I’m even more intrigued by the beginning, because it’s there that the “mighty pirate” is presented to players as an older, serene person on a bench. He also seems a bit disconnected from his family.
This symbolic image of time, age and memories has become the wallpaper of the lock screen of my phone:
Also, we have Guybrush telling the story to Boybrush and Elaine saying that he makes the ending stranger each time, so in the end the whole tale, including the Original Secret, could all be made up or have elements of the truth, etc.
Same for me. It was great.
(Please accept this joke as a noncynical tone; Herman’s art is both magnificent and useful. It looks precarious but holds firmly against pushes and pulls to its structure, suggesting new vantage points for us to peer at and learn new insights about the island and the greater world. And I still say the Lookout of Mêlée Island was extremely farsighted.)
LOL.
I feel like whatever reading of the ending someone does, it almost always suggests Guybrush has some kind of mental health issue…
The most obvious reading is that he’s a flooring inspector that somehow gets so deep in the fantasy of being a pirate while working there that he forgets where he is and that the fantasy isn’t real. He then tells his son all about this potentially frightening hallucinatory episode as a story.
Even the the most benign reading is that he’s a dad who makes up entirely fictional stories where he changes the ending, and for this ending he decided to tell his son that the hero realizes he’s having some kind of mental episode.
The only way he can find the true secret is to go off his meds
Yeah, check the images in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MonkeyIsland/comments/xoux5b/something_slightly_interesting_happened_i_loaded/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
It’s the Previously On feature. And Guybrush is literally telling his son: Then things got really weird, and I was on Mêlée Island again, except everybody was animatronic…
Like geeze, Dad!
Well that’s pretty interesting.
The anamatromics on Melee Island were another curse from LeChuck. Just like the end of MI2 was a curse. LeChuck got to Melee first and disguised himself as one of the anamatromics, and intentionally allowed Guybrush to obtain the secret (he thought it was a cop-out, and couldn’t appriciate the meta humour and nuance of the thing).
That’s nonsense, of course.
.
I never go for the darker fan theories about MI. Geeze, Guybrush’s hallucinations have NOTHING to do with piracy. He just starting talking about the material integrity of the flooring one day 
Although tbh I don’t like them because they rely on a pop psychology I don’t find compelling. at best. I’m really personally bias and against the dark theories, so oh well.
I’m just saying, man. In MI1, we know about three people who tried to sail for the Secret. Two of them died, and one of them became a crazy castaway. Of the two who died, one transformed into a Ghost Pirate and is said to be the only one who learned the Secret.
Then in MI2, things arguably got darker. 
I’m done last night after 9 days and 20+ hours and 41% achievement completion rate. (am playing twice in fact, one myself one save with my kid, helping him out making him do some stuff) Of course hard, no hints and all the extra dialogue. I feel sad and happy at the same time. I will write a long review if I can have time and discuss with you the story and ending.
I think I hit 80% achievements. I would have answered more of the trivia questions had I remembered. I left a bunch that I never guessed.
Finished. I give an overall 95%.
Puzzles are logical, they can be solved with reasoning and observing the rooms where you are playing in.
When I was stuck sometimes (it happened a few times) I simply stopped playing, took a rest, then played again, sometimes the day after.
And then, the solution came to mind.
Story is good, there were some points that made me laugh out loud (once it was midnight, and I think I woke up my neigbours! 
)
Now I must play it again in easy mode… and another time in hard mode but in english.
Why Elaine says there’s a new galleon and treasure to Guybrush? Are they a real family 3 of them? Does the park exist in the same world Guybrush is telling the story? Is it the same park kids get out (Big whoop) from ? If so is it modern times? Then if that’s the case why Elaine is acting like they are pirates…
To comfort him, who lives in his fantasies.
Apparently yes.
The park with scurvydogs? Yes.
At the beginning of the game, Boybrush and his friend see the park as Big Whoop because they are still re-enacting Guybrush’s stories. After they stop reenacting Guybrush’s stories, they see the park as it is in reality.
I’m not sure.
Because feeding Guybrush with fantasies and rides in amusement parks is her way to make him happy.
Does the ending cement that the “playable prelude” with scurvydogs and an outhouse is more real than the “nonplayable prelude” with weenies and presumably a bathroom?
@LowLevel THanks for your answers. Then in real life is there a LeChuck counterpart that Guybrush had to win Elaine over?
Unfortunately, I finished MI2 before MI1 back then. My pirated MI1 Disk 4 had a bad sector, so it would crash on Monkey Island and wasn’t completable. But I liked it enough to actually buy (or maybe wish for) MI2. I finished that and hated the ending. Even then, when I eventually got a legit copy of MI1 that I could beat, I didn’t really think much about the titular secret not having been revealed. I guess I was too young to care.
For some reason, the humor did not really click with me. Be it the stomach-turning grossness of the amusement park at the beginning, or the mayhem and destruction left in Guybrush’s wake. I think my 12yo self would have enjoyed these a lot more.
I did like the throwbacks to MI1, however. Before playing the game, I thought it was weird to re-use the same locations in a new game, but after all this time, it was actually nice to return to something familiar. Loved the Scumm Bar music, especially the metal rendition, and I got some amusement out of the new pirate leaders, especially when they laughed about Guybrush.
As far as the puzzles go, I finished hard mode without hints and without major complications. I more often got stuck for a bit, because I didn’t think the solution to a puzzle could be that simple. Like when getting the flag from the museum, I was pretty sure I needed some grog to melt the lock, and was looking for ways to turn the refreshing drink into something stronger. The heartiness contest was also weird, from a mechanical perspective, as you had to do the actions in a specific order, for no apparent reason. I guess what I also did not realize for a while was that you used the item in the world, yet it also remained in your inventory. That was kind of unexpected.
Though I also did like the puzzle at the end, where you needed to pick up items again that you had previously placed in a room. That’s something I believe I have not yet seen in any P&C adventure before.
But yeah, in general I guess they should have labelled Hard as Normal.
What I really liked, however, was when the game offered some semblance of choice, I think mostly in the dialogues with Elaine. I don’t know if answering one way or another made any actual difference, but in that moments I felt she spoke directly to me the player, and not to Guybrush. Oh, also fantastic voice acting by Alexandra Boyd! If I hadn’t already been enamoured of Elaine since MI1, I’d be so now 
.
It was a good move, but I think Fate of Atlantis also qualifies by making you pick up that ladder again after using it as a bridge.
