the one who told him about the giant monkey robot in Escape, sometime in the early-mid ‘00s when interviewing him. Glad that together we spoiled the final act of Monkey Island 4 for Ron!

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I think it’s wildly influenced by memes, reactionary acts of snap judgement, and has its own meta that can be pretty disconnected from the world at large. Within that context, what you say is true, but it’s a helluva context. I didn’t read it as “teehee,” and more like, any of these things individually are less bad than some of the truly bad things we’ve encountered, but you should look at the aggregate effect you’re having because it might not add up to something great. It read to me as Elaine extending Guybrush a line of trust, but also as an increasingly tenuous one. Like, she didn’t need to say he was on outrageously thin ice, and if he couldn’t read the room he would be in trouble. I saw the guybrush in the frame story as one who took that conversation to heart. It’s part of why I don’t really want a Monkey Island 7!

Though I’m glad there is a ton of conversation happening in the Monkey Island subreddit, the Reddit threads have made me slightly insane because of the common Reddit pattern: in any given subreddit if you like something (the game or tv show or whatever or, for example, your electronic device works properly) you reply in the comments about your experience, but if you don’t like something (or your thing is broken) you just go and make a new thread about it. I find that though Reddit reads as “honest” to some eyes, because of how surfaced negative reactions are, that’s really because the combination of how humans work and how Reddit works means that gripes end up on the front page of a sub in multiple dupes, and people enjoying a thing end up buried. It gets to the point that you end up with people making posts saying “am I the only person who likes the thing/am I the only person who isn’t having problems?” and moderators often have to start forcibly enacting rules to make the people who all have the same thought (or gripe, or problem) post in the same thread together instead of starting new ones. That’s not to say not liking something is somehow uncommon, but it is to say I think Reddit in particular ends up surfacing negative reactions and people in search of others who feel that way, than it is good at surfacing “I enjoyed it.” The art style of Return had this pattern, where many who had a problem with it decided they needed to make their own unique thread in the subreddit to show people why they in particular didn’t like it. The people who did like it mostly stuck to the game announcement and trailer megathreads. It created the feeling that the number of people who had a negative first reaction to the art vastly outnumbered the people who did, when in reality it was either a more balanced distribution, or they were a minority. We’ll obviously never know the actual split (and fortunately it doesn’t really matter how many people do or don’t like a thing), but it’s a reminder that Reddit isn’t actually a barometer of anything, especially just looking at how many threads of what type hit the front page of a subreddit, or generate the most comments. sorry I just wrote way more than I meant to about Reddit. Anyway I liked the ending. I don’t think the game was universally great, but it hit me personally pretty hard and has remained on my mind for months since I first played even an unfinished version. I usually don’t like “it was all a dream” or “YOU get to figure out what it means” endings either, for what it’s worth. I think there is more going on in Return than that. I am unfortunately a very by-the-seat-of-my-pants thinker who intuits a lot quickly and then am slow to catch up with the actual mechanical backing of those reactions (which can sometimes drive my coworkers crazy) AND I’m a big procrastinator, so I have been slow as hell to contribute meaningfully to this thread other than off topic stuff about Reddit, but I feel like the thematic throughlines across Return are very strong, and to me at least they felt fresh, within Monkey Island and gaming and the current pop media landscape.

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

It’s be cool if it’s newsworthy! But also, this has been Craig’s crusade for years. I read this more as, his enthusiasm has been rekindled (or … just more kindled) by Return’s reception.

These are all valid mops! The others can be safely thrown in the fire.