Well, this is a hefty step up from the first game - it's fun to imagine a player back in the day who had played the EGA version of MI, then upgraded and a year later got their hair blown back by this. The introduction of continuous background music along with the iMuse system that segues seamlessly between themes as you move from area to area is a godsend, for one. The graphics are much more tangible and detailed, even compared to the first game's VGA graphics - I know Peter Chan wasn't happy with how pixelated the backgrounds ended up after the scanning process, but I really like the effect - it reminds me of Van Gogh's Starry Night paintings or even Seurat's pointillism, and at worst it's a sort of randomised dithering. (It's certainly better than the sanitised crap of the special edition.) For me, it lends the art more griminess, an analogue density. The whole game is strikingly dense in comparison to its predecessor, in fact - not just because of the beefed up audio-visuals, but in the storytelling too. Guybrush comes with a built-in backstory now, plus he's had a fall in fortune between games and he now has a specific goal (Big Whoop) and specific obstacles to that goal which don't feel as contrived as the three trials; the first playable screen you get to is a small hub packed with five separate areas, some with off-shoot rooms; dialogue trees go much deeper, and object descriptions are more numerous (where before you would look at a shelf of bottles and get "I don't see anything special about them", now you get a description and riff on each individual vial). One could even say that it's a little overwhelming, especially coming off the back of the clean design of the first game, but really this is good sequelising - altering the tone to the point where it avoids redundancy but still feels of a piece with previous entries. It's Life Of Brian to the first game's Holy Grail.
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Whewf, finally got through the Four Map Pieces section of the game, which really feels huge. The puzzles are inventive, varied and mostly fair, although you have to intuit more stuff on your own than in most later Lucasarts adventures. For example, you're told that one of the map pieces belonged to Rapp Scallion, who died in his Weenie Hut on Scabb Island. The hut is locked. You then have to infer that he must be buried in the Scabb Island graveyard somewhere, notice that his name isn't on any of the graves there but there's a locked crypt with Stan's branding on it, so you should steal the key from him, get into the crypt and work out which of the coffins is Scallion's by reading the quotes on them then finding a compendium of Pirate Quotes amongst the dozens of individual books in the library's catalogue system. None of it is exactly unfair or illogical, especially when you're dealing with a finite number of locations etc, but I don't know how easy I'd be finding this now if I were playing it for the first time. And the density of detail I mentioned previously does serve to make it a little tougher, I suspect intentionally. Of course, there are some actually unfair puzzles like the notorious 'monkey wrench' one which, even if you are aware of the term, is Discworld levels of abstrusity.
Overall, though , it's structured really nicely, with the one major goal - get the map - dividing into smaller goals - get the four pieces of the map, aided by a brief summary of who last had them - which then divide down again and again. Some of these form little linear sequences of single-step puzzles as well, like when you chase one piece of the map around the island as it gets thrown out of windows and snatched by birds. It's a little daunting at first when you're dumped into a huge collection of locations with little to go on but as you make your way around, slowly figuring out your list of obstacles and theoretical solutions and whittling them down, it's really satisfying when you solve them all and move into a narrow section of interactive storytelling and then the much more contained space of LeChuck's fortress. It feels a bit like surviving one of Far Cry's 'action bubbles' and getting to walk down a jungle pathway for a bit!
I wrapped up my play session just before getting into one of Lucasarts' beloved 'looping maze which you need a guide - preferably disguised as dance moves - to solve' as seen in Last Crusade and twice in Monkey Island 1!
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Finished! The looping maze solution was a little sneaky - you have to look at the first three words of each line of a verse, ignoring the final body part - but as each door only has three body parts on it, I suppose it's not too tough. Dinky Island is mostly bullshit, honestly. For a start, it's a little deflating that after all that map collecting, all you had to do was climb into a crate heading to LeChuck's fortress then get randomly and coincidentally thrown by an explosion to Dinky Island. Then when you get there it's just a load of random items strewn about the place and some irritating pixel-hunting, 'use bottle on rock to smash it so you can use it to cut open a hanging bag' is a bit of a rough puzzle, plus another 'maze you need a guide for' and another 'animal you need a bunch of snacks for'. Plus, at this point they've completely given up on the Look At responses, just using "nice X" for almost everything. Still, it at least looks nice and doesn't take too long, then we finally come out of the flashback structure, smartly creating a feeling of propulsion going into the endgame.
LeChuck is impressively scary - I love his earlier speech about how he's going to turn Guybrush into a screaming chair, but here they pull out all the stops with the visual effects, the horror score and his rants about dimensions of pain. The puzzle is mostly fair, although there's some more pixel-hunting (that coin return slot!) and it's a bit annoying having to wait for LeChuck to show up once you've got a plan. But it's very satisfying when you complete it, and you get some chunky gore as a reward.
And then we come to that ending. On the one hand, it's a striking flourish, it works well with the feeling in the first one that you're merely playing at being a pirate, and it cleverly ties a load of earlier stuff into it (that 'employees only' door from all the way back on Melee Island in the first game is put to great use). On the other hand, it's a shame that Elaine doesn't get much to do and that a lot of it is taken over by an Empire Strikes Back spoof. It would probably work better as the ending of a two-part story - instead, they throw a couple of strong hints in that Guybrush is actually under a spell (Chuckie's eyes, the cut back to Elaine) which makes it feel very much like a cliffhanger (and even if we ignore the subsequent games, I believe Ron Gilbert was intending to make a third one or at least wasn't against it). It's a mixed juju bag, and I think that in my head-fan-edit I'll erase those two hints and make 'it's a child's fantasy' canon, relegating all subsequent games to further imaginings by the kid (his parents never call him Guybrush, even in the earlier 'dream' sequence). This can even be used to explain away the more haphazard design in the latter sections of the game - the kid is getting tired and so elements of the real world start to intrude and the logic of his fantasy starts to fall apart. It's a bit of a stretch but it works better if you take the two games as one long piece!
Anyway, overall a great game even if it does flag a little towards the end. I think if I had to choose I'd say I prefer the first game, because it stands on its own whereas this feels like a middle section of an unfinished trilogy and it doesn't have any weak sections. But the second game is a lot more gorgeous in its audio and visuals - even in its poster - and has a stronger feeling of depth and immersion while still being funny and inventive. So it's a close-run thing.
Rating: Green.
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