Curate, connect, and discover
just tried mountain dew for the first time and honestly? mid
Ironically, the Sea of Thieves tall tale is the worst offender, though made by fans.
It's great as a way to lure SoT players into Monkey Island, but they botched it in a few ways; mischaracterisation of Cate Capsize, relying on one of the limited time Adventures for build-up, taking place immediately after Curse but not referencing Demon LeChuck in favour of the most toned down version of his zombie form yet, incredibly tedious movement and not playing around enough with the inherently weird in-universe explanation; it doesn't take place on the real Meleé or Monkey islands and instead in the delusional realm of Guybrush's memories, distorted by his nemesis.
Rare had the chance to give us a world of Guybrush's own desires turned against him by LeChuck and it's just Meleé island but he's a popular has-been, and not a hated has been? Maybe it's so lukewarm because of the demographic of SoT, but come on. We could have had the nightmare pirate LeChuck positioning Guybrush in a much wackier torment nexus.
Sorry for the rant, and don't get me started on the questionable ending of Guybrush apologising to the fake townsfolk.
It's really funny that MI2 predicted Guybrush as obnoxiously stuck in the past, clinging to iconic moments and places that made him famous until everyone got bored with him completely, only for the franchise to become exactly that after Tales. We got the beautifully and artfully made Sea of Thieves DLC, which really does capture the FEEL of the original SoMI but in 3D, but there's nothing original about it, it's literally made TO be a retread, even narratively. Then Return came, and while we have a lot more original content, characters, and places, the entire story still REVOLVES around LeChuck and the Secret. Playing it with my brother was frustrating because while we both grew up with MI3 and MI4 (and the first half of Tales), he only got to briefly play the other games Return puts a LOT of faith in the idea that you will recognize places and events that shouldn't necessarily define Guybrush as a character. This fandom has been full of mi1+mi2 elitists for forever but now it feels like they've snuck into the dev team, too.