Jake

Though there are similarities to the EU, it’s absolutely not the same. The EU deliberately existed on a different plane from the films. The old rule was, if a new movie comes up that invalidates EU, so be it: that part of the EU doesn’t matter. That happened multiple times over the years, creating little funky contradictions. (Not to mention the movies themselves were created one after another, with characters, locations, and concepts introduced just to serve the needs of the movie, and no real thought to what else could happen with them, until after the dust had settled.) The different book series and comics and stuff also didn’t all fully hinge on each other, and weren’t incentivized to promote each other. And, a lot of the EU was fanciful “what ifs,” about strange pockets of the universe, or characters or eras we had never seen before. Their goal was often to make the universe bigger. This made the whole EU feel “opt in.” If there were parts you liked, you could enjoy that and ignore the rest. The gap in canon priority between the films and the EU also, at least for me, created a nice cushion of air where my imagination could slot in. "I wonder what happened here?" could be met just fine with my own answer. Now there are no tiers of canon, it's all one thing. And now the Star Wars universe is undeniably built with an aim for getting you to engage with the other parts of it, to create feelings of missing out when things show up cross media that you don't understand. It's the feeling of reading a superhero comic where the asterisk shows up on a line of dialog and tells you "see Fantastic Four #203": The Dark Saber showing up at the end of Mandalorian, or walk-on roles in Rogue One by characters from the animated TV shows. The whole thing is now entirely about stitching the corners together, filling in gaps in space and time in the lore. It means that any character who ever shows up, almost definitely already has a backstory locked in, a spinoff series or comic planned, where you will be told exactly what happens to them. To me that makes it all seem SMALLER. Nothing is expanding Star Wars outward anymore, it’s all looking in on itself. And there's no real room for you to imagine the rest of the universe for yourself, instead fans are asked to marvel at the web being woven for them.

👕 I beat #Mojole #173 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 4/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤💚 💛🖤🖤🖤💛 🖤💚🖤💚🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

“When’s the next episode” posts were a part of life, no harm in it. I eventually started making official threads for that sort of thing before the community could, so it wouldn’t diffuse out across the whole board.

We didn't ever really seriously talk about a Tales Season 2, but I would hope we would have called it something else. My honest guess is "Return to Monkey Island," because its the title I think everyone considered every time doing a new Monkey game ever comes up. (Except Tales, because we knew we weren't going to Monkey Island in Tales! It seems like "going back to a familiar place" would have been a goal for a second one if we'd done it, though.) Star Wars didn't used to do this! The post-Rogue One world is absolutely wild. Everything is canon, any gap is now an invitation for more media instead of negative space for your imagination to make the world seem bigger than it is. I think it's a huge fuckup in the direction they've taken the IP, and is part of why things are falling apart so badly. Star Wars was not a universe built for everything to be lore hole'd. Oh well! hey they should make a thread just for this kind of discussion My god, you're a madman. Excited to finally see Walrus LeChuck.

There was a brief window towards the end of TLJ, where the dreadnought stad destroyer is coming apart, and Finn finds himself about to face Phasma, and then Phasma gets injured but doesn’t quite die. In that moment for just a second I thought Finn was going to save Phasma’s life and pull her into a ship. I still wish that had happened. I want an alternate universe where Finn, Rose, and Phasma barely escape that ship explosion and then get knocked into deep space together, and have to spend act 1 of the next movie getting back to our heroes. After two movies, Fin could have faced his stormtrooper past head on, Rose could have had a way harder target to test her beliefs against, and you could actually do scenes where Gwendola Christie takes her helmet off and gets to act! Plus I like awkward road trip stories, and the three of them crammed into some tiny ship they barely made it onto before the destroyer exploded seems fun.

Oh my god the brief fan obsession with “Tales is Monkey Island 6 and there is a secret 5th game” during the lead up to Tales drove me absolutely insane. All we wanted to say was, the characters had some adventures between Escape and now, to give the world some time to reset and heal. 2, 3, and 4 seemed to have taken place back to back to back, and it was clearly more weight than the MI universe could really bear and everything was starting to get really creaky, so we wanted to give the universe a break. Oh well. People REALLY don’t like it when there are holes in canon, I guess. (I LOVE holes in canon, that’s where my imagination as a fan can have a home in the work, a bunch of weirdly shaped gaps and grooves to run my mind over, but I feel like I’m increasingly in the minority with that preference.) If it helps, I can finally tell you as one of the designers on the game that Tales is Monkey Island 5.

Whew 👕 I beat #Mojole #171 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤🖤💚🖤💛 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

This is a wild idea and I love it. They could have avoided the unfortunate fallout of Carrie Fisher’s death, by having her leave the story off screen in the past (a far cleaner way to pay tribute to her than the cobbled together performance they put in ep 9), and Luke could have continued to appear in the story without the time jump having any effect on his age, as he’d be a force ghost.

I’ve just long liked the observation that the voodoo lady is a third party and not just “someone who helps guybrush on his quest.” I think many players see her that way, but she’s very enigmatic especially in 1 and 2, and goes as far as doing business with “both sides” of the Guybrush/LeChuck conflict in 2 (and the love bomb for Wally as you said. Related: should Wally be canceled for ordering a love bomb?)

As much as I’d love to go back to Scabb, I’m also kind of glad that it’s never been touched again. It’s my favorite one. Woodtick is so perfectly done with its art, cast of characters, and incredible music, Scabb’s locations are all lonely and a touch creepy, the map music is unique in its lonely backwater mood, and though the island seems small, it’s revealed to be full of little secret spots the more you play. I like to imagine that place is continuing on exactly how it is, maybe a little shabbier and a little more sunk into the swamp but otherwise unchanged by time. Scabb Island Romantic signing off.

I also specifically remembered him live-posting about finding the moment when the voodoo lady talked through a pile of dead crabs, but can’t find a tweet like that, only the post-game summary. So who knows.

I also remember him posting more at least about Tales episode 5, but it looks like it was only these two: Tim of Legend confirmed actual legend with this Monkey 2 take, though

I like Star Wars.

Stan popping out of that coffin in Curse was such a perfect moment. I had no idea what was going to be inside, and then when it was Stan, I laughed out loud and thought “of course! who else could it be?”

👕 I beat #Mojole #169 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 3/6 💛🖤🖤🖤🖤 🖤💚🖤💛🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

Wow rude 👕 I beat #Mojole #168 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 5/6 🖤🖤🖤💛🖤 💛💛🖤🖤🖤 💛💛🖤💚🖤 🖤🖤💛🖤🖤 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

This is almost definitely true! (And, to be fair and clear, I’m sure that if a Tales season two was made it would have used or referenced that epilogue moment in some way. But I doubt it would have been a direct continuation from that scene.)

Console durability is also something with plenty of points of failure, across time. For example: your NES games might still work if you still had them, but any with battery backup are likely long dead and the saves erased, or worse the battery corroded and damaged the cartridge. Any physical media and the hardware to play it on requires vigilance and, past an inevitable point, upkeep. I hope with time, hardware virtualization and software emulation gets better and better to the point that some of this is moot. DREAMM in particular has given me a lot of hope. It really is the ideal: it emulates the original hardware and operating system so the games original data can run in a way it perceived as “natively,” and DREAMM can run a loose directory of game data, a disk image, or the original physical media if you have it along with the hardware to read it. I hope solutions like that become more and more common over time.

Not that my take matters on someone else’s read of the text of the game - your own read is your own read, which is part of the fun and the point of fiction imo - but the end of Tales was not lining up any specific plan. It was, in my eyes at least, far closer to “the adventure continues,” where the basic cycle of the status quo was allowed to roll on and on, even as the arcs of the characters reached something close to a resolution. I find it a little too much of a cliffhanger at this point, because of how much is hung on the Voodoo Lady in particular, but at the time didn’t see it as much more than Chuckie’s eyes flashing, or LeChuck being buried beneath the ice of the monkey coaster. (To clarify a tiny bit: the voodoo lady being a third party with separate ends, who is willing to push guybrush and lechuck around for whatever those ends are, is something I was very proud of surfacing in Tales, and liked how well it ties into the sudden turn to LeChuck‘s fortress at the end of 2. I think the cliffhanger is a little too specific, and that probably came from us being so inside the world of our own game at the time we were ending it. I don’t mind it, and I love the idea of that voodoo lady storyline, but I think it could have been rolled a tiny bit farther back into ambiguity than it is!)

Wouldn’t be the SCUMM Bar without closeups.

[spoiler]your text[/spoiler] Confused. The word was

My god this was a weird round for me for some reason 👕 I beat #Mojole #167 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6/6 🖤💚🖤💛🖤 💛💚💚🖤🖤 🖤💚💚🖤💚 🖤💚💚🖤💚 💚💚💚🖤💚 💚💚💚💚💚 https://funzone.mixnmojo.com/Mojole/

I went to PAX! I got to meet David Fox!* It was great. * (And Ron and Dave and Dom, but I have met them all before.)

I think if you divorce them, the game would need to address it in some way, then suddenly a portion of the game text has to be about the creators feelings about the characters relationship, and maybe that is more annoying than just not spending time litigating it. At some point it’s easier to say, fine the status quo can just exist and we’ll move on.

Guybrush also exists in that void!