Tales of Monkey Island: Rise of the Pirate God Review

When you are on a roll, as Telltale has been with the Tales of Monkey Island adventure series, you get the feeling that maybe you’re due for a off day, or a dud. But heading into the final episode of the season, Rise of the Pirate God, the Tales of Monkey Island series had only gotten better and the only question was whether they could end it on a high note. Boy, did they.

If you have not played any of the previous episodes, I urge you to skip this review and pick up the first one on WiiWare. It is the best adventure series on Wii, and you really want to experience the story in sequence. I will try to keep this review light on spoilers, but it will still be a bad idea to read through this review if you have not gotten all the way past the previous episode, Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood. So, now that the spoiler warnings are out of the way, let’s proceed:

You start off this episode the same way you ended the previous one: dead. They weren’t kidding with the previous episode’s title, that’s for sure. As you awake in the afterlife, you realize you have no powers, barely any usable items, and no idea what to do. Right off the bat, you realize that this episode is much more difficult than some of the previous ones. If you were one of the folks complaining about the easy puzzles before (I wasn’t), then here you’ll find the challenge you were looking for. The mechanics and controls are the same, you guide Guybrush around the world talking to weird and funny characters and looking for clues and items so that you can revive yourself and rescue your wife Elaine from the evil pirate LeChuck, now more powerful than ever.

The episode opens up the progress path, so that you can complete your tasks in a less linear fashion than previous episodes, but that also means that you have less guidance on what to do next, and some of the puzzles are so devilish or straight up obtuse that you may soon be reaching for a strategy guide. As you gather the various artifacts necessary to resuscitate yourself and defeat LeChuck, you will straddle the line between life and death, and cross over between worlds constantly. While this episode contains the humorous banter and situations you expect, the overall mood is much more dramatic. Much is at stake, and LeChuck is especially brutal, while your allies may or may not die, just as you have.

The afterlife is a beautifully dark and imaginative place here, full of unique and interesting new characters, as well as old friends who return (sorry, Murray does not make a comeback). The developers continue to push the graphics and audio, just as they’ve done for each previous episodes, so that Rise of the Pirate God is easily the best looking game in the series, filled with tons of locales (some rehashed) and characters. The audio is fittingly dark, rather than the cheery tropical tunes from the previous episodes.

I’ve covered the gameplay mechanics in the previous episode reviews, so I’ll close with this: If you’ve made it this far into the series (and I hope you have), Rise of the Pirate Gods will give you grand finale you’ve been looking for. The story, graphics, and audio have all grown up, the stakes are bigger, and the menace is much more imposing. You’ll find plenty of humor here, no doubt, with the afterlife being chock full of shady characters, as expected. Still, Rise of the Pirate God knows it has to wrap up this marvelous season and does so with flair and gusto.