POLL: Now the dust has settled how do you feel about Return to Monkey Island?

[Knight Owl]

49 minutes ago, BaronGrackle said:

I don't blame anybody for hating the art-haters like myself. But for my ilk, the nightmare scenario was always that this would become "The Style".

 

That, despite everybody always saying that Monkey Island changes its art style every game, we always knew that MI1 and MI2 had similar/identical character models, that if Tales Season 2 happened it would have looked like Tales Season 1, and also that if Return is overwhelmingly well-received to the point of demanding an immediate sequel then its art will look the same.

 

Funko Pops looking like Rex. Novelty toys looking like Rex. T-shirts with images looking like Rex. A world in which the universe of Monkey Island will forever continue to look like the universe of Rex.

 

Maybe for some people, that's the dream instead of the nightmare. For those of you who have this dream, I am sorry. And this is why we wage war against each other.

I love the art style but I definitely wouldn’t want every monkey island thing to look like that forever, just like I wouldn’t want it to be pixel art or 3D forever. But i would *love* a T shirt with this style pleaaaaseeeee.

 

 

And, to be honest, the only part of the game where I felt like the vibes were *absolutely perfect* was on LeShip.

Edited October 15, 2022 by Knight Owl

[KestrelPi]

1 hour ago, BaronGrackle said:

I don't blame anybody for hating the art-haters like myself. But for my ilk, the nightmare scenario was always that this would become "The Style".

 

That, despite everybody always saying that Monkey Island changes its art style every game, we always knew that MI1 and MI2 had similar/identical character models, that if Tales Season 2 happened it would have looked like Tales Season 1, and also that if Return is overwhelmingly well-received to the point of demanding an immediate sequel then its art will look the same.

 

Funko Pops looking like Rex. Novelty toys looking like Rex. T-shirts with images looking like Rex. A world in which the universe of Monkey Island will forever continue to look like the universe of Rex.

 

Maybe for some people, that's the dream instead of the nightmare. For those of you who have this dream, I am sorry. And this is why we wage war against each other.

 

I'm not sure about... any of this.

 

I don't mind that you don't like the art, you've been fairly polite about it. I don't really totally get it, because I ended up in the same place as Dom described as finding it hard to imagine not liking it, but there's no accounting for matters of taste and sometimes that's all it is, and that's okay.

 

But I think if anything Return re-affirms the well-established precedent of Monkey Island games constantly toying with the art style:

 

"we always knew that MI1 and MI2 had similar/identical character models" okay, but quite different everything-else, and since they were made just a year apart, there was only so much that was technically achievable as far as sprite work went.

"that if Tales Season 2 happened it would have looked like Tales Season 1" okay, but we know the main driver of that would have been budget

"Return is overwhelmingly well-received to the point of demanding an immediate sequel then its art will look the same." Nobody is going to be able to demand an immediate sequel from Ron and Dave no matter how badly people wanted one, and even if they could, I think that there would be a strong chance that he'd once again want to find a new visual feel for the game, since at this point it is practically a tradition for the series.

 

I mean I say this as someone who really enjoy's Rex's take, and can be said to be biased insofar as I've met him a couple of times in person and shares some mutual friends... I would be way more interested in a MI7 with a new artist than one that does this again. It is The Way.

 

And very in keeping with the themes of RMI too. These stories don't just stay the same. They change, and they look different through the eyes of different people. RMI wants us to know this, so why would they want to make another one that looks exactly the same again?

 

 

[BaronGrackle]

At least the rabblerousers are talking about the ending nowadays. I'm fine with the ending.

[Lechuck]

 

23 hours ago, Lechuck said:

* I didn't mind the ending - I didn't see it coming, but as soon as it was revealed, it was "aha, okay, of course." I remember when Mixnmojo first posted their theory on this years ago, and it blew my mind then. In the years since, I came to accept it as the likely truth - especially with that Bill Tiller quote about the making of the first two games, and knowing about Ron's initial inspiration. So this felt a bit like Game of Thrones to me: for better or worse, we all knew who Jon Snow was before the show got there. I'd say MI2's throwing in of some doubt made it a bit more fun, and possibly even contributed to the series' iconic status. Sometimes unanswered questions are just more fun to chew on. Maybe it was something that should never have been definitively resolved?

 

 

Mulling on this further... I know Ron's said that Guybrush sitting on the bench at the end is channeling how he feels, and there's a genuine sadness to it. A weight has been lifted after all these years, but at what cost? Guybrush can't go and start the next adventure with Elaine because the magic is gone.

 

I'll be interested to see if Ron does come back to make more, where he goes from here, because despite what people have said, there was a pretty clear finality to that ending. How can there be any more suspension of disbelief now?

 

 

Edited October 16, 2022 by Lechuck

[ThunderPeel2001]

9 hours ago, Lechuck said:

How can there be any more suspension of disbelief now?

 

It's an interesting question. Does the ending sour playing a game like Curse? I guess I'll find out the next time I try...

[Lagomorph01]

Thinking back on the ending and the reveal of the secret I agree with Ron wholeheartedly, "the secret is better left a secret". Which is why I'm a bit surprised by the fact he decided to reveal it anyway. For me, in retrospect, it totally ruïns the suspension of disbelief. When I didn't know it was all played out in a theme park it was fun thinking about it. Now that it's been proven to be just that, it kinda sucked the fun out of it.

It's like the "it was all a dream" ending some tv shows used to do when they wrote themselves in a ditch. You come back from the experience thinking "why did I go through this if it didn't mean anything?". Except that it smudges that feeling across the entire series.

 

If you listen to David Lynch talk about the original mystery of Twin Peaks, he describes it as a goose that lays these golden eggs. As long as you feed it, it will continue to give you riches, but if you kill it (by revealing the mystery) you have nothing left. (I'm paraphrasing.)

That's the kind of feeling I get from the ending of RtMI. The goose is dead and everything I've lived through for 30 years has been a lie. The questions the ending raises sadly aren't enough for me to go back to the mystery. I dunno, maybe it's all to fresh in my mind now and I'll have different thoughts about it in a while. But at the moment, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

 

[OzzieMonkey]

32 minutes ago, Lagomorph01 said:

Thinking back on the ending and the reveal of the secret I agree with Ron wholeheartedly, "the secret is better left a secret". Which is why I'm a bit surprised by the fact he decided to reveal it anyway. For me, in retrospect, it totally ruïns the suspension of disbelief. When I didn't know it was all played out in a theme park it was fun thinking about it. Now that it's been proven to be just that, it kinda sucked the fun out of it.

It's like the "it was all a dream" ending some tv shows used to do when they wrote themselves in a ditch. You come back from the experience thinking "why did I go through this if it didn't mean anything?". Except that it smudges that feeling across the entire series.

 

If you listen to David Lynch talk about the original mystery of Twin Peaks, he describes it as a goose that lays these golden eggs. As long as you feed it, it will continue to give you riches, but if you kill it (by revealing the mystery) you have nothing left. (I'm paraphrasing.)

That's the kind of feeling I get from the ending of RtMI. The goose is dead and everything I've lived through for 30 years has been a lie. The questions the ending raises sadly aren't enough for me to go back to the mystery. I dunno, maybe it's all to fresh in my mind now and I'll have different thoughts about it in a while. But at the moment, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

 

I relate to what you're saying, because what I said earlier in this thread was very close to what you're feeling atm. What I came around to is, the game is deliberately making reality and fiction blurred and ultimately putting the decision into your hands as to what is real and what isn't. For me, yes, the world of Monkey Island is a theme park, but I don't really side with the more bleak interpretation that Guybrush is hallucinating, suffering a psychosis, etc. I prefer to think of the Monkey Island world, both the theme park, and the outside world where Boybrush plays with his friends, as a place where anything becomes possible. In the case of the theme park, it's magical, and all those animatronics come to life as long as they continue to live inside the park.That's why LeChuck and Lila cease to be real people once they go through the door to the Secret. That is ultimately the true triumph Guybrush has and forever will have over LeChuck; he is fated to be contained within the park and never live outside while Guybrush can leave with Elaine, have a family, and share stories of his adventures. When seen through this lense, not only does the Secret not really matter to the overall experience, but neither does dwelling over what is real and what isn't. The lines are blurred, we can all be right because there is no definitive answer, and we can keep talking about it forever.  The next game is now free to be a simple pirate adventure unburdened by the Secret and no longer beholden to any true vision.

 

Ron I think has surrendered the series to us and to the people who kept the series alive in his absence. To me, not only could Guybrush be us now and Boybrush be us when we first played the series, but from another viewpoint Guybrush is Ron and Boybrush is every other dev who has worked on the series; Ackley, Ahern, Stemmle, Clarke, Jake, whoever comes next, taking the original story and adding their own spin, like the kids playing out the adventures. Looked at like that, it only makes the series more beautiful and rewarding to go back to. I totally get it if you still feel the same  way after reading this, but this is just my two cents as someone who was in a very similar positon upon seeing the ending for the first time.  

[Gins]

To @Lagomorph01 and others who say they cannot suspend their disbelief after playing Return, I want to say I understand. Yet, not all hope is lost.

 

Do you remember the first time you consciously realized that movies, books or even cartoons are not real, likely as a kid? Yet you probably still play games, watch movies and read books.

 

The world of Monkey Island was clearly never real to begin with. They were video games that many people worked on, not the accounts of a historical pirate.

 

The classic "it was all a dream" lazy ending often comes out of thin air because the writers really ran out of time and energy, but in Ron's games (also outside of MI) this layer to reality has always been hinted at from the first game, to the degree that it is even subconsciously in the DNA of the Non-Gilbert games, e.g. with the theme park references in Tales mentioned by @Jake. For Monkey Island this didn't come out of nowhere, it was the inevitable conclusion since 1989.

 

You can still be disappointed of course, e.g. because you simply didn't like the idea or how it played out.

 

But if you truly want to like these games, but are worried that you can't suspend your disbelief anymore, I guarantee you, you will be able to again, the same way as you can still do it for all sorts of other fictional works you already consume.

 

All you need is a shift of perspective. Turn your head like this and squint. And the duck will look like a skull again.

[BaronGrackle]

3 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

Thinking back on the ending and the reveal of the secret I agree with Ron wholeheartedly, "the secret is better left a secret". Which is why I'm a bit surprised by the fact he decided to reveal it anyway. For me, in retrospect, it totally ruïns the suspension of disbelief. When I didn't know it was all played out in a theme park it was fun thinking about it. Now that it's been proven to be just that, it kinda sucked the fun out of it.

It's like the "it was all a dream" ending some tv shows used to do when they wrote themselves in a ditch. You come back from the experience thinking "why did I go through this if it didn't mean anything?". Except that it smudges that feeling across the entire series.

 

If you listen to David Lynch talk about the original mystery of Twin Peaks, he describes it as a goose that lays these golden eggs. As long as you feed it, it will continue to give you riches, but if you kill it (by revealing the mystery) you have nothing left. (I'm paraphrasing.)

That's the kind of feeling I get from the ending of RtMI. The goose is dead and everything I've lived through for 30 years has been a lie. The questions the ending raises sadly aren't enough for me to go back to the mystery. I dunno, maybe it's all to fresh in my mind now and I'll have different thoughts about it in a while. But at the moment, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

 

For me, it helps to think of the Plaque as "this was my original idea" (or, if you're a Mutiny Conspiracist like me, "this was one of my original ideas"). But Ron has said repeatedly that this franchise has shifted over time.

 

I think it's easiest to imagine that all Monkey Island continuities are equally valid, and that's probably what the initial setup in the Prelude (the "is that real" parrot, and the introduction of multiple unreliable narrators for every story we've known) and the existence of multiple endings is veering us toward.

[Lagomorph01]

1 hour ago, Gins said:

The classic "it was all a dream" lazy ending often comes out of thin air because the writers really ran out of time and energy, but in Ron's games (also outside of MI) this layer to reality has always been hinted at from the first game, to the degree that it is even subconsciously in the DNA of the Non-Gilbert games, e.g. with the theme park references in Tales mentioned by @Jake. For Monkey Island this didn't come out of nowhere, it was the inevitable conclusion since 1989.

I know this was always Ron's intention, I just don't think he should've revealed it to be (in an ugly word) "canon". I know TV shows, movies and games are made by writers, directors, actors etc., I just don't want them to acknowledge that the world is fictional. At least not as definitively as RtMI now has. I like how Monkey Island on more than one occasion has been compared to Twin Peaks, because it was exactly that! The difference is that David Lynch never puts his cards on the table (except when forced to, see Twin Peaks season 2). By giving away the mystery of what made Monkey Island special, the whole thing is reduced to "it was all a dream". All those Islands, people and treasures were just theme parks, animatronic's and merchandise...

Monkey Island has always walked a very thin line by hinting at this, but not throwing it in your face. And the brilliance of it was that, even with Ron not helming some of the sequels, the writers kept those hints intact without even knowing it. Now that the cat's out of the bag... there is no mystery anymore. I don't care if Guybrush is a delusional orphan or if Elaine is suffering a mental brakedown hunting for limes, just like I didn't care for James leaving Twin Peaks or Cooper hunting for Windom Earle. Everything was held down by one secret, and now it's gone. The goose is dead.

 

The ending is a work of beauty, and my reaction to it was very personal. It just destroyed the whole world that was build upon it with it. And to me, right now, that just feels like too high a price to pay.

 

_{(The interesting thing is that I completed the game about 2 weeks ago, and that my stance on it is still changing a little bit every day. I guess that shows how brilliant the writing really is... So maybe I'll change my mind about what it has caused too. Right now however, I'm just saddened by it.)}

[BaronGrackle]

43 minutes ago, Lagomorph01 said:

And the brilliance of it was that, even with Ron not helming some of the sequels, the writers kept those hints intact without even knowing it.

To be fair, we've seen evidence in comments/interviews from designers that they were trying to keep this intact, even if they didn't fully understand what "this" was. We have j2ake here who's described that Tales Ch.5 purposely had amusement park elements and tried to convey that the MI universe was frayed at the edges and might come apart if explored too deeply. And as for Curse, Bill Tiller was one of the earliest voices telling us Ron's secret, so they kind of knew.
 

It can't be an accident that Curse's first menu is a lazy banjo playing in a swamp.

 

Quote

After boarding a small boat at Lafitte’s Landing on the outskirts of New Orleans, you pass an old shack with an elderly man playing a banjo on his porch. The strums of the banjo are intended to give a feeling of isolation in this remote backwater area. Soon, your boat plunges down two waterfalls – the second taking you back in time.

https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2013/04/the-magic-of-disney-parks-storytelling-pirates-of-the-caribbean/

 

Nor that the opening scene is a battle between a pirate ship and a fort, with our protagonist sailing to it in a literal ride cart.

 

Edited October 17, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[ThunderPeel2001]

8 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

If you listen to David Lynch talk about the original mystery of Twin Peaks, he describes it as a goose that lays these golden eggs. As long as you feed it, it will continue to give you riches, but if you kill it (by revealing the mystery) you have nothing left. (I'm paraphrasing.)

That's the kind of feeling I get from the ending of RtMI. The goose is dead and everything I've lived through for 30 years has been a lie. The questions the ending raises sadly aren't enough for me to go back to the mystery. I dunno, maybe it's all to fresh in my mind now and I'll have different thoughts about it in a while. But at the moment, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

 

It's fair that you feel that way (I'm still processing myself -- maybe Bill Tiller was right, and this answer sucks, or maybe I don't mind... I can't tell yet), but the David Lynch analogy is a red herring. Lynch was, of course, talking about resolving the murder of Laura Palmer. That mystery drove the whole show. It was why everyone tuned in. (Just like with LOST... and the mystery of the island.) 

 

Lynch didn't want to resolve the murder... it was an unexpectedly strong MacGuffin: the audience really responded to to it, and it made the show a cultural phenomenon. The mystery was the proverbial goose laying the golden eggs. Frost and ABC were afraid the audience would lose interest if it wasn't resolved. (I remember Frost saying he felt, "Cooper will slowly becomes the world's worst detective if he can't solve this thing", or something like that... although he later felt they'd made a mistake.)

 

By comparison, the "Secret" of Monkey Island was not what drove the whole series. Probably most people (myself included) felt the "secret" was nothing more than a cool title and/or the fact that LeChuck had found a portal to hell under it. So NOT revealing the secret wasn't exactly keeping the series alive...

 

However, despite this, I agree with you that the reveal has changed something about the series as a whole.

 

I wonder what Tim Schafer thinks. If Tiller is right, he was part of the contingent who didn't want the secret revealed at the end of the first game... and he's been conspicuously quiet considering a bunch of people he's close to worked on ReMI.

[BaronGrackle]

Is it a toy giraffe, or is it a sleeping pirate?  Or both? Or neither?

[Knight Owl]

To me, I feel like part of what made the years of speculation so fun was knowing that there *was* an answer somewhere that could be revealed one day. And now that it has, I feel a really nice sense of closure. And I’m glad the game still gives us more to speculate about.

 

I’d argue that the game is *not* saying that it’s better not to know the secret; if it was, I don’t think they would have revealed it. I think it’s saying that that there’s fun in not knowing, but that, if you do want to know, you need to prepare yourself for the reality that it might not be very exciting- but that, nonetheless, it can feel good just to finally find out. Hence why Guybrush says “I’ll need to think about [whether it was worth it]”, not that it definitively was or wasn’t worth it.

Edited October 17, 2022 by Knight Owl

[Lagomorph01]

13 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

…but the David Lynch analogy is a red herring. Lynch was, of course, talking about resolving the murder of Laura Palmer. That mystery drove the whole show. It was why everyone tuned in. (Just like with LOST... and the mystery of the island.) 

I understand that it’s not the same thing, because multiple games haven’t even touched upon the secret. I do think, being what it was, the secret retroactively was a goose with golden eggs. Without knowing it, it gives room for all these adventures, while knowing it makes it an “it was all a dream” sort of desillusion. Either way you look at it, it’s gone now, every new game will be reduced to “Guybrush is making up another story”, and every old game will also bear this mark.

The way I look at it at this moment, the secret was worth much more as a secret than it is now. Somehow the treasure of Big Whoop, a pirate curse, the Pox and even the Ultimate Insult to me are more interesting than a guy on a bench being an unreliable narrator.

[BaronGrackle]

Asking not sarcastically: for those of you who feel eager for a sequel, would you envision a similar structure with Guybrush and Boybrush storytelling? Would you stay in a pirate world, but with indications that LeChuck doesn't really exist and Stan set it all up again? Or is it best to just stick to the top layer of a new story, and allow players to understand the rest without addressing it again..?

 

EDIT: For years, I never felt like "the Secret" was a real thing. So it's weird to read about the Secret being stronger before we knew what it was, and being less of a thing now that we know what it is (something Return itself carries as a theme).

I feel like it's the opposite: now that we know the Secret has a "definitive" answer (which I don't necessarily agree is true, because Mutiny on Monkey Island, etc. etc.), it feels like The Secret has more power/importance over the Monkey Island universe than it ever had before.

Edited October 18, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[Lagomorph01]

18 minutes ago, BaronGrackle said:

Asking not sarcastically: for those of you who feel eager for a sequel, would you envision a similar structure with Guybrush and Boybrush storytelling? Would you stay in a pirate world, but with indications that LeChuck doesn't really exist and Stan set it all up again?

As you might expect from my above comments, right now I’m not too eager for a sequel. But if they did, I’d rather like it not to have this narrative structure. It’s very specific for this game and especially the beautiful ending it sets up.

 

I don’t know, I think we can’t go back (there’s the Twin Peaks link again) to a plain old pirate adventure with modern day elements. A next Monkey Island game would have to do something drastically different, like hopping between fantasy and reality. Maybe a kind of Day of the Tentacle like mechanic where altering something in Guybrush’s fantasy will change something in reality.

[BaronGrackle]

1 hour ago, Lagomorph01 said:

As you might expect from my above comments, right now I’m not too eager for a sequel. But if they did, I’d rather like it not to have this narrative structure. It’s very specific for this game and especially the beautiful ending it sets up.

 

I don’t know, I think we can’t go back (there’s the Twin Peaks link again) to a plain old pirate adventure with modern day elements. A next Monkey Island game would have to do something drastically different, like hopping between fantasy and reality. Maybe a kind of Day of the Tentacle like mechanic where altering something in Guybrush’s fantasy will change something in reality.

I've loudly said negative things about this game, but when I consider everything I like about Return? When I think about what Return seems to be saying... how in that Cressup interview, Ron Gilbert says that Guybrush had to WALK AWAY from a final climax against LeChuck (a climax all the other games had), because if he fought LeChuck again it would just be Guybrush stuck in the same pattern, again and again, trapped for eternity? (I'm paraphrasing here, but I think the actual quote is along these lines. The theme in The Cave is very similar.)

 

When I think about the ending moments of Guybrush turning out the lights - with Ron saying in that interview that they deliberately went with Guybrush turning out the lights instead of Stan - and then sitting on the bench quietly?

 

It's kind of beautiful as an ending.

 

EDIT: But yes, Ron himself has said repeatedly that there is definitely room for sequels, and he'd be surprised if there aren't any. That is part of the full picture.

Edited October 18, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[KestrelPi]

1 hour ago, BaronGrackle said:

I've loudly said negative things about this game, but when I consider everything I like about Return? When I think about what Return seems to be saying... how in that Cressup interview, Ron Gilbert says that Guybrush had to WALK AWAY from a final climax against LeChuck (a climax all the other games had), because if he fought LeChuck again it would just be Guybrush stuck in the same pattern, again and again, trapped for eternity? (I'm paraphrasing here, but I think the actual quote is along these lines. The theme in The Cave is very similar.)

 

When I think about the ending moments of Guybrush turning out the lights - with Ron saying in that interview that they deliberately went with Guybrush turning out the lights instead of Stan - and then sitting on the bench quietly?

 

It's kind of beautiful as an ending.

 

EDIT: But yes, Ron himself has said repeatedly that there is definitely room for sequels, and he'd be surprised if there aren't any. That is part of the full picture.

 

The way i see it is that it's a good cap off to the series no matter what, but there's plenty of room for other stories happening at different times. Revisiting what Dave said about it in interviews, it was something like "At some point it's going to be hard to put numbers on these games and in a way it might not be important" which was really to me the biggest clue that the game was going to do something structurally interesting like this.

 

I think it can be the 'end' of the Monkey Island series, and it makes a lot of sense to be that as it provides the necessary emotional closure for ... what the value of stories told in this world is. But it can be that and also not The Last Game In The Monkey Island Series To Be Made

[MST_sansfronteires]

RtMI... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 

speaking as a first-timer here so no attacks, threats, "houlier-than-thou" attitudes, "you just don't understand" attitudes or other bad stuff thrown out against my person please. i will resist them if necessary. thanks in advance.

 

i played it once, all the way to the end. tried to replay it and gave up about 30 minutes. here's why.

 

art style was the best thing that happened to the game, best way to explain it would be that whenever i think of it i can just about picture an Dolores fanart by Rex Crowle, that's how good the game looks.

 

the rest isn't so nice though, there is some humour here for sure but the best part of it is mostly at the beginning of the game though. not as bad as i'm making it out to be but my LOL moments were fairly rare as far as i can remember.

the "hint book" i feel was just there to make up for how obtuse the game was and holy shit it really was that. i had to rely on that book like there was no tomorrow. and that's on casual mode.

 

oh and the game's KB+M control scheme is so horrifyingly bad it shudders me to even think about it. i never play PC games with a full-fledged controller, for one. double-clicking one too many times so Guybrush can just move fast to some other spot has to be one of the worst game design choices you can ever go for when making a game like this. how did they think this was a good idea is beyond me. but hey, it's 60FPS on my machine so i guess it makes up for all the other shit i had to endure with this kind of bad controls, right? no? awwwwwwwwwww.

 

characters are great, very memorable but with a few exceptions they barely left an impact on me as a person. most of the cast, with, again, a few exceptions, feel very shallow. so shallow in fact that the number of characters who aren't sidelined to shit (Captain Trent in particular), have more complex characterization in this game than any other (LeChuck's crew in particular), and do more than just exist can be counted in one hand.

 

oh and there's that thegamer article that laments how Elaine was handled in RtMI, as well as another article made by two people about whether what grumpygamer said in the interview changes everything about the monkey island franchise to the detriment of its fanbase and the franchise itself. strong arguments are everywhere in these articles. says a lot about how the entire game was written tbh. taking it's audience's suspension of disbelief like a plaything. ugh.

 

ending was actually perfect for this kind of story as it pretty much explained every single issue i had with the game but didn't notice it until after the fact. after the fact meaning the aforementioned interview on youtube where grumpygamer just spills the beans about a bunch of stuff like it's nothing.

 

so, played it once, will never play it again. ever. i've had enough of this crap.

Edited October 18, 2022 by MST_sansfronteires

[Knight Owl]

1 hour ago, MST_sansfronteires said:

 

oh and the game's KB+M control scheme is so horrifyingly bad it shudders me to even think about it. i never play PC games with a full-fledged controller, for one. double-clicking one too many times so Guybrush can just move fast to some other spot has to be one of the worst game design choices you can ever go for when making a game like this. how did they think this was a good idea is beyond me. but hey, it's 60FPS on my machine so i guess it makes up for all the other shit i had to endure with this kind of bad controls, right? no? awwwwwwwwwww.

FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONED THIS. I love this game and I got used to it after a while but man this game feels so much less responsive than literally any other point and click adventure, purely because each click only registers *after* you let go of the mouse button, and you can’t hold it down to keep moving in a direction. It’s a good thing the controller controls are surprisingly fantastic. I don’t see how anyone could speedrun this game with mouse and keyboard with how much smoother the controller works; did you know you can free roam and run on the map screens with a controller, rather than being stuck to the path? It takes like less than half the time to traverse.

 

1 hour ago, MST_sansfronteires said:

 

the "hint book" i feel was just there to make up for how obtuse the game was and holy shit it really was that. i had to rely on that book like there was no tomorrow. and that's on casual mode.

I generally would agree with the rest of your critiques (although for me they didn’t bring the experience down much), but this is the one thing that I definitely never felt while playing the game. I replayed MI2 right before this one, and wow that game’s solutions are so ridiculous that I couldn’t get through it without hints. This one on the other hand, I felt like all the solutions were pretty reasonable, and the puzzles well designed, if not particularly complex. I managed to not use the hint book at all on my hard mode play through. I’ve heard some even say that the game was too easy compared to previous games. 

 

That said, I respect your opinions about it; I know how much puzzles feeling annoying can bring down the experience.

[MST_sansfronteires]

33 minutes ago, Knight Owl said:

FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE MENTIONED THIS.

guess i'm the first one to say it out loud, then! or second. you never know for sure.

 

33 minutes ago, Knight Owl said:

It takes like less than half the time to traverse.

well, in any other game any kind of movement are relegated to keyboard buttons when it comes to the player... playing... the game in KB+M setup. it would usually be responsive (very responsive) or something. but for RtMI however that's apparently unacceptable! click on some spot to walk to it, click and hold on some other spot to run toward it! and wait until the character is done moving/running to some other spot you dictate he should go to. any game that does this and to my blacklist it goes. just pretend it exists, ok?

 

33 minutes ago, Knight Owl said:

That said, I respect your opinions about it; I know how much puzzles feeling annoying can bring down the experience.

now, i will admit that some puzzles are actually rather easy if you know what you're doing. but instances where i sucessfully solved a puzzle by myself without help from the hint book were not that common actually. i mean, i just want to get on with the game, not to think about what to do next while doing so.

Edited October 18, 2022 by MST_sansfronteires

[BaronGrackle]

1 hour ago, MST_sansfronteires said:

now, i will admit that some puzzles are actually rather easy if you know what you're doing. but instances where i sucessfully solved a puzzle by myself without help from the hint book were not that common actually. i mean, i just want to get on with the game, not to think about what to do next while doing so.

So this is pretty interesting, because your experience with the game's difficulty registers as a positive with my brain. A lot of feedback has been that Return's puzzles were too easy, but some of that criticism is tempered withcthe knowledge that most of us might just be too used to adventure game puzzles. Your story indicates that might be the case.

 

Puzzles that make you stop and think, combined with that Hint Book you used so often because you "just want to get on with the game", seem like they were working effectively!

Edited October 18, 2022 by BaronGrackle

[ThunderPeel2001]

10 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

I understand that it’s not the same thing, because multiple games haven’t even touched upon the secret. I do think, being what it was, the secret retroactively was a goose with golden eggs. Without knowing it, it gives room for all these adventures, while knowing it makes it an “it was all a dream” sort of desillusion. Either way you look at it, it’s gone now, every new game will be reduced to “Guybrush is making up another story”, and every old game will also bear this mark.

The way I look at it at this moment, the secret was worth much more as a secret than it is now. Somehow the treasure of Big Whoop, a pirate curse, the Pox and even the Ultimate Insult to me are more interesting than a guy on a bench being an unreliable narrator.

 

Yep, I get you. I'm feeling something similar.

 

6 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

Asking not sarcastically: for those of you who feel eager for a sequel, would you envision a similar structure with Guybrush and Boybrush storytelling? Would you stay in a pirate world, but with indications that LeChuck doesn't really exist and Stan set it all up again? Or is it best to just stick to the top layer of a new story, and allow players to understand the rest without addressing it again..?

 

I'm not eager for a sequel, per se, but I'd like to just go back to what we had before: A hyper-realised pirate world with voodoo, crazy islands and zombie pirates in it. Basically I'd rather be in the world of On Stranger Tides than sat on a park bench feeling old. (I can do that all by myself already.)

 

Edited October 18, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[BaronGrackle]

2 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

 

Yep, I get you. I'm feeling something similar.

 

 

I'm not eager for a sequel, per se, but I'd like to just go back to what we had before: A hyper-realised pirate world with voodoo, crazy islands and zombie pirates in it. Basically I'd rather be in the world of On Stranger Tides than sat on a park bench feeling old. (I can do that all by myself already.)

 

You probably already read Ron's post about On Stranger Tides, but it's still a good read.

 

https://grumpygamer.com/on_stranger_tides

I was sorting through some boxes today and I came across my copy of Tim Power's On Stranger Tides, which I read in the late 80's and was the inspiration for Monkey Island. Some people believe the inspiration for Monkey Island came from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride - probably because I said it several times during interviews - but that was really just for the ambiance. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were -plagiarized- derived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game.

 

Maybe it's naive of me. But between this and the Mutiny document, I like to think that there's a tiny fragment... a tiny spark... a tiniest little piece of The Secret of Monkey Island's pirate world that was conceived as being just as real as Maniac Mansion, just as real as Indy 3, just as real as On Stranger Tides.

 

Not that Ron is lying or misremembering the original Secret, but that there were proto-ideas in play that weren't related to children in amusement parks, ideas that were authentically related to a straight-up pirate adventure comedy... both from Ron and also from Dave and Tim.

 

And that speck of reality is in the DNA of the Monkey Island story, whether consciously or subconsciously from the designers.

 

Then I get to tilt my head back and laugh at the power I've given to the "real" worlds of Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones, and On Stranger Tides.