KestrelPi

I agree with this... the game leaves enough wiggle room for some interpretation but it's pretty clear we're seeing the same scene from MI2's end play out but with some of the layers of imagination peeled back. I think alternate reads of that are ... POSSIBLE, but they're really pulling against what the game is pretty directly showing us. At the end of MI2 we're seeing them as adults, then as kids, then in the carnival and it seems that then ReMI strips back the carnival some, and so on, it's a progression. The area that is most open to interpretation I think is what role the carnival plays in it all. Taken at face value, where they end up seems less like a carnival with rides (the rides we can see vanish from a background) and more like ... well, at best a big park, really. Maybe a fair. It's certainly not something that feels big enough to have a network of underground tunnels supporting it, anyway. So when we see the underground tunnels with all the theme park supplies and spare tracks and things, on what level is it operating? And when the kids are imagining the big whoop sign and the rides, whose story are we seeing? It could be that they're imagining something like the Carnival of the Damned that CMI posits as the end of MI2 and start/end of CMI. I think that makes sense as an explanation, but then what exactly is the carnival we see at the end of ReMI? Is that reality? If so, it seems like a different one from the park-reality where he's telling the stories. Or at least a different aspect. One way you could tie it all together is something along these lines: In the real world (or some slightly more piratey approximation of it) Guybrush visits Stan's carnival as a kid, and goes back ever year, imagining himself having all kinds of adventures there. He doesn't quite grow out of it, but he does meet Elaine along the way, who used to appreciate it in the same way he did but has sort of moved on. She tolerates his fascination with the place but nowadays doesn't go out of her way to nurture it. In the park, there is a sort of treasure hunt, every year, but usually Guybrush either comes away empty handed or doesn't take away the biggest prize. Elaine and Guybrush perhaps go on various real-world treasure hunting adventures, but they never really do anything on the same big, grand scale of Guybrush's imagined adventures in Stan's park. They start a family, and this becomes a new priority in Guybrush's life. He no longer loses himself in the fantasy of the park every year, but he does keep it alive through the stories that he tells his son, which are a mixture of his real adventures with Elaine, and embellishments that he tells, inspired by the times at Stan's park. His son loves all the stories, and he often play acts them with his friends. Where ReMI starts is during one such thing, and we get to see Guybrush telling his son another heavily embellished tale of his old adventures. At the end of the story, for reasons, Guybrush changes tack and reminisces about his very last visit to Stan's park, the one where he stays very late, determined to finally find the secret for himself. This, he does, or doesn't do depending on the player's choice. At the end of the story Elaine tells Guybrush about a new little adventure he has planned, but before we cut to credits we get to see Guybrush reminisce one more time about his younger days when anything seemed possible, and feel content that he's passing some of that spirit onto his son with his stories.

Correct.

I keep thinking about the rug pull at the end and how difficult it must have been to write effectively. Because the game sets you up for it, all the way through, and that becomes more obvious the more you think about it. The constant allusions to being disappointed when something ends, or when a secret is revealed, everyone warning you that the secret might not be worth all the effort, when you really look at it the game is really, really saying all the way through. So it would be really easy to have the end not feel surprising, or not feel like the rug pull that it is. It must have been really quite hard to balance the desire to make the themes of the game clear with still wanting the ending to feel like a surprise. I know at least that the last thing that I expected when going through that door was to see that back alley again (great choice, by the way. Arriving there was always a big moment of wonder in MI2, and actually not to have to confront LeChuck, and to have it end the way it did. When Guybrush says 'not yet' I feel very in-sync with Guybrush in that moment. Despite everything I still wanted the big denouement even though I knew, and had been reminded so many times that it won't live up to what's in my head. And then even in the options the game presents you with. You can decide to reject what you see and go back, you can decide to take the key but not open the box, you can decide to not open the key or box, but ... much like Guybrush, I'm weak. As soon as I saw the key there I was never not going to open the box. And so it's very fitting that when I do, it's just a stupid t-shirt. I think the next time I finish it I'm going to take the key and leave. To me that's the ending that is where I ended up closest to emotionally after I had processed everything about the ending.

May Monkey Island games never become so commonplace that a fan would think "ehhhh I'll give this one a miss"

Definitely outside the scope of this project but I always thought it would be interesting to have a living adventure game where occasionally you could tell new stories with the same locations and characters via content patches, a bit like how things like MMOs keep the game alive with patches between big expansion releases.

I feel more like Guybrush than Boybrush, honestly, and can just as well imagine a lot of EMI as Boybrush's weird riff on some of the stories he'd been told by Guybrush. But yeah, if I was to take a step even further back... I feel like it's kind of like how dreams you have will incorporate elements of things that happened during the day, things that you've been thinking about, stuff you were doing before you went to sleep, how you're feeling, and all that - and then sort of remix them all into something fairly unique. I sort of could see Monkey Island (the games) as a semi-dreamlike representation of the collective imaginations of anyone who, as Ron put it, wanted to jump off the ride and explore the world, and Guybrush Threepwood as a sort of focal point that gives the world and story some coherence. In many ways it's like something I suggested a couple of months back in the main forum: "What if guybrush is the spirit of the collective imagination of all children fantasizing about playing pirates." but after playing I'd rephrase it to "What if the MI universe is a representation of the collective imagination of all people playing pirates, and Guybrush is just the perspective from which we experience it"

There's different levels all this could be playing on though of course so at any one time we don't know if we're looking at an interpretation of * Boybrush playing with friends based on a story told to him before by Guybrush * Boybrush imagining something he is being told by Guybrush right now *Guybrush wandering around a theme park he's been to lots of times and imagining his adventures in it * Guybrush remembering something that really happened, without Boybrush being there * Guybrush making up or embellishing a story to tell his son Or any other variation of these. I guess my point is that I think that any single interpretation of what the game presents us with quickly falls over. So I've started to think about Monkey Island (the world as seen by the player) as a sort of fusion of various perspectives, its own entity which is informed by them but isn't the same thing as any of them.

To me squaring all this can be a lot simpler if we assume the version of the story we're seeing through our player-eyes is not always being told with one voice. Like, when the two of them are instantly falling in love and slinging terrible pet names at each other I can easily imagine that as Boybrush playing. When there's some (pretty mild) sexual implications to one line I think it's easy to imagine that as something in an older-guybrush's head. Something I like about the introduction in this game of the idea that we might be seeing things from more than one perspective is that it resolves a lot of inconsistencies that arise if you think of it as either just a literal telling of something that happened or as an imagining of a kid in a theme park.

I'd agree with the above, sort of but I also think that there's more to this discussion of difficulty. What actually is difficulty when we talk about adventure puzzles? I think it's hard to balance for difficulty when your basic interactions are that you have an inventory of items and you can use them on stuff. Crafting scenarios where that use isn't obvious is hard, and I think adventure games have increased the difficulty traditionally in a few ways that I don't really think are very fun: 1) By unlocking LOTS of puzzles and items at once - You increase the possibility space by a lot so the player is less likely to come up with the intended solution just because they're not focused on the problem and there are a lot of potential items they can be using in different places. I think TWP does this a LOT towards the middle, and I'm not sure it's that fun. When I went to the hint guide it was very often less a case of me unveiling some sort of clever logic and more just that I'd forgotten about that inventory item between the 5 characters and inventories and 20 different goals I'm switching between. TWP got easier in the final act because there was a lot less it was possible to do, but I'd argue the puzzles were still quite satisfying. You want to say 'oh, I should've thought of that!' rather than 'Oh. I forgot I had that,' right? 2) By employing the so-called moon-logic. Adventure games do this less now, and I think the extent to which they ever did it is exaggerated (you always remember the 1 puzzle that broke you, not the 50 puzzles which were perfectly fine), but I'm sure this has something to do with the reputation of older adventures as 'hard' games. I'm glad developers are more conscious of trying to avoid this now. 3) By adding more steps to obfuscate the path. If you need to cut the rope to get the thing and you have a knife, it's pretty easy to know what to do. But if you have to craft a knife out of several other things then that's probably going to be more of a challenge. This is viable, but it's a little hard to keep interesting over the course of a whole game, because it's hard to do these sorts of puzzle chains while also keeping the plot moving. They inherently feel like 'padding', and so should only be used sparingly. But In my opinion all the best adventure game puzzles, the ones that are memorable for the right reasons and feel difficult in a way that makes you feel clever, are good because they feel unique - they feel like a bit of a set piece, working like not quite like any other puzzles in the game. In Return for example I really enjoyed the successive museum heists, with the final puzzle twisting it so that you needed to set off the alarm to succeed. There's loads of good set-piece puzzles in MI1, the insult sword fighting, the stan-negotiating, the grog-mugs, the map-directions, the head of the navigator, but I think it's incredibly difficult to consistently design these kinds of one-offs, and so, wanting not to fall into the various pitfalls of 1) , 2) and 3) I'm not surprised that adventure games have got easier, a little. But yes, we have to remember the other thing too which is that we've all had a lot of practice.

The other thing that points to it is the ending of course where Guybrush tells Boybrush, "But you and Chuckie play the ending of Monkey Island 2 very silly" after Boybrush protests, which I think has to be an allusion to the ending we see in the game. To me, the implication is that we actually don't KNOW how MI2 ends from Guybrush's perspective. It could end that LeChuck puts a curse on him and he ends up in some sort of hell carnival, or it could be something else. Which is perfect to me because it means we can take the start of CMI at face value and say that yes, he did indeed escape some sort of carnival of the damned, and similarly the ending. Or, we could sort of read it as... the carnival stuff starts to appear whenever the story is getting a bit frayed around the edges. Like the carnival is closer to reality than Guybrush's stories or Boybrush's imagination, and so whenever we see the carnival it's like when you hear something from reality in a dream and it starts to get incorporated into the dream, then eventually you wake up. Or as you're falling asleep you start to incorporate whatever happened the day before into the dream.

I mean, they can do what they like with it regardless of what it said on some marketing material in 2022. It wouldn't surprise me if that miswording was just a goof from Devolver's end. In Lucasfilm's defense though, without Craig Derrick on the case I think this'd be much harder to get off the ground. Seems like it's revewed decently and had solid sales though, and with a pretty tight development time I think they might be happy enough with how it performed to give it another shot down the road.

He says "let's pretend I have powers where I can make lightning come out of my eyes," when he's walking along behind the others. Which is what happens in MI2: Also he's wearing the same DETH shirt as Chuckie in MI2. It's all interpretation of course, but I feel like there's a pretty strong implication that what we're seeing at the start of ReMI is the exact same moment as the end of MI2, but with some of the layers peeled back... a process which finishes when they give up on the 'parents' and walk back to the previous area and the buildings etc. have changed. Also, Ron said it was important for him to pick up the story exactly where MI2 left off, which I guess it wouldn't actually be doing if this was actually just a re-enactment of that moment happening way later.

I get that we're used to just making the soundtracks ourselves as Monkey Island fans because it's been a poor track record on official soundtracks... but given that we don't know what the soundtrack plans are at the moment, I hope we get something official. I was slightly lamenting that most of the best music moments in the game are old themes. And they're all extremely good, but given the strength of MI2 and EMI's to an extent I was hoping for more original themes that were memorable. I still think I wish we'd heard some more, but someone pointed out that the quarantine ship music is quite catchy - is that from anything? I don't immediately recognise it. Any other original standouts?

That's not quite how I resolve it. I'm happy with the idea that the end of MI2 is basically the start of Return but deeper in the kids' imagination (if it wasn't then its weird that the adults look the same, no? And that the lightning eyes thing happens in the same place, and that Boybrush would mention criminals and so forth, like the line we see said at the end of MI2.) But the fact is we're actually never told what Guybrush's intended/'real' end to that story is supposed to be. So even with all that being the same, it's still perfectly possible that at that point in the story LeChuck takes Guybrush to a cursed carnival, so it doesn't affect CMI's interpretation of events at all.

I can't help but think of it in the context of another game whose story I've enjoyed and takes a very different road, Final Fantasy XIV, which recently wrapped up the story arc that began when it was first released. So we're taking about a decade-long arc rather than 3 decades long, but still more than long enough to generate high anticipation. In that game (don't worry, no spoilers) the most recent expansion wraps up threads that started long ago, and while it deliberately and consciously leaves some threads open still, everything important about the conflict set up years ago is answered and resolved. Surprises come thick and fast, and it's a grand conclusion worthy of the decade spent leading up to it. It was very, very satisfying. And I wonder if Monkey Island could ever have done anything similarly satisfying. I think... probably not, if the idea was to stick close to Ron's vision of what the series is capital A About. I think the ambiguity is baked into Monkey Island. If you remove the ambiguity you sort of remove the Monkey Islandness of it at the same time. You could, I suppose, completely resolve all open mysteries, before opening up new ones, but... I don't know. I just don't see this thing ever being built for the grand conclusion. Whatever it was, I don't feel like it could have ever done the job. To be a Monkey Island fan to me, thinking all the way back to my 10 year old self staring at the screen at the end of Monkey Island 2 and wondering what I just saw... has been to grow comfortable in its eerie, dusky mood. Maybe there's an argument that 30 years is long enough for anything to remain mysterious and that by this point more closure was called for, but I feel like the game does provide a sort of closure. Just not the kind that is 'here are the answers to all questions.'

This sort of thing is exactly what I mean when I say ReMI gives us so much to work with. It's not just washing its hands of responsibility and saying 'whatever, you decide. Have fun!' If you want to make up your own headcanon of what it is going on, the game certainly hands you enough slack that you can tie whatever threads together you choose, and I think that's neat that it does that, but there's so much here that also feels like it's just on the edge of being explored, and in that can live all sorts of things like the kind of wonderful read that I quoted above, which makes sense of a bunch of things that I also found unusual. For all the game gives us in the way of possible explanations for what's going on I still feel like there are potential deeper reads of all this lurking underneath the surface, more reasons to keep on digging and wondering and uncovering because I think that it's more than just 'anything goes.' I was talking to a friend yesterday who is a fan of the series but has been completely disconnected from this discussion and the wider community around MI. He enjoyed the start and the end in much the same way I did, which pleased me (there's always a bit of a worry that by being really IN it you lose the big picture a bit), But also he mentioned something interesting which is that he felt like there were a lot of hints in the game that either something more is going on between LeChuck and Elaine than the game wants to let on, or alternatively hints that Guybrush and LeChuck are, in a sense, the same person: the fact that LeChuck has that wedding veil, the way that you end up checking off most of the stuff on his list, the fact that your goals are so closely aligned in this game and both characters are criticised for obsessing over it. I hadn't thought of it much before, but there was that thing Ron said once which was 'In a way LeChuck are brothers, but in another way they aren't brothers' or something right? I think we'd always taken that to mean that perhaps they're step brothers, because some things in MI2 hint at that. But what if it actually means - yeah, they're related, in that they are the same person. I don't know how much I trust that read, but I think it's super interesting that you CAN get that from this game. The other thing that he picked up on which some people here did to is how much of the themes of this game are about storytelling, and what makes it work, with the stuff with the Chums being the most direct example of that. There's a whole stories-within-stories thing going on here, and also a discussion of what's important when telling a story which feels very not-accidental.

He did share it in a blog post a few months back. It was: "Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there." Thats it. There wasn't a big plan beyond that. I know he's said stuff elsewhere that appears to contradict that. But if he doesn't think whatever plans he had were big or interesting enough to mention (and he clearly doesn't)... then why do you? (also I still just disagree that this game doesn't add much more coal to the fire.)

I respect your opinion but want to point out a couple of things: Ron has been very clear he didn't have to compromise his 'vision' since that never existed - he didn't have very clear ideas about what the plot of MI3 would be. He did know what the secret was and says that this game gives the player it as originally envisioned, so take that as you will. But there is no such thing as 'If Ron had only got to do what he really wanted I'd have my answers' Also... I have to say I think "The game doesn't really give us anything new to chew on" is a pretty incredible statement. It doesn't?! Finally, I think the most revealing thing about why I liked what this game did and you didn't is that you say "continue to speculate and theorize ad nauseam, just as we have for the 30 years prior to this release." Oh. Ad nauseam? Was it so bad for you? I think what the game argues for was that 30 years speculation wasn't so bad. It was fun. I made friends from it. I developed many creative skills while thinking about it. Again, not trying to negate your opinion, more just trying to explain why I have a different one

Although we are used to ripping out the soundtrack files in order to get at Monkey Island music because historically they have a SUPER bad record at releasing soundtracks for them, I actually think it could happen in this case, especially if we ask for it. I'd really like for it to happen at least

I liked that they used Elaine to explore the idea of Guybrush's selfishness in going for his goals. I wish they'd leant into that a little bit MORE but I think it made sense for her to be the character that needled him a little for that, given that she has been on the receiving end of it a couple of times.

I admit it feels a bit like cheating, but earlier it did occur to me that the very fact we're having this conversation at all sort of proves to me that the game works on the level I think it works. If it didn't, there'd be nothing to talk about. I know I know 'I win automatically, so there' isn't all that compelling, but nevertheless I'm thrilled to an extent that this is the kind of conversation we can have at the end of this game.

...to appreciate the ending in the same way that some of us have. 😉 Seriously though, it's fine, it's not going to work for everyone. I'm just trying to convey why I think the ending was more than just 'idk you decide', for me at least, and even though it was ambiguous and invited the player to decide, it wasn't weightless, there was purpose behind it.

I guess if I thought ALL this game was doing was saying 'eh, I don't know. Everything's true. Or nothing is. Who cares? you decide' then I might feel the same way about it. But I don't think that IS what it's doing. It's presenting you with a range of possibilities and then arguing for the value in wondering about them rather than finding The Answer. And at the same time it's doing this with the perspective of someone (Guybrush) who has been at this for a long time now, trying to impart a lesson to someone who is just getting started (Boybrush), and maybe learning a little something about himself in the way. When many of us started all this, in the early 90s, we were all more like Boybrush, but I think that by the end of ReMI we've all become a little more like Guybrush. That's why I think it comes across as so warm and affecting, rather than just kind of callous and dismissive of its own material.

Following on from that thing we were talking about how once you start you can't stop noticing ways how the game alludes to its larger themes. Over in the other thread I just got done talking about how I see monkey island now as this kind of amalgamation of the different lenses through which the story is being told, and that accounts for a lot of the weirdness and inconsistency we see. At which point I thought... maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems a really odd detail to include in the scrapbook that you can make this weird monster out of lots of different parts in EMI. It's such a tiny bit of that game. But is this another wink to the player, another metaphor for what the Monkey Island storytelling universe is? "It didn't help with anything... but I had fun doing it." I'm probably overthinking it. But that's okay.

I think the way to resolve this, for me at least, is to keep in mind that we're seeing the story from multiple perspectives. For example, when you select at the end that the chest was full of rubies and gold, and then the post credits scene is Boybrush playing in piles of treasure, I think the most obvious read of that is that we're seeing Boybrush's imagination of how rich they are. But the whole game probably isn't seen through the point of view of Boybrush. It's an amalgamation of the different viewpoints. Some bits are Boybrush-lens, like the end of MI2 and start of Return. Some other bits are seen through the lens of Guybrush telling a story. Some other bits might be through the lens of Boybrush imagining things Guybrush is saying to him right now (maybe that's why Lila looks an awful lot like Dee). And some other bits might be told through the lens of Guybrush visiting a theme park and letting his imagination run wild. And some other parts might be more of a literal telling of something that really happened. I think the Monkey Island games are what you get when you stir all these different lenses into a soup. Okay, this metaphor is getting weird... direct all these lenses through a prism, maybe? I don't know. Sure. Let's go with that: The Monkey Island universe as experienced by the player is a prismatic glimpse of stories told from several possible points of view, and thus inconsistencies and contradictions are not only to be expected, but are part of the fun.