The Third Monkey Island Tall Tale was Fun

Finally, we got the third Tall Tale from the Monkey Island series. We finally get to properly help Guybrush and defeat LeChuck once and for all. But we’ve got a lot of work to do in order to save the day! And it all starts by going through a portal, to a mystical paradise.

The island is fun to explore

The Lair of LeChuck takes place not on Melee Island but Monkey Island. Monkey Island feels like a big place and has a lot of exploring to do on it. Most of the puzzle solving went on up here, and it really did send us all the way across the island. We mostly had to find three golden monkey heads in order to open a massive chest and get a massive key in order to open the path to LeChuck’s lair. This involved a lot of running around, but it wasn’t particularly difficult, at least, with a guide. Without a guide, I think it would have been a bit trickier, mostly because finding things in the dense jungle was tedious. We rather amusingly found Admiral Coco early on and carried him through most of the jungle part of the tale, wondering when we were going to need him.

There were also little memory spots and scrolls to read. Some of these were obvious, but some of them were insanely well hidden. The commendations for this area were also pretty funny, and one involved hitting your own ship with a massive rock – it gave a commendation called Whoops.

The cave system though was a bit lame

I honestly thought we’d do more in the cave system inside the giant monkey head. But it was mostly just wandering around. We were given an undead head, which would spin around and show us what direction to go in. Guybrush sort of followed us, but we also kinda followed him. He was annoyingly both invisible and solid at the same time, and would constantly bump into us. Not great when you’re running around lava.

It just felt kinda lame. There were no puzzles or anything to do inside the lava caves, just some walking and a little bit of jumping. At least the books were easy to find. We’d have to stop every little bit so that Guybrush could pick something up off the floor and give us a little bit of commentary. We’d also find that he’d get stuck, tell us to stick together, then give us a direction to go in once we’d all gotten close. It seemed that the next cave section entrance would only appear as Guybrush got close, not because we found the next cave section ourselves.

All of this led us to a lava river.

The naval combat was a bit weird

We did actually have a ship battle in this tall tale. After we wander through the caves, we just miss LeChuck sailing away on his ghost ship over lava, but then Elaine appears with a ghost ship of her own. So we chased after LeChuck and it ended in a ship battle in a large lake of lava. This ghost ship though had cannons on the front of the ship, controlled by Guybrush and Elaine, and we couldn’t fire them. However, we could fire the cannons on the side, of which there were 10 of them. We had to use rum-soaked cannonballs to damage LeChuck’s ship, would would teleport and respawn after taking a certain amount of damage. But then they teleport off and we have to follow them.

It bugged out, never took us to Melee Island

At this point, we were supposed to go to Melee Island in order to finally defeat LeChuck, but the game game left us on Monkey Island and became softlocked. It also caused my game to crash, which was not fun at all. Luckily, we had a checkpoint, and everything seemed to work when we quit the Tall Tale and restarted it at the checkpoint. So we could finally make our way to Melee Island.

Final battle was alright, better character development than Flameheart though.

What surprised me was that we kinda got a cut scene. Sure, it was in first person, but it was pretty cool seeing LeChuck almost winning. It was also surprising seeing Ramsey, the Pirate Lord, incapacitated. This magic sword that LeChuck had stolen was stupidly powerful if it could just mind-control people. Luckily, Captain Capsize saves the day by jumping through the window and knocking everyone down, separating LeChuck from his magic sword. We then get into a fight against LeChuck, but it’s the same retort system from the second Tall Tale, where you have to beat them via insults. The fight led us through Melee Island’s main town area and ended in front of the bar, where Ramsey gives us a crate full of root beer to properly defeat LeChuck.

We then got a nice happy ending with some fireworks and everyone being freed from mind control. Elaine and Guybrush elope and decide to plan a new honeymoon, while Ramsey thanks us and leaves, taking the evil sword with him. And with all that done, we can head back to the Sea of Thieves proper and get our rewards.

Overall, better than Tall Tale 2.

The Lair of LeChuck was a much longer tale than that of saving Guybrush, but it was also more fun. The three of us were engaged for pretty much the whole thing, while in the previous Tall Tale, we kinda got bored with the fighting. What’s also nice is that we actually got a decent reward. For completing the Tall Tale, we got a replica of LeChuck’s magic sword, a portrait of LeChuck and a shanty for Monkey Island, although that was bugged and didn’t appear for us. Better than just the handful of trinkets we got for the previous Tall Tales.

I think it was a good conclusion to the series of Tall Tales. A simple ending but a happy one. And we got all the commendations on our first try, so we don’t need to play it ever again.