Hey everyone, PushingUpRoses here and today I’m going to be taking a look at Escape
from Monkey Island, the 4th and last game in the Monkey Island series that was developed
by LucasArts.
I have fond memories of playing this game in my teens; it was released in 2000 for PC
and in 2001 on the PS2, and I was at an age where I could really digest the story and
understand the mechanics of an adventure game.
I remember going to Best Buy and seeing the box on the shelf; I had already played and
enjoyed its predecessor, The Curse of Monkey Island, and because adventure games had all
but died by 2000, I was pleasantly surprised to see one, especially another Monkey Island.
I remember spending all day trying to figure out these puzzles, enjoying the game’s atmosphere
and settings, and being charmed by the humor; the memories of playing it are pretty burned
into my brain because I had just gotten braces and I would always be late to my orthodontist
appointments due to wanting to stay home to play this.
I had also just gotten kicked out of public school and started at an alternative school,
and I would play this game as a distraction from the unpleasantness of those days.
Even though I had played it many times and own the CDs, I always found the game tricky
to run on modern machines; not long ago I tried running it in a program called ResidualVM,
which can be used to play games that run on the GrimE engine, but found it was glitchy
and not running smoothly, so it had been years since I committed to a full playthrough.
When it was released on GOG not long ago, I found that I still enjoy it; memories of
my weird orthodontist who liked to talk about Terry Pratchett and kids getting into weird
fights over cigarettes at alternative school came flooding back into my brain, and I thought
“You know.
This game is better than people remember.”
It currently has the reputation for being the weakest in the Monkey Island series, which
might be true, but I feel like when you hear someone say that it automatically leaves this
negative impression, as though it must also be a bad game.
You hear the word weak and you don’t think, “Ah yes, but surely it’s still a good
game on its own!”
But I think this is a very nice looking, funny, and enjoyable Monkey Island title, so I am
here to defend this game in all of its 3D glory, while also touching on the reasons
why people think it’s lackluster.
Including “Monkeeeey Kombat!”
Yeah,I know.
I’ll get to it later.
As you probably know, the original creators of Monkey Island were no longer involved with
the series after the second game.
Curse of Monkey Island, which is a personal favorite of mine, was designed by Jonathan
Ackley and Larry Ahern, who previously worked on Full Throttle.
The project leads changed again for Escape from Monkey Island; it was designed by Sean
Clark and Michael Stemmle, also members of the LucasArts team; they had previously worked
on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Sam and Max Hit the Road.
Despite the Monkey Island games having different designers and artists for each title, they
all seem to have that classic LucasArts humor and charm because everyone who worked on them
still came from the LucasArts family.
The biggest difference between this game and the others is, as you’ve probably noticed,
the artstyle.
We’ve gone from more of a 2D, cartoony style to….threeeee deeeeeee…
But before I hop on my soapbox and get all preachy about the graphics and mechanics,
let’s take a look at the story.
You play as main character, Guybrush Threepwood, and the goal is no longer to be a mighty pirate.
You’ve achieved that, and have even married the plunder bunny of your dreams, Elaine Marley.
It picks up where the previous game left off; after marrying, Guybrush and Elaine go on
their honeymoon.
On the way back they get pillaged by some stocky looking pirates, and that is how the
game starts.
After defeating them with a jaunty looking jig, you resume life on Melee island as the
beleaguered husband of your strong witted governor wife.
Unfortunately, you were gone a tad bit too long and Elaine was declared dead, opening
up a space for a new governor.
In the running is the suspiciously named Charles L. Charles, whose goal is to win the favor
of the island’s pirates so he can promptly exterminate all of them.
There is also a brand new villian named Ozzie Mandrill, and this game really, really wants
to let you know that he is Australian.
Ozzie is a weird antagonist to bring into the plot; he’s evil, but not in a supernatural
way like LeChuck was in previous games; he simply just does not like pirates and wants
to turn the islands into consumer tourist traps to make money, and apparently he is
so good at insult fighting, a practice in the lore that started way back in The Secret
of Monkey Island, that all of the pirates have lost their jobs and houses to him.
It’s weird that there’s some kind of capitalist vampire narrative for this game, but it works
for the most part.
Huh, this villain seems kind of familiar to me, can’t quite place my finger on it, huh.
Elaine sends us on a trip to Lucre Island, where we have to discuss what happened with
the family lawyers.
They point us to the bank where our family heirlooms are, and while trying to pick them
up, it gets robbed by another pirate wearing a guybrush mask.
From here on out we need to prove our innocence, figure out what Ozzie Mandrill’s motives
are, and win back Elaine’s rightful position of Governor from Charles L. Charles.
The best parts of this game feature the wonderful
voice acting; most of the actors were previously in The Curse of Monkey island, though it IS
unfortunate that Elaine was given a new voice actress; it’s even a little jarring considering
Elaine went from having a distinct accent, to no accent at all.
Stan also has a new voice actor, but everyone else is familiar, like Dominic Armato as Guybrush,
Earl Boen as Zombie Ghost Pirate LeChuck, and Leilani Jones Wilmore as the VooDoo lady.
And this is a fantastic segue to discussing what makes this game really enjoyable; LucasArts
has always had the upper hand when it came to voice acting; their main competitor, Sierra,
always kind of lagged when it came to this.
Good lord.
Everyone is very convincing in their roles, I barely even see the characters as 3D animated
models, but rather actual people who are experiencing real situations in the game.
On top of that, it’s funny.
I don’t think it’s quite as good as Grim Fandango in terms of humor and use of dialogue
trees, but you can tell that the writing, even with the weird storyline going on, is
in the spirit of Monkey Island.
I think I just killed that man.
Hm.
Now let’s talk about (monkeeeeey kombat!)
Not yet, I’m getting there.
Let’s observe the 3D graphics.
I’m going to defend them.
Look, 3D was not exactly the hotness at this point in time when it came to adventure games.
3D + Adventure Games = DISASTER.
It became very unpopular very fast, much like me right before I got kicked out of high school.
But look at this game, LOOK AT IT.
BE HONEST WITH YOURSELVES, this game does not look bad.
In fact, I think it looks...pleasant.
I love these swirly clouds.
Like, a lot.
I like them a lot.
When I streamed this game a couple weeks ago I couldn’t really get past the swirly clouds
thing, I was enamored.
And the cutscenes are really not that bad; the characters have expressions, their movements
are not poorly done; I really do think it’s fine.
And the reason it looks better than other attempts at 3D adventure games is the fact
that the design team made the very wise decision of keeping things cartoony; obviously not
as cartoony as Curse of Monkey Island, but cartoony enough to where certain things can
be forgiven.
I like the characters’ walk cycles, I like the attention to detail with their clothing
and hair; it’s not like, oh...say...Gabriel Knight 3, released just a year earlier, where
they tried to go for...uh...realistic faces and bodies?
Seriously though, what is this?
This is just bad, no wonder people were so turned off.
What the fuck is this???
I love the settings, some are more lively than others of course, but overall I found
everything very easy to look at.
I especially like the first couple islands you visit, melee and lucre.
Very fun to explore.
The puzzle design is about on par with the first couple of games; I’m excluding Curse
because I thought that game was superior and had smarter inventory object puzzles than
the others, so when I say it’s on par with the first two games what I am trying to say
is that I thought it was on the harder side.
Apparently I had no issues expressing my opinion on this in my stream.
Though I do recall beating the game without a guide when I was young, so it couldn’t
have been too hard.
The game is segmented, so there are only so many things you can do in one location before
moving onto the next; very little backtracking, but some of these puzzles seem pointlessly
frustrating.
Speaking of inventory, would you like to meet Jeff?
I made him.
He’s my very own abomination of nature.
I made him out of prosthetics.
Jeff is useless and doesn’t do anything in the game, but when I was young I thought
I absolutely HAD to create this poor lost soul and eventually use him for something.
I mean, you can get ONE use out of him.
There’s a puzzle in this game that involves getting a skin prosthetic to stretch over
a manhole so you can use it as a trampoline… wow, only in adventure games, right?
To get this item you have to find three names, which are random each time, on the inside
of the manhole.
You use these names in a mad-lib type of dialogue tree puzzle; if you use the correct names
in the story, you get the skin.
If you do random names, you get all of these random body parts, and I figured as long as
they were inventory items and LucasArts, being such pioneers of puzzles that don’t spit
out superfluous items, that I would need them.
When I collected enough, I constructed Jeff.
This was very tedious, time consuming, and pointless, but I don’t regret it.
Everyone needs love.
And a liver.
And a stomach.
And a butt.
A big ole butt.
There’s also this.
Guybrush glued himself to this mechanical manatee and rode it for two hours straight.
You know, I always wondered what Elaine saw in guybrush and now it’s very clear.
So obviously, I have a lot of positive things to say about this game.
I genuinely think it is good.
But if it is as good as I say it is, then why do people view it as weak?
Whenever I read reviews on this game they are usually prompted with some sort of defense,
as though people have to acknowledge that this isn’t the best game but they still
enjoy it do to nostalgia, or something akin to that.
One of the most interesting things about this game is the fact that it was received pretty
well; in fact nearly all of the reviews for it were positive, even praising it for being
a fresh addition to the slowly dying adventure game genre.
It probably helped that it had zero competition at the time, but still; it was well liked.
The criticisms were mostly about the horrid, awful, NO GOOD tank controls, which I cannot
for the life of me figure out why the developers did this, and of course…(monkeeeeeey kombat!)
It seems like all of the Monkey Islands have something holding them back from being the
perfect games; insult sword fighting was met with mixed reviews, and when it was expanded
on in the third game, it was liked even less.
Monkey Kombat seems to be the new style of insult sword fighting, only it is way less
fun, takes up way too much time, is annoying, is not fun, involves making monkey noises,
is tedious, is frustrating to learn, and did I mention NOT FUN?
I know you’re hear to listen to me defend this game, but there’s really no defense
for Monkey Kombat.
In this section of the game, you have to fight these innocent little monkeys with an array
of grunts and groans.
No insults, just...monkey sounds.
To win, you have to learn which moves beat which and how to switch to those moves using
ooks and eeps, which you input with your arrow keys.
Don’t even think about using a walkthrough; the commands are randomized, so your best
bet is to write all this shit down.
This makes up for a majority of the end of the game, which jumps over damn near every
shark in the ocean, not just because of the Monkey Kombat but because the story splits
off from the group and does its own thing.
Even more so than the feeble attempt at a Mortal Kombat parody, how the story concludes
is where the game starts to suffer.
Usually I don’t give a spoiler warning for older games like this, especially in a retrospective,
but I’m going to for this one just in case you want to experience this jarring madness
all for yourself, so if you wanna skip this, head on to the time stamp on the screen.
We good?
Okay, in a callback to The Secret of Monkey Island, we find ourselves once again marooned
on Monkey Island..
While we are here we need to figure out a way to beat the Ultimate Insult, a magical
voodoo curse Ozzie Mandrill plans to use to eradicate all of the pirates so he can use
the island for his weird touristy money making schemes.
We also learn that Ozzie and LeChuck are working together because Ozzie saved him from a certain
doom, no idea how but apparently he pulled LeChuck out of the ice we buried him with
in the last game.
LeChuck’s intentions remain the same, he still just wants to marry Elaine.
We find good old Herman Toothrot still stranded on Monkey Island, only this time he plays
a different role.
He is in fact, NOT Herman Toothrot.
He’s actually ELAINE MARLEY’S GRANDFATHER.
So he, with the help of a talking monkey named Jojo, help us make a bigger, better ultimate
insult out of the giant monkey head.
Surprise, there was actually a monkey GUNDAM underneath this thing.
To fight us, LeChuck turns himself into a giant statue, Ozzie takes control of him,
and then we have to literally not fight and give up to win.
Yes, we have to cause a draw three times in a row during Monkey Kombat until LeChuck gets
tired of it, because the best way to cure a voodoo curse is laziness.
After LeChuck loses, he regains control of himself and squashes Ozzie in a rather graphic
death scene, then he EXPLODES!!!
What in the fuuuuuck?
I have so many questions.
How did LeChuck regain control?
Why didn’t they just kill guybrush right off the bat?
Why did he combust???
Why the Grandpa Marley stuff?
There’s also a minor subplot with LeChuck disguising himself as Charles L Charles and
getting voted in as governor and I don’t understand WHY; It’s so convoluted that
it’s rather hard to explain, which is the first sign of a bad plot; if you can’t describe
it to someone rather concisely, you may want to reconsider the story.
I’m not sure I can even pin down the main plot; it’s more like a lot of subplots that
don’t quite add up to a main idea.
I also want to add that I never liked the Monkey Island parts of the first game either,
so I am not sure why the writers went that route for this one.
Strange that the worst parts of the Monkey Island games seem to be when you’re on the
game’s namesake.
In the game’s defense, I adored the first three quarters; it’s really the final act
that throws it all off.
Not that adventure games have a great track record for iconic endings or anything, they
definitely don’t, but this one just kind of...gives up.
It just seems like nobody knew what to do with it, so they threw LeChuck in there in
the form of a giant statue and now it’s just a game of giant rockem sockem robots
for no reason.
I also never liked the addition of another antagonist; Ozzie Mandrill just doesn’t
seem to fit the tone of Monkey Island; he’s not a bad villain, I’m just not sure he’s
in the right game.
I do admire the writers for trying something new, because let’s be honest; how many times
do you want to see Guybrush Versus LeChuck?
I know you’re probably aggressively nodding your head, saying “Me, I totally wanna see
the same thing over and over again!”
and no, do you WANT this game to suffer from Nickelback syndrome?
They release the same damn song over and over again with slightly different lyrics and now
people hate them.
You don’t want the same shit.
No one wants the same shit.
I do not want my entertainment to be infested by Nickelback syndrome.
That being said, I do think the inclusion of Ozzie Mandrill, though something new, strayed
a little bit too far from a Monkey Island lore and didn’t quite fit thematically.
Like Nickelback.
They don’t fit anywhere.
I also think people are very quick to judge 3D animation from the late 90s and early 2000s,
and I don’t blame you.
I do feel like there is some blind judgement there, probably due to the fact that there
were so many ugly games using this style, and over time we’ve come to realize just
how ugly those games were, but I think it’s unfair to throw Escape into the mix because
LOOK AT THESE DAMN CLOUDS I LOVE THEM-
But the biggest reason people don’t favor this game is because the previous three are
just...better.
When you have a series of anything, whether that be movies, music, or in this case, video
games, SOMETHING in that series is going to be crowned the worst by comparison, that’s
just how it goes.
But it is of my personal opinion that Escape from Monkey island, though outshined by the
previous games, is not a bad game.
I think it has a lot of fun moments, a lot of quality design, and even with (monkeeeeeeeeey
kombat!), I liked it.
Something I always liked about LucasArts is that even their less favored games maintained
a certain level of quality and appeal, something I definitely cannot say about every developer.
When a Sierra game isn’t great, it topples into absurdly bad territory.
When a LucasArts game isn’t great, it still manages to be pretty decent.
And if you still can’t find anything to like about this game or you think my praises
are just some bullshit powered by flowery childhood nostalgia, then I just have one
thing to say: How appropriate, you fight like a cow.
Yeah.
Like a fuckin’ bovine.
Also, here’s some Murray.
I know it’s what you’re all here for it anyway.
Roll the clip.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching my Escape from Monkey Island retrospective.
Remember, never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game.
Unless you want to buy one for me, in that case please consider becoming a patron and
supporting my channel!
All of the details are in the description, and as always, I’ll see you in the next
one.