Working My Way Through Tall Tales
Tall Tales in Sea of Thieves are basically story quests. It turns out, the pirate sandbox game has a decent backstory, when it can be bothered to tell it and not hide it away in one-off adventures and events. There are three main ‘series’ of Tall Tales, the original 9 Sea of Thieves Tall Tales, the five Pirates of the Caribbean Tall Tales and the three Monkey Island Tall Tales. Doing all of them takes a good chunk of time, and, honestly, they’re not even that fun.
Okay, sure, the stories themselves are fine, even if they are a bit disjointed. For example, the Sea of Thieves Tall Tales are all about reaching the Shores of Gold. However, Wild Rose, the fifth Tall Tale, has literally fuck all to do with that. In fact, it’s only mentioned in passing, how, because you helped save two lost souls, you can eventually go to the Shores of Gold. However, the previous Tall Tale has you explicitly going hunting for part of the special mcguffin needed to reach the Shores of Gold. On the plus side, these stories are all closed off and finished, meaning there’s only a handful of loose endings. Each story is mostly the same, but they do vary somewhat and are set in different areas of the Sea of Thieves, and you do visit a lot of unique locations. At the same time, there’s also a lot of books to read.
The randomness doesn’t help. Going back to the Wild Rose Tall Tale, it’s random where you’ll fight Rooke, the bad guy who cursed Wild Rose and George. We did this multiple times – one time, she spawned on an island two islands away from where we had to hand in the final items and finish the tale. Another time, she spawned LITERALLY HALF THE MAP AWAY. Why? Because, uh, randomness.
I think another problem is the rewards. All the good rewards are stuck behind doing the same thing over and over. The best reward, the Gold Curse, is stuck behind doing every single commendation from every single one of the main tall tales. You can also get two unique shanties, the Pirates of the Caribbean shanty and the Monkey Island shanty, and both of these are locked behind every single commendation for their respective tall tales before. And a good chunk of commendations involve pixel-hunting. There are books for every Tall Tale that give background information, and you need to read all of them for specific commendations. The Monkey Island ones are particularly bad because there are just so many of them, but the main Tall Tales are no better, since a lot of the time, the books aren’t even on the same islands as the stories. Going back to the Wild Rose Tall Tale, one book is located on Lagoon of Whispers, which isn’t really related to the story at all.
However, I feel that the biggest issue is all the waiting. The dialogue just seems to take forever. In the Sea of Thieves Tall Tales, normally the waiting is at the end, which isn’t too bad unless you’re running around repeating the Tall Tales for commendations. But the other Tall Tales have long waits at the start. The Monkey Island Tall Tales are somewhat annoying, mostly because you need to wait for the portals to open up so you can travel to the locations outside of the Sea of Thieves. On the other hand, the Pirates of the Caribbean ones, just STARTING them takes forever, because Calypso will just not stop talking.
And there’s a ton of empty sailing and swimming. The Sunken Pearl from the Pirates of the Caribbean Tall Tales requires sailing to the middle of fucking nowhere and then swimming to the bottom of the ocean. Some Tall Tales can and will take you halfway across the Sea of Thieves due to sheer randomness.
As one-off adventures, Tall Tales are fine. And they are worth doing once. However, you may need a guide to do so, because they’re not exactly clear cut and it’s easy to get lost. However, I would recommend doing them on Safer Seas, because you don’t want to waste time getting sunk, and some Tall Tales involve leaving your ship unattended for long periods of time. The instanced Tall Tales (mostly just the Monkey Island ones and a handful of Pirates of the Caribbean ones) are fine since they’re in their own separate areas, but the main Tall Tales can be fucked up, even with check points.
Repeating them though? Doing each one five times for commendations? Wouldn’t recommend, not unless you cheese checkpoints. But you’ve got to get the Gold Curse somehow.