JacquesSparkyTail

maybe I wasn’t totally clear. In my mind lechuck and guybrush are beneath dinky island, guybrush does get turned into a kid in a theme park but not the one we see in mi2. Then curse, escape and tales happen and then we get the mi2 epilogue /return prologue. It’s not very clean but it’s the only way this makes any sense at all to me. Fair enough. That’s just as good as anything i can come up with but it definitely feels like a bit of a stretch narrativly and a cheat creatively. If they’d written themselves into a corner i feel like, based on how creative the rest of the game is, they could come up with something better than “lets bung in some doppelgängers to awkwardly steer us away from this writing challange.” Granted I can’t come up with anything better but ron’s seemingly cleverer than i am and has been thinking about this for 30 years and actively working on it for 2.

I think i could definitely get on board with that if not for the fact that the same “parents” are present both times. That couple are identical to the couple from mi2 and remain that way even after the kids stop playing their version of the big whoop story and move on. For what you said to hold true wouldn’t we have to accept that in both cases upon leaving the catacombs guy and boybrush not only stumble up a married couple but both married couples look exactly the same. Either that or its the same couple who stand in the same spot consistently for decades and never age. The more i think about it the more sure i am that the end of 2 and the start of return are supposed to be the same event but return retcons the specifics.

Not sure if anyones mentioned this yet but in the prologue you fight chuckie on a ship and beat him in a race. Both of which you do in the main game. Is the prologue a summary of what’s about to happen? And if so what do the rest of the things you do represent? 😮 And what does this mean for the what is/isn’t imagined by guybrush discussion?

I thought dee represented lila. One, because that’s the character she looks most like and two, because then you have one representative from each of the three factions in search of the secret. What’s going on and how it all fits together is beyond me however. We need a game theory episode to slowly explain everything to us.

Oh of course. Thats why the carnival changes. Its boybrush leaving the imaginary world in which his father is trapped as a child in a carnival and reentering reality, in which he is a child in a carnival. The clearer it becomes the more confused i feel 😂

Just for clarity, you’re saying lechuck did turn guybrush into a kid in a carnival but not the same kid or the same carnival that the mi2 ending implies? I think that works. Very minor mental gymnastics necessary and suddenly the franchise is plot hole free

I like that. It did initially irk me that the opening showed you the same events but they were now different from what we’d seen before just to make it fit the new story. I quickly got over it tbf and it soon proved to be worth it.

Not that this matters at all but it’s interesting to think about… curse opens with guybrush having escaped the mi2 carnival and lechuck later goes on to explain that he did in fact turn guybrush into a child. But return suggests that guybrush was never turned into a child and never found himself in the carnival after finding big whoop. That scene happened to boybrush many years later so how do guybrush and lechuck reference it in curse when it hadnt even happened yet and why did they remember it so wrong? The answer is obviously that the toybox team took creative license in order to create the best game possible but is there any way to make the continuity fit here? Everything else can now be put down to “guybrush is an unreliable narrator” so I’m pretty sure this is now the singular series plot hole.

But how many geckos?!? I really need to know. It’s the only trivia card i got wrong and it’s starting to consume me.

I like the idea that the curse and tales recaps are off. If guybrush is an unreliable narrator and, as we’ve discovered, the whole series is a story guybrush is telling, then suddenly theres a whole new aspect to the canon discussion. Now the events happen, are filtered through guybrush’s poor memory, are filtered again by his desire to tell an interesting story to his kid and then are filtered one more time by the kid’s interpretation. A part of me kinda wants a remake of the entire series but just showing what really happened.. and i want it to be really dull. Like SoMI originally was about how guybrush once lost a bottle of root beer and had to go buy another.

I think this is the most warm and likable Elaine’s ever been. I don’t know if i’ve ever heard them tell each other directly that they love each other before but it went a surprisingly long way to making the relationship feel legitimate. Then as people slowly start complaining about guybrush to elaine i was thinking that his running around adventuring was going to put a strain on their relationship as elaine was finally hearing all of the awful things he does when she’s not around. I was starting to think that the story wasn’t going to be about finding the secret at all but about saving the marriage and my heart was in my mouth. But then there’s that scene where the two of them are walking through the jungle and elaine basically reveals that i was worried over nothing. She knows exactly who he is and accepts him for it. The love for eachother was on display in this game more than ever before. Secret, curse and tales all showed guybrush’s love through grand gestures but return just put them side by side and let the characters act naturally. I don’t know how but that for me was so much more effective. I feel like very little was actually done with elaine in the game but they still took me on a journey. From adoring this couple, to losing my mind with stress, to adoring them all over again.

Just finished. Played through the first time on casual as i’m going to jump straight back in and leaving hard mode til second playthrough gives a little replay value. Won’t go too in depth as it’s nearly 4am here but what i will say is that I wasn’t a big fan of the way they handled the monkey 2 ending but it wasn’t anything too egregious and it’s essentially just the first and last 20 minutes of the game. I was waiting for there to be a twist on top of the twist and was disappointed when i realised that it wasn’t going to be any more than what was revealed at the very beginning as that felt a little like a cheat. But i think that may have been my own fault for raising my expectations even while playing. by far my favourite chapter was when you’re a part of lechucks crew and essentially just hang out with the other ghosts, zombies etc. Of all the new characters, they were the most charming. I was always going to be disappointed by some of the characters they left out so i can’t hold that against the game. I think they struck the perfect balance between including the nostalgic stuff and the new stuff. Even if i would have stuck an extra meathook in there at the very least. I could talk for hours but I desperately need sleep now so I’ll probably post more in depth over the next few days. Basically… loved it. It’s great. It’s just not perfect. P.S. pleasantly surprised by the amount of morgan leflay shout outs in this game.

Here’s a question. Which monkey travelled to the most islands? Did jojo 1 really end up in that wedding dress on melee? You could carry jojo 2 around three islands in revenge but is that canon? Jojo jr travels to melee but there’s a quick pit stop at the ultimate insult amplification tower. Is this a seperate island? It looks like it but its not really clear. This started out as me trying to think of the dumbest question possible but now i sort of have to know.

Captain smirk, meathook, the cannibals, the navigator head, the fettuccini brothers, largo legrande, the voodoo priest, the men of low moral fibre, kate capsize, govenor phatt, the barbary coast crew, kenny, goodsoup, i.Cheese, pegnose pete, van winslow and morgan leflay. my prediction is that no more than 2 of these characters will appear. To be just a little more pessimistic i’ll say probably just the cannibals.

I caught this too. Gotta say, in my mind the only adventure franchise that can comfortably compete with monkey island is broken sword so it’s cool to see the respect on show here.

Clearly you didn’t notice those boots. Major character development incoming. 😮

Here lies smirk with a wit that could cut but he wouldn’t quit smoking so now he’s kaput.

That turned out to be a much breezier conversation. For the sake of padding it out a little here’s my full rankings. secret - 3 curse - 4 escape 5 revenge - 5 (6 if you include the fortress) tales - 8? There’s a lot at any rate now maybe i’ll be wrong and people will correct me. That should get us through another 6 pages.

Plot twist. His first name is lindy and in life he was the cabin boy of ht marleys ship. This game will also reveal that winslow is really rum rogers sr and that madame xima is the real rapp scallion.

I think 4 islands is enough for one game and 2 new islands with 2 returning islands feels like a good ratio. What i wouldn’t mind though is a brief montage giving cameos to the various other islands but i can’t imagine they’d create backgrounds and design characters for the sake of a couple of seconds in game.

it’s ok. I’ve heard rum rogers decapitated head and murray compete in a three legged race which apparently puts the game in contention for a bafta.

I think there’ll be plenty to talk about. Tone, quality, difficulty, hilarity, comparisons to the rest of the franchise. All of these things could be discussed at length without getting into specifics. But as soon as i’m finished i’ll be heading straight over to the spoilery thread to talk about how elaine left guybrush for otis and how much i hate the retcon that the navigators head is actually rum rogers sr.

Yeah that’s true. I was just worried about murray fatigue. In the post I accidentally deleted i compared the coffin holding stan in curse and the chest holding murray in tales to surprise christmas presents. It was a beautifully worded analogy worthy of wordsworth. Its a real shame for all of you that you’ll never get to read it.

My whole thing was that characters like murray and stan seem to work best in small doses and I don’t know if i really want to see them develop passed “goofy guy who you can’t wait to show up.” Too much screen time and they may lose some of the excitment that surrounds them but at the same time this may be the last time we ever see them so i sort of want to spend as much time with them as possible before they return to the void.

Ok so i just spent 10 minutes typing out a wall of text that for some reason disappeard when i posted… i’ll sum up. Too much murray?