Leontes

Oh to be sure; I am not saying I am "more qualified" to have an opinion than other people or anything to that effect. Or that others aren't as "practiced" as I am so therefore they are just too blind to see the flaws in the ending or any other statement of massive hubris. I am saying instead that because I went through the "exercise" of doing this process so much in a very arbitrary, institutionalized and fabricated way that I'm legitimately scared that I had such a bad experience that it prevents me from enjoying the same thing you're all seeing in this ending. Like I've just been traumatized somewhere so I check out when this sort of thing happens in media. I mean the farthest thing from "I know about literature, I know what I'm talking about". If anything, getting that degree was a mistake if for me it just sucked all the enjoyment out of everything forever! Haha. EDIT: Ninja edit, though my girlfriend had the literal same exact response as I did so my theory about being jaded by college falls flat. Damnit.

Funny enough, I felt like Boybrush at the end.

On this; I feel like the point-and-click genre is all about those eureka moments. You look at what's in your inventory, you think about what the game has told you and what hints it's given you, and suddenly a lightbulb turns on, you say "aha!" and you insert the solution. It's the driving force behind any puzzle game, and why escape rooms and the like are having their renaissance. You're rewarded for your "work" with that epiphany moment and it's so addicting you always keep coming back for more. Being presented with a problem and feeling good about solving it is an incredibly human thing. This ending says "there's lots of hints. Think back to everything you know about the series and that's the solution to this final puzzle", only there actually is no answer. There's no payoff for "getting it right" as "getting it right" isn't even a thing that makes sense when there's no solution or feedback to get that eureka moment at all. You can think it's a theme park if you want, you can think they're really pirates, you can think it takes place in 1701 or 2022, Return could take place in New Orleans Square in Disneyland, etc. I don't want "my" solution because I could either put zero effort or tons of effort into it and come up with my own elaborate delusion on what the ending means. I just want the real ending. I'm a sucker for canon. Postulating on what I think the real answers are bears no fruit for me because I know will never receive that feedback or that "eureka!" reward. I notice that a great deal of community and discussion is born when a game has an ambiguous interpretive ending, but I feel very isolated and excluded from enjoying those discussions because they're all just fan-fiction to me. A previous post said that the 30+ years of speculation on what really happened at the end of Monkey Island 2 was a gift, but I wasn't a part of those discussions because I just didn't care. You know what would be really great? For Ron or Dave to say in an interview "oh I thought we were 100% clear about the fact that it was always a theme park since MI1" or "yeah he's just telling his kid the exaggerated story of what really happened, don't worry about the details too much, that's the nature of stories". That would be the ultimate gift for me, because at the end of the day, I'm not the type of person who wishes that the story truly ended the way I wanted it to in my own personal headcanon; I just want to see the full expression of the artist's intention on the page, not mine, not anyone else's. The perfect ending. All in all, I am really happy to be in the minority on this (though heading to other online places, a lot of people agree with me on this and frankly I'm sad that that's the case) and I hope that in time I can grow to see what you all thought was great about how the story ended. If it turns out that Return to Monkey Island is liked by 99.9% of people I'm overall very pleased with that. Thanks to everyone for sharing their thoughts here. I hope I'm not being too much of a downer.

Funny you mention this; my girlfriend (who also greatly disliked the ending) and I were discussing why we were so bothered, and I said "Maybe it's because I have a literature degree. Not in the sense that 'I know what I'm talking about and everyone else's opinion is wrong!', but rather because I have spent SO much time being literally graded on how well I'm able to extract meaning from someone else's work." All of my upper division courses were basically "okay we just read something, let's collectively come up with 10 theories that all work as to what really happened" and essentially you can either go in the camp of "well, this is what's actually on the page, soooo that's just it" or "but this was written in Germany in 1947 so clearly this is all about the Holocaust" and another kid says "well I think it's about dinosaurs and unicorns" and all of these interpretations hold equal weight because everything's made up and the points don't matter. To not be bored I would just come up with the most outlandish theories possible and be maximally convincing to sell my garbage idea, only to get an A from the professor. Inside I'm screaming "no, you idiot! I'm just bullshitting you! You're rewarding me for grasping at actually nothing!" That's why I never rush straight to a game's Steam forum after I've seen the interpretive ending to find out what wild theories people have about what they just saw. It just puts me back in school in the worst way possible 😂 So is it a theme park? Is it all real? Being told it doesn't matter and I get to choose what I believe just makes me check out. I'm just completely soured on that entire process and I think as a result I've never been able to enjoy those kinds of endings ever since.

Uh oh! I do want to be clear and say I totally loved this game from the first minute to the last. I think it was a fantastic return to form and really felt, at least to me, like a great old school point-and-click adventure game by the true masters of the genre. I loved the art, the music, the voice acting, the story, the puzzles, everything was absolutely fantastic. It's just that minor thing at the end that is nagging at me, but at least I'm not here saying "I don't understand the ending, ending bad". I don't think it's a bad ending at all. However, this wouldn't be an internet forum without a jerk like me who loves 99.9% of something but only ever posts about the 0.1% they don't like though That tends to be the case with anything anyone is passionate about, though. When everything else is great, it's very easy to focus directly on the negatives and suddenly that's all that ever gets brought up.

Thanks for responding. It was helpful for you to say in the stream earlier (thanks again to you and Cressup! That was a lot of fun) that as an insider you actually do know about the other ways they could have done the ending, and that out of all of them, you think this one probably works out the best, at least for telling the story the way they wanted to tell it. I think I just have to chalk it up to the fact that I don't care to speculate as to what might be truly happening. I just want the truth. Any truth. I'm not invested in any one truth over any other. The thing is, when I don't actually have the truth, I unfortunately stop caring about the story. Usually if I run into an interpretive ending I just think "great, anything and everything could be possible. Man, that's boring". The trouble is, I don't want to stop caring about Monkey Island. That's what scares me right now. This is my favorite game series of all time, the one that got me into the industry. If this were any other game series I wouldn't have made an account on a forum just to decompress my thoughts, I would have just said "damn, oh well, thought it was going somewhere" and been on my merry way. Maybe I thought I didn't have any expectations, but it turns out I did, but not in the way that I think the game is telling me not to. I didn't care about what the secret might be. If I had to guess, The Secret of Monkey Island is a 1990 point-and-click adventure game in a world of pirates. Maybe I'm just so thrown off by how Guybrush seemed to simultaneously know and not know what was going on at the end that it's completely derailing my ability to enjoy it. He's the one telling the story! What's he actually saying to his son? "And then, I opened the door and I was back at the theme park just as they were closing! And then I got really confused and had no idea where I was. And then Stan gave me the keys and told me to lock up. And then I got very confused again. The End!" Ahhh! Why? Even if I wanted to take the mental route of saying "I believe it's all just theme parks" or "they're really pirates and Guybrush is bad at endings" the dialogue at the end is so unbelievably jarring that I can't solidly land in either direction (or both directions at once, which ALSO works!). He should not be confused; he should be fully in control in that scene, even though he's an unreliable narrator. I think I could appreciate everything much more if I could just get past that hurdle. Maybe his confusion is supposed to mirror ours, but I was actually only confused at the fact that he was confused. I'll keep working on it, haha.

Hey everyone, I need your help: Maybe someone in here can convince me otherwise, but I actually really hate the ending to this game! It's not necessarily what happens, it's the execution. I feel it didn't stick the landing, and since so many of you are saying that for you, it did, I'm hoping I'm not too far gone; I'd love to be swayed! I definitely understand the metaphors at play. It's about family, about aging, about the power of stories, about losing your sense of place in the world and trying to go back in time to recapture a feeling you felt when you were younger. I played the first game 30 years ago when I was 6 years old; it's not lost on me that I'm Guybrush, and if I'm hoping to get that feeling I felt as a 6-year old when I first played SoMI, I'll have to face the horrible truth that no matter how much you want to, you can never truly go back. Too much has changed, you just get shadows of what once was, and that's what Guybrush's quest is about here, overall. The part that fails for me has everything to do with Guybrush's disconnected dialogue towards the end. As soon as he gets out of the door in the alleyway he says "Oh no! I'm not ready yet" and implies that the park is closing. Stan trusts him enough to give him the keys because Guybrush is either an employee or a superfan (saying he's going back to his flooring inspector job suggests the latter). Guybrush then makes some comments about how Stan did a good job with the puzzles this time, LeChuck was fearsome (but I'm still 6-0 against him!), and that adding the other pirate lords was a good twist. He's lucid and understands what's happening around him. This all suggests that everything in every game has been different times that Guybrush has come to his favorite theme park (sure, video games are theme parks, so we're "him" playing the different games, or Boybrush) and the scrapbook is full of physical objects from those trips. That's fine! I'm happy with this, after 30 years of waiting I was initially excited to get some kind of answer as to the truth of what's happening here. Unfortunately It's completely deconstructed as when Guybrush talks to Elaine, she sounds like she's trying to calm down an insane person having a nervous breakdown ("You're right here with me"). He repeats himself, says that he doesn't understand where he is, and Elaine just tells him it's time to go. Wait what? I thought he was an expert on this place? Why would he be suddenly confused in the slightest? Is he supposed to be a player-insert where we're supposed to be confused? If so then why the initial dialogue that plays the entire situation straight? What the hell just happened? Literally SECONDS ago he knew what was going on. Now we're back on the bench at the "real" theme park. And Elaine says she has a map to a treasure. So which is it? It's a pirate theme park and Guybrush is a flooring inspector? Or he and Elaine are pirates, voodoo/LeChuck are real, he's telling stories to his son but exaggerating them and he's bad at endings? I'm seeing a lot of folks in here saying they love that the ending can be interpreted in many different ways. That it's great that it doesn't actually matter which of the above is true; that it could be either, both or neither, and that's what's beautiful about it. I'll go ahead and say it; I must be in the minority where I absolutely hate when writers do this. I don't find the activity of speculating what the ending means to be particularly fruitful, as it puts the burden on the audience to establish their own headcanon instead of actually answering anything. Yes, I'm serious when I say BURDEN. Maybe I'm just burnt out from taking tons of literature courses in college but I check out as soon as we get to the part where we're interpreting what we thought the author meant vs. what they chose to actually portray in the story. I could come up with a million theories as to what's really happening in this story (the two above are just what I'd consider the most likely answers) but since there is no objective truth I just have to pick something to believe, and I'd honestly rather not. I just felt like I'd leave Return with answers to 30-year-old questions, but then I'm just told "Ha, you dared have a question you thought we'd answer? Jokes on you, maybe you shouldn't have cared so much". I'm frustrated that all of the characters in the game essentially patronized me the whole way through, saying "hey you probably shouldn't care too much about the Secret" or "it's gonna be a disappointment so you shouldn't get your hopes up". When Flambe came out of the fire to tell me again I was very, very annoyed. Like, my dude, I get it. My bad for caring about what really happens in the story The endings of stories do matter, and I'm not happy that I'm being told otherwise. The thing is, I didn't care what the secret was. I didn't care if I ever found the answer, I just wanted an actual ending that makes sense. The one where "it's always just been a theme park" is great. An ending where "these stories really happened, Guybrush is an unreliable narrator and we may never know the true ending to MI2" is also fantastic. It's just that what we actually see in the theme park is a Guybrush who is simultaneously fully aware of what's going on in the story, but also somehow completely confused and doesn't know where he is, and then he just gives up and says "well, does it even matter?" It's almost intentionally disruptive so that you can't definitively choose one or the other. Ron had an interview where he said that people would either be excited or infuriated by the ending. Do you folks think I'm just doomed to be the latter?