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Jake

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Everything posted by Jake

  1. Jake
    Yeah it is definitely cut content! But as a space it looked compelling. Nowhere near as substantial as Melee or Brr Muda, but more substantial than Scurvy. I would love to know what they’d planned for it and how it was supposed to fit. (And if it was always underwater and the timer played a role there, or if it was only “sunk” when turning it into an Easter egg.)
  2. Jake
    There’s plenty about the game I don’t like or wish would have been done in (to my eyes) a better way, but pulling those things apart is infinitely less interesting to me than talking about what worked, what impact it had on me, and why. That’s an easier thing for me to say in this case because the large majority of the game worked for me, so I’m here with that attitude able to talk about most of the game, and I’m fine discarding the minority for the purposes of digging into the good bits on this forum. I think too much of the critical discourse on the internet is dedicated to talking about why something failed, why something is bad, why something was a disaster, and I almost never find it interesting, because the answers are often the same (unless the story of why something failed is truly spectacular). But hearing about why something DID work, or (more specifically) what effect a work had when it passed through the brain and is filtered through the life experiences of any human being outside myself, is almost always interesting. I have sympathy for when something you’re excited for doesn’t do it for you, because that feeling absolutely sucks. And sometimes breaking down why it didn’t work is useful, and commiserating is also often useful as a way to move on from being let down by something you were hoping to like. But telling people who did like it that they’re wrong, and here’s why, is never going to do anything helpful for anyone, especially in an online context. (Maybe if we were good friends and had this conversation over lunch, maybe!)
  3. Jake
    Keeping the title spoiler free, but this is definitely a spoiler thread. Has anyone found and visited the other island in the game? Not the tiny one hidden in the crooks of the map that you need to find to complete the game, but the whole secret island sunken beneath the sea? If you get the trivia card about Cogg Island, and see an answer that looks like map coordinates, pick the coordinates and then sail there and dive into the ocean! I haven’t done this yet but watched a YouTube video about it and, immediately switched it off because it looked substantial I want to explore it for myself, but there’s a whole other place hidden inside the game, attached to the trivia card sub-game.
  4. Jake
    I believe the amusement park fantasy is the original, and that is the meaning of the plaque. The tshirt is your reward for finding the secret, and is a fun callback to the three trials. I don’t think the tshirt would hit as hard without the passage of time, the pent up desire, but the amusement park fantasy thread has always been there.
  5. Jake
    WARNING: THIS THREAD AND ARTICLE ARE AS SPOILERY AS IT GETS! It turns out that the very end of Return gets pretty ragged and frayed; the different things you do in the final few scenes can tip the games conclusion and epilogue in many directions. Mojo has compiled all the ones they’ve found so far and it’s already a whopping ten variations. That article is a great writeup of what’s currently known about the different endings and epilogues including full video capture of all of them and how to get them. (Pour one out for the Mojo staffers who watched the entire credit sequence dozens of times to tease all these endings out and then verify how they are reached!)
  6. Jake
    as @Joe monsters said, it actually starts off very in line with Monkey 2: and is only after the kids stop “playing” the end of Monkey 2 and start thinking about what to do next, that it changed to the less extravagant park.
  7. Jake
    Disc and GOG versions only, for inexplicable reasons.
  8. Jake
    I don’t think so. Madison’s gang is, if memory serves, referred to as “dark magic pirates” and I think the graffiti is some sort of spell or threat? But I was never clear on it. Have they taken over Melee by force? Some sort of charm? It’s a point where the fact that I last played through six months ago is hurting my ability to remember details since this was already fuzzy.
  9. Jake
    They’re related to Madison’s gang but I didn’t entirely understand it.
  10. Jake
    It’s undocumented but right stick also works for hotspot switching and lets you do it directionally. Just great all around.
  11. Jake
    Go for it!
  12. Jake
    👕 I beat #Mojole #183 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 💛🖤🖤💛💛 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/
  13. Jake
    Ooh! I think I saw others in a Steam post but can’t find them now. I hope they have the time to both list them all out somewhere on a wiki or GitHub, AND time to do a full keybind screen at some point. I’d really like to put “open inventory” on middle click in a future playthrough.
  14. Jake
    I’m tempted to do a music-only stream or something like it just to be able to hear it in isolation.
  15. Jake
    Your English is great. If you hadn’t said anything nobody would have noticed
  16. Jake
    I hadn't even realized there wasn't a battle against LeChuck until people online started pointing it out! Now I kind of wonder what one would be like, but I also think its pretty great that they didn't do it. LeChuck is stuck on the wheel, now along with Madison and her crew, but Guybrush managed to get out (it seems, at least?!). I know the folks who like Tales had wondered if any of its plot elements would come up in Return, especially the LeChuck/Guybrush/Voodoo Lady stuff that appeared in the very late parts of Tales' story. I didn't expect them to reference any of it, and they didn't, BUT when I think back on those parts of Tales, I remember Elaine was consistently pushing Guybrush to not keep falling into the same patterns (which LeChuck was insisting the Voodoo Lady was forcing them into through deceit). In Return, Guybrush actually escapes the pattern, with some nudging from Elaine, but LeChuck definitely does not! Guybrush eventually pops out of it to a theme park where everything is stuck on loop, but he's not part of it anymore, and can go home. I know that is probably not the primary read of that ending scene, but that whole notion of Guybrush and LeChuck on an endless wheel from Tales re-entered my brain this week and I was glad to see that Return has some resonance and resolution to that thematic arc, even if the "lore" parts about the voodoo lady are left behind.
  17. Jake
    I think Murray’s theme from tales gets a little appearance in a cutscene.
  18. Jake
    I don’t know how much there is. I heard it described as playing a DVD with the deleted scene special features stitched back in. In my experience that is good for satisfying intellectual curiosity and sometimes it works really well, but often you say “ah yeah I see why that was cut, in context.” Seemed like a good “second playthrough” feature to me.
  19. Jake
    Writer’s Cut!
  20. Jake
    I should talk about this in a later-game thread. non-plot spoiler, but I will put this in spoiler tags anyway, alludes to thoughts on greater themes of the game and series maybe best saved for when youve played it all:
  21. Jake
    This is close to my arc with it. I got to the end and literally sat back from my computer in my chair and said "huh." And then was quiet for a little while. Then paced around my house for ten minutes thinking . Then went and excitedly told my wife all my thoughts on it because I had no one else to tell because nobody knew the game existed yet (she said "cool" or something, and I can't blame her because it WAS COOL).
  22. Jake
    Unrelated to anything, the structure of Return has made me think back to 2 and how it also told its story through a frame flashback, and opens on even more storytelling (Bart and Fink). Monkey Island 2 also has moments of the events of the past game being seen through this murky lens (“the Voodoo Lady said SHE did in LeChuck!”). Return takes that and runs with it. Not just the frame story but the lure guild where you take your story and keep pushing it until the truth gets farther and farther from you in the fog. Storytelling, subjective truth and reality, unreliable narrators, and just letting things run on for too long out of blind excitement come up a lot in the series! Not sure what that means but 🤷‍♂️ Anyway we are now crazy deep in frames! This isn’t quite right but almost, if you tilt your head and squint, we have Guybrush in a park telling his kid, who is reenacting with his friend at the fair, the story of Guybrush hanging from a rope in a hole, telling Elaine about the time he told two pirates on a beach about the events of Monkey Island 1.
  23. Jake
    Wally's doormat is a map of the inside of his store, with a little "you are here" dot on the doormat.
  24. Jake
    I like this read a lot, though I think it gets complicated (in an exciting way!) by Elaine revealing at the end that she's got a map to some lost island and they're about to go there. I read that moment as "real" and not in the imagination of the park. But it's all very fuzzy and misaligned... and I really like it that way. I like the stuff you said about Guybrush seeing everyone else crash themselves against the rocks of the Secret too. In general I like that the game is not "about" just one thing. It's not some beautiful multilayered metaphor or anything, it's kind of raggedy and has about six endings on top of each other, but for me that worked really well. From the beginning of that walk and talk with Elaine, through finding the note in the back of the scrapbook, I feel like Return tried its best to close the book on a bunch of different layers and throughlines of the story, from the most literal in-universe ones up to explicitly meta conversations about the game series itself. The different moments didn't all hit for me equally, but by the end I don't think there was any more I wanted from it than what I got. ESPECIALLY if you take into account that Curse is still valid, Tales is still valid, hell even Escape is still valid if you want. I said in some previous pre-spoiler threads that one of my favorite things about Monkey Island has always been the sense of the world getting dogeared and frayed and kind of crackling with dangerous energy when you get too close to the edge of it, and Return was... all about that. I think about the final shot of Guybrush on the bench often. I really like the ending. I can really feel myself starting to ramble so I will stop and eventually collect my thoughts better! There's too much
  25. Jake
    This game has approximately one infinity little details that are good. I'm going to list a few of the ones I liked here. These are probably bigger things than the main "Details of Monkey Island" thread, because I'm not feeling the need to drill so deep yet, but it's in that spirit: Stuff that didn't need to be there but made me happy or excited me. Not sure how to spoiler tag this so I'll just go whole hog, but if that isn't necessary we can just leave them open?? A thing in the prologue: A cool thing in part 1: A couple good details in part 4: There are many more but there are a few that came to mind when thinking back on my playthrough.
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