Dmnkly

Gotta say, I was rather taken aback by Ron's post as well. Though having been on the other side of more than a few inadvertent teases recently, I should REALLY know better than to read too much into throwaway lines. (Love you all, and I don't blame you one bit, but man... the number of times I said to myself "They're going to be soooooo disappointed when they realize that rando comment meant absolutely nothing." 😄 ) Don't get me wrong, I sure hope he's learned something specific that hasn't trickled down to me yet. But as @ja2ke suggests, I suspect it's more likely that it's just speculation that Disney will want to do more with the IP. Which I'm........ not mad about? I realize I have some motivations that the rest of you don't, but man... an animated film or a regular role on an animated show was always the big dream — even before MI — that I never quite caught. Would sure be kind of poetic for that to come full circle after so many decades. (Pardon the navel gazing.)

Obviously, I have a VERY vested interest in what happens with Monkey Island going forward, so take this for what it's worth 😄 But one of the things I kind of love about how the fellas wrapped this one up is that I don't think more would diminish anything. I love how they've kind of closed the loop while setting up almost a kind of framework that all of these stories inhabit. In some ways, I feel like this frees any future projects, should we get them, to simply be fun Monkey Island stories, new adventures, a standalone chapters, without the burden of dealing with the larger questions and setup. I feel like it would now be possible for a new game — with maybe just a couple of subtle nods to the metastory — to simply tell a fun story. I mean, it would be tough to top the emotional pull of RtMI. And maybe the best thing would be not to try. But so long as any future adventures are deferential to what we just played, I don't think there's any reason they'd have to detract from anything.

I did? Was this pulled from the SE for licensing or something? If you'd asked me five minutes ago whether I knew the MTM Show theme, I'd have sworn up and down I don't. Even seeing the text now, still got nothing. Of course, I also discovered evidence not too long ago that I apparently watched Red Sonja around 2018 or so and I have precisely zero memory of it, so maybe this is a me issue.

Not necessarily. If one is inclined to require a decipherable timeline, I like the notion that MI2 has been slightly retconned such that there's actually a massive gap WITHIN MI2 that engulfs CMI, EMI, Tales, and who knows how many other unrevealed adventures? But while I like that, I'm personally much more in the Terry Gilliam/Baron Munchausen camp. Doesn't really matter. Free your mind and let the pieces not quite fit. That slightly disoriented feeling isn't a bug, it's a feature.

To be fair, I haven't heard this one yet! 🙂

Jesse Harlin's orchestration of the Woodtick Suite for MI2:SE is, bar none, my favorite cue from the entire series. (Yes, including the main theme, LeChuck's theme and A Pirate I Was Meant to Be.)

Right?!? MORE SWAG! MORE SWAG! MORE SWAG! 😄

All of this, incidentally, is really getting me thinking about The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Some rather interesting parallels there. A collection of adventures that blur the lines between fantasy and reality, feature outlandish exaggeration and improvisation, and while vaguely tethered to reality, seem to exist out of place and time, almost as though our protagonist were more of a symbolic archetype than an actual person.

Nor should you feel compelled to apologize for it. (Not saying you are.) For me, I don't want to pretend I know what's going to stick with me so close to the moment, but I think it's a good bet the fireworks and the carnival for me is going to be that long, slow pull on Guybrush, contentedly sitting alone on a quiet park bench.

Hey, P.S., I don't mean to say that anybody would be wrong for wanting something less ambiguous. My MO would be to encourage you to judge it for what it is, not for what you wish it were. But at the end of the day, you like what you like.

Had Ron and Dave made this game in 1992, I'm sure it would have been very different. But unless I'm mistaken, I believe the notion that Ron HAD ideas for MI3 back in 1992 assumes facts not in evidence. I mean, I'm sure his mind wasn't a total blank. But has he ever said that there was any vision for MI3 back in the day? Again, I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that never existed. It seems that for those who feel dissatisfied with the ending, there is a theme of feeling like they just wanted closure. But may I suggest the possibility that you're just overthinking it? I mean, there is a lot of ambiguity around the specifics, but I'm not sure how much more clear RtMI can be about the core revelation. The Secret of Monkey Island is that these stories are fantasies inspired by an amusement park. And in the fellas' defense, they've basically been telling us this for 30 years — in ways both subtle and less subtle — right from the first two lines of the first game. What constitutes "reality," so to speak, is much more unexplained and nebulous. Do Boybrush and Elaine exist? Where are the lines between Guybrush's fantasy and reality? What's the back story? How do all of these pieces fit on the timeline? My hunch is that these are intentionally very undefined because — to put it bluntly — who cares? It's interesting to ponder, but at least as far as this chapter is concerned, as they say quite explicitly, that's not the part that really matters. I'm not sure if the disappointment some people experience stems from feelings of ambiguity beyond the secret, or that RtMI's big reveal is hammering home confirmation that the secret is a fairly obvious thing that's been staring us in the face the whole time. (Or from something else, I don't mean to put words in anybody's mouth.) But FWIW, I really don't think there's a lot of wiggle room around what the core of the revelation is. Like I said way upthread, I get the impression that people's comfort with this ending largely comes down to whether you're comfortable with a lot of peripheral ambiguity, or if you really want everything spelled out to the letter. This definitely isn't the latter. But just because an ending is ambiguous, that doesn't mean it can't bring closure. My opinion is that yes, the game obviously and quite intentionally leaves all kinds of loose ends hanging. But when it comes to the primary themes of the story, the heart of the matter, the capital T Truth at its core, it really wraps things up quite nicely while still giving us a bunch of other stuff to play around with. And speaking for myself, that's what I want from a Monkey Island game. I don't want everything spelled out. I don't want a neat package where everything is carefully explained. To me, that hazy, ambiguous half real, half fantasy isn't the thing Monkey Island is trying to work through to get to a destination. That IS the destination.

I mean... there are ten (that we know of) different endings that change depending on your actions in Part V, so even within the game itself, this is kind of explicitly so 🙂

I'm not saying *I* feel this way. I'm positively thrilled 😄 But I understand that not everybody does or might feel the same. People might take a break from the the spreadsheet work they get paid for by doing the "work" of playing solitaire. Which calculations people find taxing and which they find relaxing is interesting and, I suspect, very personal. I'm just saying that while I LIKE having all of this subtext to sort through, I can see how somebody might enjoy solving adventure game puzzles but not solving the analytical/thematic questions. I am, by nature, somebody who always wants to help somebody else enjoy something that I enjoy. (Food, anyone?) But I've spent enough of my life doing that that I've learned to grudgingly admit to myself that sometimes it just ain't gonna happen. EDIT: VERY illuminating cross-post there, Leontes 😄

Oh, agreed. Repeating myself, but as mentioned upthread, good stores are rarely about what they're about. But, you know... sometimes you (not YOU you, clearly 😄 ) want to turn it off and just enjoy something without thinking too hard about it. I'm sympathetic to that. Particularly given how worn out everybody is right now. I just mean that I don't think RtMI is complication for complication's sake. That ambiguity isn't gratuitous. Yeah, as Leontes described it upthread, I think it's fair to consider the ending a "burden." This game asks you to do some work. And I think that might upset me if there weren't meat on those bones. But there is. Quite a bit of it. (P.S. Thanks for stopping in. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you have to say about RtMI going forward.)

It occurs to me that this might also be why I find myself quite willing to accept a sort of weirdly ambiguous ending. An entertainment needs the big finish, the carefully timed pacing, etc. But for something that has more depth — and I think RtMI does — I'm happy to be left with something a little complex to chew on. I think it might bother me if I felt it hadn't *earned* that finish.

I like this take. My initial impression from March (which remains) was that it was extremely well-written in a very thoughtful, subtle way. As far as the humor goes, there was less reaching for punchlines (stylistic difference, not a value judgement) in favor of a more laid back kind of humor. But those themes, man... very mature, quietly powerful, and expertly woven throughout the fabric of the game. To me, most of the other titles in the series were superlative entertainments, while this one felt like a more thoughtful and robust work of art.

Ha! No, there was no misdirection. I knew what was going on. Well... at least the face value representation of what was going on 😄

He was never upside down.

Not trying to deny you your opinion. Just as an aside, FWIW, @Jake and I both played the game months ago. We've been stewing in it and talking about it for quite a while. I realize "recency" is relative, but speaking only for myself, my appreciation for it has grown with time.

This is interesting because I'm having this exact same discussion elsewhere with somebody who feels the same. And of course, I like to talk about why I like the ending, but at the end of the day, if you don't like it, you don't like it, and I don't think you need to apologize to yourself or anybody else for that. But this other person had a very similar reaction. They felt punked, going so far as to imagine Ron and Dave making fun of them. And THAT got my hackles up. Not in an "I'm mad at you, you dolt" way, but in a way that just made me sad. Kind of like, after all these years and all these wonderful moments and all love that has gone into these, how could you think they wanted to end things with "Ha ha, we tricked you, stupid!" So if it makes you feel any better, Leontes, you're not alone. Though it makes me sad here, too. I mean, I get it. Sorry to flog a tired analogy, but David Lynch isn't for anybody. And I don't think you're wrong to use the word burden, necessarily. Neither do I think you're wrong for not wanting to work for it. I hate to say it, but maybe this ending just isn't for you. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. No matter what they did, it was bound not to be for somebody. (Read: a bunch of somebodies.)

Heh... that's funny. Seems more like a throwaway than any kind of deliberate clue or anything. But it is funny. Incidentally, has anybody tried standing by the SCUMM Bar fireplace for any length of time? Don't want to overanalyze it (too late), but I would note that mixing a little bit of contemporary pop culture (Star Wars) into their pirate story is totally a thing a couple of kids playing pretend would do. Probably just an opportunity to pay tribute to the mothership. But it happens to work well on that level 🙂

Oh wow... DID NOT KNOW THAT. I mean, I think where I fall on this is that the literal SECRET, as it were, is that there is an amusement park that actually exists and that some amount of what we're seeing is fantasy. Which, I mean, it's easy to overthink, but we've been buried in a metric crapton of "clues" pointing directly at that since the very beginning. How MUCH is fantasy is where things start to get subjective, I think. Bits of it? Some of it? Most of it? All of it? Hard to say. I don't know if Ron and Dave have very clear notions of where those lines are drawn, or if it's kind of fuzzy for them too. But while it's fun to ponder (and I intend to continue doing so!), I feel like that's of secondary interest. Like so many good stories, it isn't about what it's About. And what it's About is abundantly clear, even if what it's about isn't.

No, I think you've got your finger on it there, Colorfinger. The Lynch/Gilliam interp I put forth mostly as a half-joking exercise. My actual feelings are much more along the lines of what I expressed earlier, and I think you capture here as well. The details, what's "true" and what isn't... none of that really matters. What matter is what's True, not what's true.

Hey, has anybody floated the idea that Boybrush isn't Guybrush's son, but rather Guybrush's troubled orphan kid self, and in passing his wisdom on to his "son," he's healing himself? I'm off to bed, but... that 🙂

Come to think of it, I suspect anybody who grew up on Terry Gilliam is primed and READY for this kind of ending 😄