Return to Monkey Island

[Toymafia88]

Wally mentioned he had been in therapy for 'years' after the events of mi2 which means this part of the game has to take place after Curse and maybe Escape and Tales. 

 

Wally mentions getting over blowing up. I'm surprised they didn't add nearly drowning or being told he's a failure as a pirate in Curse or some reference to Curse. All the references seemed more focused on mi2.

 

I get the impression they will avoid making references to non Gilbert games but obviously dodge contradicting them.

 

But then again Morgan is in the scrapbook and Murray is in the game.

Edited August 16, 2022 by Toymafia88

[OzzieMonkey]

I just paused the clip before Wally sees Guybrush and it looks like his arms are bleeding! Maybe he suffered burns after the fortress explosion.

[BillyCheers]

I always interpreted the whole “canon” thing by Ron/Dave, that they will add stuff from the other games as they like (e.g. Murray), but that it doesn’t mean that everything will be acknowledged.
 

Therefore I don’t think, that anything from CMI to Tales (story wise) will make it in ReMI. And I don’t think we’ll be able to put the game (or parts of the game) before or after one of the sequels acter MI2. Many things point in that direction, too, in my opinion, for example the monkey head on Monkey Island. 

(But maybe it’s also just my hope, that leads me to that conclusion. 😅)

[AndywinXp]

18 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

Stray observations

• This voice doesn't sound quite the same as either the CMI voice OR the one he did for MI2SE. Sounds a bit older, to me. Deliberate, perhaps? Hard to say. 

 

Neil Ross is 77 years old, he was 65 during the Special Edition, and he was 50 when he did COMI. I wouldn't say that the older tone is deliberate 😛 

[BaronGrackle]

5 hours ago, Marius said:

In the new clip, Guybrush says:

“I’m putting together an expedition... I mean, raiding party.”

That gives me strong LeChuck’s Revenge Guybrush vibes. He’s still a bit insecure about his image.

Funny enough, that line made me think of Escape. Not in a bad way... but in how he was assembling a crew to meet with lawyers, but he could lie that they were going to raid fishing villages.

[Vainamoinen]

26 minutes ago, OzzieMonkey said:

I just paused the clip before Wally sees Guybrush and it looks like his arms are bleeding! Maybe he suffered burns after the fortress explosion.

 

That's the thing with Rex' art direction, it's probably wide open to interpretation. YOU DECIDE. Which is actually great for fan art!

 

Maybe it's burn marks, maybe he's bleeding from spinning that globe too much, maybe he did what I do all the time these days, resting my arms on the table while painting and accidentally soiling everything with the paint.

 

Personally, I will cling to the theory that he has gigantic compass needles tattooed on his forearms. It all makes sense.

[Thrik]

7 hours ago, LowLevel said:

* How do people do that? Where can I find the documentation for this text editor? Can I use MarkDown? Why don't they change the CMS and do a major overhaul of the entire website rewriting everything in C64 BASIC? 😐

You get a much fuller set of buttons on a desktop size screen, however I believe the forum supports most classic BBCode. You can wrap things like b and spoiler in [square brackets].

[BillyCheers]

I don't know if it makes sense, but....

What if at the end of MI2 Guybrush was just taken back in time by LeChuck (to a real past he had only forgotten) and at the beginning of ReMI we see his whole life fast forwarded - to the point where they are in the tunnels. There we have to stop LeChuck from taking him back to the past again, so that Guybrush doesn't get stuck in a time loop. And then, after he brakes out, we get a big time jump and the new story begins.

[KestrelPi]

32 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

 

That's the thing with Rex' art direction, it's probably wide open to interpretation. YOU DECIDE. Which is actually great for fan art!

 

Maybe it's burn marks, maybe he's bleeding from spinning that globe too much, maybe he did what I do all the time these days, resting my arms on the table while painting and accidentally soiling everything with the paint.

 

Personally, I will cling to the theory that he has gigantic compass needles tattooed on his forearms. It all makes sense.

Yeah, looking at it closely I'm not sure those are red marks, looks like they could be black splotches. Ink splotches make sense.

[Toymafia88]

2 hours ago, BillyCheers said:

I don't know if it makes sense, but....

What if at the end of MI2 Guybrush was just taken back in time by LeChuck (to a real past he had only forgotten) and at the beginning of ReMI we see his whole life fast forwarded - to the point where they are in the tunnels. There we have to stop LeChuck from taking him back to the past again, so that Guybrush doesn't get stuck in a time loop. And then, after he brakes out, we get a big time jump and the new story begins.

That sounds insane but i'd be so down for time travel in mi.

[BillyCheers]

1 minute ago, Toymafia88 said:

That sounds insane but i'd be so down for time travel in mi.

I think it all depends on how it’s done. But it could be a really interesting element.

 

I’m not so fond of the idea of multiverses though. Either they should implement all games or not, but they shouldn’t  try to please everybody that way to explain inconsistencies…

[demone]

I think the best way to handle the whole canon thing is to essentially just go with the flow. Not everything needs to be referenced and Ron and Dave have been pretty upfront about not letting their canon guidelines be so stringent that they have to go out of their way to make everything consistent.  

[BaronGrackle]

With the Warcraft franchise, the thing I tended to say was: Every piece of media is a different version of canon. Each game or book will recount past games and books differently. The Second War in Warcraft II is a different continuity than the Second War according to Warcraft III, or the Second War according to its later novel, or the Second War according to the current version of World of Warcraft.

 

I originally meant it as a half joke, but it kind of holds true for any franchise with a loose canon.

 

Even within Gilbert canon Monkey Island. Is the Voodoo Lady lying in MI2 when she says she helped Guybrush make root beer (she did no such thing in MI1)? Is Guybrush stretching things in MI2 when he tells the Men of Fiber they tried to sell him PTA minutes as a map in the last game (they joked about it but revealed their joke before Guybrush could even respond)? When we replay MI1 and see Guybrush crash into the grog machine and get pulled out, are we to inagine that it now looks as physically damaged as it does in the MI2 tunnels (because it doesn't, not yet)?

Or, is the continuity of MI2 slightly different than the continuity of MI1, and within the story of MI2 these things actually happened?

[LowLevel]

5 hours ago, Toymafia88 said:

All the references seemed more focused on mi2.

 

True and, regardless of this specific scene, I have a hunch that the entire story is designed to fit well just after playing MI2.

 

4 hours ago, OzzieMonkey said:

I just paused the clip before Wally sees Guybrush and it looks like his arms are bleeding!

 

I think that they are ink marks, because they appear also on his apron and because I assume that his job requires working quite often with a fountain pen.

 

 

4 hours ago, BillyCheers said:

but that it doesn’t mean that everything will be acknowledged.

 

That's also my take on it. I think that the writers have found a way to make it feel a sequel to MI2, for people who wanted MI3a or at least some closure to the original Ron's idea, even if technically it isn't, so that it can be appreciated by everyone.

 

4 hours ago, Thrik said:

You get a much fuller set of buttons on a desktop size screen

 

Thanks! I was using a desktop screen but the buttons didn't show up because the page was zoomed in.

 

 About where we might have seen Terror Island:

 

Spoiler

The trailer shows a happy looking scene in a place with bunnies and other nice creatures of the woods. My speculation is that there is some joke in play, like "Skull Island".

 

 

 

3 hours ago, BillyCheers said:

What if at the end of MI2 Guybrush was just taken back in time by LeChuck

 

The thing about time travel is that in my opinion it doesn't match very well with what both Noah and Dominic told about the game.

 

They said that the way the game connects with the other ones is extremely clever. To me that didn't sound like the adoption of the usual time travel mechanic. It's a trope that is a bit overused in fantasy/scifi storytelling and not compatible with those emotional ecstatic remarks about how ingenious the writers' solution was.

 

My guess is that the solution involves simply Guybrush's memories and that scrapbook seen at the beginning of the trailer. I could speculate more:

 

Spoiler

I think that the recurring theme of a storybook would fit well with the "coming to age" theme, considering to whom storybooks are usually dedicated.

 

Edited August 16, 2022 by LowLevel

[BillyCheers]

9 minutes ago, LowLevel said:

The thing about time travel is that in my opinion it doesn't match very well with what both Noah and Dominic told about the game.

 

They said that the way the game connects with the other ones is extremely clever. To me that didn't sound like the adoption of the usual time travel mechanic. It's a trope that is a bit overused in fantasy/scifi storytelling and not compatible with those emotional ecstatic remarks about how ingenious the writers' solution was.

I wasn't talking about time travel for the whole story. Only in case of the first part at the carnival (the escape so to say). The theory would be: LeChuck brought Guybrush back in time to his childhood using voodoo, so that Guybrush would relive his live again and again from there to the underground tunnels. After that: (maybe!) a time jump and then the new game. 

Edited August 16, 2022 by BillyCheers

[Remi]

I don't know if it has been mentioned -- thread is moving fast -- but Terror Island is the name of an infamous Houdini movie from the 1920s. Without going into details, it is a... problematic... watch.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TerrorIsland-6reelversion-1922.ogv

 

Still, its notoriety might be the basis for a reference.

 

(Or it's a complete coincidence with a generic name, who knows?!)

[LowLevel]

1 hour ago, BillyCheers said:

Only in case of the first part at the carnival (the escape so to say).

 

Oh, I see... Yes, I assume that time travel or fantasies or voodoo shenanigans will be necessary to explain the younger Guybrush at the carnival.

 

If time travel is somehow involved, I personally hope it doesn't take up all the first chapter of the game; it would feel underwhelming to me.

[BillyCheers]

28 minutes ago, LowLevel said:

 

Oh, I see... Yes, I assume that time travel or fantasies or voodoo shenanigans will be necessary to explain the younger Guybrush at the carnival.

 

If time travel is somehow involved, I personally hope it doesn't take up all the first chapter of the game; it would feel underwhelming to me.

Yes! I think I am totally with you there. I don’t even know if I’d like my “theory”. 😂 

All in all it’s gonna be hard to persuade/satisfy me with the solution of the MI2 ending.

 

What I do really love though is the word “shenanigans” – how great! ❤️

[Niemandswasser]

6 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

Maybe it's burn marks, maybe he's bleeding from spinning that globe too much, maybe he did what I do all the time these days, resting my arms on the table while painting and accidentally soiling everything with the paint.

Speaking as a citizen of the gingery persuasion myself, I think there *may* be a simpler explanation for red patches on the arms of a man with Wally's hair color...

[Aro-tron]

Isn't the fact that they've brought back Neil Ross kind of a reference to MI3? Wally really only had a cameo in that game anyway...

 

In terms of time travel and multiple versions of Guybrush, etc, I am very much hoping the game doesn't self-referentially frame the other games as a kind of multiverse, or spend a lot of time revisiting the earlier games. I expect the game won't all take place in the same chronological time frame (if it is indeed starting where MI2 left off, and then jumping years ahead at some point), but I realllly don't want it to be about time travel. It's already going to be a nostalgia trip, for better or for worse.

 

The narrative of Monkey Island 2, in a lot of ways, was about the impossibility of reliving past glories - Guybrush is searching for a treasure that just seems arbitrarily bigger than his last adventure, but no one's particularly impressed by him anymore, his spark with Elaine is gone, etc. This kind of cuts against the actual experience of the game, which actually is bigger and more technologically advanced than Monkey Island 1, which gives it a nice frisson.

 

I think if the Monkey 2 really just rehashed Monkey 1 (ie you start on Melee Island and have to complete a second set of trials), it would have felt like a cynical cash-grab. Instead, we get Guybrush and the other characters call the adventure as a kind of cynical rehash, while the game itself does all kinds of new and interesting things, and it all feels kind of exciting. I think this trick of lampshading the desperation of sequels gets harder the longer the gap is between sequels for a whole bunch of reasons. The theme of longing for an idealised, simpler past is kind of funny in Monkey Island 2 because it's been like two years between the games. There hadn't really been time to get nostalgic about the first game yet, and here they were making a sequel that was chiding itself for being too nostalgic. For Return, that subtext is unavoidable.

 

I played Monkey Island 1 when I was in fourth grade, and Monkey Island 2 when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I think it affected me because they both felt slightly too 'grown up' to me at the time. Now I feel like Monkey Island 1 is kind of superficially about growing up, in that Guybrush wants to be a pirate, and doing that means meeting other people's weird expectations for what a pirate does, and learning how to navigate the rules of the pirate world. In Monkey Island 2 is more about the struggle to become mature -- Guybrush has already become a pirate, and no one cares. So he decides to become a better pirate -- but how? Compared to Monkey Island 1, a lot of the puzzles are about tricking people and bending the rules. Instead of insult sword-fighting, which you learn through repetition, you have the spitting contest, where you have to cheat in about four different ways at the same time. Monkey Island 2 tries really hard not to repeat itself, and in fact seems to be trying to caution the players from living in the past.

 

The moment at the end where you are able to inexplicably revisit the alleyway on Melee Island felt so evocative and creepy to me, I think because it wasn't just a throw-back Easter Egg, but because it ties into that theme of the impossibility of going backward. I remember feeling desperately like I wanted to go back and explore the town again and find something that would help me defeat LeChuck, and so frustrated that there was no way to do that. You had to go back into the tunnels and face him -- Monkey 2 style.

 

In that sense, I suppose the weird ending of Monkey 2 makes sense on a thematic level - if the game is about the futility of trying to recover the glory of past adventures, what's more appropriate than being shown the horror of what that means when taken to the extreme? Instead of maturing, learning and triumphing over the past, you end up regressed, infantalised, and trapped in the past.

 

(This is a digression, but: in narrative terms, I don't think that ending fires on all cylinders because elements of it feel arbitrary - it's like, are we now supposed to care about Guybrush's childhood, or who his parents are? I don't think those things are important to the character, and I will be surprised if Return dwells on those things in any substantial way. It's also an ending that doesn't feel connected to anything the player does. On a conceptual, dream-like level I think it DOES work, but as the ending to an adventure game, which is narratively driven by the actions of the player-character, it doesn't feel totally earned. You defeat LeChuck and then just kind of watch as weird things start happening.)

 

All of this is to say that I fully expect Return to deal with the past *as a concept*, but I'm hoping the story looks more to the future, and asks questions about how we can live and grow regardless of whatever past failures or triumphs we may have had...

[KestrelPi]

Like I saw someone say once, I actually don't think for the most part plot matters substantially. You can convey the most fantastic plot in a terrible way, and likewise you can enliven the blandest plot with character work and world building, and just telling it well.

 

Even the plot points I really disliked in, say, EMI (HT Marley, Ozzie Mandrill's whole... deal, etc) I feel like the game COULD have sold me on, the problem to me is less that those were the plot points and more that I don't think it did enough to bring me along for the ride (okay, I admit it would have had a hard time selling me on HT Marley but I still think it could have)

 

We already know that the core of ReMI is going to be a piratey adventure game. If they want to put some time travelly or multiversey implications around the edges of that, I'm totally down for that, all they've got to do is sell it to me. And I don't think it should be too hard to do so because IMO what's in the first two games has already set me up for something being oddly out of place/time in the setting.

 

In any case, I'm trying not to think too much along the lines of 'I hope the plot doesn't do this or that' because then when it does I'm going to be prejudiced against it, rather than just trying to take the story for what it is.

Edited August 17, 2022 by KestrelPi

[BillyCheers]

48 minutes ago, KestrelPi said:

In any case, I'm trying not to think too much along the lines of 'I hope the plot doesn't do this or that' because then when it does I'm going to be prejudiced against it, rather than just trying to take the story for what it is.

Good point! I try to do that, too. I have things that I'd prefer in the game than others, but at the same time I try to be open to be convinced on a concept. It all comes down to how it's done. 

 

For example, I wasn't very fond of revisiting Mêlée... but now that we've seen much of it, I like what I see and I'm looking forward to it, as they clearly made lots of changes and try to make it a new experience - not only a nostalgic one.

[Vainamoinen]

8 hours ago, Aro-tron said:

(This is a digression, but: in narrative terms, I don't think that ending fires on all cylinders because elements of it feel arbitrary - it's like, are we now supposed to care about Guybrush's childhood, or who his parents are? I don't think those things are important to the character, and I will be surprised if Return dwells on those things in any substantial way. It's also an ending that doesn't feel connected to anything the player does. On a conceptual, dream-like level I think it DOES work, but as the ending to an adventure game, which is narratively driven by the actions of the player-character, it doesn't feel totally earned. You defeat LeChuck and then just kind of watch as weird things start happening.)

 

3 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

Like I saw someone say once, I actually don't think for the most part plot matters substantially. You can convey the most fantastic plot in a terrible way, and likewise you can enliven the blandest plot with character work and world building, and just telling it well.

 

@Aro-tron's theory hits the nail on the head for me. And it isn't just the gameplay that's new and fresh, the narrative has this strong contrast in that the protagonist tries to rehash the first part, but fails in that respect and finds something merely personal instead.

 

I have to concede that LeChuck's Revenge didn't feel like that much of a grown up, deep storyline to me. But it did feel like a brilliant parody of intellectual/literature tropes, culminating in that final Star Wars reference, and a Star Wars reference it was. I'm not disappointed in that ending, but I understand all the disappointment it has gotten. The Devil's Playhouse's ending has deepened my understanding of this disappointment: In a parody setting of casual exaggeration, frequent fourth wall breaks and crass anachronisms, light hearted mentions of keelhauling or white slavers, it is a dangerous thing to care for your protagonist so much that you can not abide the integrity of the fictional reality to be scratched or even broken.

 

Canon inconsistencies become sacrilege, interactive story elements become difficult to accept (which is why EMI made the "Guybrush sunk the Mad Sea Monkey" timeline canon). Expectations become one-sided and specific ("Monkey Island must be a pirate story, so that means that giant monkey robots can not be canon"). The perspective of the unreliable protagonist might be interpeted as absolute truth ("TSoMI was a story of great success for Guybrush, and not a senseless goose chase that turned out to be completely superfluous because the damsel was in control all along"). What happens to the protagonist has depth and meaning, an emotional truth for us, and if that emotional truth is disrepected or used for laughs by the creators, god help them. 💀

 

We are as of right now totally in the dark about how "deep the currents are" in Return to Monkey Island. There will certainly be a bit of the personal in there, of Ron as well as Dave, and of the lives they've led. I'm pretty certain we'll have a good bit of closure in the game, it might just not be a happy ending. Unfortunately, that perfect happy ending has kind of become the standard not just in Monkey Island games, but in video games overall. Might be because developers and players confuse the feeling of success in "beating the game" with the protagonist's success in getting what she set out to do. It's a bit infantilizing, really, all these fairytale happily-ever-afters. 😄

 

Prince of Persia (2008) had one of the best endings in video game history because it was so utterly bitter, and so expected, at least if you didn't lie to yourself. Maybe they'll try something like that for Return to Monkey Island. It'll feel like an open ending although all the loose threads have been properly cauterised.

 

... I'll try to keep an open mind.

 

 

Edited August 17, 2022 by Vainamoinen

[BillyCheers]

1 hour ago, Vainamoinen said:

It's a bit infantilizing, really, all these fairytale happily-ever-afters. 😄

*cough* Red Dead Redemption 2 *cough*

 

But overall, yeah… you’re right! 🤔

[BaronGrackle]

1 hour ago, Vainamoinen said:

(which is why EMI made the "Guybrush sunk the Mad Monkey" timeline canon).

I've never heard of this thing. What's the premise?