I wasn't a big fan of these when I first played them, so I might not last very long.
Thoughts on the first ten minutes:
Earl Boen! Hooray! I think it was only the first episode that it was tricky to get the Boen version of for a while, so it's good that they sorted it for the GOG version.
They're definitely putting more effort into the cinematic presentation than EFMI.
It does look better than EFMI as well, but... not by much. They were still scuppered by the suits wanting to get the games on Wii (hence Club 41 being exterior only - the name is an in-joke about how they weren't allowed to have episodes compress to anything more than 40 meg!), and they just haven't managed to get the desert island setting looking as good as Devil's Playhouse or Wallace & Gromit, it looks pretty fucking cheap. And I haven't even got to the reused character models yet!
The budget/space issue also extends to having multiple dialogue options but the same clip getting played whatever you choose. It's like that 'Guybrush has a host of rude options and decides not to say any of them' gag that the older games did, but without that framing and happening regularly.
The tone is still very Saturday morning cartoon. Guybrush talks a lot and makes really bad quips. I can't remember if it was Sam & Max or EFMI or both that I said this about, but it's just over-written. Every exchange could do with ending a line or two earlier.
So, I've been given my first proper puzzle and it is literally 'go do some piratey stuff'. Some journo won't give you info you need until you provide him with material for pirate news, so... go do pirate stuff. I don't know if they're trying to be post-modern, but it feels rather unengaging and lazy to me! (I realise that this is essentially what SOMI does, but that's the start of the very first game and it's still doing the 'Guybrush is playing at being pirate' thing, so it's much more suitable, plus, y'know, it's all done a lot better!)
Small note about the tutorial puzzle: it's a complete rip off of the BTDT 'start at the end of an unseen adventure with all but the last step of a convoluted puzzle completed' thing. BUT it does have a 'put the Mentoes in the soda pop to make it fizzy' puzzle on a pirate ship, so I guess we accidentally ripped that off for LOTCG and now we're even?
Oh, I forgot to say as well: the dated humour from Escape is still in here. Guybrush's pink ship gets an appearance, 'male pirate wears pink frilly underwear' is a joke unto itself, and the Voodoo Lady is codenamed "Deep Gut" and when Guybrush is told a closet contains her underwear he reacts with revulsion and the hotspot changes to "the scariest closet in the world".
Okay, finished episode 1. Not awful just very bland. There are two irritating map puzzles, and almost the whole thing is just you wandering around this ugly-ass Master System looking desert island interacting with idols. Also geez the writing, it's all fart jokes and hand puns. Stuff that Dan and I would be embarrassed to put in a game, and it's not like we're above toilet humour. I think these get better as they go, but oof this is a bizarrely lacklustre way to kick off your big-name series.
Played about half of episode 2, it's definitely better. It has a nice sunset skybox (even if you can see the seams in it!) and the merfolk island is more interesting visually even if the rest of the locations are repeats of the island from the first one. Also, the story has got started now, and I like the merfolk, they're cool.
The puzzles are a bit better too, no bullshit so far. The only annoying thing is that I got stuck on a couple of things at the end of my play session, so I took a look at UHS and it turns out both things were due to bad signposting.
It does have a bit that I remember Dan liking, where you have to coach human LeChuck through solving an adventure game puzzle. It's no different mechanically to doing it yourself, but it's a fun little joke.
Okay, finished ep 2. It is better than ep 1 but it does still have some bad signposting, some padding, some navigation problems. Really, it all just needs a bit more polish. I think a Skunkape remaster would solve a lot of this series' issues and push it up a lot higher in the pantheon. Sort out the inter-screen controls (possibly the biggest problem with the two episodes so far has been puzzles based around walking through the jungle, with Guybrush coming to a halt on entering every screen, lots of blind spots, irritating diagonal paths etc), improve the textures and lighting, add some new models and some more dramatic camera angles and, if they dared, maybe even cut out some of the bullshit. They could fiddle some stuff around and perhaps get Dom in for a few new lines of dialogue to sort out the signposting issues. Just a few licks of paint here and there would make the world of difference. Can't fix everything, of course, but it'd make it all a lot more bearable.
On tone, I think I felt the morning cartoon vibe a little less in this episode. The writing's still not half as sharp as it needs to be. Also, there's this weird thing now where everyone fancies Guybrush, and there's this pirate hunter who's also a massive fangirl of Guybrush's. This is all very different from what the series has done so far where everyone thinks Guybrush is a joke and a liar and an overall goober. I appreciate that they're trying new stuff out, and maybe that after Guybrush has had so many adventures he would gain some renown. But it also just feels a bit weird and the game overall still treats him like a useless idiot who keeps failing upward.
Oh, also, Guybrush seems to be unironically low-key sexist a lot of the time, and his fangirl comes off as quite young which creates some... Roilandy vibes, especially when Guybrush decides to pretend she's his wife to get out of some problem. Nothing cancellation-worthy, but it feels a little uncomfortable sometimes.
Finished episode 3. I think this is thought of as the best of the 5, and it's... okay. It doesn't have as many irritating navigation issues (especially once you've figured out the exit points of the main level, and it has some clever puzzles. It does still have some laborious mechanics around those puzzles (the face-pulling contest especially), a bunch of minor bugs, and a need for like 10% more polish in the cutscenes and editing and such. The writing's still not great - the characters are archetypes like 'stoner surfer' and 'nerd' and what have you (released a short while after we did jock and nerd cavemen in TGP except ours was done well, obv), and it's still over-written. Murray is okay but feels like he's wheeled on for fan-service, they don't really do much with him except repeat his greatest hits (from his ten minutes of screentime in COMI!).
Also, more fat jokes aimed at the Voodoo Lady, and after getting his young groupie to pretend to be his wife Guybrush then tricks her into feeling up the creepy nerd. This is 2009 and it feels like a Porky's movie. I know BTDT and TGP have a handful of problematic moments but at least it was always made clear that D&B were being pricks and the only women manipulated into getting it on with nerds were literal cavewomen being attracted by fire!
So, I was playing episode 4 and it was pretty good. You have to defend yourself in court against a bunch of different allegations and find different ways to get yourself out of each one, it's nice and tight and the puzzles are moderately clever. Then it goes back to jungle maps AGAIN, and my enjoyment was immediately dampened. Thankfully, it crashes whenever I try to go into the jungle, so I'm going to take that as my cue to stop playing these episodes. They're fine, just about, but still hanging around at the bottom of the franchise with EFMI. (I haven't really given RTMI a proper chance yet, maybe it won't be quite so abhorrent as my first half hour of gameplay with Dan suggested.)
So I think I'll skim through a playthrough of the last episode and a half then move on. The only other observation I have is that this whole Morgan storyline really feels jarring. They're just going for straight drama and it's quite embarrassing to watch them trying to do a touching death scene and then a furious revenge story with Guybrush bloody Threepwood. It's like when Toy Story started putting ballads in about how sad it is to be an abandoned toy and shit, the established tone just can't support it. And also, frankly, I don't care about Morgan. The 'previously on' told me that she and Guybrush had become friends and I was like "Really? I don't remember that happening, she was just kind of there."
Watching through now. There have been a couple of vaguely transphobic jokes about the merpeople - Guybrush referring to them as 'sexually ambiguous' in an othering (and kinda incorrect) way, and then LeChuck saying they weird him out (granted he's the villain but it feels like the game is on his side with this joke and it just comes out of nowhere). Again, it's not like there are huge cancel-worthy elements here, there are just... a lot of moments Skunkape would probably be cutting out of a remaster!
Finished watching. Oof, a really weak ending (this franchise isn't very good with them!). Just lots of back and forth with boring voodoo macguffins, and a load of story elements that bog it down and don't get paid off. Elaine doesn't like that the Voodoo Lady is always giving Guybrush quests and that's why she was pretending to trust Lechuck and also engineered this whole sponge thing maybe, very unclear. Morgan's whole deal was that she thought Guybrush was a fearsome pirate then realised he was a weenie and fulfilled her pirate hunter contract on him but then on a dime started to feel guilty about it because she respected him for dealing with situations, and also she fancied him and her jealousy partly motivated her to capture and deliver him but also she respected his commitment to Elaine and she didn't even like him anyway so why was she jealous and.. whatever, she gets killed by LeChuck, and in the afterlife mostly regains her self-esteem kind of and helps defeat LeChuck. The Voodoo Lady is maybe evil and has been manipulating LeChuck and Guybrush through all the games, but then probably not and she's just dealing with fates and stuff that can't be easily explained, also unclear as to where Guybrush stands on that now. So they defeat LeChuck and hooray the end, very abrupt. But then post-credits, Morgan delivers LeChuck's spirit to VL who sends her back to the land of the living as a ghost so she can continue to be a pirate hunter (even though she can't touch anything and this seems to deflate her character arc such as it was) and it turns out maybe the VL is evil but also we have no idea why or how because... that's the end.
Basically, I think they got far too into the weeds with MI lore and their fanship of it, trying to deconstruct it and explain it and add a bunch of dramatic underpinnings to it. The two things fans seems to really like about TOMI are Morgan and the Voodoo Lady intrigue and I just don't think either one worked at all.
Rating: Some good moments, but heavily compromised
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