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“Below”? Do you mean “above”? Yes, I have read that comment. It claims that the secret is an amusement park when the game clearly states that it is a T-shirt. Heck, they give it away in the first few minutes.[i.imgur.com]
I always thought Curse was a great Monkey Island game and my respect for it only grew after Return. It had the impossible job to followup on all the meta stuff Ron threw in at the end of two. And it really did a very good job of getting the series back on track with a beginning, middle and end that grounds all the characters in the world and establish a franchise that can live on. Not sure that can be repeated after this one though. The meta knife has been stabbed even deeper this time.
The game doesn't think that caring about these stories is silly the way some people have said -- it thinks caring about The Secret™ is silly. That's why it's a story about Guybrush caring too much about The Secret™, finding it, and moving on to focus on what matters: the memories of the adventures he's had, and the stories yet to tell. That's why we end with the tag about a treasure map to Mire Island and the scrapbook.
The ingame secret is irrelevant, it is not the real secret. The real secret is indeed that the game MI is fake and just stories loosely based on an amusement park. This has been the case since MI1.
If that were true, then the secret would have already been revealed since 1991. Also, if the stories are just made-up, how can Guybrush be telling them within the supposedly fictional pirate setting said stories take place in?
Then Chucky's eyes glow evil and there is an ominous sound, indicating that no, it's not a theme park. This game re-creates the ending but removes this part.
So essentially, Ron told us "The Secret" in 1991, but he immediately walked it back, then lied for 30 years I guess about The Secret being something else. Then with this game he reveals that he lied to us 30 years ago. Lol.
Well done, Ron. I didn't realize you had so much lack of faith in your brilliant twist that you would lie to your fans for decades. But apparently you did. Well done.
Oh well, it only wasted 10 hours of my life watching what amounted to a clip show. With a twist ending, surprise, the writer is a jerk!
The original secret in 1989 is that the pirate world is a actually a theme park. That was pretty easy to intuit from the end of Monkey Island 2. The reveal in Return is that both the pirate world AND the theme park are stories Guybrush is telling to his kid. Those stories might be completely made up or they might be based on real adventures he's had with Elaine. Or something in between.
It's fair to not like that, but it's not what we thought we knew 30 years ago. The assumption people made was that the pirate world was kid Guybrush's imagination as he wandered around a theme park and got into trouble with his brother. Return frames all the Monkey Island stories as stories, and Guybrush likes to come up with silly endings and change details for fun. So the Caribbean being a pirate theme park is part of a flourish in the story he's telling, and his kid calls him out on it being silly. The opening of the game is Guybrush's son and his friend Chuckie playing "Big Whoop" and making up their own ending to it, NOT kid Guybrush and kid LeChuck like we thought.
Whatever your problems with that, and again, fair if you don't like it -- that's new to the series. I doubt Ron had exactly this in mind back in 1991, or in the intervening years when he kept saying "there's a Real Secret Only I Know" (which was obnoxious, I agree), but it's a new wrinkle and not just a retread.
(However, notice that MI2's framing device is ALSO about Guybrush telling stories - he's telling Elaine about his search for Big Whoop, he tells everyone he meets about the time he defeated LeChuck -- and he tries to embellish details here, too, like saying he got dunked in the acid until Elaine calls him out on it. So the storytelling/exaggerating aspect had some roots in the series already.)
As was stated already, Curse pretty much had the secret already in its final act and also Le.Chuck pretty much explains everything that happened in excruciating detail (if you ask the right questions). In this game nothing is explained.
Furthermore, spoilers from here on:
How is the safe the secret of Monkey Island if it is on Meele Island? Doesn't Guybrush say it can't be moved?
Why does the Voodoo lady have the Safe without knowing about the Secret? (maybe something more is explained with Writers Cut turned on)
Since when does she have the safe?
Who created the map pointing to her shop?
To me in Curse everything came together in a much more satisfying conclusion and since Monkey island always was like one big joke (you get t-shirts for the 3 trials, there is insult combat) I always accepted the Secret being a joke itself.
Or maybe the cavern beneath MI (that serves no real purpose) was meant to be the secret, who knows ;)
This aged like milk, lmao
How come? Have there been new developments or discoveries somewhere? I can't see what's particularly incorrect about the first comment, so what am I missing?
I've posted on another thread about "unfinished business" and whether what's said to be the secret is really the secret, or just some kind of red herring or possibly even a curse/trick by Lila, and she could've replaced the real secret with the item you find or suchlike. I also still don't understand why Chuckie isn't there at the end with Guybrush and his son, or where he is. They're brothers, aren't they? Isn't that what's been stated previously, or was that unconfirmed? I thought that's what they said at the end of MI2. I just have this nagging feeling that there's something that's been missed and there's some kind of REAL secret ending that's going to be found 20 years from now or revealed on Ron Gilbert's deathbed or something.
After the critics to RMI´s reveal Ron Gilbert stated a couple of times that the amusement park has been always the secret, I mean tbh it has always been obvious as ♥♥♥♥ but for some reason people insist it wasn't (you as an example, lmao)
Ok - here's my theory/theories and a few comments to back them up. I was up late last night sifting through Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park forum posts, so I've absorbed lots of details about the ending, and am now a bit sleep deprived, but just want to jot down some hypothetical theories.
Overall - things don't add up. There are so many posts I've read that state, "I felt let down, the ending was abrupt, came too soon, and seemed over-simplified." The Occam's Razor conclusion to that should be, of course, that perhaps it was - and therefore maybe it wasn't the ending? There are already so many multiple endings, are we sure that there aren't more that we might've missed and be more carefully hidden?
It could be the case that the game is finished when you either stay in the 'real' world, decide to leave it a mystery, or go back to Monkey Island. These all seem somewhat unsatisfying. Many people have also commented on the nagging feeling that there should've been a showdown with LeChuck. For me and many others, it's just inconclusive without this. That can't be a mistake, surely? Which leads me also to speculate, as others have, that LeChuck is in control at the end with the three 'regular' endings. He got to the Real Secret first, as is clear in the game, which gave him some kind of control over Threepwood (which he hilariously rants about in his diary, and is one of the highlights of the game) and then just swapped that with the t-shirt. Now hear me out - this is a bit of a reach, but it's got some reference points - one 'secret' about Monkey Island is that it's not just a parody of an amusement park - but it's a parody of The Amusement Park - that is, Disneyland - which is where the idea of the game came from, and that maybe LeChuck could represent Walt Disney studios, in a way. What is Disney's motto? "All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them." Guybrush is following his dream to become a mighty pirate - but LeChuck represents the counterpoint to that - what Disney most feared and shyed away from representing - death. LeChuck could be a means by which Ron Gilbert was trolling Disney itself.
This leads to another point. A lot of people have criticised Gilbert for letting fans down. I don't go with that view. I give him more credit than that, and think he's not trolling the fans at all (there's so much fan service in the game). I think he's perhaps trolling Disney. The fact that they let him make the game suddenly might've been a surprise to him as much as anyone, so he had to reconsider what was going on, but it could be that there are still some subtle digs to be found. Giving Guybrush a child in a Disney universe has implications. Something must've gone on, and Disney was never a big fan of featuring such illicit references. I've played the Delores Thimbleweed bonus game, and the acerbic comments in the book store are pretty revealing. I'm just scratching the surface here. Maybe there's something to it, maybe not. I'd like to believe that there is, and will try to keep the possibility open. Perhaps a little follow-up like Delores for Return could be in order? I'm just jabbering now, so will leave it there. Elaine does suggest going to Mire Island to Guybrush at the end of one of the endings- so surely that means that he must be a pirate in that universe at least, as well as the non-Amusement Park one?
*another edit: I added a bit more to this post earlier, but it disappeared somewhere. I replayed the ending and there were some parts in the game that certainly hinted that there was more than meets the eye going on. Automaton LeChuck explicitly says, "I have the Secret!" I'm not sure if he's lying or if it's not a joke and he's perhaps telling the truth. There are a few other things that seem "off" a little as well. It feels like there might be something in the giftshop window, but it cuts off very quickly. The Voodoo Lady also returns after the credits in one ending, saying, "That's the last time I take a long lunch." Where was she during the game? Is the lunch comment a hint?
BUT... at the end of the scrapbook, there's a torn piece of paper where Guybrush says, "Shoot! Where did that get to?" What is it that fell out? On top of this, I was thinking about the message from Ron and Dave. Did they really send this to Guybrush somehow? Is that the secret, that there's a portal to Guybrush's universe that Ron and Dave can communicate with the characters in the game? This leads to one possible logical extention to the meta ending (which I've always loved and find amusing how it freaks some people out) - the next level of meta endings in the game would be for Guybrush or whichever character opens the box to find out that they're just characters in a computer game controlled by human players, wouldn't it? Maybe it's a message from Ron himself telling them that? For the characters in the game, this would be the biggest revelation, surely? It could be something else too, like some kind of matter transporter (which Elaine already found and helps her travel around at high speed) or something else entirely. I don't know for definite, yet, but I would really like to know what that piece of paper that fell out of the scrapbook is, and if it's possible to see it. Anyone found it yet?