On Replaying The Monkey Island Tall Tales

The other day, we were meant to go sailing as Reapers, but half the team never turned up. We kinda tend to avoid using sloops because they’re less fun, and because I get 2 minute respawn timers, one death tends to fuck me up entirely. But rather than not doing anything at all, Bacxaber and I decided to go and redo The Lair of LeChuck, since we both needed to replay it for a stupid cosmetic.

When the Monkey Island tall tales came out, they came with a bunch of commendations but not really any rewards. For completing the last tall tale, you got a replica of the Burning Blade and that was it. A later update made it so that you could get extra rewards, but these rewards were NOT retroactive. So, despite us having already done all the commendations (except me, I missed one), we had to replay the tall tales again to get these extra rewards. Bacxaber and I did The Lair of LeChuck, and all we got for it was a stupid sword, because we already had all the other rewards. In fact, this sword wasn’t even USED in The Lair of LeChuck! It was the sword used in the end sequence of the previous Tall Tale, to prove that we were a true pirate.

But on top of that though, these tall tales are needlessly long. Half of The Lair of LeChuck is getting into the lair in the first place. You need to obtain three golden monkey heads, place them on a giant hand and raise a pillar that contains the key to LeChuck’s lair. However, this takes up the majority of the tall tale, and the path to doing so is ludicrously long. Only one single monkey head is relatively easy to obtain, the other two require convoluted puzzles that don’t even make much sense! One of the monkey heads is inside a cage and we need to blow the lock off. But rather than, I don’t know, shooting the lock off or prying it open or something, we have a small explosive which we can use to blow it up. Which is fine, but to do this, we have to make a bouncing beam of light puzzle across a good chunk of the island! We could have just thrown a bunder bomb at it or something.

I get it, these ARE tall tales based on adventure games that are known for these backwards puzzles, but these puzzles aren’t exactly fun. Especially when there is a ton of running back and forth, and you have to carry items around with you, meaning you can’t sprint either. A lot of it feels like padding too. The first monkey head requires you to find the oars for a rowboat, then row the rowboat to a skeleton that is JUST out of reach, only to be given a bad treasure map and have to dig up the head yourself – it would have been more tantalizing to have the monkey head be on the hanging skeleton, so we could see the prize for ourselves.

After the puzzles though, it’s all kinda on rails. You open up the lair, then wander through a bunch of boring lava caves. Caves that are designed to only open up new passages after you’ve wandered around in circles a few times and Guybrush has said all his stupid dialogue. And then you spend FOREVER going down boring lava corridors on a boat that steers somewhat weirdly, something between a Galleon and a Sloop. It’s supposed to be a frantic chase as you race after LeChuck and try and sink his ship before he finishes work on the Burning Blade, but you hardly even SEE LeChuck’s ship, and the naval combat is in a dreary lava cave with little going for it, designed in a way that you HAVE to use the chase cannons on the front because LeChuck always runs away from you.

And when you defeat his ship, LeChuck just teleports away, ship and all. There’s no satisfying sinking. Instead, you just get teleported to Melee Island. Except it’s broken and half the time, you get teleported back to Monkey Island, with nothing you can do. So you have to cancel the tall tale, sail back to the Sea of Thieves, start the tale again from a checkpoint and then sail BACK into a portal and HOPE that you get sent to Melee Island.

All that for a rather boring and very stilted cut scene. We don’t even get to see the Pirate Lord and LeChuck fight. Ramsey teleports in, gets immediately frozen by the Burning Blade and when things get unfrozen, he just takes the sword and legs it, leaving us to fight LeChuck. It’s not even a good fight, it’s a stupid repeat of the retort combat from the previous Tall Tale, it goes on for too long and LeChuck mocks us for running away when it’s HIM who’s running!

Sure, it ends up with fireworks and LeChuck exploding, but it’s not worth it. It is FULL of unneeded padding.

The whole thing, with a guide, took me and Bacxaber two and a half hours. That IS including the time it took for us to restart the game though, because the game kicked me out of the session when it was supposed to teleport us to Melee Island and instead took us back to Monkey Island, and Bacxaber had to cancel and restart from a checkpoint. Except we had to do that twice, because his checkpoint was only at 2/4, when mine was at 4/4 for some reason. But all of that was skipping over all the notes and diaries you need to read in order to get all the commendations. Doing those would have easily added another 30 minutes to the whole damn thing.

Thing is, these tall tales COULD be fun, but it all drags on for too long. I understand that you need puzzles for your puzzle-based tale, but it’d be better to have more short puzzles and less massive ones. And the whole lair is just… boring. It’s lava caves. They’re not interesting for very long.

Really, I remember this tale being better. Oh well.