The Second Legend of Monkey Island Tall Tale

On September 1st (or rather August 31st for my friends), the second Tall Tale of Monkey Island, the Quest for Guybrush, came out. It’s a tall tale set on Melee Island, the same place as the first Tall Tale. This Tall Tale had us looking for a way to save Guybrush Threepwood from the strange day dream that he is trapped in. As we sail through the sea of the damned, we get a message from Lechuck, who says that he’s basically already won and wants to take over the Sea of Thieves. But we have a plan to stop him and that requires saving Guybrush.

In order to do so, we have to complete three trials to prove that we’re pirates, and obtain three items in order to make a concoction to wake Guybrush up. So off we went, back to Melee Island. In a semi-immortal form, since we yet again bugged out and died in the loading sea.

The tale started off with a bit of running around. We had to go to the mojo place, meet Corina and leave and go back again a few times. This time though, there were no Pieces o’Eight to find. Instead, we just forge ourselves credit notes from Guybrush in order to get all the things we needed, like a map. Once things had been established, we made a potion to clear the fog around Melee Island, and the whole island became open for us to explore. We were now completely free to explore.

However, we had to get these three legendary tasks done. The first was a simple treasure hunt, following a poem and moving from chest to chest. It wasn’t particularly difficult, and we finished it quite quickly. Once we’d completed the task and found the last chest, the mystical mojo woman Corina popped out of nowhere to take the item we’d found.

Up next, we had to steal an idol. And, in doing so, we meet Stan the salesman, the guy who sells ships in his own little pier. We already have a ship and don’t need to buy one, but we do need to steal the idol Stan keeps in his office. And we don’t even have enough money for a ship anyway. So what we do is quite strange. We find the guy who bought the cheapest ship and try and get the deeds off him. To do that, we have to find Meathook, who is on his own mini island, and is planning to pack up and sail away, since he no longer has his tourist attraction, a terrifying beast. We help him out, find the Beast (which turns out to be a cute parrot) and bring it back, making meathook change his mind and re-open his attraction.

We went back to Stan, who wants to show us some accessories for our newly acquired ship. What’s pretty cool is that the ship we got is a ghost ship, but Stan is also selling the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean. He also has his cool, glitched shirt, which we sadly can’t take from him. However, we do trick Stan into climbing into a wardrobe and sealing himself in. We use this as a chance to steal his key, break into his office and steal the idol from him. But we also rather cruelly push Stan and his wardrobe into the sea. We got a commendation for that.

Speaking of commendations, there are a few to get, including finding all the ink wells where we hear Guybrush’s thoughts. There are also five books we need to find and read. But most of the commendations aren’t that convoluted, though a guide is useful for finding them all. We were following a guide on RareThief, which has all the tall tales made into guides.

There’s also a bit in the circus, where we did a small gauntlet to earn some pieces of eight, but I’m otherwise not really sure why we were there. My character though looked seriously buff in the outfit we had to wear to do the gauntlet. Turns out, my pirate is very much a buff woman – she looked insanely buff in the chef costume from the first tall tale.

Anyway, we got the idol and Corina pops up to take it from us. The last thing we needed to do is to fight the legendary swordmaster. But this involved learning a new technique: insults. Now this is where the tall tale falls down a bit. We needed to learn insults and retorts from fighting a bunch of pirate ghosts, but learning them is somewhat random. This was done in a really clunky way. You basically hit them until you got a prompt to insult or retort them, then the enemy just stood still while you picked out a fitting response. It looks really stupid. The fight aren’t short either, since the enemy has to choose an insult or retort as well.

And then we didn’t even fight the sword master. We end up fighting a guy called Ribbsy who works for LeChuck, and used the insults on him. But we did get a medallion out of it and it’s the last thing we needed to make this potion with Corina.

So we raced back into town and head to Corina’s shop, where she just lobbed all the items into her magic cauldron, and a blue bottle floated to the surface. We immediately grabbed it and rushed up to Guybrush’s manor, where he was working on a book. Corina appeared here too in a magic cloud, and we persuade dGuybrush to drink the potion.

After drinking the potion, Guybrush suddenly got all his memories back and realized that it had all basically been a dream. As did everyone else on Melee Island. Luckily, Guybrush knows where LeChuck has gone, but he needs to go and basically apologise to everyone before we can set off on our next adventure.

The Tall Tale ended with us going through a portal back through the sea of the damned.

We completed the Tall Tale in about a couple of hours. It was fun, but it did drag on quite a bit. Also, we didn’t get any decent rewards. Not the cool sword we bought, not the costume from the circus, not the ferocious beast. All we got were a handful of ship trinkets. Which I’m never gonna use.

I did enjoy the Quest for Guybrush, but it could have easily been trimmed down a bit.