Feedback on Episode 1 (Possible Spoilers)
First, I would like to thank Telltale and LucasArts for reviving Monkey island, I am very glad to finally have a new game to play.
Next, upon completing the game (part 1 anyway) I would like to offer some feedback on the overall experience to aid Telltale in the creation of the later episodes and give everyone a thread in which they can do the same.
What I really liked:
Loved the puzzle design, the new characters, the plot and story as a whole and the general progression of events. I thought the environments were very well made and the maze puzzles were a nice throwback to the old games. really liked the part in de Singe's chair! Overall, a very good start to a rebirth of monkey island!
What I though could have improved:
1) Control design- the click and drag thing was not what I expected at all. I immediatley assumed point and click when I started playing and the controls were a bit awkward at first (I was running into walls, etc.) The examining of objects in the inventory was a bit tedious as well, but only because there was no hotkey (that I know of anyway) to do it quickly (like the action medallion in curse). Maybe the addition of a keyboard hotkey for certain inventory functions could be implemented in the next episode.
2) Depth of Dialogue- I know (or expect) that most of the characters and plaaces seen or talked to in this episode are not likely to have much of an appearance in later episodes, but one of the things that I loved most about the other Monkey Island games was the large amount of dialogue choices and varying resonses. In COMI, for example, nearly every character on Plunder Island had some part of their past, their personality, or some other development shown through dialogue. We also got a lot of pop culture references (i.e."Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me" in the episode of the cabana boy) While we get enpugh development in the major and minor characters, we do not get the same amount of dialogue choices as previous games, with options being quick to repeat themselves. I would like to see a dialougue tree closer to some of the sam and max characters in which you can ask multiple questions with mostly humorous replies, one question leading to the next, until it is fully exhausted, not just 2 alternating questions or so (I would have liked to know more about Crimpdigit's choice of unicorns, for example).
Please post your thoughts on the first episode!
Next, upon completing the game (part 1 anyway) I would like to offer some feedback on the overall experience to aid Telltale in the creation of the later episodes and give everyone a thread in which they can do the same.
What I really liked:
Loved the puzzle design, the new characters, the plot and story as a whole and the general progression of events. I thought the environments were very well made and the maze puzzles were a nice throwback to the old games. really liked the part in de Singe's chair! Overall, a very good start to a rebirth of monkey island!
What I though could have improved:
1) Control design- the click and drag thing was not what I expected at all. I immediatley assumed point and click when I started playing and the controls were a bit awkward at first (I was running into walls, etc.) The examining of objects in the inventory was a bit tedious as well, but only because there was no hotkey (that I know of anyway) to do it quickly (like the action medallion in curse). Maybe the addition of a keyboard hotkey for certain inventory functions could be implemented in the next episode.
2) Depth of Dialogue- I know (or expect) that most of the characters and plaaces seen or talked to in this episode are not likely to have much of an appearance in later episodes, but one of the things that I loved most about the other Monkey Island games was the large amount of dialogue choices and varying resonses. In COMI, for example, nearly every character on Plunder Island had some part of their past, their personality, or some other development shown through dialogue. We also got a lot of pop culture references (i.e."Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me" in the episode of the cabana boy) While we get enpugh development in the major and minor characters, we do not get the same amount of dialogue choices as previous games, with options being quick to repeat themselves. I would like to see a dialougue tree closer to some of the sam and max characters in which you can ask multiple questions with mostly humorous replies, one question leading to the next, until it is fully exhausted, not just 2 alternating questions or so (I would have liked to know more about Crimpdigit's choice of unicorns, for example).
Please post your thoughts on the first episode!
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Comments
I don't have any thoughts about it other than i loved it and can't wait for episode 2!
After S&M ep2 I witnessed a steady decline in quality for telltale (Wallace&Gromit is only average) and now they seem to have hit rock-bottom. I really like the company, their attitude, what they do.....but for MonkeyIsland and its history, this is not enough, not in the fartest.....
btw, why bring mixing of inventory items back when it's use itself never is a puzzle to solve than just following directions...
don't wanna make the game bad, it's certainly ok but compared to the quality of art, dialogue and puzzles in the old one....it's not very well.
Other than that, it was a fantastic follow-up to the Monkey Island...and yeah, I can't think of anything they could've done to improve it. It was rather lengthy, 'epic', clever, funny, and most importantly, Monkey Island-y.
so much better than escape, if they keep this quality up through all the episodes then i will be ecstatic. it easily stands up next to the rest of the MI series.
couldnt be happier with the way its come out.
the look, puzzles, humour, story are all spot on.
well done telltale, thankyou.
An abject lesson in the importance of spell-checking - a single typo can invalidate even the most reasonable argument.
Anyway, I loved the episode myself. The art is excellent, brings out the lush, exotic and quirky feel of the original games, and the jokes were quite lovely as well. I'll admit I could have done with more dialogue as well, and the overuse of the 'multiple-choice-but-just-one-line' gag turned out just a bit tedious towards the end. Other than that though, I've very few complaints. A thoroughly competent job, and the promising beginning of a series worthy of its successors!
I don't like several of the puzzles, which have a lot of handholding even if I turn all the hints off (would you mind not telling me about the weathervane whenever I touch the idols, Guybrush? I'd have liked to figure it out for myself. Kinda the same for confirming each screen in the right direction when you walk through the jungle) and the second jungle map puzzle was disappointing because it was about arbitrary actions, not lateral thinking.
Dialogues could be better. Sometimes there are interesting options but Guybrush won't speak those when selected and the same options keep reappearing in the dialog-selection without much variation.
I started the game using subtitles, but I quickly turned them off again since they don't keep up with the spoken dialog, which gets very annoying. This is true for other TellTale game as well and I think the system really needs some work. Subtitles seem like an afterthought while they can be very important for people that don't speak English natively.
The real downside for me are the controls. Many asked for point-and-click controls before the game was released and we were told to wait and see. Now we've seen it in action and many still ask for point-and-click controls. That should tell you something.
If you click on an item, Guybrush walks to that item like you'd expect. It just makes sense that clicking on an empty space makes Guybrush walk over to that empty space. Currently it works completely counter-intuitive and I keep bumping into things, especially when the camera-angle switches.
Using inventory items also seems to take much more effort than needed. It really feels like we're getting a second-rate control scheme because the game also needs to run on consoles.
So I have some gripes, but overall the game was much better than I expected it to be, so I'm happy and I hope that some of the points mentioned above will get better in the chapters still to come.
I was used to the sam & max box icon in the bottom left corner and i kept clicking there, which brought me back to the first screen of the jungle... ARGH.
Also, the look function was kinda annoying... Nothing too troublesome, but i think the option to right click an item to get the description would be most welcome.
Now, about the game itself...
Well, I did like it, just not as much as i thought i would. I agree with the lack of depht in the dialogues... they aint baddly written but they do lack some depht. They weren't that funny either...
Also, the "guybrush doesn't say what i clicked" thing, which i thought wouldn't bother me, finally did cause it happens so much throughout the game. The few references were pretty well handled, tho, i felt there were pretty good and there weren't too many of them (i loved the one to stan).
I think what i like the least is that it feels very much like EMI (i'm not talking about graphics here). The jokes, and what we can guess of the overall plot (la esponja grande ? Why am i reminded of the ulitmate insult or giant monkey robots ? I thought these jokes didn't really "fit" in EMI, i'm affraid i'm not gonna love this new plot... But hey, then again, i know it's only the first episode and this might turn out in a million different way, so let's ignore that right now. I trust Telltale to make something good out of this anyway. Maybe not what I'd expect, but still good.
I thought the puzzle were pretty well done, nothing too difficult, but not too easy either (disapointed, as many others, by the bar fight one). Oh, and unlike most review i read, i had no problem with the mouse drag controls... It was a bit annoying sometimes cause it was somehow hard to manage it precisely, but nothing to scream about.
I'm vaguely wondering if the episodic format works so well on MI... Sure, they handled that cliffhanger pretty well and i don't doubt there's more to come, sure, all this guessing while waiting between episodes is great, but it does feel like it lacks some "epic" dimension... It didn't matter much in Sam and Max, cause even though there was an (awesome, especially in season 2) overall plot, each episode could mostly be seen as a single detective case. Here, i dunno.. But once again, i guess it's a bit too early to comment on this (i wasn't too thrilled about episodic about sam and max in the begining either, and in the end i LOVE what they did
So overall, this first episode wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I still had a good time, and playing monkey island again does rule, but i'll wait for the rest and see how it goes. What is kinda disapointing is that it is way under the sam and max season imo, in which a lot of jokes were pure gold... I know telltale can do better than this, and i hope they will.
(by the way, being a french who loves being laughed at by yankees, i was an easy target for LeSinge... And i loved him ! Now i'm gonna start sayin Sacre-merde over and over again and piss off people with that