That’s it! I finished Escaped from Monkey Island again and it was an excellent adventure. I postponed playing the last of the classic LucasArts adventures, afraid that it wouldn’t be as fun as I remembered and put a taint on my streak of playing through all of them, but it certainly didn’t disappoint.

I felt that the game only got better as it lasted. The first part in Mêlée Island was fine, but the puzzles felt a bit mundane and while gathering your crew is a required element in the Monkey Island games, it started to feel a bit long in the tooth.
The second part on Lucre Island was the weakest in my opinion. The quests weren’t as fun to do and I found them a little difficult.
The third part on Jambalaya Island and Knuttin Atoll was the best. The characters were very funny and the puzzles seemed intuitive to me.
The final part on Monkey Island felt a bit empty, but this didn’t bother me, because it also didn’t overstay its welcome. I liked the story with Herman Toothrot, loved the idea of a religion based on LeChuck and didn’t hate Monkey Kombat. Although I think some other sort of fighting would have been better, maybe something with timing and positioning or something.

I have two minor things that annoy me about the ending of the game: The first being that the q-tip in the giant monkey head seems to be on the wrong side. In EfMI it’s in its right ear, while I seem to remember putting it in its left ear in TSoMI. I don’t know why I haven’t read anything about this before. And I can’t imagine that the developers would have done it wrong. Then again, the mechanism for opening it’s mouth is totally changed. So maybe they changed it on purpose. But then I would’ve expected there to be a comment about it. Am I missing something?

The second thing is that Elaine walks away from Guybrush at the very end when he says that he wants to be a pirate. Didn’t she just convince her grandad that he had to be governor again, because she wanted to have adventures? And Jimmy pushing Guybrush of the edge was just mean. So, not the best finale to an otherwise great ending of an excellent game.

Now onto replaying the post classic era LucasArts adventure games, such as Broken Age, Thimbleweed Park and of course Return to Monkey Island!