Monkey Island (series)/YMMV

• Awesome Music: Has its own page.
• Broken Base: Oh God. The Monkey Island fanbase is notorious for being split, particularly for fans of a bunch of silly pirate games. Some believe that the series began and ended with Ron Gilbert, and everything from Curse onwards is a monstrosity with stupid cartoony graphics, abandoning the "funny characters in a serious plot" feel. Then we have those who came in with Curse, and believe the first two games to be quaint, and that they suffer from a lack of Dominic Armato's voice acting and Bill Tiller's beautiful art direction. On top of this, there are those who think Curse and Tales are brilliant games, just as good as the first two, but that they are still not "true" sequels, because they don't explain the ending as it was meant to be. The release of Tales has made another group rather prevalent, who like the first three but detest any others purely due to not being 2D and having keyboard controls. And then, finally, we have a rather "obscure" little group who doesn't care about these details, but likes all of the Monkey Island titles. (The only thing that the fandom does seem to agree on is that Escape is the weakest, but even that isn't universal.)
• Ear Worm: The main theme is an in-universe example: If you ask Edward Van Helgen for a pirate story, he'll tell you about a pirate crew who went insane because they couldn't get the theme out of their heads.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Murray...the evil demonic skull! Muahahahahaha!
  • And Reginald Van Winslow. He's so popular he got to appear in Poker Night At the Inventory.
• Even Better Sequel The game that wins most popularity polls is actually the 2nd or 3rd game.
• Fan Dumb: Due to the love the Monkey Island series gets, there are just as many (perhaps even more) Misplaced Champions in the fandumb as there are general whiners.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: One line from Curse, rendered much less funny by the fourth chapter of Tales: "Funny, I didn't think you could die in Lucasarts adventure games."
  • Technically, this is a Telltale Games adventure game.
    • But you can't die in Telltale games, either... can you?
  • Guybrush's Hand in the Hole joke in Curse culminates in the line "You're going to have to cut off my hand!" In Tales someone does.
• Game Breaker: Each of the first four games has a keyboard command that lets you win the game. You don't usually get the full credits if you use it, though.
  • Though since the fun in adventure games is found in solving the puzzles, and you miss the entirety of the plot, there's not much purpose unless you want to hear the typically kickass credits music again.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point in LeChuck's Revenge, Guybrush asks LeChuck why he didn't just kill him when he came in, and LeChuck replies, "Because we had an extra disk." In Tales, LeChuck actually does go right ahead and kill Guybrush without the formalities. This occurs at the end of the fourth chapter of a five-chapter series, each of which comes on a separate CD in the PC version... in other words, we did have an extra disk.
• Memetic Mutation: "I found the treasure of Mêlée Island and all I got was this stupid T-shirt."
• Memetic Sex God: Reginald Van Winslow. Being the most sexually active character in a game series will do that. Being attracted to anyone regardless of gender or species helps too.
• Moral Event Horizon: LeChuck actually has many to his name, apparently, but in Tales of Monkey Island murdering Guybrush after pretending to be on his side for four episodes is considered his most heinous and evil action.
  • For some, it was his sadistic delight in torturing Guybrush in the climax of the second game.
• Villain Decay: LeChuck's threat level dwindled quite a bit thanks to getting repeatedly killed by Guybrush. Tales reverses it, completely.
  • Initially averted in that the first game plays him semi-seriously, but the second game makes him terrifying.
• The Woobie: Poor Wally. Poor, easy to torture Wally.
  • Guybrush always goes through a hard time, for drama and comedy alike.

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