[Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat]

29 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

the fact that LeChuck has that wedding veil

 

Heh. I completely forgot about that veil until now. I thought for sure it was going to come into play at some point. I think it just ended up being a trivia card question? Really makes me wonder how much stuff got cut for time at the end (just like that whole Cogg Island at the bottom of the sea). 

[Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat]

3 minutes ago, leecrawford19 said:

My current thinking is a bit on the darker side. I see Guybrush as a man with very severe issues who has lost himself in this endless fantasy of Monkey Island and the rivalry with his nemesis LeChuck. The ending of Monkey Island 2 was ALMOST the point at which the illusion was broken, but he instead created an even deeper fantasy that we see in the prologue of Rtmi. I think his son and his friends do not exist, they are merely extensions of his own personality that revels in the stories of pirates and adventures and act as a conduit for him to become lost yet again in his fantasy. 
 

I mentioned in a different comment that Elaine, in certain sections of the story, acts almost like a therapist, guiding him along to face certain truths about himself. Her very peculiar behaviour when (and if) you choose to leave the amusement park is almost like she is waiting for Guybrush to make the choice to step out of the delusion. I find the scene on the bench at the end striking in that it seems like it’s the final moment of truth. Guybrush is almost free, but there is a final test. Elaine whispers about a hidden treasure and the promise of adventure. Then Guybrush is sat alone (maybe he was always alone). Does he finally break free of the fantasy, or does he cave in and meet Elaine at the dock? I guess that’s for us to decide. 

 

These are the kinds of interpretations I enjoy a lot. When I first finished the game and saw Guybrush sitting there, alone on the bench, my initial interpretation of it was sadness rather than quiet reflection. (The interpretation changes slightly depending on my choices preceding it.) I always suspected something closer to this when we got the "twist" ending to MI2. That all was not as it appeared...

[Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat]

15 minutes ago, Jake said:

I bet whatever we got in 1993 would have had the same feeling as Return, of an unsettling and thrilling record skipping the groove before settling in again, but all the details would be different. 

 

The major difference is that we wouldn't have spent 30 years speculating about it, for better or worse. Even if the ending to that hypothetical game was just as anticlimactic, it wouldn't have stung so much because we wouldn't have been waiting as long. Even if the big joke was that it was a T-shirt all along, it would have seemed funnier in 1992 than it does in 2022.

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8 minutes ago, RobDangerous said:

I have no hope that he will ever open up about it. How he talked about it also completely changed over the years. In 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20051122075149/http://idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=59) he said

while in every recent interview it was always just versions of "Guybrush goes to hell and Stan is there is all I ever had".

 

I know, his claims have been wildly inconsistent throughout the years. I remember when he said this:

Quote

My dream is to buy the rights to Monkey Island and do the true Monkey Island 3. I'd call it "Monkey Island 3a: The Secret Revealed or your Money Back".

 

I refuse to believe he didn't know where the series was heading when he ended MI2 the way he did. And the fact that he stubbornly refused to accept the sequels as canon until recently made me think he had something completely different in mind for his version of 3a. None of that actually came to pass; we never got his Guybrush in hell (since it's been done in other games) and we didn't exactly get the game that continues directly from the end of MI2 (it's cleverly reworked). It just feels like ideals were compromised at a certain point and I think that's where a lot of my disappointment stems from.

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1 hour ago, KestrelPi said:

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

 

 

Yeah, fair enough. When I say "ad nauseam," I just mean we've already covered all this ground before. This game doesn't really further the plot or add much more coal to the fire, it's pretty much the same conversation we've exhausted after all this time.

 

I know the difference is that a lot of time has passed and the devs aren't the same people who made the originals, which is why I'm so interested in Ron's ideas for MI3 back in 1992. I think it would have been a much different experience overall, and they probably would have handled the final reveal differently. For one, we know in Ron's vision that Guy and Elaine weren't a couple, so they presumably didn't have kids, which would have altered the framing story considerably. There's just a lot of conjecture for things that could have been. I hope at some point Ron opens up about it and shares his original outline/notes for the game.

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I've been mostly posting to Reddit, but have been following this thread closely and finally decided to sign up just to add my (worthless) thoughts to the fire.

 

I finished the game last night and since then have gone through a hastened version of the five stages of grief. From denial that it's all over, anger that it's not what I was promised, bargaining by exploring different interpretations, depression that I wasted so much of my life thinking about this, to eventual acceptance that there's nothing much more I can do about it.

 

I think the reason this game didn't hit home with me is the fact that I haven't moved on in the same way Guybrush has. I never found my Elaine, I never went on any worthwhile life adventures, I never had a kid and now I sit on that park bench alone, contemplating my dead end of a life. 

 

In a way, though, it's a cheat. In the story Guybrush tells us, he is just as gung-ho about finding out the secret as I am. He lengthens the search as long as possible and even turns it into a search for five golden keys, and then a Matryoshka doll treasure within a treasure. Boybrush (who we initially control and in some ways represents the player) hangs on his every word.

 

But at the end of the story, Guybrush uncharacteristically bails. In his current state, he's perfectly fine with not explaining the deeper meanings or even revealing the actual "secret" that the entire game was leading up to. He apparently reached this level of enlightenment off-screen, which doesn't necessarily feel earned throughout the gameplay we're given (which is single-mindedly about a dogged search for the truth). 

 

Rather than give us one definitive, satisfying, unifying, cohesive answer, we are allowed to "choose" our own ending and continue to speculate and theorize ad nauseam, just as we have for the 30 years prior to this release. The game doesn't really give us anything new to chew on, other than the fact that we will likely be disappointed by what we actually get (which feels a bit heavy-handed as far as foreshadowing goes).

 

The only thing I really want to know at this point is the author's original intentions. Going back to 1989-1991, what were they initially planning to do? I know Ron has purported that this would be his MI3a, but I suspect he ended up having to compromise a lot of the original vision by accepting the new lore as canon.

 

As others have speculated here, if the original intention was always for Guybrush to be a little kid lost in a theme park, and Guybrush and Elaine were never meant to be together (possibly because he's actually a kid with a crush on an older woman) and the whole thing culminates in a carnival like setting (which was apparently pitched as the original ending to MI1), then it still feels like we are denied an actual climax to MI2. Sure, we got other people's interpretations of what happened afterwards, but we never got all the answers straight from the original creator, and that's why I was so excited for Ron to complete his actual vision. (I'll also admit that I harbored a bias towards Curse onwards, because Ron wasn't involved; he initially seemed to disinherit the rest of the sequels, which always put a damper on my enjoyment.)

 

I know that the "Original Secret" as established in 1989 by R. Gilbert on the plaque is that it's a theme park. That's about as literal an answer as he gives us, other than the stupid T-shirt in the ornamental box (which I suspect was devised by Stan as a cheap marketing gimmick and was probably always "The Secret" we were going to get). That's all fine and well, I guess. We can choose to tell Boybrush that it's literally what happened, or we can go back and bury our heads underground and deny everything. It's clever that we are allowed to keep our own interpretations within the construct of the game, but it's not really what I was tuning in for. I just wanted to know the truth directly from the horse's mouth and we've ultimately been denied that.

 

Sorry for blathering on like this. It was actually therapeutic to get this off my chest, if nothing else.