The Curse of Monkey Island

The Good
I should probably start this review by stating outright that Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge is one of my sacred cows. The game is everything good about the adventure game genre, and one of the best presented computer games of all time. It achieved feats of sound design that to this day are barely matched or even attempted. It is, as one might figure, a hard act to follow.

Curse tries. First on its list of attempts is a visual update. The backgrounds are still hand-painted, and look nice enough, if drab in comparison to MI2's. Unsurprisingly LucasArts overhauled the animation entirely, going for a 'theater quality' style with low detail and high animation. This same craze of "Disney-like" animation had swept through, and killed off, the rest of the adventure game genre earlier in the 90s, so it's no great surprise that it got to LucasArts eventually too. Unfortunately the new style of animation with thin lines and flat colors did not mesh well with the SCUMM engine's 3D perspective feature, and rooms had to be designed to be as flat as possible. The few times that actors walk into the distance they lose all definition like a low res sprite run through 2xSai too many times. Still, this was a limitation the team was aware of, and they worked around it where they could.

Curse could hardly even have hoped to have matched MI2's sound design, seeing as how the latter had been both a showcase and advertisement for the iMuse system itself. Music (aside from one hilarious musical interlude) ranges from good to appropriate, but never quite reaches memorable. The voice acting is excellent, easily living up to the precedent set by Sam and Max and Full Throttle. While some of the choices for characters that return from earlier games do not match how I would have imagined them speaking, they all very obviously got into their roles fully, and every line of dialogue (which are 100% voiced) is entertaining on its own just due to the actor's particular inflections. In fact out of the entire cast the only dud as far as voice acting goes is, as it happens, the primary character Elaine, but she is a topic I will be returning to shortly.

Puzzle-wise Curse is a mixed bag. There are returning puzzles from earlier entries in the series, and they are all weak, but the new puzzles have a few standouts. "Adventure game logic" is for the most part absent, and the solutions to problems are usually logical based on the circumstances and world. In fact one puzzle requires you to throw out "video game logic" entirely and solve a problem how you would in reality. It's a shame that they didn't have enough of the good puzzles to make a full game out of.

The Bad
The problems with Curse probably start with the absence of one element: Ron Gilbert. Gilbert had envisioned Monkey Island as a trilogy that would have had a very distinct ending in its third installment. The aberrant details of Secret and MI2 would have come to a head as the nature of Monkey Island and Guybrush's place in it would become apparent. Ending a franchise, however, is not at all what Lucas or the development team had in mind. They weren't making a game, they were making a Monkey Island game. What resulted in Curse is the best example of why fans should never be game developers.

The details of MI2, especially the ending, were a curiosity put next to the pirates and voodoo and the humor of the rest of the game. Unsurprisingly these elements of the game were exorcised entirely, written out in the most ham-handed way possible as just an illusion and display of LeChuck's magic powers. The team had no interest in developing the series toward an ending or goal of any kind. They were fans of piratey fancy, and now that they had control over the series they were going to make the piratiest, fanciest game they possibly could.

Curse was where the series began its unfortunate descent into self-referential humor, pulling out past jokes and themes to remind you, yes, you are indeed playing a game with Monkey Island on the cover. Secret ended its first chapter with a hunt for crew members, so therefore this game too should end its first chapter with a hunt for crew members. Secret had a highly quotable puzzle based around insulting opponents, so if this game has one of those as well, it will be just as quotable and memorable (admittedly it is well written, but that doesn't prevent it from being any less needlessly derivative). MI2 ended with a fast paced battle of wits and inventory puzzles with LeChuck, so bringing that back will make the ending of this game just as exciting (unlike the last point this one was not done even remotely as well as the previous game's).

In fact of all the things to be brought back from earlier games, the most glaring, and least surprising, change from the earlier games is also one of the greatest crimes of writing in the history of computer games: the complete and total character derailment of Elaine Marley. Elaine was the first strong, well-written female character in the history of electronic gaming. When Samus Aran was still hiding her gender, and half a decade before Lara Croft had any snappy comebacks to Atlantean demi-gods, Elaine was running an island of scoundrels and vagrants and, in her off time, working out how to deal with that annoying ghost pirate in the area. The protagonist Guybrush Threepwood went out on a heroic quest to save her from the clutches of LeChuck upon her disappearance, only for Elaine to reveal she'd never been kidnapped at all; she'd just gone out to look for some way of putting an end to LeChuck herself. In previous Monkey Island games there was a plot of romance between herself and Guybrush, but Elaine breaks it up, twice even, because Guybrush is an entirely impossible person to live with. Elaine's reaction to Guybrush falling to certain peril and possible death at LeChuck's hands in the closing hour of Monkey Island 2 was 'Oops.'

Suddenly, in the weeks between that and Curse's opening Elaine is bemoaning the lack of a Threepwood in her life, unsure if she can go own now that LeChuck has taken from her ' the only man (she) ever truly loved.' In the opening of Curse's first proper chapter Elaine is incapacitated and, shortly thereafter, kidnapped, and only Guybrush Threepwood is capable of saving her. Worse yet, upon being rescued and revived, Elaine is, before the cutscene has even ended, incapacitated and kidnapped again. There exists a storyboard of a cut movie where Guybrush and Elaine fend off a group of LeChuck's henchmen before being overwhelmed. I find it very telling that, when pressed to make a cut to the game for budget or time reasons, the developers cut out the one part where Elaine does anything of any competence or significance.

If they had to cut anything they could have cut out that misplaced ship combat minigame. As a hack of the SCUMM engine (like the optional highway minigame of Sam and Max and the motorcycle combat of Full Throttle that could be solved either through action or thinking) it's interesting, but pointless and contrasts heavily with the remainder of the game. I feel it was put in as an apology from the developer to the customers who were not "dyed-in-the-wool faithfuls" of the franchise. 'We're sorry,' they are saying, 'that our game only has dialogue and puzzles. Please enjoy this part of the game that reminds you of other games you have played.'

The Bottom Line
When Return of the Jedi originally came out it was blasted by fans and critics alike for being so underwhelming compared to the bar set by The Empire Strikes Back. Over the years, however, that perspective has been lost now that Jedi can be compared to Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Yes, Curse is a better game than Escape from Monkey Island. This does not mean that Curse's quality lies halfway between Escape and MI2. For all its Slave Leias (honestly Murray is one of the better things to exist in the MI franchise as a whole) Curse is a fundamentally damaged product that did its part to kill the adventure game genre by just not caring about itself or its medium beyond superficial elements. Perhaps others can play Curse for its few bright spots, imaging them as being part of a proper adventure game of the caliber LucasArts was, at one time, capable of producing, but I can only see it for everything that went so wrong.