I don’t want to go back and find out who talked about special case animations, but I’m sure the new art style and Spine will result in a lot more cinematic scenes.
Also, facial expressions. Guybrush always has a different stare in every scene in the trailer. I’m sure it will have a strong impact in how we’ll enjoy the game. The main complaint I always had about CMI was that Guybrush didn’t feel like Guybrush - partly because of the Italian dubbing, whose voice was too playful for the character IMHO, but also writing and looks, he always felt too childish instead of smug.
We have here a Guybrush written by Ron, animated under Ron’s supervision. I’m sure that the style will convey the right feelings, so I don’t care whether he looks ugly or not, I just care that he’ll FEEL like Guybrush
Guybrush is lying on a bed in a hospital and is in a coma, dreaming of being a pirate. Possibly the Voodoo Lady is a nurse reaching through to Guybrush’s subconscious from the real world.
Alternatively, a darker take of a similar theory would be that Guybrush is a patient in an asylum and the whole pirate world is one he constructed to avoid confronting his dark reality.
I’ve kept watching the trailer and it’s growing on me. I’m starting to notice everything is extremely dynamic. See for example how guybrush shivers, trembles, sweats, and how he doesn’t walk around but almost runs around. The game might feel dynamic in a way we aren’t used to, and therefore we aren’t taking it into account when evaluating the art quality, (because we don’t consider that a quality that an adventure game can have).
Unrelatedly: a funny thing is how LeChuck is squeezing an anti-stress ball
I don’t think there are strong puns for Mêlée, Booty, and Scabb at play here?
Booty does have a double-meaning for butt, yet I don’t really think that’s ever invoked in MI2? The only joke I remember for it is MI4, where the Voodoo Lady references gas shipments from Booty Island?
Scabb is misspelled scab, like Phatt is misspelled fat. Again, I don’t think there’s a pun at work here. The other meaning for scab is someone who works during a strike, and that’s not a relevant thing.
And Mêlée is pretty straightforward as well? It’s a fight.
I agree with that take on the tone, absolutely, and I’ve felt it as well. At least for Secret, all of the zoomed in closeup images (including all those characters speaking, but also the Head of the Navigator and LeChuck exploding from blimp cam) have given me the impression that all of the characters look realistic - or at least like Pirates of the Caribbean animatronics - if you would just zoom in close enough.
Monkey Island 2 shifted into a little more Tex Avery cartoonish, but some sprites like Guybrush were so comparable that they could put MI1 and MI2 Guybrush side by side in the dream sequence, and it didn’t feel likr breakingcthe fourth wall (unlike when MI3 put their Guybrush alongside MI1’s).
My greatest disappointment with Return’s artstyle is: it doesn’t remind me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. If you zoom in on the characters’ faces, it isn’t like I’m looking at a real person. It’s still the paper character.
And to my brain, that puts a disadvantage on the darkness and mystique you’re referring to.
Doesn’t this criticism apply to the original as well?
Yes, in MI1 there are closeups, but they are only seen a couple of times, so I don’t think they change anything. (arguably they make things worse, because they appear after you have made your mental picture of Guybrush and Elaine)
What am I trying to say? For me, Monkey Island was never about faces, it was about backgrounds, settings…
Those closeups defined my memory of Secret of Monkey Island, from Mancomb and Esteban up to Guybrush and Elaine watching fireworks. I’m not sure Secret would’ve stuck in my brain so fondly without them.
Yes, I started on VGA. But I see it with the EGA also, working with the colors they had.
EDIT: I wouldn’t say they come after our images of Guybrush and Elaine are formed. Elaine’s closeup is almost immediately after her introduction; Guybrush has his realistic face on the game cover, and you see his back profile during Scumm Bar conversations.
The MI1 close-ups definitely helped me define how the characters really looked like. They have probably contributed to shape my belief that the game graphics seemed “realistic”.
That’s also why I correlate so easily MI1 and MI2 with that realistic painting of Guybrush in Uncharted or even with the aesthetic of the movie franchise “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
The same hasn’t happened with the later games of the series.
So … you guys see a couple of portraits for a few seconds, and this makes your brain interpret the rest of the game in a realistic way? Woa My mind doesn’t work this way.
But if this is true, then all Ron has to do is show a couple of realistic portraits in the beginning of RtMI, and problem solved. You will see deformed vector guys but for the rest of the game you will see a realistic game instead. Lucky you
I know you’re joking, but absolutely yes. If Return had a realistic cover along with some key realistic close-up scenes? Then I would probably have an easy time visualizing this game’s art as Guybrush drawing his own pictures of what’s happening.
…speaking of which, IS this meant to be Guybrush’s drawings of what’s happening? Maybe that explains the scrapbook. I guess we’ll see. A nice realistic face at the beginning or end would cement it.
That nose has poked its way into depths best left unsaid. Let’s just say that on Guybrush and Elaine’s honeymoon, Guybrush did his best impression of Pinocchio telling a lie.
On the other hand, associating a realistic portrait to a wacky character caricature, like those used in the style of DOTT would have been different. I think that I would have found it a striking incongruence.
While I rather disliked the (admittedly impressive) VGA close-ups in MI 1 back then (too much detail, compared to the rest of the game and therefore misplaced somehow), the cover art for MI 1 & 2, which had quite realistic styles as well, made the games even more immersive to me, when I was a kid.
I’m not sure if it still would have done so in my current age, though. Also, I first played and enjoyed the games without having seen the cover art, because I first had pirated copies. By the way, the cinematic cover art was one of the reasons why I wanted to buy it later on.
However, up to now, I have no hope for cover art with such a style, since the trailer and the web site share the game’s art style. Nonetheless, it would have been awesome if Steve Purcell had done this job one more time.
