Return to Monkey Island 🚨GAME-WIDE🚨 Spoiler Chat

[Marius]

23 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Thinking about it, there’s nothing from stopping a sequel establishing that park bench Guybrush is part of the curse of Big Whoop. Or throwing some ambiguity back into the mix. 

[BaronGrackle]

1 hour ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Thinking about it, there’s nothing from stopping a sequel establishing that park bench Guybrush is part of the curse of Big Whoop. Or throwing some ambiguity back into the mix.  

 

It would be disrespectful and insincere, but it could happen. Just thinking out loud 

Something something Part 5 is called Beneath the Monkey Head. Something something Guybrush kept going down and down and down and down but never turned to go back up, is still deep beneath the monkey head unless he chose to deny what he THOUGHT he saw. (Something something Guybrush didn't climb the ladder up and is still trapped in The Cave.) Something something in the Prelude, that door you came out of remains the "scary door". 

 

It doesn't even need to be seen as disrespectful of Return. Ron told us in that Cressup interview that it's likely he and Dave Grossman have different opinions on which ending is most accurate, and Ron doesn't want to say which one he prefers because he doesn't want it to "become canon".

If that's true, then I'm pretty comfortable in my belief that Return kept things vague and mystery-boxy on purpose, that every interpretation is plausible because all of them have evidence of being the one(s).

 

When you're replaying the end of MI2 and coming to the amusement park and LeChuck's glowing eyes and see the toy giraffe, it's equally plausible that the thing is a toy giraffe or a sleeping pirate.

Edited October 20, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[Al.DeHyde]

An idea that I don't recall being mentioned, following on from the idea that the secret of Monkey Island is a gateway to Hell.

When Guybrush steps through the code-wheel door at the end of Return he enters hs own personal Hell. One where all of his impressive adventures were nothing but imagination. Where the fantastic secret he finally managed to discover was nothing but a joke T-shirt. Where the archenemy he triumphantly defeated multiple times was nothing but an animatronic. It also fits in with the old "Guybrush goes to Hell and Stan is there" plot.

[Garystu]

I was poking around the games images with Thimblemonkey (Thanks @Didero ❤️ ) and stumbled onto this image. It's titled PickupEvidenceCU-hd.ktxbz, and shows a closeup of Guybrush's hands and a shovel on a shelf. I'm not sure where this appears in-game. And with the shovel breakdown post in the Details of RTMI thread, i'm even more confused. Where does this happen? I'll just post the image.

[BaronGrackle]

8 minutes ago, Garystu said:

I was poking around the games images with Thimblemonkey (Thanks @Didero ❤️ ) and stumbled onto this image. It's titled PickupEvidenceCU-hd.ktxbz, and shows a closeup of Guybrush's hands and a shovel on a shelf. I'm not sure where this appears in-game. And with the shovel breakdown post in the Details of RTMI thread, i'm even more confused. Where does this happen? I'll just post the image.

The Lost Shovel of Monkey Island! 🤯

[neoncolor8]

20 hours ago, Al.DeHyde said:

An idea that I don't recall being mentioned, following on from the idea that the secret of Monkey Island is a gateway to Hell.

When Guybrush steps through the code-wheel door at the end of Return he enters hs own personal Hell. One where all of his impressive adventures were nothing but imagination. Where the fantastic secret he finally managed to discover was nothing but a joke T-shirt. Where the archenemy he triumphantly defeated multiple times was nothing but an animatronic. It also fits in with the old "Guybrush goes to Hell and Stan is there" plot.

 

I think this is my canonical ending! It incorporates the theme park and the hell idea. It doesn't devalue the stories of all the games, because the secret is a real thing (gate to hell) and the fantastic pirate world is real too. The flooring inspector reality is literally hell and it's the result of finding the secret. 

It makes a lot of sense, would be cool if it was actually intended. 

 

[BaronGrackle]

26 minutes ago, neoncolor8 said:

 

I think this is my canonical ending! It incorporates the theme park and the hell idea. It doesn't devalue the stories of all the games, because the secret is a real thing (gate to hell) and the fantastic pirate world is real too. The flooring inspector reality is literally hell and it's the result of finding the secret. 

It makes a lot of sense, would be cool if it was actually intended. 

 

Nice! I'd recommend trying the ending where you go straight back the alleyway without even getting the key, and get the post-credit with Guybrush and Elaine sailing together. You can treat it as a Monkey Island 3a that starts immediately after MI2 and before MI3.
MI6 references to later MI games would be voodoo fortunetelling timey wimey.

Guybrush and Elaine sailing together would be the only part that technically happens after MI5.

Edited October 21, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[neoncolor8]

39 minutes ago, BaronGrackle said:

Nice! I'd recommend trying the ending where you go straight back the alleyway without even getting the key, and get the post-credit with Guybrush and Elaine sailing together. You can treat it as a Monkey Island 3a that starts immediately after MI2 and before MI3.
MI6 references to later MI games would be voodoo fortunetelling timey wimey.

Guybrush and Elaine sailing together would be the only part that technically happens after MI5.

I just played it. Boybrush doesn't exist in this ending? Feels delusional to choose this. I thought he'd still tell the story to his son in the end. Hmm. 

Btw the music during the credits is great, very lively, I don't recall hearing it in the game.

 

Edited October 21, 2022 by neoncolor8

[BaronGrackle]

1 hour ago, neoncolor8 said:

I just played it. Boybrush doesn't exist in this ending? Feels delusional to choose this. I thought he'd still tell the story to his son in the end. Hmm. 

Btw the music during the credits is great, very lively, I don't recall hearing it in the game.

 

That kid, what's his name? Did Guybrush and Elaine name their son "Boybrush"?

 

If you want him, you've got to turn out the lights and return to reality (also known as: live forever Beneath the Monkey Head).

Edited October 21, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[neoncolor8]

29 minutes ago, BaronGrackle said:

(also known as: live forever Beneath the Monkey Head). 

 

So you're saying, it's hell after all.

[BaronGrackle]

13 minutes ago, neoncolor8 said:

 

So you're saying, it's hell after all.

Eh, I'm just saying... Ron and Dave gave us a very definitive plaque describing Ron's original vision of the game in 1989, and they marked this as the original Secret.

 

Other than that? They gave 10 different endings and aren't telling us which one they like best, specifically so canon won't form around it.

Edited October 21, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[ThunderPeel2001]

4 hours ago, Garystu said:

I was poking around the games images with Thimblemonkey (Thanks @Didero ❤️ ) and stumbled onto this image. It's titled PickupEvidenceCU-hd.ktxbz, and shows a closeup of Guybrush's hands and a shovel on a shelf. I'm not sure where this appears in-game. And with the shovel breakdown post in the Details of RTMI thread, i'm even more confused. Where does this happen? I'll just post the image.

 

The original 5 keys looked more like this: Very different and unique. Not sure why Ron changed them to be more generic looking. 

[Wally B.]

Well, after speed-reading all of 26 pages of discussions about endings, fan-theories, disappointments, marriage, storytelling and meta-narrative, here I am.

I already gave my interpretation of the ending on another thread, but reading all of your posts, I felt like adding something to the conversation.

This ending not only gives more freedom to future creators to make other Monkey Island games and makes completely canon all the previous games, but also gives freedom to the player (us) to take every possible path we could take in the games and still count them as "canon".

To me the point isn't that we are Boybrush listening to Guybrush tell his story, we are Boybrush reenacting the story, and every little change we make is "canon", because it's just a story we are making ours.

Of course we are guided by Guybrush/the game designers, and following the major story beats, just like Boybrush does, but we can change the details without feeling that "oh, I was wrong, this isn't how it went, because a later or earlier game contradicts this".

I don't know if this is making any sense, I'm mostly rambling at this point, but I feel like it's an important point the one I'm trying to make.

As an example I can imagine a future Monkey Island game where Carla or Otis or Meathook can ask Guybrush if he remembers who brought him back from Monkey Island in the first game, and while he answers that he was Herman with his ship, they can say "it was US you idiot!" and it would work, since that's a thing that can happen in Secret, even though future games go for the Herman's ship ending.

 

In short, there is no real way the things in the Monkey Island games happened, there is only the way we decided they happened by playing the games. In an incredible moment of brilliance, the game and the developers are giving the players complete freedom of choice and interactivity with the game, not only in a gameplay sense, but in a storytelling sense.

Edited October 22, 2022 by Wally B.

[Gins]

2 hours ago, Wally B. said:

In short, there is no real way the things in the Monkey Island games happened, there is only the way we decided they happened by playing the games. In an incredible moment of brilliance, the game and the developers are giving the players complete freedom of choice and interactivity with the game, not only in a gameplay sense, but in a storytelling sense.

What I also really like about this is, that it even canonizes various fangames, e.g. The Devil's Triangle (I don't know if anybody here has played it too, or if there is even still a way to find them these days). There were some that I played and enjoyed tremendously back in the day, which try to fill in the gaps between e.g. MI1 and MI2 (how did Guybrush end up with all this money and how did he split up with Elaine?).

Hypothetically somebody, or really, multiple independent people, could make fangames with the goal of ticking all the boxes on Ron's "If I made another Monkey Island" blog post.

And all of them are kind of canonized by Return to Monkey Island, since they are all possible stories that Guybrush could have made up in the theme park, that he daydreamed about, that he told Boybrush, that Boybrush is reenacting, or that might just have actually happened, and it's up to a fan to pick and choose what stories they like best.

 

Monkey Island is no longer a series of games with a strict canon, with Return it entered the realm of mythology, where you can make up all sorts of stories featuring the Gods and explore their core personalities and interactions from so many different angles, that it doesn't matter what the canon is, you're simply using mythical characters of legend to tell a good story, or explore some scenario that nobody might have thought of before, and some fans might elevate to the status of "plausible enough to be canon" and others might simply get a good story out of it regardless.

 

What sours this a bit is that I am quite sure Disney is quite likely to crack down on such fangames than the old Lucasfilm would have been back in the day ;_;

[BaronGrackle]

4 hours ago, Gins said:

The Devil's Triangle (I don't know if anybody here has played it too

Oh yeah. I'm already reminiscing about shooting the skeleton's truck while "Flagpole Sitta" plays.

 

EDIT: No wait, that was his MI2 game...

Edited October 23, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[BaronGrackle]

You know, a little while ago I went on Reddit and said Part 5 of this game was the endgame battle between Guybrush and LeChuck.
 

As soon as Guybrush screams that he's coming, and LeChuck hears the echoes and responds by pulling levers, the two of them are in DIRECT COMMUNICATION and having a mental battle (or, puzzle battle) against each other. I said this was the climactic battle, and Guybrush won when he solved the pirate wheel and cornered LeChuck.

 

. . .

 

But then Ron Gilbert did the Cressup interview. No, there was no final battle between Guybrush and LeChuck. And apparently it was very important that there was no final battle.

 

So reddit and the steam forums can keep talking about the game ending before the climax, and I can't answer them because Ron said they were right.

 

EDIT: I guess it's just more "I don't want to believe"! 🤪

Edited October 23, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[LuigiHann]

Like so much else in the game, it is and it isn't. The reveal of the Melee Facade is decidedly and clearly deliberately a narrative anticlimax, but I agree the last string of puzzles do represent an acceptable final confrontation, even if it isn't The Final Confrontation

[Thrik]

I’d also like to add that I found LeChuck’s face each time he heard Guybrush shouting hilarious. 

[Jake]

17 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

You know, a little while ago I went on Reddit and said Part 5 of this game was the endgame battle between Guybrush and LeChuck.
 

As soon as Guybrush screams that he's coming, and LeChuck hears the echoes and responds by pulling levers, the two of them are in DIRECT COMMUNICATION and having a mental battle (or, puzzle battle) against each other. I said this was the climactic battle, and Guybrush won when he solved the pirate wheel and cornered LeChuck.

That’s a great read on it. I think it is the climax even if they don’t have a face to face fight. The two of them scrambling over a bunch of nonsense lore machinery  to try and be the first one to the secret is the correct conflict for this story imo. 

[Udvarnoky]

On 10/3/2022 at 9:06 AM, Jake said:

I think you might be projecting if you’re implying the Curse team effectively censored themselves for mass appeal, when it’s probably just that they didn’t like that stuff and didn’t want it in their game. I think the team did see themselves as artists and did feel free to create what they wanted, and it’s just very different from what you wanted. I think that team just didn’t like those surreal and mysterious themes that came to a head at the end of 2, so they chose to interpret that moment as “I hope LeChuck didn’t cast a spell on him or something” being the literal plot truth, and based their game on it.

 

Even though I like Curse a lot, it’s never been the Monkey Island 3 that I wanted, because it ignores the things you’ve been talking about (which I also love about the series), but I’m sure it’s the game they wanted to make, with the only real compromises coming from budget and scope restrictions, not creative or thematic. Personally I didn’t ever care if I got “Rons original vision” in future monkey Island games, but always wanted them to live in that exciting space where uncertainty exists, where the world feels like it’s almost projected on paper and you can see that unreality and feel like you could poke a hole through it or fall through at a moments notice, if you dig too deep. I don’t think that stuff remotely appealed to the leads on Curse, though. In that case they were the ones who were irritated at the thought of the potential head on car crash with those themes, and drove the car as far away from it as possible as the motivation for their game.  You’re probably right that it was a big contributor to its success - not necessarily because those themes are unpalatable, I think, but because their absence from the plot made Curse a soft reboot in a way, a great entry point in the series for a new era of players. 
 

Sorry my thoughts on this are kind of jumbled. It’s not something I’ve thought about enough. 

I know I’m late to this, but I think it’s an interesting area.

With regard to the CMI team’s perspective on MI2’s ambiguity: I always figured that literalizing its predecessor’s ending was more about making a judgment call not to disappoint what they perceived were the audience’s expectations (“What’s this soluble daydream hokum doing in my pirate game?”), rather than it necessarily representing a personal distaste or rejection of the innuendos Ron was making.

Skirting that stuff may have in fact been partly out of respect, with the thinking being “Only Ron can wrap up whatever it is he was driving that, so we’ll just proceed from the escape hatch we were given instead of trying to divine intentions he himself might not have mapped out.” Which, by Ron’s own admission, he in fact hadn’t.

Maybe I’m giving too much credit for forward-thinking here, but just look at the way, by intention or by accident, things worked out in the end: Ron was able to complete the statement he was making without having to pretend the other games didn’t exist. Those interim sequels successfully kept the bench warm for the creator’s eventual return -- they didn’t override Ron’s vision so much as postpone it, and it’s probably ungenerous to think this happened entirely by dumb luck. Every team brought their own tastes to the way they grappled with that shoddy seventeenth century electrical wiring, but it was grappled with.

CMI seems to have the reputation of being the Monkey Island game that steers the clearest of the meta-angle that Ron was toiling in, but I think it’s a little underappreciated in this regard. It definitely carries the torch of the first two games in terms of perpetuating that surrealistic undercurrent, the anachronism/fourth wall jokes, and the near-constant theme park evocations. Both Plunder Island and Blood Island have plenty of Disneyland nods both subtle and overt, and of course the entire final act takes place at a danged theme park. The fact is, a game that truly flouted the weirdness of the series and insisted on being a pureblood, risk-adverse pirate adventure with an inflexibly straight face would not look like CMI.

We know Ron wouldn’t have made CMI, but that game’s team was neither unconscious nor careless about recognizing the substructure going on in his games, in my opinion, and they made an earnest attempt to do that aspect justice. In the wake of Ron finally getting to have his say after thirty years, I actually find myself more impressed than ever with the ways the middle chapters walked that tricky line they were lumbered with.

[BaronGrackle]

I've said before: I think it's impressive that Curse's first menu is lazy banjo music in a swamp (https://pirates.fandom.com/wiki/Old_Man_in_the_Bayou), and its opening scene is your main character coming up to a battle between a pirate ship and a fort - while literally riding a ride cart.

 

I don't think there was hate for the theme parkness of MI2.

[Jake]

2 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

I don't think there was hate for the theme parkness of MI2

I don’t either. Curse clearly loves that it takes place in a world of pirate pastiche inspired by Pirates of the Carribean and that part of Disneyland in general. I think the split realty part was what wasn’t liked. 

[gwarek]

Hi! I’ve not posted here probably in 15+ years but it’s nice to come back and talk some MI.

 

Having finally finished the game I’m just delighted by how wonderfully well this bookends and recontextualizes all of the MI games. The themes running through it were much stronger than I expected and on a meta level it just resonated a LOT. It’s an amazing design feat that not only does RTMI feel satisfying in itself, but it also manages to kind of rescramble and reinsert a whole bunch of stuff from the previous games in a way that’s incredibly pleasing (in part because some elements are left sufficiently ambigious). My head canon is having a great time right now.

 

I do still have two reactions. By far my strongest one is that I love what it’s done on a higher level. On a lower level I guess not everything worked as well (at least not all of the time). It's not really the most important level of experience for me at this point, especially considering this game comes 13 years after the previous MI games, so I find the meta stuff delicious and accept it wholeheartedly, but I'm still thinking of the surface-level experience as well.

 

RTMI being so much about looking back reminds me why I like the stories of earlier games which weren’t quite yet as layered in meaning. I enjoyed MI1 and MI2 precisely because they were stuck deeper inside their own little worlds (and, well, I was also a kid back then). In the early games it was nice that you got to inhabit a pirate story book that, while not taking itself at all seriously, did spend quite a bit of time with character and world-building. Slowly peeling that stuff back was really fun. 

 

I enjoyed Chapters 1 and 2 the most in this regard while exploring the world and getting to know LeChuck’s crew. In Chapter 4 it felt like the islands were too obviously thematic and in service of the puzzles. A lack of story/location detail made this chapter less interesting to me. It’s a pity as structurally it was the closest to MI2’s “Four Map Pieces” which is probably my favorite MI chapter. 

 

In RTMI the reward comes a lot more from the meta-narrative aspects than what’s inside this particular glass bottle itself. I don’t think that matters too much in the end though and I’m very happy this game exists. What it has to say is ultimately far more important and rewarding. If an MI7 ever gets made (which feels hugely optional) it could decide to focus on telling more of a stand alone story, though I would hope the meta elements are still at least acknowledged or hinted at.

 

I must confess when the art style was first shown I had some doubts (I’ve been known historically to, uhh, have dumb kneejerk reactions to art styles 👀👀). It was more angular and DOTT-like than I’ve associated with MI but I very quickly warmed up to it and came to love it.

 

It’s really really nice to play an MI game again and to be so wonderfully surprised.

 

Thanks also to Dominic for doing such a wonderful job voicing Guybrush again
 

Edited November 21, 2022 by gwarek

[Remi]

3 hours ago, gwarek said:

Thanks also to Dominic for doing such a wonderful job voicing Guybrush again

 

 

You sure it was Dom? #VintageReferenceHumor

[Udvarnoky]

Did we ever get the signatures, by the way?