Curious if playing any/all of the earlier releases is worthwhile before diving into this.
A few years back I tried playing The Secret of Monkey Island again (special edition from Steam), and it wasn't quite as great as I remembered. The special edition has got voice acting, but the original script (which was for text) doesn't lend itself to voice acting (dialogue feels odd) and having it text only felt a bit archaic.
Rose tinted? Possibly. But underneath the tint it’s still solid gold. One of my favourite games I’ve ever played.
For example:
Curse of Monkey Island - No Commentary Play Through - THE SCUMM BAR - https://youtu.be/zfAo3O2qZR0
The same channel that posted said video has posted full play through no commentary videos of other games in the series also.
I watched a few of these a while ago during night time as while I was falling asleep. As a mix between background noise and something that I paid some amount of attention to. Same way that a friend of mine likes to put on movies sometimes when going to sleep.
But the game (as far as I played it so far) contains a lot of characters and jokes that might be more fun if you've played the earlier ones.
If you want to play them, there are "special editions" of the first two in Steam. They have improved graphics and voice acting, with the option of switching to the original graphics and back with the press of a button.
A few things I understand were borrowed from Curse of MI, but you don't need to know them beforehand. They were borrowed because they are charming and funny, not because they add something to the canon (cannon?).
Actually you should just play them because they're bloody brilliant, as jonplackett said.
There are remakes for modern ish systems available:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/The_Secret_of_Monke...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/32460/Monkey_Island_2_Spe...
3 4 and the Telltalle series... you won't miss much. But 1 and 2 are why this game launch made it even to HN.
Fair enough about the others, but that’s a controversial opinion about 3, which is critically acclaimed and a classic for anyone played it as a kid in the late 90s. It only gets criticised because Ron Gilbert wasn’t involved.
The voice acting cast from it are nearly all in Return, along with lots of references, so it’s canon for Gilbert purists now too!
Was it the one with monkey combat? And time travel? Or time travel was in 4...
Curse was the 2D-cartoon one with demon LeChuck, Elaine turned into gold statue, chickens and rollercoaster of death.
- 1, 2, Return <- "Gilbert Canon" or, "OVA"
- 1, 2, Curse, Escape, Tales <- "Extended Canon", "Guybrush Universe", "Guybrush Muyou"
A little bit of Curse is going into Return, which is the loosey goosey part**. Memorable characters/gags, and less the events of Curse.
* Full disclosure, I haven't played Tales, or Return yet.
* *Well, also PC gaming is a thing in the MI universe, and pirates are shilling LOOM in the SCUMM bar.
Yes, I can tell. Return to Monkey Island explicitly references events from all the previous Monkey Island games.
When it comes to the timeline, I won't comment on it, as that's kind of a spoiler. It becomes obvious early in the game though.
I mean. I have a day job. I won't have time until the weekend to play it. It's only been out like 9 hours!
If you don't have time or energy for that though, I'll echo that watching a let's play is also very good.
So much I can say: This definitely feels like a Monkey Island game.
I always enjoyed this meta game back when it was fiddling with config.sys and such. Shouldn't need that for a 9x game, but other fiddling would make sense.
4 is indeed very much a pain (and so are the controls). The PS2 version is better than the PC version in my experience.