So, Return to Monkey Island came out, and I figured I ought to play it, right? But also I thought, hey, why not replay the other Monkey Island games first? It's been quite a while. And I'd never played Tales of Monkey Island at all. (Or played the Special Editions of the first two.)
So, I did that! Mostly. I didn't really want to boot into Windows for this, so it was a question of which games I could get working under WINE. The special editions of the first two worked with a bit of adjustment, and the third worked with no problems. (Unfortunately The Secret of Monkey Island suffered from nasty audio glitches which could make it painful to listen to; Monkey Island 2 also had this a little, but uncommonly enough that it wasn't a big problem.) Escape From Monkey Island, however, didn't work at all, so I ended up skipping it. Tales of Monkey Island worked fine for the first three episodes, but in episode 4 I hit a crash. I skipped ahead to episode 5, but, *that* hit a crash too. So I gave up on that game, which, well, I wasn't really having much of a good time with anyway by that point.
(Return to Monkey Island I played on Switch instead, so this wasn't a concern for that one.)
Anyway, I wanted to record my thoughts on replaying the whole series. This is likely to be a bit disjointed.
1. Monkey Island 2 is better than I remembered, Monkey Island 3 is worse
The first Monkey Island game I played as a kid was The Curse of Monkey Island. I thought it was pretty great! At some point later I went back and played the first two and didn't like them very much. But I think a lot of that was really just down to the lack of voice acting -- the voice acting really helps. On replaying the games, Monkey Island 2 is much better than I remembered, and I think has to be my favorite of the bunch.
By contrast, The Curse of Monkey Island is fine, but when it comes to the actual puzzles, it's mostly your standard adventure-game lock-and-key style puzzles. (Return to Monkey Island also has this problem.) The one standout puzzle, I think, was how to get the gold tooth out of the chicken shop. But... that's kind of it.
2. The games work much better when they give you multiple things to do at once, and worse when you have to do things in a linear sequence
When you only have one thing to do, at least if you're me, you're more tempted to turn to hints when you get stuck. As opposed to when you have multiple things to do, you wander around, seeing if you can find any way to make progress on any of them. When you only have one thing to do it's easier to go into tunnel vision and miss things.
This was actually a big problem I had with the early parts of Return to Monkey Island -- for quite a while, the game is really linear; it only opens up in the later parts.
Speaking of which -- one of the really good things that both MI2 and Return to Monkey Island do is having the game open up *geographically* in the later acts. In most Monkey Island games, later acts send you to somewhere *different*, and you lose access to where you were before. But in MI2 and MI6, the game instead *opens up* to let you roam over a larger area. This is distinctly better! Disappointing that the other games don't do this.
(MI2 I'd say does this better, because there are things you encounter in the first act that simply *aren't relevant* then, but *become* relevant once the game opens up. I don't think that really happens in MI6?)
3. The problem with replaying the original is that I remembered too much of it
Despite having played it only once and so long ago, I remembered basically all of the major puzzles from The Secret of Monkey Island. So, uh, oops. I guess they just made them really memorable?
4. The writing in Tales of Monkey Island was really off
Oof, the writing in that game really did not feel like a Monkey Island game. Not a fan. Also, so much of the game is downbeat in tone, which just doesn't suit the series. This is one of the problems I remember having with MI4 as a kid, Monkey Island shouldn't be downbeat! Tales of Monkey Island apparently failed to learn from this.
And I mean like -- they introduce Morgan LeFlay, who I imagine might be some cool new recurring character, and then, nope, they kill her off. That really soured me on the game. I gather that at the end she maybe comes back to life or something? (I didn't finish the game, as mentioned.) Even so. And, I mean, she didn't reappear in Return to Monkey Island, so, <shrug>
And, oh geez, what did they do to the Voodoo Lady character?? I mean, OK -- her character hasn't exactly been very consistent over time. In MI1 she's a mysterious prophet who appears briefly and then vanishes; in MI2 and MI3 she's a more ordinary, matronly figure who also happens to be good at magic. (Her depiction in MI6 is somewhere inbetween.) And then in MI5 she's more back to the "mysterious prophet" angle, but... much worse. All generic "balance" mysticism. Eesh. Thought the voice performance was much worse too.
One thing I did like about the story: Setting it after a timeskip where now Guybrush Threepwood is more established. Lets us see things from a different angle. And then the introduction of Morgan LeFlay heightens that. I liked that part. (Return carried this over to some extent... and also MI2 did it as well to some extent, but less so.)
5. Not being able to tell what's interactable was a recurring problem
Since I played Return to Monkey Island on Switch, it didn't have this so much, but, man, there are ways to solve this! Like why not draw an outline over an interactable object when you hover over it, say? And make a sound too.
I particularly had problems with this in The Secret of Monkey Island; playing the special edition largely contributed here, unfortunately its graphics are rather muddy. I saw a lot of reviews calling it a bad remake. (Its interface is even clunkier than the original's.) Oh well.
6. Thoughts on how the verb system has changed over time
So, the first two games obviously had too many verbs. Later games reduced this to a reasonable number, but they sometimes went too far or didn't get it right.
Monkey Island 3's verb coin -- inspect, use/push, and, uh, talk/bite -- works OK, but the "use mouth on verb" is definitely an odd bundle. The game contains some unusual verb puzzles, like the first two games did, and I feel like they don't work as well in this context. I got stuck for a long time on how to open the corked bottle; I eventually had to look it up that, duh, you just had to bite the cork! >_> Similarly, why would I have ever thought to try pushing Cutthroat Bill?
Monkey Island 5 offers no choice of verb at all -- not even inspect vs use -- which I found quite frustrating. Did not like that.
I think the games that handled this the best were Monkey Island 2 Special Edition, and Return to Monkey Island. Return only offers two verbs, but they're all custom; this means you can't have unusual-verb puzzles, but those aren't really essential.
But Monkey Island 2 Special Edition I think gets it the best. It offers enough of a selection that you can try unusual verbs, without, like, making the number of choices ridiculous.
Btw, there's once nice thing that Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Monkey Island do that none of the others do (except possibly for Escape since I didn't replay that one), which is making a distinction between "use this item in my inventory" and "use this item in my inventory on that other thing". In MI1 and MI2 this just depends on the item and sometimes annoyingly the context (e.g. the compass in MI1); and then in MI5 inventory items can only be used on other things. But MI3 and MI6 get this right by letting you distinguish.
7. Good in-game hinting upon doing something close is a hard problem
I'm not really going to go into detail here, but, yeah, the games have varied between not doing enough of this and doing too much... it's just a hard thing to get right.
8. Most of the towns in the series feel pretty empty
Secret of Monkey Island tries to fix this by having random NPCs walking around, but it doesn't really work. The town that felt the most real to me would I think be Woodtick from Monkey Island 2 -- no, there's nobody just hanging around, but, that's because there's nowhere to hang around. Although, I'm not sure how, but in Return to Monkey Island the town on Melee Island somehow felt less empty? <shrug>
9. Further thoughts on Return to Monkey Island
If I didn't like what Tales did to the character of the Voodoo Lady, I don't like what Return did to the character of Elaine; she didn't seem like the same character at all. (I am glad that the suggestion of marital trouble between her and Guybrush turned out to be a fake-out; it was bad enough how much of Monkey Island 5 was about suggestions of that. I guess really I don't like what Tales of Monkey Island did with her either -- e.g., having her as a straight-up damsel-in-distress at the beginning, that shouldn't happen with Elaine; but the discrepancy in character didn't seem as drastic.)
Also, unfortunately, Jess Harnell is no Earl Boen. Not nearly as menacing. Oh well.
It's funny how the character of the change is quite different from in The Secret of Monkey Island... or at least, quite different from in the special edition! Maybe they weren't working from that. :P
Apparently the "twisty passages" bit was supposed to be an actual puzzle? Um, I just sort of got through it by accident; skipped the puzzle entirely. That's disappointing.
The lack of "I can't use with that with that" lines, in favor of a no icon, is a bit disappointing; yeah, those lines were often tiresome, but I feel like the no icon kind of encourages just brute-forcing your inventory on things.
One thing I have to note -- the whole premise of the game, and a recurring joke throughout the previous games, is that neither Guybrush, nor LeChuck, nor anyone, ever actually found out the secret of Monkey Island, despite the first game being titled that. But, I always thought that it was implicit -- obviously, the secret of Monkey Island is the fact that there's this hellish magma area under the giant monkey head! That's a pretty good secret, right? So, the whole "we never found the secret" thing never made a lot of sense to me.
10. Further thoughts on Monkey Island 2
One thing I liked about Monkey Island 2 is that Guybrush's quest is proactive. (This is also true in Return to Monkey Island.) In most of the other games, he's essentially reactive. I feel like Guybrush in Monkey Island 2 really does feel like he's grown as a character compared to in the first game, and part of that is that he has his own, self-directed quest.
But, I do think the MI2 story had a number of problems. The ending is infamous (the whole sequence, not just the very end), of course but the story had a lot of problems beyond that -- and if you fix those, maybe you can make a better ending.
(Speaking of the ending, man that part was annoying. I get the idea was to make things tense, but it mostly just made things annoying. There has to have been a better way to do that.)
Like -- why does LeChuck have this big hideout, instead of, y'know, captaining a ship? Why does he have human followers? Actually, better question -- why is LeChuck in this game at all?
You want to know what I'd do to the story of Monkey Island 2, if it were 1991? Take LeChuck out of the game entirely. Yes, LeChuck is a great character, but he doesn't need to be in this one! He can return in a later game! This game is about Guybrush going on a proactive quest to find Big Whoop, and LeChuck is just an odd fit. Imagine if not every game had to include LeChuck!
You know what other change I'd make, skipping ahead to this hypothetical alternate-timeline Monkey Island 3? Let's not have Elaine immediately get back together with Guybrush! In the first game they get together because, idk, love at first sight or whatever -- I mean, whatever, it's fine, it's a plot device.
By the second game they've broken up because, well, Guybrush is kind of a hapless pain in the ass! And then come the third game Elaine's mooning all over him again because...?
But like, the thing here is that, as I mentioned, it seems to me that Guybrush really does grow as a character between the first game and the second. So, like, maybe in a later game they could have gotten back together after Guybrush has demonstrated that he's no longer so hapless? The timeskip before MI5 seems relevant here.
Those changes -- no LeChuck in MI2, Elaine and Guybrush don't immediately get back together in MI3 -- would obviously set the story down a pretty different path. But maybe a better one?
There's probably more I could think of to say, but, eh, I think that's enough.
-Harry
So, I did that! Mostly. I didn't really want to boot into Windows for this, so it was a question of which games I could get working under WINE. The special editions of the first two worked with a bit of adjustment, and the third worked with no problems. (Unfortunately The Secret of Monkey Island suffered from nasty audio glitches which could make it painful to listen to; Monkey Island 2 also had this a little, but uncommonly enough that it wasn't a big problem.) Escape From Monkey Island, however, didn't work at all, so I ended up skipping it. Tales of Monkey Island worked fine for the first three episodes, but in episode 4 I hit a crash. I skipped ahead to episode 5, but, *that* hit a crash too. So I gave up on that game, which, well, I wasn't really having much of a good time with anyway by that point.
(Return to Monkey Island I played on Switch instead, so this wasn't a concern for that one.)
Anyway, I wanted to record my thoughts on replaying the whole series. This is likely to be a bit disjointed.
1. Monkey Island 2 is better than I remembered, Monkey Island 3 is worse
The first Monkey Island game I played as a kid was The Curse of Monkey Island. I thought it was pretty great! At some point later I went back and played the first two and didn't like them very much. But I think a lot of that was really just down to the lack of voice acting -- the voice acting really helps. On replaying the games, Monkey Island 2 is much better than I remembered, and I think has to be my favorite of the bunch.
By contrast, The Curse of Monkey Island is fine, but when it comes to the actual puzzles, it's mostly your standard adventure-game lock-and-key style puzzles. (Return to Monkey Island also has this problem.) The one standout puzzle, I think, was how to get the gold tooth out of the chicken shop. But... that's kind of it.
2. The games work much better when they give you multiple things to do at once, and worse when you have to do things in a linear sequence
When you only have one thing to do, at least if you're me, you're more tempted to turn to hints when you get stuck. As opposed to when you have multiple things to do, you wander around, seeing if you can find any way to make progress on any of them. When you only have one thing to do it's easier to go into tunnel vision and miss things.
This was actually a big problem I had with the early parts of Return to Monkey Island -- for quite a while, the game is really linear; it only opens up in the later parts.
Speaking of which -- one of the really good things that both MI2 and Return to Monkey Island do is having the game open up *geographically* in the later acts. In most Monkey Island games, later acts send you to somewhere *different*, and you lose access to where you were before. But in MI2 and MI6, the game instead *opens up* to let you roam over a larger area. This is distinctly better! Disappointing that the other games don't do this.
(MI2 I'd say does this better, because there are things you encounter in the first act that simply *aren't relevant* then, but *become* relevant once the game opens up. I don't think that really happens in MI6?)
3. The problem with replaying the original is that I remembered too much of it
Despite having played it only once and so long ago, I remembered basically all of the major puzzles from The Secret of Monkey Island. So, uh, oops. I guess they just made them really memorable?
4. The writing in Tales of Monkey Island was really off
Oof, the writing in that game really did not feel like a Monkey Island game. Not a fan. Also, so much of the game is downbeat in tone, which just doesn't suit the series. This is one of the problems I remember having with MI4 as a kid, Monkey Island shouldn't be downbeat! Tales of Monkey Island apparently failed to learn from this.
And I mean like -- they introduce Morgan LeFlay, who I imagine might be some cool new recurring character, and then, nope, they kill her off. That really soured me on the game. I gather that at the end she maybe comes back to life or something? (I didn't finish the game, as mentioned.) Even so. And, I mean, she didn't reappear in Return to Monkey Island, so, <shrug>
And, oh geez, what did they do to the Voodoo Lady character?? I mean, OK -- her character hasn't exactly been very consistent over time. In MI1 she's a mysterious prophet who appears briefly and then vanishes; in MI2 and MI3 she's a more ordinary, matronly figure who also happens to be good at magic. (Her depiction in MI6 is somewhere inbetween.) And then in MI5 she's more back to the "mysterious prophet" angle, but... much worse. All generic "balance" mysticism. Eesh. Thought the voice performance was much worse too.
One thing I did like about the story: Setting it after a timeskip where now Guybrush Threepwood is more established. Lets us see things from a different angle. And then the introduction of Morgan LeFlay heightens that. I liked that part. (Return carried this over to some extent... and also MI2 did it as well to some extent, but less so.)
5. Not being able to tell what's interactable was a recurring problem
Since I played Return to Monkey Island on Switch, it didn't have this so much, but, man, there are ways to solve this! Like why not draw an outline over an interactable object when you hover over it, say? And make a sound too.
I particularly had problems with this in The Secret of Monkey Island; playing the special edition largely contributed here, unfortunately its graphics are rather muddy. I saw a lot of reviews calling it a bad remake. (Its interface is even clunkier than the original's.) Oh well.
6. Thoughts on how the verb system has changed over time
So, the first two games obviously had too many verbs. Later games reduced this to a reasonable number, but they sometimes went too far or didn't get it right.
Monkey Island 3's verb coin -- inspect, use/push, and, uh, talk/bite -- works OK, but the "use mouth on verb" is definitely an odd bundle. The game contains some unusual verb puzzles, like the first two games did, and I feel like they don't work as well in this context. I got stuck for a long time on how to open the corked bottle; I eventually had to look it up that, duh, you just had to bite the cork! >_> Similarly, why would I have ever thought to try pushing Cutthroat Bill?
Monkey Island 5 offers no choice of verb at all -- not even inspect vs use -- which I found quite frustrating. Did not like that.
I think the games that handled this the best were Monkey Island 2 Special Edition, and Return to Monkey Island. Return only offers two verbs, but they're all custom; this means you can't have unusual-verb puzzles, but those aren't really essential.
But Monkey Island 2 Special Edition I think gets it the best. It offers enough of a selection that you can try unusual verbs, without, like, making the number of choices ridiculous.
Btw, there's once nice thing that Curse of Monkey Island and Return to Monkey Island do that none of the others do (except possibly for Escape since I didn't replay that one), which is making a distinction between "use this item in my inventory" and "use this item in my inventory on that other thing". In MI1 and MI2 this just depends on the item and sometimes annoyingly the context (e.g. the compass in MI1); and then in MI5 inventory items can only be used on other things. But MI3 and MI6 get this right by letting you distinguish.
7. Good in-game hinting upon doing something close is a hard problem
I'm not really going to go into detail here, but, yeah, the games have varied between not doing enough of this and doing too much... it's just a hard thing to get right.
8. Most of the towns in the series feel pretty empty
Secret of Monkey Island tries to fix this by having random NPCs walking around, but it doesn't really work. The town that felt the most real to me would I think be Woodtick from Monkey Island 2 -- no, there's nobody just hanging around, but, that's because there's nowhere to hang around. Although, I'm not sure how, but in Return to Monkey Island the town on Melee Island somehow felt less empty? <shrug>
9. Further thoughts on Return to Monkey Island
If I didn't like what Tales did to the character of the Voodoo Lady, I don't like what Return did to the character of Elaine; she didn't seem like the same character at all. (I am glad that the suggestion of marital trouble between her and Guybrush turned out to be a fake-out; it was bad enough how much of Monkey Island 5 was about suggestions of that. I guess really I don't like what Tales of Monkey Island did with her either -- e.g., having her as a straight-up damsel-in-distress at the beginning, that shouldn't happen with Elaine; but the discrepancy in character didn't seem as drastic.)
Also, unfortunately, Jess Harnell is no Earl Boen. Not nearly as menacing. Oh well.
It's funny how the character of the change is quite different from in The Secret of Monkey Island... or at least, quite different from in the special edition! Maybe they weren't working from that. :P
Apparently the "twisty passages" bit was supposed to be an actual puzzle? Um, I just sort of got through it by accident; skipped the puzzle entirely. That's disappointing.
The lack of "I can't use with that with that" lines, in favor of a no icon, is a bit disappointing; yeah, those lines were often tiresome, but I feel like the no icon kind of encourages just brute-forcing your inventory on things.
One thing I have to note -- the whole premise of the game, and a recurring joke throughout the previous games, is that neither Guybrush, nor LeChuck, nor anyone, ever actually found out the secret of Monkey Island, despite the first game being titled that. But, I always thought that it was implicit -- obviously, the secret of Monkey Island is the fact that there's this hellish magma area under the giant monkey head! That's a pretty good secret, right? So, the whole "we never found the secret" thing never made a lot of sense to me.
10. Further thoughts on Monkey Island 2
One thing I liked about Monkey Island 2 is that Guybrush's quest is proactive. (This is also true in Return to Monkey Island.) In most of the other games, he's essentially reactive. I feel like Guybrush in Monkey Island 2 really does feel like he's grown as a character compared to in the first game, and part of that is that he has his own, self-directed quest.
But, I do think the MI2 story had a number of problems. The ending is infamous (the whole sequence, not just the very end), of course but the story had a lot of problems beyond that -- and if you fix those, maybe you can make a better ending.
(Speaking of the ending, man that part was annoying. I get the idea was to make things tense, but it mostly just made things annoying. There has to have been a better way to do that.)
Like -- why does LeChuck have this big hideout, instead of, y'know, captaining a ship? Why does he have human followers? Actually, better question -- why is LeChuck in this game at all?
You want to know what I'd do to the story of Monkey Island 2, if it were 1991? Take LeChuck out of the game entirely. Yes, LeChuck is a great character, but he doesn't need to be in this one! He can return in a later game! This game is about Guybrush going on a proactive quest to find Big Whoop, and LeChuck is just an odd fit. Imagine if not every game had to include LeChuck!
You know what other change I'd make, skipping ahead to this hypothetical alternate-timeline Monkey Island 3? Let's not have Elaine immediately get back together with Guybrush! In the first game they get together because, idk, love at first sight or whatever -- I mean, whatever, it's fine, it's a plot device.
By the second game they've broken up because, well, Guybrush is kind of a hapless pain in the ass! And then come the third game Elaine's mooning all over him again because...?
But like, the thing here is that, as I mentioned, it seems to me that Guybrush really does grow as a character between the first game and the second. So, like, maybe in a later game they could have gotten back together after Guybrush has demonstrated that he's no longer so hapless? The timeskip before MI5 seems relevant here.
Those changes -- no LeChuck in MI2, Elaine and Guybrush don't immediately get back together in MI3 -- would obviously set the story down a pretty different path. But maybe a better one?
There's probably more I could think of to say, but, eh, I think that's enough.
-Harry
