Game Review: The Secret of Monkey Island
2018-Oct-06, Saturday 19:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
My first spooky game for October!
Hey, there are ghost pirates. It counts.
As I mentioned in my review of Loom lo these many years ago, I grew up playing Sierra adventure games and repeatedly dying, so I always considered the focus to be the progression of the puzzles. In addition, even though games like Quest for Glory I or King's Quest VI had humorous elements and a lot of jokes, particularly the Quest for Glory series, they were still fundamentally serious stories. Even Loom was the same, mostly serious with a bit of humor in it, and Maniac Mansion had more humor but not that much dialogue in which to really display it.
My sister![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
wanderluster_kp bought Curse of Monkey Island and played through it with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
uriany, though, and that had a completely different mood. It was much more focused on the jokes, on the snappy comebacks and side comments in dialogue, on Murray the Invincible Demonic Skull and the singing pirates. I clearly remember how hard I laughed when Guybrush shot the banjo and his response when accused of foiling the duel was, "That shot could have come from the grassy knoll." I never played it but the two of them beat it, and when I recently listened to an episode of Go Back and Play about The Secret of Monkey Island, and now that it's October, the time had come.
Don't we all.
The Secret of Monkey Island is about Guybrush Threepwood, possibly one of the greatest game protagonist names in existence, who wants to be a pirate. That screenshot is one of the first things that happens in The Secret of Monkey Island. Guybrush walks in from the left side of the screen and declares that he wants to be a pirate, and the lookout tells him to go talk to the pirate leaders. When he does, they tell him that in order to be a true pirate, he has to pass the three trials of thievery, sword mastery, and "treasure...hunter...y." That's the first half of the game, solving the various puzzles necessary to get the proof for each of the three trials.
This turns out not to matter in the end, because the real trial is the practicum of defeating the ghost pirate LeChuck, but while the treasure huntery puzzle was kind of perfunctory, just involving buying a map and following the directions to the X that marks the spot, both the thievery and sword mastery puzzles were great. The sword mastery puzzle requires seeking out the Mêlée Island™ sword master in her cabin deep in the jungles of Mêlée Island™. Guybrush finds her, she sends him packing because he's clearly never been in a fight and needs to go take lessons, and fortunately there's someone offering lessons on the island! Over the course of a few hours, Guybrush learns to fight competently and, more importantly and more fitting for a LucasArts game, learns that the true measure of a sword master is the quality of their banter during a duel.
This was probably my favorite puzzle in the entire game, since it focuses on the writing, the game's strongest aspect. Guybrush wanders the roads of Mêlée Island™ and challenges other pirates to duels, learning insults and using them as he fights. So maybe you cross swords with a pirate and he says:
A shredder's greatest weakness.
The thievery trial requires breaking into the mansion of Elaine Marley, the governor of Mêlée Island™. In The Curse of Monkey Island, she's on screen for only a few minutes before she gets subjected to the titular curse and taken out of the game, so I had no idea what to expect. I actually thought she was the governor's daughter for some reason.
Guybrush gets past the piranha poodles guarding the governor's mansion and infiltrates it, and after a long automated sequence where Guybrush hypnotizes a rhinoceros, pushes the red button, fights a yak and steals its wax lips, hurls them into a fire, uses a file on the lock, and steals the idol, he meets Governor Marley. He's immediately struck dumb by her beauty and his dialogue options are all some variety of "Hbbthb" or "Umgfh" and you can probably see where this is going. When the governor later gets kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck and Guybrush immediately vows to go to Monkey Island™ himself and rescue her, it seems obvious what the rest of the game will be like.
I was wrong, though. Guybrush is more competent than he initially seems, but Governor Marley is exactly as competent as she seems. She lets herself be kidnapped in order to be taken to Monkey Island™ so she can track down the secret ingredient to the potion that is LeChuck's one weakness. And she does! Unlike Guybrush, she doesn't need to solve any puzzles because she has the whole situation in hand. Her plan was going perfectly until Guybrush came up with the same plan and she had to tip her hand early, but she's gracious enough to give him the credit for executing the plan and for coming to Monkey Island™ to save her even though she didn't need saving.
More games need characters like Governor Marley, is what I'm saying.
Adventure games.
I used a walkthrough more than I should have when playing because I'm still in Sierra mode even all these years later. I'm used to the wrong dialogue option leading to death, or using an inventory item at the wrong time wasting it and making the game unwinnable, rather than the game intelligently preventing either of those circumstances from occurring. There's only one way to die in The Secret of Monkey Island, and it's so incredibly specific, so unlikely to occur on its own, that the only way to discover it is to deliberately seek it out. At that point, it's basically another joke.
The main frustration came from the interface. The Secret of Monkey Island has fewer verbs than Maniac Mansion, and the VGA version at least has contextual right-clicks, but often it wasn't clear exactly what the context was. Right-clicking on a door opened, it but right-clicking on a chest usually looked at it. Right-clicking on a person talked to them except when it didn't. And separate from that, sometimes objects need to be used on people, and sometimes they needed to be given to people, and it wasn't always clear which was which. Fortunately, since this is a LucasArts game, I never ended up dying or losing due to clicking the wrong command, but it still caused more confusion than I think was necessary.
I'm not even sure all the commands were necessary. Is there a reason Give and Use had to be separate, for example? And Push and Pull only showed up in a couple puzzles that seemed specifically designed for them, usually involving rotation. Really, I feel like Walk, Look, Talk, Use, Item covers it pretty well, though the contextual clicking already makes it more user friendly than Maniac Mansion. But not being able to die or get stuck covers for a multitude of sins.
They're probably not even licensed. It's an unregulated term.
It's a bit hard to talk about the best parts of the game because they're almost all dialogue related and I don't want to just post a bunch of quotes without context. The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the best-written games I've ever played, though, to the degree that I think the humor has aged incredibly well. I already mentioned the portrayal of Governor Marley and how she is decidedly not in distress, but that care extends throughout the game even with characters that could have gone so poorly.
Take the cannibals on Monkey Island™. They definitely look like stereotypical pirate movie cannibals, but one of the first things you learn after talking to them is that they're vegetarian now due to the health risks of red meat. Both Herman Toothrot, who had been marooned on Monkey Island™, and the cannibals describe themselves as the only civilized people on the island, and indeed they communicate with each other by leaving notes. And once Guybrush returns their stolen idol, the cannibals become friendly without the kind of obsequiousness so common in these scenarios. There's absolutely no worshipping of Guybrush as a god, which is good because there's certainly no way I could ever buy that.
Also, there is this exchange when Guybrush is asking the cannibals if they've seen LeChuck's crew and Governor Marley:
Still good advice.
I will never be a Sierra hater because I still think the Quest for Glory games are some of the finest CRPGs ever created. But playing through games like this, I can see why there are some LucasArts fans who hold their position as a moral imperative and bring up King's Quest as an example of gaming garbage. The Secret of Monkey Island is definitely better than King's Quest V, and I think it's only nostalgia that would make me compare King's Quest VI to it favorably. Brilliant writing, puzzles that make sense, and no need to constantly worry about dying or dead ends put this head and shoulders above most of its contemporaries and render it competitive with adventure games made today. A true classic of the genre and I'm so glad I finally played it.
Hey, there are ghost pirates. It counts.
As I mentioned in my review of Loom lo these many years ago, I grew up playing Sierra adventure games and repeatedly dying, so I always considered the focus to be the progression of the puzzles. In addition, even though games like Quest for Glory I or King's Quest VI had humorous elements and a lot of jokes, particularly the Quest for Glory series, they were still fundamentally serious stories. Even Loom was the same, mostly serious with a bit of humor in it, and Maniac Mansion had more humor but not that much dialogue in which to really display it.
My sister
wanderluster_kp bought Curse of Monkey Island and played through it with uriany, though, and that had a completely different mood. It was much more focused on the jokes, on the snappy comebacks and side comments in dialogue, on Murray the Invincible Demonic Skull and the singing pirates. I clearly remember how hard I laughed when Guybrush shot the banjo and his response when accused of foiling the duel was, "That shot could have come from the grassy knoll." I never played it but the two of them beat it, and when I recently listened to an episode of Go Back and Play about The Secret of Monkey Island, and now that it's October, the time had come.Don't we all.
The Secret of Monkey Island is about Guybrush Threepwood, possibly one of the greatest game protagonist names in existence, who wants to be a pirate. That screenshot is one of the first things that happens in The Secret of Monkey Island. Guybrush walks in from the left side of the screen and declares that he wants to be a pirate, and the lookout tells him to go talk to the pirate leaders. When he does, they tell him that in order to be a true pirate, he has to pass the three trials of thievery, sword mastery, and "treasure...hunter...y." That's the first half of the game, solving the various puzzles necessary to get the proof for each of the three trials.
This turns out not to matter in the end, because the real trial is the practicum of defeating the ghost pirate LeChuck, but while the treasure huntery puzzle was kind of perfunctory, just involving buying a map and following the directions to the X that marks the spot, both the thievery and sword mastery puzzles were great. The sword mastery puzzle requires seeking out the Mêlée Island™ sword master in her cabin deep in the jungles of Mêlée Island™. Guybrush finds her, she sends him packing because he's clearly never been in a fight and needs to go take lessons, and fortunately there's someone offering lessons on the island! Over the course of a few hours, Guybrush learns to fight competently and, more importantly and more fitting for a LucasArts game, learns that the true measure of a sword master is the quality of their banter during a duel.
This was probably my favorite puzzle in the entire game, since it focuses on the writing, the game's strongest aspect. Guybrush wanders the roads of Mêlée Island™ and challenges other pirates to duels, learning insults and using them as he fights. So maybe you cross swords with a pirate and he says:
"You have the manners of a begger!"and through using it on battle, you learn that the proper response is:
"I wanted to make sure you were comfortable with me!"And then when Guybrush squares off against the sword master, she has an entirely new set of special insults and you have to match the insults you know to her responses. It's clever and fun and it makes you feel fantastic when you do it right.
A shredder's greatest weakness.
The thievery trial requires breaking into the mansion of Elaine Marley, the governor of Mêlée Island™. In The Curse of Monkey Island, she's on screen for only a few minutes before she gets subjected to the titular curse and taken out of the game, so I had no idea what to expect. I actually thought she was the governor's daughter for some reason.
Guybrush gets past the piranha poodles guarding the governor's mansion and infiltrates it, and after a long automated sequence where Guybrush hypnotizes a rhinoceros, pushes the red button, fights a yak and steals its wax lips, hurls them into a fire, uses a file on the lock, and steals the idol, he meets Governor Marley. He's immediately struck dumb by her beauty and his dialogue options are all some variety of "Hbbthb" or "Umgfh" and you can probably see where this is going. When the governor later gets kidnapped by the ghost pirate LeChuck and Guybrush immediately vows to go to Monkey Island™ himself and rescue her, it seems obvious what the rest of the game will be like.
I was wrong, though. Guybrush is more competent than he initially seems, but Governor Marley is exactly as competent as she seems. She lets herself be kidnapped in order to be taken to Monkey Island™ so she can track down the secret ingredient to the potion that is LeChuck's one weakness. And she does! Unlike Guybrush, she doesn't need to solve any puzzles because she has the whole situation in hand. Her plan was going perfectly until Guybrush came up with the same plan and she had to tip her hand early, but she's gracious enough to give him the credit for executing the plan and for coming to Monkey Island™ to save her even though she didn't need saving.
More games need characters like Governor Marley, is what I'm saying.
Adventure games.
I used a walkthrough more than I should have when playing because I'm still in Sierra mode even all these years later. I'm used to the wrong dialogue option leading to death, or using an inventory item at the wrong time wasting it and making the game unwinnable, rather than the game intelligently preventing either of those circumstances from occurring. There's only one way to die in The Secret of Monkey Island, and it's so incredibly specific, so unlikely to occur on its own, that the only way to discover it is to deliberately seek it out. At that point, it's basically another joke.
The main frustration came from the interface. The Secret of Monkey Island has fewer verbs than Maniac Mansion, and the VGA version at least has contextual right-clicks, but often it wasn't clear exactly what the context was. Right-clicking on a door opened, it but right-clicking on a chest usually looked at it. Right-clicking on a person talked to them except when it didn't. And separate from that, sometimes objects need to be used on people, and sometimes they needed to be given to people, and it wasn't always clear which was which. Fortunately, since this is a LucasArts game, I never ended up dying or losing due to clicking the wrong command, but it still caused more confusion than I think was necessary.
I'm not even sure all the commands were necessary. Is there a reason Give and Use had to be separate, for example? And Push and Pull only showed up in a couple puzzles that seemed specifically designed for them, usually involving rotation. Really, I feel like Walk, Look, Talk, Use, Item covers it pretty well, though the contextual clicking already makes it more user friendly than Maniac Mansion. But not being able to die or get stuck covers for a multitude of sins.
They're probably not even licensed. It's an unregulated term.
It's a bit hard to talk about the best parts of the game because they're almost all dialogue related and I don't want to just post a bunch of quotes without context. The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the best-written games I've ever played, though, to the degree that I think the humor has aged incredibly well. I already mentioned the portrayal of Governor Marley and how she is decidedly not in distress, but that care extends throughout the game even with characters that could have gone so poorly.
Take the cannibals on Monkey Island™. They definitely look like stereotypical pirate movie cannibals, but one of the first things you learn after talking to them is that they're vegetarian now due to the health risks of red meat. Both Herman Toothrot, who had been marooned on Monkey Island™, and the cannibals describe themselves as the only civilized people on the island, and indeed they communicate with each other by leaving notes. And once Guybrush returns their stolen idol, the cannibals become friendly without the kind of obsequiousness so common in these scenarios. There's absolutely no worshipping of Guybrush as a god, which is good because there's certainly no way I could ever buy that.
Also, there is this exchange when Guybrush is asking the cannibals if they've seen LeChuck's crew and Governor Marley:
Guybrush: "I’m looking for 30 dead guys and one woman."In The Secret of Monkey Island, no one exists only to be the butt of jokes. Most characters who do anything are competent at it, including Guybrush. He may have a weird name and be scrawny and prone to snappy comebacks first and foremost, but he beats all three of the pirate trails, successfully sails to Monkey Island™, patches things up between the cannibals and Herman Toothrot, finds LeChuck's hidden lair, and defeats the ghost pirate himself. You can't argue with his record.
Cannibal: "I don’t think I want to hear any more about it."
Still good advice.
I will never be a Sierra hater because I still think the Quest for Glory games are some of the finest CRPGs ever created. But playing through games like this, I can see why there are some LucasArts fans who hold their position as a moral imperative and bring up King's Quest as an example of gaming garbage. The Secret of Monkey Island is definitely better than King's Quest V, and I think it's only nostalgia that would make me compare King's Quest VI to it favorably. Brilliant writing, puzzles that make sense, and no need to constantly worry about dying or dead ends put this head and shoulders above most of its contemporaries and render it competitive with adventure games made today. A true classic of the genre and I'm so glad I finally played it.
no subject
Date: 2025-Aug-29, Friday 04:48 (UTC)Same, which is kind of a shame in retrospect, because it put me off picking up Monkey Island back then because I took the packaging too seriously and thought it would be "too hard", require me to actually swordfight, and generally be trying to kill me. (I remember that I had liked the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland a year or so prior, so I don't know why I didn't make the connection, but I didn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
the cannibals become friendly without the kind of obsequiousness so common in these scenarios. There's absolutely no worshipping of Guybrush as a god, which is good because there's certainly no way I could ever buy that.
That's... lol... that... no way.. *laughs until tears come to my eyes* I love Guybrush and everything, but there's definitely no way that could have made any sense. Maaaaybe they could have pulled a joke where one of the natives starts to and the others are like "bro wtf are you doing. we talked about this. you can't just go worshipping everyone who manages to find their way here." But it's probably better that they just entirely don't go there.