The Legend of Monkey Island – A Tall Tale – Part 1

The Legend of Monkey Island has just released in the Sea of Thieves, and it’s pretty damn cool. The release involves Melee Island and a Tall Tale that introduces you to the new island and its lore. What we have seen so far is a Part 1 of Monkey Island, with the release of a second and third Tall Tale coming along next month. Now, I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about the original Monkey Island games, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. Because I really did enjoy this tall tale.

The first thing that stood out to me was the music. The music was absolutely great throughout the adventure, and felt pretty accurate compared to the original music. Sadly it seems that the song isn’t available via sea shanties yet.

Anyway, the premise is simple. The Pirate Lord invited Guybrush Threepwood and his wife to the Sea of Thieves for a honeymoon, yet they simply didn’t turn up. So we’re sent off to find them. And that involves going through a portal through the Sea of the Damned. As we sail through, we hear Guybrush talking about various stuff, and we see both his ship and the ship of LeChuck sailing around. We continue onwards and… we get stuck. And all of us appear to die. Eventually though we make it through and continue on our adventure.

When we arrived on Melee Island, we get the cool music and, as soon as we’ve docked, we’re already running around stealing gold. Oh, no, sorry, pieces of eight. This isn’t the Sea of Thieves, no one accepted our generic gold coins. Turns out, the pieces of eight are vital to the Tall Tale and we have to grab as many of them as we can. We also discovered that we are immortal, although unfortunately Bacxaber got stuck after jumping off a cliff, so he had to leave and come back and ended up becoming mortal again.

Now, the crew of Stormcloud was using a guide to complete this tall tale, but I think it would be fun to do it blind. The puzzles aren’t too hard, although the commendations are kinda easy to miss. Normally there are books scattered around to read, but this time, you had to sit next to little ink pots with quills for a commendation. We missed a commendation where we had to show a skull around the island, but there was nothing indicating that showing the skull around was even a thing. The pieces of eight were also important – if you missed a single one, you’d be unable to get the commendations. There should have been more pieces of eight, to save running around looking for ones you missed.

I would say that the puzzles weren’t completely stupid. You can somewhat figure out what you need to do, and nothing about the puzzles is too frustrating, aside from finding all the pieces of eight. We did make sure to talk to everyone, and most of the dialogue was actually pretty good. The street was a little bit empty though, the majority of the population was in the Scum Bar.

It took us about 2 hours to complete the tall tale, and there is a lot of running back and forth, but it’s definitely not boring and it does feel a bit Monkey-Island-y. Not as crazy though. That being said, we definitely didn’t see everything that we saw in the trailer. No circus and no giant monkey mouth opening to reveal a cave. This tall tale was very localized on Melee Island.

What I find interesting though is the direct connection to the Sea of Thieves. LeChock is the person who was disguised as Ramsey back in that adventure we did a while back, and he’s got Pendragon’s sword. He also happens to have a ship that can turn on a time, which you can see as he rushes off. LeChock wants to have the power over the Sea of Thieves, which is a pretty interesting tie-in. I was expecting the Tall Tale to be completely separate from normal Sea of Thieves stuff, but no, there are ramifications for everyone involved.

Problem is, that’s it for the tall tale. There’s nothing really left to do once you finish it, especially if you do all the commendations or something. There are two rewards but they’re trinkets for your ship, which you can’t really use if you’re sailing on someone else’s ship. There’s no clothes or weapons to be bought, no new shanties, no new anything. Just a handful of commendations. Sadly, we couldn’t even keep the chef disguise that we had to buy as part of the tale.

Still, I did enjoy it. And I’ll probably be doing it again to get that last commendation I missed. Gotta get all those commendations, right?