References to Escape
As with every Monkey Island game, Tales of Monkey Island has tons of references to its predecessors. However, while it's chock-full of callbacks to Secret, Revenge and Curse, Escape is often skimmed over or ignored; Morgan knows about all of Guybrush's adventures, except for that time he used a giant monkey robot to kill an evil Australian land developer, and Stan seems to have forgotten the time he spent hawking real estate (though he does mention Jambalaya Island), and Murray doesn't really go into why he quit working at Planet Threepwood.
Of course, I can understand why it was done this way, seeing as the game has its...fair share of problems. And rebooting the series back to its original style rather than continuing on in the direction Escape was heading in was definitely the best way to go.
Here are all the references to Escape from Monkey Island I found in Tales of Monkey Island:
-At the beginning, Elaine says "And now we're going to die. Again." Presumably, she's referring to Guybrush being buried alive in Curse and herself being declared legally dead in Escape, respectively. It's a very cryptic comment, mind you.
-The Ultimate Insult is on Guybrush's Cursed Cutlass of Kerflu recipe.
-Jambalaya Island is mentioned by Stan
-Guybrush's middle name is still Ulysses, or at least, it begins with a U.
-Guybrush mentions LeChuck's living statue form.
It would appear that only the most important events from Escape, involving Guybrush, Elaine, LeChuck and Stan, have carried over to Tales, and the rest of the game can be left vague. The only exception would be the stuff involving Herman Toothrot, which will probably never be touched apon and we'll most likely never see him again.
But anyway, does anyone know if anything else from Escape From Monkey Island is ever mentioned in Tales?
Of course, I can understand why it was done this way, seeing as the game has its...fair share of problems. And rebooting the series back to its original style rather than continuing on in the direction Escape was heading in was definitely the best way to go.
Here are all the references to Escape from Monkey Island I found in Tales of Monkey Island:
-At the beginning, Elaine says "And now we're going to die. Again." Presumably, she's referring to Guybrush being buried alive in Curse and herself being declared legally dead in Escape, respectively. It's a very cryptic comment, mind you.
-The Ultimate Insult is on Guybrush's Cursed Cutlass of Kerflu recipe.
-Jambalaya Island is mentioned by Stan
-Guybrush's middle name is still Ulysses, or at least, it begins with a U.
-Guybrush mentions LeChuck's living statue form.
It would appear that only the most important events from Escape, involving Guybrush, Elaine, LeChuck and Stan, have carried over to Tales, and the rest of the game can be left vague. The only exception would be the stuff involving Herman Toothrot, which will probably never be touched apon and we'll most likely never see him again.
But anyway, does anyone know if anything else from Escape From Monkey Island is ever mentioned in Tales?
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Comments
Yeah I doubt we'll see Herman again if there are any more games, or HORATIO as we must now call him. :rolleyes:
EfMI: The Ultimate Insult. With it's unholy powers I will make the sea run red with the blood of my enemies. I will bring the forces of hell to the shores of the carribean....
The bolded part was a line which LeChuck used in Launch of the Screaming Narhwal.
It's a small part, so it could be an coincidence
That's actually a very well used quote, so it's probably just coincidence.
Oh come on, barring the last two acts of Curse, which were rushed, what's wrong with places like Plunder Island, Blood Island? Characters like Murray, Goodsoup, etc.
Plus the music was awesome, Michael Land's best really, the character designs may be weird to some, but background designs are brilliant, etc.
And besides, as much as you hate Curse, if we didn't acknowledge it, then Tales couldn't exist, not just about the whole Ring issue but also, you know, the whole MI2 ending thing.
Each time I've seen you moan about apparently how crap Curse is, it seems to stem from the last two chapters in the game where they dared to explain what the hell happened after MI2. Even though the whole Curse thing was hinted at in the end of MI2?
They went back to meelee after ending on CMI got a monkey Elaine did some govnery stuff then they went on there honeymoon leaving Timmy behind.
Land's music in Curse is great, mostly better than his work on Tales, even. But the best music award certainly goes to one of the first two games. The first established the musical themes we identify with Monkey Island(Main theme, LeChuck's theme, Love theme, etc). It's simple and iconic. The second game had the iMUSE system, which made the music respond to your actions, something a soundtrack in an interactive medium should ideally do. By going off the player's cues, the music is able to work in ways that it wouldn't as a straight-up track.
Still, Land's music in Curse is by no means "bad" or even "mediocre". It's even great! But the first two games' music is excellent, technological gap aside. But no, I would not hold the music up as a negative of Curse, because it's well done, the same way I wouldn't hold Guybrush or Elaine's voice acting against the game, because it's well done.
Tales as we know it wouldn't exist, no. But we certainly might have been able to get a better sequel. And if people had enough backlash against Curse even though it exists, it wouldn't be negatively affecting Tales(the same way Escape exists, but due to negative public opinion it is almost completely inconsequential to Tales). Escape is just as good as Curse, as far as I'm concerned, and I'd like to see both equally ignored.
And if I could live in a world in which Curse did not exist, and it did so happen to take away Tales, or even any Monkey Island game made by Telltale at all? It would probably be worth the trade. No sequel at all is better than a sequel that retroactively butchers the originals.
This is something Curse fans never understand. The idea that it was magic is not the biggest problem with the ending. The problem is that it was magic, and that's that, let's sweep this whole thing under the rug so we don't have to deal with it anymore. It was the execution, like they were trying to GET RID OF the Monkey Island 2 ending rather than grow naturally from it. And OF COURSE they did that for money, to bring in people who hadn't played the first two games. And I understand that reasoning, but that doesn't make it a good thing for the franchise.
Curse of Monkey Island is a well-made adventure game. The background art, music, a lot of the voice acting, and most importantly the gameplay and puzzle design are excellently done. The problem is that it doesn't fit with everything else, for a lot of reasons. And while the way they dealt with the ending of Monkey Island 2 isn't the least of them, it's by no means the only issue or even the most important one.
And I'm personally a big fan of subjective reality in fiction, in which case I have no problem accepting "LeChuck's spell" and "Guybrush's Imagination" not only as equally valid theories, but also as equally true, they are both completely accurate interpretations of what happens in the game as far as I am concerned. I have no problem accepting that the first two games take place mostly in Guybrush's mind, at the end of Revenge he has been snapped out of it, but by the start of Curse he has started imagining again, and has also rationalized away the time he spent in reality as part of a spell... and then he goes on to imagine a couple more adventures after that... he's a creative kid. But then the idea that the adventures take place in his imagination doesn't mean that they aren't real, either. I feel like the whole point of Revenge's ending is that what's real and what's not real isn't so black and white, and I don't feel that the later games broke the spirit of that suggestion, even if they didn't dive as far into it again.
i think you got it right with the that guybrush was a really creative kid, i liked the ending of MI2, and maybe later on you see Guybrush telling his kids the story, which carrys on the adventures of monkey island. i know alot of people would disagree lol
Including Nor Treblig
http://lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=202652
Demetris
I do agree that Curse should have spent some time actually fleshing out what happened between MI2 and Curse, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it doesn't fit into the series. The sense of humor and writing are consistent in pretty much every game, even Escape, and that's what's most important to me.