Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 5: Rise of the Pirate God Review

Guybrush Threepwood is dead. Long live Guybrush Threepwood!

Big surprise! LeChuck was evil all along. Who knew? At the end of The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, our hero literally got what was coming to him: death. Dead and buried, he’s still not done, as there’s still one episode left in the Tales of Monkey Island series, The Rise of the Pirate God.

[image1]The spirit world is not enough to stand in Guybrush’s way, as he now has to find a way to reverse La Esponja Grande’s power in order to foil LeChuck’s plan to become a god. It’s been a long and dramatic build up for this final episode and it mostly pays off by the end. We get a nice tie-in to a possible recurring season to boot, one I hope will come through eventually.

There’s not much to comment about how this episode is played. It’s pretty much what you’ve been doing since Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. The puzzles are about as tough as before and are about combining items at the right time. We do get a little nod to the old insult sword fighting in an early portion of the episode, but there really isn’t nothing particularly new in the puzzle department.

You still directly control Guybrush and interact with the environment by clicking (or hovering, depending on which version you’re playing), with the occasional mix of items in your inventory. Telltale has a clear shift in direction to its adventure games, keeping the classic point and click while making things more flexible with direct control over character movement.

[image2]The fact that LeChuck’s on the loose now presents itself as the perfect excuse to limit the environs Guybrush visits, since everyone’s on edge and hiding from him. Unlike the spirit world, which is divided into five distinct but small areas, only little niches of areas from past episodes can be visited. But it’s not all that limiting and in the bigger picture, it makes the game much more fluid due to how difficult it is to miss something along the way.

As mentioned before, the story does tie up nicely by the end. Sadly, some of the series’ most beloved recurring characters don’t make a comeback in this episode. Knowing Telltale, however, they’re bound to spring back in future seasons. The main cast of Tales of Monkey Island had a rocky start with some shallow characters, something that Rise of the Pirate God makes up for, with some excellent performances by some of the new and most of the old.

Whichever version you decide to pick up, Tales of Monkey Island is yet another great episodic adventure series by Telltale Games. Even with a few hiccups along the way, most of them technical ones in the Wiiware version of the game, the story and characters more than make up for any of that. This series is more than worth it for just about anyone who is remotely interested in adventure games.