Re: Sea Of Thieves Legend Of Monkey Island
Hercules Montero
I always felt like something was missing from Sea of Thieves. I loved the sailing and general moment-to-moment play of Rare's open world pirate sim, but the game's thin worldbuilding and lack of meaningful questlines often left me feeling adrift. Rare has made admirable attempts to right the ship with additional quests and storytelling since launch, but it still never quite captured my imagination in the way I hoped it might.
Anyway, it appears the reason I never gelled with Sea of Thieves is simply because it wasn't Monkey Island. I know this because Microsoft has just announced an expansion to Sea of Thieves themed around LucasArts' legendary adventure games, and suddenly I couldn't be more excited to set sail in Rare's a-vast ocean.
Fittingly titled "The Legend of Monkey Island", the expansion is a three-part adventure that will see players freely exploring key locations from the series, such as Mle Island and the eponymous simian landmass, as well as meeting the series' most famous characters like Lechuck, Elaine, Murray the Talking Skull, and of course, Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate.
According to an Xbox Wire interview with Sea of Thieves' Creative Director Mike Chapman, the Legend of Monkey island is set after the third game 'Curse of Monkey Island,' and asks the question "What if Guybrush and Elaine had their honeymoon in the Sea of Thieves?" It seems this is a canonical story, too, with Chapman adding "we wanted to pull from the most beloved elements of the franchises while also trying to pick a time period where an untold story could be unveiled."
The expansion isn't just a thematic infusion of both games, it also aims to bring some mechanical elements over from LucasArts' original adventures, including puzzles designed to be solved in a point-and-click style. "You can speak to the characters, and start to understand what the puzzles are going to be as they slowly unfold in front of your eyes," Chapman explains.
It's a neat collaboration for its own sake. But I'm excited by this for a more specific reason too. I've always wondered what an open-world (or should that be open-sea) Monkey Island game might look like, with actual sailing and cartoonish swashbuckling thrown into the mix with the daft jokes and dafter puzzles. Monkey Island strikes me as a setting that would work on a larger scale, all it requires is that you maintain the series' particular tone.
And frankly, this doesn't seem that far off what I'd imagined. Sea of Thieves has always had a slightly Monkey Island-ish attitude, embracing goofiness and fun over, say, an authentic portrayal of the horrifying effects of scurvy on the human body. So a Monkey Island crossover doesn't require that much massaging to make it fit. In any case, I'm very keen to see how exactly Rare and Lucasarts' worlds mesh together.
This Guybrush looks exactly how I'd imagine a Guybrush who'd continue on the same path MI2 Guybrush was. Older, more unkempt, bigger beard, more full of himself but also more down about not getting the recognition he wanted, and still broken up with Elaine.
It does really make me question where exactly this fits into the storyline. Granted, Return thankfully made those details less important with the way the stories are framed, but even aside from that, you ever notice that there's genuinely no consistency at all with G/E's relationship between games?!
If they're hinting that Guybrush and Elaine are broken up, or worse, that can only place this game after Return. But still, their relationship is a real rollercoaster between games, and it feels like we miss huge chunks of it based on how they interact! Their overly-cutesy interactions with each other in Return almost felt like a overcorrection after they decided to change it from G/E being separated from each other.
And yeah, Guybrush's appearance in this checks out when combined with the line about him being locked away in the mansion for a year. It makes me think there's been a tragedy, or the like, in his life to the degree that he wants to distance himself from the rest of the island, despite being Governor, apparently!
Yeah, one of the things I do more often than I should, is to imagine what happens between Secret and Revenge and what would have happened after Revenge if there hadn't been the "Curse correction" of Guybrush's character.
Revenge Guybrush was a collossal dick, the more often I play it, and adventure only served him as a source for stories to brag about Guybrush didn't want to BE a pirate anymore, he WAS one. And he'd realized no one gave a damn about it.
Guybrush was still the same person from Secret to Revenge. In Secret he'd already screwed people over if he'd think they'd deserve it: the shopkeeper, Bob, the Sheriff, even Elaine (before he met her).
Sounds like point and click style puzzles and dialogue trees will be included to some degree but the gameplay as a whole will skew more towards sea of thieves style than monkey island style. Nice to have something a little different without completely losing what makes monkey island what it is.
I love that whenever I think the series is over, it continues in another way. I was really happy with how the main series concluded and the answers that were given, so I'm fine with this just being a love letter for the series and its characters in general.
Wow, I didn't think we'd get new MI content this soon...is this the fastest turnaround since Secret to LeChuck's Revenge? Very cool that all the voice cast is back, and I've read that there WILL be point and click puzzles. This will bring a lot of new eyes to the series that hadn't even heard of it before, which can only mean more good things for the series going forward. Your move, Skunkape I just hope that I'll actually be able to play it because I tried to play the standard Sea of Thieves and couldn't get off the first island without getting shot ?
I have a feeling that now Disney has been made aware there's an active audience for this particular thing they own, we're going to have more and more Monkey Island "content" shoved down our throats in perpetuity, until we find ourselves longing for the days when we only got one of these every few years to a decade and each one meant something. If you don't believe me, I invite you to Google "Disney's entire business model for the past 15 years or so"
The first of the three-part Sea of Thieves Monkey Island expansion is a mostly painful test of patience for all but the most stalwart of Monkey Island aficionados. A full disclosure up front: I am not the biggest Monkey Island fan. I'm aware of the "legend" of the series, if you will; my colleague Dustin Bailey called it "the greatest adventure game of all time" unironically, but I've personally not played a single game in the series. I have, however, logged hundreds of hours into Sea of Thieves, and I couldn't keep my eyes open for most of this utterly monotonous and shallow collectathon.
Not everything about the Monkey Island DLC disappointed me. The new location, Mle Island, is visually distinct from every other Sea of Thieves island I've explored, and I felt some satisfaction piecing together the mystery of Guybrush Threepwood's disappearance, but by and large this is dull stuff.
It's also worth an extra point of clarification that what's available today is only the first of three Tall Tales encompassing the whole of Sea of Thieves' Monkey Island chapter. In fact, creative director Mike Chapman took to Twitter recently to "set expectations" for the first update, explaining that the entirety of Mle Island won't be open to players until the second Tall Tale launches next month.
Even so, there's no escaping the unfortunate reality that this first content update in Sea of Thieves' Monkey Island saga is a drag from beginning to end. Without spoiling anything, I'll just say an unreasonably large chunk of your time on Mle Island will be spent running around stealing haphazardly placed coins - Pieces o' Eight, of course - from barrels and crates, and after that arduous task is complete, you'll mostly be looking around for other items and finding entirely mundane ways to interact with them and advance the plot, which, I hate to say, bored me to tears.
The connections between clues are usually glaringly obvious, and none of them introduce a single new mechanic, or at least not one interesting enough to remember. Puzzles, I say between exaggerated quote-mark hands, involve pouring grog into mugs, going fishing, throwing cooking ingredients together into a stewing pot, and operating a pully system, and never once did I feel truly challenged to think outside the box. The only times I felt lost were when I couldn't find whatever thing was required, but without fail that crucial item always turned out to be simply hiding in a location I hadn't combed through sufficiently.
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