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Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God
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Graphics & Sound:
As the finale to the first season of Tales of Monkey Island (and believe me, it does set up a second season ... at least if you wait until after the credits, that is), Rise of the Pirate God does a great job of pulling together most of the loose ends and ending the five-game arc in a very Monkey Island manner, complete with a showdown against LeChuck. While I enjoyed most of this latest chapter, it falls short when compared to the last two, and ends up falling back into a few of the standard adventure game traps (most notably, backtracking), but more on that later.
Like the rest of the ToMI chapters, Rise of the Pirate God looks good, and its fully 3D worlds continue to add depth (pun intended) to the Monkey Island series. While this chapter doesn't introduce any old favorites from previous MI titles like the last ones re-introduced Murray and Stan, it does bring back many characters introduced in earlier chapters like the mer-people, the judge on Flotsam Island and Bugeye from within the belly of the manatee. Of course, major characters like Guybrush, LeChuck and Elaine remain staple characters and even Elaine and LeChuck have a bit more than a background role in Pirate God, unlike the past few chapters where they showed up only briefly.
Voice and music continue to be top notch as the main character actors deliver their witty dialogue in the standard fun and amusing Monkey Island manner, while the game's amusing sea-shanty of a theme song plays throughout without any real looping issues or irritation. Even the darker sounds of the Crossroads (where Guybrush wakes up after being killed in the previous chapter) don't feel so ominous that they feels out of place in a Monkey Island game. |
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Gameplay:
At the end of The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood (the previous chapter), Guybrush had successfully enlarged La Esponja Grande and used it to suck up the pox that was infecting the whole Caribbean, only to be betrayed by the human LeChuck who used La Esponja's powers to re-imbue himself with voodoo magic and kill Guybrush. As long-time Monkey Island fans will know, death in this series is far from the last word ... I mean, how many times has LeChuck come back? Well, now it's our hero's turn to cross to the other side and find out just how hard it is to get back in your body and stay in the living world. As it turns out, it is a pretty tough task that involves a painful amount of backtracking.
Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God takes place primarily in the eerie pirate underworld of The Crossroads. Actually, The Crossroads is only the stopping point before you go to the afterlife, and here pirates can stay as long as they like having sword fights, digging up buried treasure or just hanging out with other master thieves. You will, of course, have to deal a lot with all of these aspects of The Crossroads if you are not only going to possess your body (for more than just a few clicks at a time), but also stop LeChuck who has not only used La Esponja Grande to become the Pirate God, but finally convinced Elaine to become his bride (after all, "Til death do they part" has actually happened for Guybrush and Elaine). To make matters worse, it seems that Elaine, now filled with voodoo godly magic, is evil as well and every time Guybrush's ghost tries to get near to the new couple, she douses his spirit in rootbeer ... which, of course, sends him back to The Crossroads.
There are quite a few enjoyable puzzles in Pirate God, including a couple of twists on old favorites like Insult Sword Fighting. When you get to the sword fighter's area of The Crossroads, you not only find the guardian there who is tasked to prove that a pirate is a worthy enough fighter to move on, but you also find Morgan LaFlay's ghost who is incredibly disappointed by her death. When you try to challenge her to a fight in order to regain her confidence, you inadvertently end up in a double duel that also involves the beheaded guardian. With normal insult sword fighting, the opponent throws out a dig, and you reply with the most appropriate counter-insult. Here though, you have to not only make sure you insult hurts the guardian, but it is also a compliment to LaFlay and relates to her statement. It's a really enjoyable twists that is fun to play around with.
Unfortunately, while the game is pretty good on the whole, there is a major dipping point pretty much midway through where you not only know where your body is and how to take control over it, but you need to find some "spirit gum" that will help stick your soul to your body permanently. This task is tedious and involves going to one location to possess your body (where you go back to when the time in your body is up) and actually standing next to your body (where you have to perform several tasks) which is about four screens away. It wouldn't be as bad if there were only a couple of trips across The Crossroads, but in order to do it with the least amount of frustration, you have to go from one location to the next no less than four times. Of course, if it is your first time playing through the game, it will take more attempts as you have to figure out exactly what you need to do in order to solve all of the little issues that come up. If it weren't for this section of Rise of the Pirate God, then this last chapter would be a hell of a lot better. As it is, it feels more like the first or second chapter of the season instead of the last two where it finally felt like Telltale has found their stride and the perfect formula to excellent Monkey Island games. |
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Difficulty:
I found a couple of sticking points in Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, but with few exceptions (most notably the permanent-possession segment mentioned above), good, exhaustive adventure gaming should get you past pretty much any issue this chapter throws at you. When in doubt, try all of the dialogue trees, or try any of the items in your inventory against anything else ... you might be surprised at some of the odd things that will work. During the final showdown with LeChuck (as he is throwing you around his ship), there is a bit of an effort involved in getting everything to line up just right and if you miss a step, it will be a few tosses across the area before you can get back to where you were and do what needs to be done. While it won't take an infinite amount of patience to work out all of the kinks in this confrontation, it does take a good bit. Besides those points though, Pirate God is pretty smooth sailing and clocks in at an hour or so longer than past ToMI chapters, making it a much bigger finish that does a solid job of wrapping up the season.
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Game Mechanics:
By having Guybrush incorporeal throughout a good bit of Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God, well when he isn't in The Crossroads that is, it allowed Telltale to add an interesting layer to the puzzles in this chapter. At one point, the Ghost of Guybrush finds himself underwater trying to retrieve a certain object ... the problem is, he can't grab it. All he can really do is talk to other characters ... it is the task of convincing these other characters to do what he wants instead of simply picking items up and manipulating them normally, that adds an interesting twist to this particular chapter. Trust me, quite a few of these puzzles would have been a lot easier to solve if it weren't for Guybrush's ghostly nature, but with these twists to the gameplay, you will have to go through a few more dialogue trees and figure out different ways to approach old-time problems.
All in all, Telltale's premiere season of Tales of Monkey Island should make a lot of fans happy. Presenting the longer story as a series of chapters was great for fans who wanted new Monkey Island adventures ASAP, and Rise of the Pirate God does a great job of wrapping things up, but if you haven't downloaded the previous chapters, and are interested in Tales, then it is much more worth your while to just get the whole season as one package instead of buying the individual episodes, especially since it is one large story arc unlike past Telltale episodic adventures. If, on the other hand, you've been keeping up with the season one chapter at a time, then you won't be disappointed (well maybe in the middle a bit) with Pirate God and should definitely finish up the season ... especially since the next one looks like it will be a doozie. |
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-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer |
Minimum System Requirements:
Windows XP / Vista, 2.0 GHz+ Processor (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent recommended), 512MB RAM (1GB recommended), DirectX 8.1 sound device, 64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB recommended),Version 9.0c or better |
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Test System:
Windows 7 Ultimate, AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core 2.20 GHz, 4 GB Ram, Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card, DirectX 9.0c |
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