Genre : Adventure
Developer: Telltale Games
Players: 1
Retail Price: $9, or $35 (as part of Tales of Monkey Island)
Availability: PC, WiiWare
Rise of the Pirate God starts in the uncomfortable position of having its protagonist be, uh, dead. It was pretty easy to guess where the episode would go: you need to get un-dead so that you could rescue your wife from the once-again-evil LeChuck. That’s a pretty accurate synopsis of the start of the game, though it leaves out a few plot related bits of interest.
I was wondering how they would handle Guybrush’s death: it was a pretty shocking end to Chapter 4, even though the title was ‘The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood‘ (after all, how much besieging was there in The Siege of Spinner Cay?). On the one hand, having a semi-serious take on the ‘oh crap my wife is fighting my arch nemesis, who just killed me’ situation would be good, but on the other… this is Monkey Island, man. I don’t think that serious would really fit in well. The very start of the episode is a short recap of the previous events and then you’re back in it, working to free yourself from The Crossroads, and so overall I think it was done well.
While last episode had longer puzzles, Rise of the Pirate God’s are shorter but in greater abundance. This meant that I was always accomplishing something, and not having too hard a time of it, leaving room for more things to happen. Also, in many cases, what seems to be a straightforward task like ‘find your physical body and reinhabit it’ has a few more steps that crop up as you go. There’s also a variation on insult swordfighting, which is good if you like telling people they fight like a cow (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?)
Ghostly Guybrush looks nifty, with see-through ribs
It’s hard to discuss a game as plot-heavy as Episode 5 without divulging things that would detract from your enjoyment were they spoiled, but speaking broadly I enjoyed the story as it unfolded but could have guessed most of the story with no problem. Anemone the Vaycaylian is back (and has, evidently, been shacking up with the cartophilic Winslow), as are a few other characters, but by this point I’ve gotten a little sick of the prefabricated character design: I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to have met a person before, or in which chapter they had been in, because quite a few people fell into the category of ‘stubby fat guy’ or ‘tall, elongated face guy.’ That’s not to say everyone is like this, or that there aren’t any new characters, but with each episode it’s become more apparent.
The ending puzzle is a time sensitive loop, with the showdown with LeChuck you’re expecting taking the form of Guybrush getting the tar beaten out of him until you can figure out what to do, when and in what sequence to do it. It was annoying at first, since I’d be trying to figure out what to do when LeChuck would come make up my mind for me and decide that what I wanted was to be punched across the ship. In the end I think it was maybe a bit long but on the whole a good experience, though the ending was a little anticlimatic (and if anyone thinks things will be staying as they are in a hypothetical season two you’re either naive or an idiot).
Now that Tales of Monkey Island season one has wrapped up, I can say: damn. That was fun. Telltale’s maturing and becoming masters of what they do, and this is by far the best series of theirs I’ve played so far. The title of this episode gave me some expectations that weren’t quite met, Pirate God-wise, and it wasn’t perfect, but ‘not perfect’ does not preclude ‘enjoyable’ and I hope that, after the next Sam and Max season, Guybrush gets more time in the spotlight.
