KestrelPi

Yeah ... just. I disagree on almost every point. Sorry to be glib about it, but at this point I feel like that's really all there is left. I feel like if I were to answer all this it would just be me saying 'nuh uh' and you saying 'yuh huh' and that's not interesting for anyone concerned.

Firstly, I just don't agree with the assessment. I think there is depth there. It's not the deepest thing I've ever seen, but I absolutely do believe that it does everything it needs to do to make the 'mindscrew' work. And I also don't think it's never been that sort of thing. Fans have FOREVER talked about Monkey Island feeling like it has layers, how there's something about it that hints at stuff bubbling under the surface. I've had so many conversations about that. ReMI is perhaps the first game to directly look at that aspect of Monkey Island and try to make comment about it, but it has absolutely always been there. But to answer the above question, the way that it expands the world to me, is that before I felt like I would have to shy away from the bits I didn't really like as much. Like, for example, I think the monkey robot/statue showdown in EMI is much sillier than I like my Monkey Island to get. And the whole HT Marley thing. And certain parts of Tales, too, which worked less well for me, and even CMI, which I like a lot, I never liked its avoidance/dismissal of MI2's ending, but even that works fine now in the context of what Return does. Which is that it gives us permission to think of these as stories. Or even as myths, that change depending on who's telling them, and who's listening. And I don't think that diminishes them at all. People still care about ancient greek myths thousands of years later, despite the fact that they're really a disparate collection of stories with a lot of internal inconsistencies and variations. Myths are some of the greatest stories we have. And, freed from the stricture of 'this thing really happened. This thing didn't happen. These things contradict each other directly but we're just going to pretend they don't by not talking about it', I can just think things like: 'Giant Robot ending? Yeah, that's definitely something I can imagine Boybrush and Chuckie coming up with. Maybe that's what's going on there.' When I say it makes the world bigger, I mean it allows me to welcome back in parts of the story that for years I've rather just pretend don't exist, but just decide to view them from a different lens. "But if everything is permitted and there's no right or wrong, who cares, why does any of this matter?" No, I'm not saying that there aren't ways that I like Monkey Island to be which are closer to what I enjoy. But I don't think Monkey Island's world has to be either 'tightly regulated' or 'anything goes!'... I think there's a sensible middle ground somewhere where the more outlandish tellings can happily live in Boybrush/Chuckie Apocrypha or Guybrush's fantastical embellishments, or Stans weird theming decisions, without the world losing its distinctive feel. And all the stuff I do like, well, I can mull over where that all fits in for 30 more years, with any luck. Maybe that's a burden. But I don't feel that way.

I appreciate this, but the real power move would have been to have that secret T-shirt printed and quickly have Dom wear it for this photo, and keep it hidden until today.

I think it's fair to consider it a burden but I do think it argues for itself being a gift. I think it is saying 'this ambiguity is a great place to live in, so come in. Have 30 more years of things to ponder over. You're welcome.' And when it says that to me I respond 'great! I'll make myself at home' ... but I think I see how someone might respond... 'but I can't relax here.'

Right? I love the Monkey Island series dearly, I've talked a lot of times about how formative it was to me and how much it taught me as a kid about the possibilities of storytelling within media. But I'm not sure that those games ever felt like they had something to say outside of themselves to me. That's fine, not all art needs to have a lesson or even a message. I've never had a problem with MI just being ... what it has been. But the thing I love so much about ReMI is that it makes me think not just about my relationship with MI, but my relationship with all fiction, with ideas of canon, with concepts of mystery and ambiguity, with hype, with nostalgia, with all sorts of things, and I feel like I've learned a little, just a little about myself in the playing of it, and in that way I think it elevates not only itself but all the previous games in the series too.

etc. I do get where you are coming from with that stuff, and I don't disagree with all of it, I just think that parts that bother you bother me a bit less. One reason that I think I give ReMI a bit of a pass on its writing is (and I've just talked about this in a different thread) that I think what it lacks in some worldbuilding detail and some of the character work, and what it lacks in razor-sharp wit, I think it more than makes up for in its approach to its themes and ideas. The more I look at it, the more well-integrated it feels as a work, the more I feel like much of the writing effort was spent on making sure that it really hit the themes that it wanted to hit, and made them operate on a lot of different levels. I understand that the themes didn't really work for you, but they worked REALLY well for me, both in how they address MI2 and how they expand the world as a whole. More than any MI game before, I feel like this is a game that wants to be about something, and I can definitely seen an argument that some of the finer details get lost in its quest to be about something. But to me, at least, it succeeds at what it set out to do so well that I don't really mind if I think it's slightly less witty, or has slightly less memorable characters, or slightly less fleshed out locales. I think this is actually a really well written game, but perhaps not in the exact ways I expected it to be well written.

Oh dang and that actually meshes very well with the idea that these actually maybe aren't just the adventure of guybrush, but just a place guybrush has been returning to for many years and feels a personal connection with him. Of course the curator doesn't think the artifacts are to do with his adventures, from that perspective. They're everyone's. Which has a really nice thematic resonance with the idea that we all, or at least those of us who have been around long enough, have a personal connection with the games, and have come to value different things in them. It's really the themes of ReMI which I think are so well done. It's almost like a fractal, when you zoom in on any one little bit of it it starts to look like a microcosm of what the whole game is about. I might be a little meh on the game's attention to detail in some areas but I can't deny that this is a game that has really thought about what it wants to be about. You get it too when the Voodoo Lady reveals her name. The dialogue is something like: "It was kind of more exciting when I didn't know." "You will find that to be true of many things." Dang, even stuff like Bob. He finishes the book and ends up disappointed that it's over and with each reread it's diminishing returns. Then he asks you to go and get him a book that never ends so that he doesn't have to feel disappointed any more. I feel like the details in the writing really reward repeat viewings.

You know... now you SAY it I remember I did consider that possibility briefly, but I dismissed it, for reasons that I don't know why.

I don't want to go back to this well too much but I really do think a lot of the stuff that worked less well for me in ReMI may partially be put down to the lack of the third member of the writing team. When I think of what Schafer's hallmarks are in his writing I think of: Super clearly defined characters. People who may only be on the screen for a short amount of time but you know exactly who they are and what their deal is. I think of Quohog, and Emmett in FT. I think of the Tube/Elevator demon in Grim, and Chowchilla Charlie. He's really good at just distilling a character in a way where you only need a small amount of dialogue to get exactly who they are. Evocative world building. He's not the sort of person who is going to give you a big old lore dump, but he knows how to, with real efficiency, give a setting a sense of place through dialogue. You don't know anything really about the world of Full Throttle in terms of its history or even precise location. But you know exactly how the game wants you to feel about it, to the point that you don't even really wonder. Similar with the Land of the Dead. These are breathing places, you get a sense of how they fit into the wider world. Killer Dialogue Trees. I don't know how else to put this I just think he's really, really good at dialogue tree humour, witty comebacks and the like. And these are all the things I feel like ReMI could have more of. I might be giving Schafer too much credit there - maybe it has more to do with the passage of time than it has to do with him, but to me at least it feels like the holes in the flag line up pretty well. It's funny because I felt the opposite way about it. I felt in TWP I was being pandered to against my will, they were just throwing in references and pointing to them and grinning and it worked for me about 50% of the time. While in ReMI while I feel like there were a lot of callouts, I always felt like they were well-implemented. Either they were small enough that I don't feel like they were too lampshaded, or the way they were lampshaded was just funnier then in TWP (I did enjoy the 'say the line' stuff with Cobb). Or they were quite poignant. I think it's sort of touching that the last puzzle in the game is a codewheel, say. TWP to me felt all on-the-nose, all the time. ReMI felt to me like there was more texture in the way it used nostalgia.

Ah, I knew about the island but now how to find it. Using the actual answer on the trivia card is pretty funny. I think I would have spent a long time looking for clues. I've said elsewhere but there seems to be a lot of this easter-eggy content in this game. Perhaps more than we're used to. I'm still stuck wondering if there are secret uses for those items you pick up in part 1 and never use (I can think of 3 off the top of my head - a sponge, a tangled up piece of string, and a plush dog). Or if there really could be any deeper meaning to all that graffiti or that weird symbol that seems to have appeared on the Melee Island clock. Maybe I'm just hoping for more mysteries to uncover, but ... there is some stuff in there that feels a bit inexplicable right now.

Eh, maybe it's just that I played TWP recently, but I feel like in comparison to that, (and especially given that unlike that this was an established franchise) ReMI was remarkably restrained.

I sorta... both agree and disagree with this part. I definitely experienced recency bias with EMI in that I remember trying pretty hard to persuade myself I liked that game more than I did. I've talked before about messing with subtitles and trying to see if I'd find it funnier with them on or off. And in my review of the time, I let it off the hook for a lot of stuff I later would not to. And eyeing over the Secret History, I definitely think the first impressions of that game were stronger than the eventual impressions of it. But I'd caveat all that with this: recency bias works both ways, and I think it's simplistic not to include the other way it works: It can make us think we like something more than we maybe eventually do, because of a desire to give it a chance, or just a deep need not to have our anticipation negated. I acknowledge this can happen, but my experience has been as I get older I get better at understanding when this mechanism is at play. I know what this feeling is, and can to some extent compensate for it. But also minds don't trust the unfamiliar. I think we've seen this very clearly with the reaction to the art style which I think has trended very heavily from a lot of people being initially wary of it to people growing to like it. I don't think that's true of everyone, but that's a pretty clear trend I've seen. I haven't seen a lot of people initially say they like the art style but now they've had time to sit with it decided they don't like it. Recency can also make us recoil from the unfamiliar and the unexpected, it can make us react badly to things that wrongfoot us (see the responses from people whose INITIAL reaction to the ending was confusing or slightly negative, but have since grown to appreciate what it did). I suppose my point if I had one is that I think recency can distort our view in lots of directions, positively and negatively. It'll probably take some time for us to sort out all our feelings about this game. But it's not like we're completely blindsided by recency. Personally, I've had a couple of days to think about it, and I know myself well enough that I feel fairly secure in saying it'll never be my favourite MI, but it does things which I think are absolutely brilliant in the context of the series as a whole and I will always treasure it for that.

You're again implying that it's perhaps because I'm blinded by my desire to like the game so much that I might be ignoring 'fairly obvious flaws'. Like I said the last time, dislike whatever you like. It's always a shame, but you're allowed. I'm just asking you not to do that 'ah, maybe you'd dislike it too if only you were thinking clearly' thing. It's a bit patronising not to take it at face value. Just believe people when they say they like it? And sort of makes me think you didn't really read what I wrote (or anything else I've written in this thread, for that matter) because the whole dang point was that I know my own mind well enough by now to understand when I'm trying to like something and when I actually just like something. Besides, I've made plenty of comments in this thread about the parts of this game I think are a bit weaker, and a bit stronger, and I don't feel like I've approached my comments about this game at ALL like some sort of wonder-stricken child who can't see past the haze of my nostalgia to be critical. So far I've been mildly critical of some of the world building in the middle of the game, some of the character writing, some of the dialogue writing, and a few other things. It's really that just where I'm landing on it, I think the things it achieves are valuable enough and add so much to the series as a whole that I can kind of forgive it for what I see mainly as it being a little underwritten in places.

Hmm, I don't feel like I really made myself clear. I absolutely do think the T-Shirt is part of it, and is the 'prize' as far as the secret goes, but I definitely think that the amusement park bit was always the framing device around it, I think there's enough evidence of that in the first game to make that kind of a lock when you take it all in, and the second game only reinforces it. I think the only sense in which I perhaps differ is that I really do think the t-shirt was part of the plan from the beginning. They were clearly fond enough of the joke (I don't get why THAT bit is controversial when they already use that joke TWICE in the original.)

Yeah, my read of it is that the T-Shirt absolutely is the secret as originally envisioned, and that it was imagined as some sort of carnival-like prize similar to the other shirts in the first game. It fits exactly with the general tone of irreverence in the first game and you HAVE to think about it from the perspective of the guys writing this game in 1990 when they had no idea that the secret was something anyone would care about in 3 months, let alone 30 years. I absolutely and 100% believe this is essentially the secret as originally envisioned. Of course it is. Of course it is. It's so obvious when you think about it. I'm sure that I remember someone somewhere even joking about it. But like you say, it doesn't just give you it and leave you to stew on why you cared about this for 30 years. It gives you it, then invites you to think about what's really important, and how that answer might have changed over years, and the role of mysteries in the fiction we enjoy, and even whether Ron's 30 year old answer is any better or more valid than an answer he or we could come up with now. All the while setting up new things for us to talk about and disagree over and wonder about the meaning of, a process which evidentally has already started, beginning the cycle anew.

Yes... I know how to use the controls. I don't think I would have got very far without understanding you could use the right stick to select items. I just don't think they're very responsive in rooms where there's a lot to pick from, as I explained. For example, in Wally's room there are LOTS of different objects to select in the room, on the walls, but they're not all revealed at once and so you have to move around in order to get the right circles even to appear, to pick them, and it gets fiddly in crowded rooms like that.

I think controllers work really great, in fact it's how I'm doing my second playthrough at the moment, mainly. Partly that's because it's so much easier to spot trivia cards with it, but I think it's just smoother to get around by holding the trigger than by double clicking everywhere. I also think the interface is a little bit easier to use with the controller. The only complaint I have is that in busy areas like Wally's shop with a lot to look at, I sometimes had difficulty getting the thing I wanted to highlight. To the point that at one stage I gave up and just used the mouse for a second.

Yes, I also believe you hear this when you talk to the lookout in ReMI. It's a minor key variation of it. I always loved that little bit of music, and it's very nostalgic to me since as a kid I would play the start of MI1 a lot, so I was glad to hear a version of it again.

There's another interesting line I've been thinking about, trying to decide what it means. At the start of the story Guybrush tells Boybrush that he can't just change bits of what happened around, that's not how storytelling works. Later, when he does a silly ending, Boybrush reminds him that he said that, and he says 'I did?' It's an interesting line and I'd be interested to hear thoughts on it. To me it could mean a couple things: Over the course of the story Guybrush has changed his mind, and decided that, actually, you can change stuff round if you like, to serve your purposes, and the game is a sort of refutation of the idea that you can't, as well as a gracious concession that the non-Ron monkey games were also perfectly valid in their own right, and that these stories don't 'belong' to anyone. Maybe even a way to give future Monkey Island creators permission to be bold, and weird. Perhaps he knew this all along, and this switcheroo was the lesson that he intended to impart to Boybrush. It could be seen as another 'how much of what we are looking at right now is reality?' type moment. But I'd love to hear other reads of it.

Interesting thought! Off the top of my head, as Boybrush you can also: eat some disgusting food which you can make worse (scurvydog/ketchup, eating contest) steal something by using a distraction (bread, a couple of puzzles in the game) use fake money (the slug, the stone pieces of eight) borrow something which someone is anxious you bring back (the pegleg, carla's books) Ok, so not all of these examples are super strong, but along with the Dee/Lila thing you could make a case that Guybrush is watching the kids play, and when they come over, weaves a tall tale of which some parts are true, others are exaggerated or made up, and incorporates some elements of the things he saw into it. I see Guybrush as someone who likes to get lost in his imagination. That, to me, is the meaning of how the game can have these jarring moments of feeling wrenched out of it. You know when you have a great dream, or even a dark dream which is so vivid and so imaginitive that you feel slightly sorry to be out of it? I think Guybrush feels that way, but about daydreams.

Re: recency bias, I usually feel like I feel like I get a pretty good handle on whether I'm going to appreciate something longer term at this point in my life. When I was younger I had the capacity to want to like something so much that I could go days and weeks trying to convince myself that I enjoyed it more than I did. I know that it's a tired one to bring up, but I had that kind of experience with EMI. But these days I feel like just... experience helps me recognise how I feel about something sooner. Heck, if you read my reactions to it here I think it's fair to say I've been mildly critical of a few aspects of the game. I know when I really like something though, I know the feeling that I get, of feeling more rewarded the more I think about it, and I get that feeling with this game. I'm sorry if you or some other people aren't enjoying it in the same way - you're allowed, but rather than imply that if our judgment wasn't so clouded we'd feel like you do, could you just... Believe us?

Maybe? I don't mean to be glib about it, but from my perspective, introducing ambiguity about on which level various parts of the story are operating is the opposite of a burden to us, it's a gift. And I think the game lays out a very clear and well-thought-out case for why it's a gift and not a burden. But perhaps it'd help to consider it from another direction. A week ago, we were all still wondering and disagreeing about what the ending to Monkey Island 2 meant, and exactly where the lines of reality are drawn in the Monkey Island universe. We'd in fact been talking about it for 30 years, and are no closer to having a firm, precise solution to it. Few of us hated MI2 for that. Many of us loved it that much more for it. ReMI gestures at some possible answers to that question, but it deliberately stops short of answering it absolutely and definitively, so while we might have more material to work with now, in many ways we have no more closure than we did a week ago. We might even have more questions than we started with. But the one emphatic thing it says that that cuts through all that which I think is important is: 'That's not been so bad, has it?' I don't think it's mocking you for caring about it, and of course it's all subjective, but if you could have been said to make any mistake I think it's in assuming the game is taunting you for wanting to know the answer. I don't think it's trying to taunt you all the times it alludes to being careful what you wish for and the like. I think it's trying to mentally prepare you for an ending that actually isn't about answers, but is instead about a different sort of closure.

For me the conundrum was always that... ever since the early 90s, I trusted the end of MI2. I believed that it wasn't just an anti-ending. It wasn't just a non-answer or a curse or whatever else. It was something, and wondering what that something was has been with me all this time. I believed that if ever Ron were to make a game that directly addressed it, it would do it justice. But Then Ron moved on, other games were made, in the series. And it wasn't that they didn't trust the ending like I did... it was more that they were not in a position to address it. Whatever Ron had in mind, he wasn't saying, and they went off in their own direction. and the thing is, I liked a lot of those games, so eventually I just sort of let it go. I never really expected the ending to be revisited in any detail, and I kind of made peace with it. To the point that Ron's hinting at 3a actively irritated me. The ship had sailed, and I was worried most of all that there'd be no way to revisit that moment without damaging everything that came after. That's why I'm so pleased that the solution they finally came up with is such a broad and generous one, one which makes all the games better just by existing. It feels like a game that actually welcomes 3, 4 and 5 into the family, and invites us to the table, too, and shares the love around. And while I think it's understandable that they gloss over some of the more outlandish plot details of the later games, I'm glad that we end up seeing allusions to all the entries to one extent or other.

I think after spending a couple of nights thinking about it I'm starting to form a tentative opinion. I really like Return to Monkey Island. I think I sort of love it. but (though it's just a little but) I think I like it more for what it does than what it is. In terms of what it is, it's great. It's well written, has fun characters, jokes that make me smile, neat puzzles, a servicable central story and wonderful art and music. All I could have realistically hoped for from a new Monkey Island game in 2022 really. But I'm never going to like it more than the MI2. I'm never going to internalise it in the same way I did with those games. I was ten. Those games opened my eyes to all SORTS of stuff that I've carried with me my whole life. But also, there are just some areas where I just don't think it's quite as sharp as the original - the dialog trees, the locations, the characters - I just don't think they're as well defined as I felt them to be in the earlier games. They're decent, just not *chef kiss* wonderful in the same way. But what it does, I think, and why I value it so much is that it provides just enough (but not too much!) extra context to the world of Monkey Island that it lifts every other game in the series. Return to Monkey Island is the game that does that rare thing of improving all the other games around it, and making me value them even more than I already did. And for doing that, I think it's really something special.

Did anyone yet mention that the checklist on LeChuck's motivational pamphlet gets filled out as you do stuff in the game?