This remake it's a mixed bag, but overall I liked it. I agree that there are some unfortunate design choices that can be VERY ANNOYING, but I tried to look past them and in the end I enjoyed playing this remake.
What I hated:
- Guybrush's hair is so wrong it makes me wanna puke. His overall character design isn't any good either which is a VERY bad thing seeing as he is the main character.
- Le Chuck's design. He doesn't look like a ghost at all! He's like a random mishmash of parts: living human head and legs, skeleton ribcage, ghost hands, plus a spectral fog thrown in the mix in the hopes to add a convincing ghost effect, but it fails miserably. He has mostly living colors and it's not transparent anymore. He should have been the same bluish hue as the rest of the ghosts but for some odd reason it's not.
What I just didn't like:
- The more cartoonish style in the close-up face scenes. I liked better the more realistic style of the originals. However I can see how it's easier to get away with that realistic style with the old low resolution sprites. It wouldn't have fit completely with the faces of the new high resolution sprites. I just don't get why they didn't animate the character's mouths when they are talking in close-up scenes. That's just lazy.
- Some of the voice acting ruined what I had imagined for some characters. For instance, Stan sounds way too relaxed which doesn't match with all of his arm waving. I always thought he would speak more frantically like a locutor from an infomercial. Also, the cannibals sounded like very educated people (or was that intentional as a joke?) not what I imagined at all.
- Guybrush walking animation is not very well done. It gives the impression that his feet are sliding on the ground, however after a while I stopped noticing this.
What I liked:
- The background art is gorgeous and the water effects look great, specially during the bird's eye view of the islands. Personally I liked that Lucasarts just decided to pimp up the original 2D graphics instead of remaking them into a completely different style (like 3D or COMI style). It still feels like the first Monkey Island.
- The sound effects and music are good, for the most part they remain faithful to the original. However there's some improvement as well, like the added ambient sounds in the jungle that add a lot of mood.
- The ability to switch between the classic and remake versions on-the-fly is plain genius! But they screwed up in not allowing speech in the classic version. That would have been a great intermediate point to those people who can't stand the new graphics.
- Probably many people won't agree with me here, but I liked how they kept some of the skippy animations (like in Stan's arms or when opening/closing doors). IMO they give the same retro feeling of the original.
- I'm still undecided in regards to the new commands and inventory interface. It's a good thing that the game window now takes up the whole screen but I miss having all of my commands and items at hand on the bottom of the screen. At least they kept all of the original commands and offer plenty of choices for invoking them (hotkeys, pop up menu, and mouse wheel), as opposed to the Tales of Monkey Island interface which I frankly didn't like.
I really hope that MI2 gets the same treatment with hopefully better character design.
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