So, your argument is "The art is terrible and he must have known it was terrible and possibly made it terrible intentionally for some sort of complex culture-war publicity reason because the only other possibility is that he's actually offended by people telling him he's a terrible person and and idiot and a moron and only capable of producing absolute garbage because no person today would be offended by that because I guess it happens a lot because internet"?
Honestly, I'm trying to say something about this argument that falls within the site's guidelines for discussion and I can't really figure out a way to.
the first four words of your attempted paraphrase of my post, or anything like them, do not exist in my post in any form. while reading my post you hallucinated that I was "one of them" and disapproved of the game's art style.
to clarify: I don't have any strong opinions about the art style of Return to Monkey Island, and while I have some thoughts about it, that entire line of discussion is uninteresting to me. I see no reason for the art style to have been chosen other than that those involved in making the game think it's a good fit for the game they're making. and it probably is! so please, if you're going to continue to engage with me on this topic, update your mental model of me and the position I'm taking on this, because you seem to have made some faulty assumptions, unsubstantiated by what I've posted here.
however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected. if Ron Gilbert really, truly did not expect backlash on the reveal of the art style, then either he is ridiculously naïve compared to how I would expect him to be, given his career and previous works... or the reveal and subsequent response, in which we all meant to feel warm and fuzzy and sympathetic to a legendary game designer who had anonymous fuckwads write mean things about him and his game on the Internet, was expected, and planned as part of making a broader audience care about a point-and-click adventure game being released in 2022, at a time where great lengths must be taken to get anyone to care about any game you make at all, as there's way too many options for not just games to play but places to give one's attention in general.
what do you think the net effects of this entire saga are going to be? do you think more people know and/or care about the release of this upcoming game, a game which is of a genre that is broadly (back) in decline (after a brief resurgence a decade or so ago), as a result of this debacle?
and almost more importantly: what was it about my post that made you think I disliked the art style of Return to Monkey Island? because it wasn't the words that said as much, because those words don't exist—yet something made you think I think the art style is bad! it might be useful to analyze what led you to this incorrect assumption.
So what I did is look up all the Monkey Island games. There are essentially 7. The Secret of, LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of, Escape from, Tales of, and Special Editions of The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge.
And I went look up screenshots of every game.
Consistency does not exist. The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge are pretty similar, The Curse of looks very Dragon's Lair-esque/Don Bluthy, Escape from looks kind of ass to be honest. It's very "early 3D" and did not age well. Tales of is also 3D and is ok-ish. The remakes are also 3D, but also different from both Escape and Tales of.
And the character design of Guywood changes from the first two, to the third, to the fourth to the sidestory, to the Special Editions.
So any argument based on "consistency" is a red herring for something else. Consistency has not been a hallmark of this series, graphics-wise. This series has more departures than LAX.
I agree with everything you've written here 100%, and this is why I actually think the art style they've chosen for this new game is interesting in a tentatively good way, despite me having basically zero grounds upon which to judge art in general. they eschewed the sort of overwrought cartoon whimsy of the later games and Special Editions, and found an art style that allows much of the same level of expression you'd get from pixel art, while not being pixel art, if that makes sense. it's certainly a bold choice, but it kind of had to be, right?
this is why I never said anything about "consistency" and why I am empathetic to the plight of having to figure out how a Monkey Island game in 2022 should look, because as you discovered it somewhat surprisingly (for someone unfamiliar with the series) doesn't "draw itself" like one would expect for a revival of a retro franchise.
all of this reasoning is exactly why I don't understand why Internet backlash to the art style reveal was so allegedly unforeseen—it was a real "damned if you make it look like any of the old games, damned if you make it look completely different"-type situation.
I can't recall any real backlash about any of the other games though.
That's the issue. Just about every game looks different, but not until this one do people "care".
It literally has no real basis to base its look off of.
> however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected.
This here seems to be you talking about consistency. Saying that it doesn't match the older games. Well, which older game should it match? If anything, it not matching any of the older games would be more stylistically appropriate than matching any of the older games.
I never played the old Monkey Island games in their day because for some reason my dad had pretty much the rest of the SCUMM catalog except for Monkey Island and LOOM. but if I understand correctly, the transition to 3D wasn't as criticized because everyone was trying to figure out how to make games look good in 3D at that point, plus Ron Gilbert had left LucasArts at that point in time, so those games weren't as appreciated as the first two. the Remastered version of the first game was certainly met with mixed opinions though.
> Well, which older game should it match?
I already explained that I agree with you that this is the exact problem they faced when coming up with a look for the game. if they had picked any of the different styles, there would have been fans and detractors both. arguably, if they wanted to minimize backlash at the expense of everything else (such as broad marketability), they would have painstakingly recreated the art style of the first two games, with its weird disconnect between the cartoonish character sprites and full-screen realistic-looking closeup shots intact. so they did the almost certainly right thing and figured out a new style. but just because they chose the correct course of action doesn't mean that it wasn't going to frustrate just about everyone who looks at it and says to themselves, "well Monkey Island looks like many different things to be but it doesn't look like that." as a comparative example, see the reaction to the art style of the remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I haven't played it but I think it looks great—much like the Return to Monkey Island art style, it found a way to split the difference in making a new graphical style that still retains some of the "vagueness" of the old, hardware-limited style, while looking unique and good. as you can imagine, even though the Zelda franchise has had its fair share of totally different art styles over the years, there were many people who felt like this particular style doesn't jive with their franchise preconceptions. (I'm kind of at a loss for why I'm fully explaining all of this... this all seems pretty self-evident, for self-evident reasons.)
It really feels like you're defending the backlash though. As if it was a foregone conclusion.
But why? They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.
You also keep positing alternatives they could have done and claiming that those alternatives would have been better. But it's all based off of your conjecture. You claim it's self-evident, but it's only self-evident in the way that is evident to yourself.
The backlash seems out of proportion to what was done.
> They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.
I think what you might be missing is that "they" has been a different group of people each time since the original two games—this is the first Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game since LeChuck's Revenge. I believe Gilbert has also said that he's disregarding everything in Monkey Island "lore" that he wasn't around for the writing of. because of all of this, the franchise has a general identity problem, including a visual identity problem. most people who are excited to play Return to Monkey Island are not coming from a place of "well most of the rest of the games looked different from one another, let's see something new!" I think most people expected the franchise to either maintain its new "Remastered" look, or look closer to the original two games. personally I'm glad they chose neither!
the backlash only seems disproportionate due to reporting on it. "New Game In Franchise Looks Different From Old Games In Franchise, Many Anonymous Internet Users Vocally Upset About This, Like Everything Else, As Per Usual" doesn't really have the same emotional galvanization effect, see?
Except that the graphical style isn't even that dissimilar from MI1 and MI2 once you account for the obvious difference in resolution and detail. It's a lot less cartoonish than, e.g. Day of the Tentacle where Gilbert was also involved, that came out not long after MI2. So I'm really not getting what the complaints are about. MI1 and MI2 were never trying to look anywhere near photo-realistic, so what's the alternative those complainers have in mind?
fullscreen character closeups in the VGA release of the first game at least (never played the second one! keep meaning to) were most certainly more realistic-looking than anything else in the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island#/m...
but again I agree that the new style is actually a neat compromise between the old cartoony pixel art character sprites and something totally different, without going down the full-cartoon-whismy route that the later titles and Remastered games took. part of the charm of the first game is how expressive the characters without being too over-the-top cartoony like DoTT or Sam & Max. the new style looks like it should be able to recapture this feeling quite well!
again, the complaints are stupid, but should have been very easy to expect, because pleasing everyone—especially when it comes to nostalgia—is basically impossible.
One might argue that you need realism in a character closeup more than anywhere else, to avoid falling into the uncanny valley. But even then, these are not trying to be actually photorealistic. They could be described as painting-like, not unlike so many other scenes in 1980s and early-1990s games.
Honestly, I'm trying to say something about this argument that falls within the site's guidelines for discussion and I can't really figure out a way to.