The Curse of Monkey Island

The Good
Game designer/programmer Ron Gilbert is the equivalent of a folk hero for several thousands of old school adventure game fans. He was the brain behind 1987's Maniac Mansion, a seminal graphic adventure game with unprecedented atmosphere and storytelling; the brain behind 1990's The Secret of Monkey Island, another milestone that took absolutely everything about adventure games to the next level; and the brain behind 1991's Monkey Island 2, an epic, refined and outlandish piece of art that I seriously believe is the best adventure game ever made. He left LucasArts soon after for reasons that were discussed to death.

Monkey Island 3 has nothing to do with Ron Gilbert. It has everything to do with LucasArts' greed to make some new bucks off the revival of their flagship adventure game series several years after Gilbert's departure, when LucasArts was very probably faced with diminishing sales and critical reception.

This game's popularity baffles me. Then again, maybe not, as I can see where it's coming from. Monkey3 is like an Indiana Jones film NOT directed by Steven Spielberg, or like a Harry Potter novel NOT written by JK Rowling. It lacks the soul of the series, or worse yet, it is replaced with a different soul. Obviously, this is not sensed by those who dashed through the originals in a superficial way. It is only felt unanimously by fans who embraced Monkey1 and Monkey2 to their hearts, or were even obsessed about them, like I was in my late teens. See, not obsessing about a game series is no sin. (In fact, the world probably doesn't need more hardcore game geeks.) But trying to argue how a counterfeit entry to the series is on a par with the true classic entries... is plain wrong. Monkey3 has superior graphics and music compared to the originals, which seem to have dazzled several gamers, but this is the only upside I can think of.

The Bad
Monkey Island 3 was designed and led by the Ackley-Ahern duo, with only one of them present in the team of Monkey2 (as an animator). While they prove to be capable game developers by and large, in the delicate, nuanced, semi-serious, and very personal world of Ron Gilbert, they move and thrash around like a particularly clumsy elephant in a porcelain store.
Regardless if they do or do not understand what made the original games work, they prove utterly unable to emulate their general weirdness, their general Ron Gilbertness. Now it's hard to define this Ron Gilbertness in mere words and give it a semblance of justice -- but for the purposes of this review, we can try: bittersweet, spooky, unpredictable, odd, offbeat, atmospheric, enchanting, smart, subversive, tragicomic and poignant; definitely poignant. The design in Monkey3 sometimes manages to be remotely spooky and/or atmospheric (the theater scene comes to mind), but that's where similarities end.

The Bottom Line
Aimed squarely at prospective new fans who were probably still preteens during the run of the original Monkey Island games, Monkey Island 3 is an OK if unremarkable adventure game when taken strictly in isolation. It looks well, plays well and sounds great. But it's not a proper Monkey Island entry. What LucasArts does here is effectively betraying the old fans (and Ron Gilbert himself, I guess), and producing something lighter, less profound, less edgy and more "PG" than Monkey Island 1 and 2, all for the sake of catering to a "fresher" audience. Out of cold calculation, the Monkey Island soul is replaced by a cheaper, downsized one that proves incapable of emulating the feeling, mood and peculiar jokes of the original, despite trying hard.
All this results in that no real fan of the series would honestly cheer this game. They just feel it's fake, like a changeling. What is there to cheer about an Indiana Jones movie deprived of Spielberg?..

The Good
As always, the standard Monkey Island humor we all know and love was present in this game. The story was also done very well, in the four-chapter style of Monkey Island 2.

The Bad
Unfortunatly, this game has a good deal of "filler" in it. The insult sword-fighting, a "plot device" from the first Monkey Island game, reared its head again. While some of the lines are amusing, it really gets old and repetative after a while; one wishes they could just skip over that part of the game, and continue with the story itself. Luckily, though, it only makes up a small, but time-consuming part of the game.

Some of the puzzles weren't particularly clear; there was an amount of random inventory-experimentation involved in solving some of them.

The Bottom Line
While not as enjoyable as its predecessor, this game does shine at times - I'd recommend it, despite my complaints.

The Good
It really is amazing. Every time a Monkey Island game comes out it manages to top the last title. The story is loads of fun with the same humour and comic charm of the previous MI titles (whoever came up with the hilarious pirate song in the middle of the game deserves an award). Graphically this is about as good as hand drawn 2d art gets. The backgrounds are all lavish cartoon art and the characters are brilliantly designed. Several favorites from the first MI games make a return along with some great new characters like Murray the evil talking skull and the hilarious Captain Blonebeard who runs the local chicken shop. Voice acting is flawless. Everyone has so much character and brings a brilliance to the game that text sentences just can't capture. Music is equally brilliant and never sets a foot wrong. The puzzle difficulty also makes a return so that novices aren't left in the cold.

The Bad
Nothing! well maybe that boat section in the middle of the game. The arcade aspect is a little dull but it can be turned off if you desire.

The Bottom Line
I can barely believe it but I think this is the greatest Monkey Island adventure of them all. Any adventure fan simply must get it with the exception of purists who think that if a game wasn't made when speech was only text then it should be ignored.