Return to Monkey Island (Hide Spoilers)

Krathoon

The game is out.
Debate and Discuss. Hide your spoilers.
https://youtu.be/310dzhfFmPU

cooljammer00

Trying to figure out if I need to play MI2 or not. Played MI1 a few months ago to refresh my memory a bit for this new one. Never played 2 but I get the story gist

ED!

Oh shit I thought this was out tomorrow! Thanks for the heads-up. Just looked at those scores and I hope the developer feels vindicated after the "what is this artwork even" feedback they were getting.

Jubal77

Oh god the music. I had no idea this was a thing so...

OMG my week just improved!

AlphaRomero

I'm on Chapter 2 so far, I'm playing on very hard but it's not been super challenging so far, I think the major difference was I was a stupid kid when I played Secret. Only thing that stumped me was the (Chapter 1 complete spoiler)

thousand biting needles thing as I'd already written off the forest after getting the tree.

rahkeesh2000

Difficulty levels in an adventure game? How does that even work?

enlightenedbum

Launching it and hearing the music brought a smile to my face.

AlphaRomero

rahkeesh2000 wrote: »

Difficulty levels in an adventure game? How does that even work?

It says harder puzzles.

cooljammer00

If it's like what they did with Thimbleweed Park, which Ron Gilbert also worked on, the puzzles are just more involved on higher difficulties/less involved on easier ones.

Didn't the remasters of Monkey Island 1 and 2 have a hint system that was sort of like that, where they would give you a vague hint at first, then if you kept asking for hints they would just tell you what to do next? It was a way to dynamically change the difficulty.

ArcTangent

Monkey Island 2 straight up had an easy/hard mode. Most of the difference was that a lot of puzzles were already half solved. Like, for example, the spitting contest didn't exist at all. Instead of the map piece price costing (impossibly large amount) it was just... small amount that you already had. So you skipped that whole sequence. Seems like similar here.

Krathoon

I got a Monkey Madness disc. What is neat is that it plays the first 2 games right off the disc.

discrider

rahkeesh2000 wrote: »

Difficulty levels in an adventure game? How does that even work?

In MI3 they did it really well I thought.
In easy mode, you had to steal a gold tooth to convince a pirate to join your crew.
In hard mode, you had to steal the tooth and then smuggle it out of the shop of the pirate you just dislodged it from.

enlightenedbum

AlphaRomero wrote: »

I'm on Chapter 2 so far, I'm playing on very hard but it's not been super challenging so far, I think the major difference was I was a stupid kid when I played Secret. Only thing that stumped me was the (Chapter 1 complete spoiler)

thousand biting needles thing as I'd already written off the forest after getting the tree.

I very much thought I needed to get the cookbook back and get the book about voodoo, so that stumped me for a bit.

Krathoon

I totally do not remember the ending of Monkey Island 3.
I kinda remember the ending to Monkey Island 4. It was actually pretty creative and silly.

enlightenedbum

Krathoon wrote: »

I totally do not remember the ending of Monkey Island 3.
I kinda remember the ending to Monkey Island 4. It was actually pretty creative and silly.

MI3 ending:

Guybrush blows up the carnival of the damned and marries Elaine.

PMAvers

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Trying to figure out if I need to play MI2 or not. Played MI1 a few months ago to refresh my memory a bit for this new one. Never played 2 but I get the story gist

I wish I had it on hand, but supposedly they play-tested it heavily with people who've specifically never played the games and they did fine, so it'll probably be okay.

Krathoon

Is this a reboot from Monkey 2? Kind of annoyed with that. They pulled a Terminator.

enlightenedbum

Krathoon wrote: »

Is this a reboot from Monkey 2? Kind of annoyed with that. They pulled a Terminator.

No. Other games are definitely canon. Including 4.

enlightenedbum

enlightenedbum wrote: »

Launching it and hearing the music brought a smile to my face.

Smile was bigger after the prologue was over and the main title theme kicked in. Which is still brilliant.

enlightenedbum

Chapter 2 finished. Didn't think anything was super complicated puzzle wise, but it's fun and the dialogue is great.

discrider

Krathoon wrote: »

Is this a reboot from Monkey 2? Kind of annoyed with that. They pulled a Terminator.

It looks to me like it operates in the space between child Threepwood at the end of 2 and him floating in a bumper car at the beginning of 3.
But I haven't played it yet.

klemming

Krathoon wrote: »

Is this a reboot from Monkey 2? Kind of annoyed with that. They pulled a Terminator.

Early spoilers:

The main story is post-everything else we've seen. The framing story establishes that the child stuff from the end of MI2 was way later than we ever thought.

Rhesus Positive

cooljammer00 wrote: »

Trying to figure out if I need to play MI2 or not. Played MI1 a few months ago to refresh my memory a bit for this new one. Never played 2 but I get the story gist

If you've never played 2, play 2

For its own sake, more than anything else

To elaborate: it won't necessarily affect your understanding of the game, as there is a recap at the start, but it's an excellent game in its own right and there might be some things that are spoiled by incidental dialogue

Neveron

Without spoiling: The game makes a lot of references to 1 and 2, obviously, but also has major references to 3. The references to 4 are much lighter, but then again that just wasn't a particularly good game to begin with. Tales from Monkey Island has one major reference and one minor reference that I spotted, but otherwise isn't super relevant.

If you click on the scrapbook in the main menu, even before starting the game, it'll give you a very condensed summary of the plots of Monkey Island 1-5.

But Return to Monkey Island is also very much its own thing, with new islands and new plot and whatnot.

Krathoon

Well, good to see that Ron Gilbert did not crap on the games he was not involved with. He is not pulling a Dan Harmon.

AlphaRomero

(ending spoilers)

WTF was that ending? Regret spending full price on it.

OldSlacker

AlphaRomero wrote: »

(ending spoilers)

WTF was that ending? Regret spending full price on it.

Which one did you get? I plan to do a replay to see if saving Wally and doing some more stuff on the pirate checklist changes things a bit.
The fake Melee high street bit is always there, but there are definitely differences if you decide not to open the Secret or use Stan's keychain to go back to Monkey Island dungeon.

AlphaRomero

Slacker1913 wrote: »

AlphaRomero wrote: »

(ending spoilers)

WTF was that ending? Regret spending full price on it.

Which one did you get? I plan to do a replay to see if saving Wally and doing some more stuff on the pirate checklist changes things a bit.
The fake Melee high street bit is always there, but there are definitely differences if you decide not to open the Secret or use Stan's keychain to go back to Monkey Island dungeon.

I didn't even realize you could open the chest at first, then I watched a video and went back and got the key.

Like the secret was always going to be something stupid, it was in a guady, homemade box, that's not the problem. I was chasing the little pirate and LeChuck and then all of a sudden they're both gone and I'm in a theme park and all those characters have disappeared. I don't even know what happened to Captain Madison, I must've missed it, but there's no closure on what happens to Melee which was in debt to her, and I don't know why Guybrush is saying he's a floor inspector.

If you go back for Wally it stops you before you get that far with the option that you refuse to believe.

So we go from a coherent story to randomness where everything we were doing just doesn't matter, which Gilbert's done in two games now.

I'm NOT happy about it. I get the point they're making, don't make it with a game I've paid full price for by just cutting the story short.

PMAvers

...Huh, weird. Dunno if it was some weird Cloud save stuff, but my saves got rolled back at some point after finishing the game last night. Swore one was at least

on the fake Melee, (was going to look to see some of these alternate ends people are talking about) but when I went to load one I was on the real one back during the flag & key hunt.

I do still have the bonus letter in the Scrapbook unlocked still.

AlphaRomero

Also there seemed to be a theme that

Elaine was picking up on the chaos Guybrush was causing, I genuinely thought they'd get a divorce and Guybrush would have to go through some kind of existential character change or something, but all that is dropped as well.

OldSlacker

AlphaRomero wrote: »

Also there seemed to be a theme that

Elaine was picking up on the chaos Guybrush was causing, I genuinely thought they'd get a divorce and Guybrush would have to go through some kind of existential character change or something, but all that is dropped as well.

I kinda liked that bit.
Every time the scene cut to Elaine finding out about another victim of his obsession I had this ohshitohshitohshit feeling. So when the final confrontation between them was not a confrontation, but a genuinely concerned talk from a loving partner was a nice surprise.

I think parts of the story are deliberately vague because it is a story Guybrush is telling to his kid so he is censoring some of the more gruesome bits, especially the fates of the pirate leaders. From what I gathered, captain Madison was killed by LeChuck and her body thrown in the lava which is why you only see her hat on a rock nearby.

edited to add:

I like the theory that it all did happen, more or less, how it was described. The inspector job older Guybrush has is checking the new attractions Stan is building, based on stories of his exploits when he was young.

Thirith

To people wondering whether they should play Monkey Island 2: it was a divisive game at the time due to its ending, but for myself, it's by far my favourite game in the series, ending and all. I often find that those people who like MI2 like it *a lot*. It's perhaps a bit Marmitey, but even if someone doesn't like the ending, there are absolutely fantastic moments and puzzles and characters in it. And if someone doesn't like the ending, well, the continuation of the series has sort of fixed that. (Or ruined it, if, like me, you don't have any issues with MI2's ending.)

discrider

I wouldn't recommend playing MI2, but apparently I was playing on hard mode?
I don't think there were modes originally.
In any case, I got really stuck on some puzzles and the ending was daft.
Heck, the beginning was daft too. Don't even remember what happened to the campfire. Unless it was double in media res or something.

Didn't even have insult swordfighting.

klemming

Return ending:

Was all but shouting at the player that the endings to all adventure games isn't the point; it's not about the ending, but the puzzles and dialog to get there.
It's like when MI2 had a code to get to the end of the game. Like, right to the end. Here are the credits, go home.

OldSlacker

discrider wrote: »

I wouldn't recommend playing MI2, but apparently I was playing on hard mode?
I don't think there were modes originally.
In any case, I got really stuck on some puzzles and the ending was daft.
Heck, the beginning was daft too. Don't even remember what happened to the campfire. Unless it was double in media res or something.

Didn't even have insult swordfighting.

MI2 was the first adventure game I played, back when my knowledge of English language was pretty rudimentary so a lot of the puzzles had to be brute forced. And yet, the puzzle where everyone I knew at the time got stuck was the dark room with a single pixel light switch because we all thought our crappy pirated copy was corrupted.
It originally had a difficulty selector right at the start, but I think it was removed in the remaster and they defaulted to hard difficulty. Unlike the Return, where they only remove one or two steps of a puzzle on easy difficulty and even the harder puzzles don't feel as difficult as old ones, I remember MI2 and Curse being much, much more obtuse on Mega Monkey.

The campfire in MI2 was not really important, it was just a way to give show players what Guybrush is up to at the start of the game, but the part where he is hanging off a rope because he doesn't want to let go of the treasure is something you eventually get around to while playing.

Thirith

Monkey Island 2 had at least one puzzle which very much depended on English-language wordplay, and while they did a reasonable job with the German translation, I could imagine that there were a few puzzles that were obtuse primarily for people whose mother tongue wasn't English. However, I always felt that LucasArts did a much better job designing puzzles that had internal coherence than most of their competitors. The out-and-out moon logic was usually not found in LucasArts adventure games IMO.

Krathoon

Lucasfilm Games.

*sigh*

It should be Lucasarts.

enlightenedbum

Huh, I had no idea Larry Wilmore's (now-ex) wife was the Voodoo Lady's voice actor all this time.

Jam Warrior

There’s an option slightly hidden in the menus to turn on the ‘writers cut’ for ‘more blather and less pacing’. It actually makes quite significant changes like adding/removing the old senior pirates from Melee island. As someone who loves diligently clicking through the ridiculous joke lists (‘We can’t go there mon, that’s the forbidden oblate spheroid!’) I’d have been quite annoyed if I found it after having completed any sections.

Anyway, up to chapter 3 and super charming so far, if entirely lacking in difficulty to me who has played far too many of these games over the years.

I wasn’t expecting the ‘big mood’ of the game but it is certainly feeling very relatable!

cooljammer00

So there's a toggle for writing? And it's off by default? Weird.

I don't know why you play these games if not for the writing.

joshofalltrades

It’s a bizarre design choice to hide it in a menu. Ask the players straight up when they start the game.

Do you want the full experience?

- YES! I want all the Monkey Island content, including the appearances of characters and dialogue that could possibly be taken as red herrings for puzzles.

- NO! Just give me the streamlined experience so I don’t get confused. I don’t mind missing out on some jokes if it means I get stuck less.

As soon as I saw the menu option I restarted the fucking thing because I didn’t want to miss shit.