Romão

The very first screenshot that was shown of Melee Town showed the alley in High Street made inaccessible by the fish crates. This ended up not being in the game, correct?

I must say Part II of this game is probably my favorite "Island-less" act in all of the Monkey Island games. Everything was perfect

One piece of music I particularly loved was when Guybrush frees Murray in Leship's hold (right after we hear a rendition of Murray's theme from TOMI). The music in that "room" changes once you can explore the whole ship (it then becomes a variation within the whole Leship music suite), and you never get that piece of music again. It was quite fantastic:

*wrong topic

There's a particular segment in the music where we are by the rudder, underwater, that's linked to using @BillyCheerswonderful suites:

LeShip. There was just a wonderful melancholy about the whole thing

Absolutely this!!! Cannot agree with this enough. The Monkey Island storytelling potential never felt more open and ripe for exploration than it does now. A Curse-like type of game, for example, with its great locales, puzzles, humor and atmosphere, but with some lack, let's say, of far reaching implications and being kinda "toothless" (don't know how else to put it) would now fit much better within the Monkey Island world than Curse did coming of the heels of Monkey island 2. The whole series became unburdened, let's say. If I were a video game creator, I'd much rather work on a Monkey Island in the aftermath of Return to Monkey Island that in any other moment before this game was released.

I finished the game yesterday late in the night and I still haven't fully digested what I have experienced, but I still haven't been able to spot thinking about it. Probably the first time it has ever happened with a computer game. Took me a while to read all the posts in this thread and it has been an absolutely fascinating discussion, with some truly wonderful and thoughtful insights throughout. Just some very scattered thoughts, I hope to write something more coherent in the future: - Having Guybrush and Boybrush as our POV works wonderfully well. Not only it allows to reconcile the various and often conflicting viewpoints and tonal shifts in the previous games, but it is also a clear reflection of the various stages at which we, the players, experienced these adventures: whereas as a gullible innocent child or a nostalgia-hungry, seasoned adult. - I really don't interpret the ending as a sort of "anything goes" or "make up your mind about it" kind of situation. It's actually quite definitive in some of the answers it provides. Again, we come to the fundamental differences between plot and story. The ambiguity is not so much about what happens (plot), but rather what it means. - Some people like to call the ending "meta", but I feel that's really reductive. Great works of art require some degree of input from its audience. Art is always a dialogue. It's not a monologue. It will generate outputs that vary with the input given by its audience. - In that vein, I feel this sort of storytelling has probably never found a better vehicle for exploration that the point-and-click adventure game genre. We dictate the pace, the timing, how we linger in certain places. We are, as much as possibly we can be, the main character. Not a spectator. But an active participant in what's unfolding. So what reflects upon the main character, reflects upon us as well. It would not work as well if this were a movie, or a book, or what have you. So that urge for escapism to a fantasy pirate universe is out own urge, that's why we play these games to start with. So the consequences associated with unraveling what's behind the curtain, sustaining this fictional construct, hits a much a deeper chord. -Although this might be a very egocentric point of view, this game seems tailor made to where I'm at in my life right now. I became a father 5 months ago. My whole professional career has been tailored and greatly influenced by my exposure to Monkey Island (I will elaborate a bit on this in future posts). It was deeply touching to realize that all this obsession with Monkey Island is good and all, has given me countless moments of bliss, but it's very important to place in its proper rank in life's priorities and goals. Don't let it consume you or drive you. And that some things you really cannot experience again. But if you are at peace with that notion, you can go back into the rabbit hole and experience new things with a lot less baggage on your shoulders and maybe, just maybe, regain some of that child like wonder in experiencing new things , freed from expectations and nostalgia that have metastasized into our senses. In that sense, that Elaine line about a new quest felt like a renewal of what Monkey Island can be, in its purest form.

Do I hear Wagner's Tanhauser when approaching the castle in Brrr Muda?

The menu music is a reworking of the theme we hear when Guybrush meets the lookout, after the main title sequence, in The Secret of Monkey Island, is it not?

I'm still going through part I, but I must say I wouldn't mind having a whole game centered around little Guybrush as a main character

See everyone on the other side

Soundtrack CD! That's paramount

I just skimmed through the gameplay video (watched like 20 seconds total), but one thing I absolutely loved was the Melee Island map theme being interspersed in the new Melee Town music

I really don't think any great piece of storytelling can truly be "spoiled". Sure, some stories can lose the impact of the revelation when you come up upon it the first time, but if plot twists is all a story has going for it, it's not much of a story. And story is always more important (and less "spoilable") than plot. On another point, I hope Steam will have some sort of achievement for completing the game without using the hint book. That's an extra bit of motivation to keep me from resorting to it. I want to get stuck eventually. It's definitely not a game I want o breeze through. I hope it lives with me for quite a bit

BTW, is it just me, or did they hide a tentacle in the thorny tree branch you can see in the foreground?

That looks and specially "feels" fantastic. From what we've seen thus far, this really feels like an amalgamation of a lot of previous styles in the MI games. Premature as it might be at this point, this might be my favorite look of a Monkey Island game

I don't remember where I found this, but I think it is particularly cool and proper interpretation of what Mêlée Town might look like during the day:

This is a fascinating topic to me. I've spent a considerable amount of time in the last 25 years musing on what the is overall layout of Mêlée Town, for a personal project I've been conceptualizing and will share in due time. This will be a very long post, so please bear with me. To that effect, I've been compiling every image, screenshot, artistic depiction and interpretation I've been able to find, in order to see the way other people pierce together the different parts of the town ("rooms", in video game jargon), that we get to see and visit in Secret of Monkey Island (and now also in Return to Monkey Island). I must say your map is the very first I've seen that tries to encapsulate and describe the whole town, and it was most refreshing and exciting to see it in this very topic. Now, some considerations: To start our discussion, I will refer to the street with the Clock Tower and as Low Street and the street with the church, store and prison as High Street. That's how they're referred to in the Monkey Island Chronicles book that came with the Monkey Island Anthology by Limited Run. I agree with you that is absolutely obvious that the town has a considerable climbing gradient when walking uphill from the Scumm Bar by the dock to the Governor's Mansion. This obvious from the fact that the Scumm is just by the water and the Governor's Mansion is build on a cliff that rises dramatically from the sea, at a considerable height. Now, when looking at this image: There doesn't seem to be a considerable climbing gradient between the location of the Mansion and High Street, which on its own also seems to be relatively flat and at the same level throughout. Which means that the uphill section of the town must come before we reach High Street when walking from the Scumm Bar. I also agree that no way is the archway that we see on the right side of the image above is the back side of the archway under clock in low street. It's a common misconception to make, since all "rooms" that comprise Mêlée Town have archways on both its left and right ends, which may lead one to assume that a right-hand side archway on a section of the town is directly connect to the archway on the left-hand side of the following room, without any unseen sections of the town in between. But just by seeing how long it takes Guybrush to transverse between the three sections of Mêlée Town we can visit, we can automatically infer that there are unseen sections between the the section with the Scumm Bar and Low Street, and again, between Low Street and Hight Street: With that in mind, we can conclude that when walking from the Scumm Bar to the Mansion we have to transverse at least two, thus far unseen, sections of the Town, and that the path is generally uphill when walking from the Scumm Bar to the High Street, where the climbing gradient seems to level out. Low Street, on its own, seems to have noticeable climbing gradient, specially on its left-hand side, when walking, from the docks, although I reckon it also keeps a (slightly lower) climbing gradient when walking up the right-hand side of the street and through the archway under the clock tower. However, the sum of the overall climbing gradients visible in the sections of the town we can visit doesn't seem to be enough to bridge the difference with the level height of the Mansion and that of the docks surrounding Scumm Bar, So your choice of having a staircase between Low Street and High Street makes perfect sense. Nevertheless, although your interpretation of the layout makes perfect sense, in having High Street, Low Street and the docks roughly parallel to one another, I must admit my preference with having the clock tower roughly facing the camera when we see Mêlée Island in the title screen from The Secret of Monkey Island. In a similar placement as you can see on this wonderful piece of fan art (although its placement of the left-hand side archway of Low Street is completely off): I just think it makes for a wonderful panorama of the town when approaching the island, with its iconic clock tower standing tall, as it is, as we have seen, on the highest point of Low Street. Return to Monkey Island seems to take a similar stance to the location of Clock Tower in relation with the docks: As do others pieces of fan art (this one does have a more correct placement of the left-hand side archway of Low Street): Now, a lot of the fan art and interpretations have had a hard time reconciling and fitting together the position of the archway at the right-hand side of the Scumm Bar screen and the left-hand side archway of Low Street, which is nearly impossible to do if one does not consider that are unseen sections of the town between these two "rooms" we can actually visit. The fan art above, with the Curse-like art style, does a good job at this, whereas others, while fantastic pieces of art on their own, really are not coherent with that we are shown in SOTMI (this is not meant to be read, at all, as a criticism of the art shown), like this piece from the SOTMI comic adaption by Paco Vink: So in my interpretation, after we walk through the archway to the right of the Scumm Bar, we turn right into a U-shaped street, with a fairly steep climbing gradient, eventually reaching the archway on the left-hand side of Low Street, where we will continue our climb. After that, we walk through the archway under the clock, where we will turn left, climbing a staircase, until eventually reaching High Street and the level height of the mansion. High Street is, therefore, in a roughly perpendicular position to the street that goes through the archway under the clock tower. I will try to make a simple scheme in the next few days to illustrate my reasoning Concerning what's behind our viewpoint of the dock, I've always assumed it was a fairly large inlet or bay, which recedes into the land quite a bit, in so much as it makes sense to built the dock walkway across it, as a short cut connecting the two sides of the bay, instead of following the contour of the shoreline, which would make for a much longer path. In your map, I don't think the bay recedes enough to justify having it bridged by the walkway. This is more in line with how I see it (and the previous image, also by Paco Vink): This fantastic piece of fan art offers a similar interpretation, although I would imagine far less docks walkways on the right side (inner side of the bay), as they would serve little purpose, having no access to the open sea: I really could discuss this all day and never was a topic on this forum dearer to my heart. Don't take my remarks and disagreements of the layout of your map as criticisms, as I cannot praise your endeavor enough. It was really heartwarming to see a map showing the layout of Mêlée Town, probably my all time favorite fictional setting, in any medium. I hope this discussion keeps going P.S. I apologize for not crediting all the artists that did the wonderful fan art I used in this post, but after years of searching and saving whatever reference material and artistic interpretation I could find of Mêlée Island, I just lost track from where I got the images initially. My apologies to all the artists

I must say, although I somewhat get your dislike for that musical cue, I do like its rendition in the "Cursed" edition of the Secret of Monkey Island soundtrack:

I really can't wait to see the Melee Town low street, with the clock tower over the archway. That was always my favourite "room" in the whole series

Thank you for your input, @BillyCheers So all that's left is to create a proper suite for Woodtick (with gapless play between the subtracks) and properly assemble the track for Captain Kate and I would say we're ready to go

It's also pretty cool to see pretty much all the islands from the Monkey Island games featured in the book Atlas of Imagined Places, and Melee was placed pretty close to Hispaniola, which makes the dominance of coniferous forests on the island even less far fetched (enlarge for greater detail):

I know we all tend to associate the Caribbean with palm trees, but there's a huge variety of vegetation all around the region. There are pine forests in the island of Hispaniola (shared between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba, for example. So even bearing mind it is a fictional location, nothing seems too far fetched to me in Melee Island in terms of vegetation. I would argue, perhaps, that the architecture might feel a bit too medieval or European. But the whole thing just oozes charm and atmosphere

Thank you, Laserschwert, love your extended Woodtick suite. The Lechuck Interlude is at the beginning of The Voodoo Dolly on the official album, but the other tracks could work very well as bonus tracks