LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean is a LEGO Adaptation Game based on the first four films of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
This game contains examples of:
- Adaptational Badass:
- Mr. Brown in canon- incompetent drunkard whose apprentice is a better blacksmith than him. Mr. Brown here- he can fix damaged machinery while Will himself can't, unless he picks up a blacksmith's hammer on Isla Cruces and duel with Jack Sparrow himself, without a sword.
- Syrena takes part in the final battle in "The Fountain of Youth", and while she can't fight Blackbeard directly due to lacking a sword, she's necessary for beating him by transferring his health to Angelica with water from the Fountain.
- Adaptational Heroism: Quite a few characters, due to the gameplay mechanics.
- Will never knocks Jack out at Isla de Muerta. Instead, they catch up to the Pearl, board the ship and fight their way through the crew to catch Elizabeth, then just when they're bailing, the Interceptor pulls away from the Pearl while Jack's still on the Pearl, so Will abandons him by accident.
- Norrington and Will work together to fight Jack, instead of fighting one another and Jack.
- Elizabeth stays behind on the Pearl with Jack to fight the Kraken, instead of chaining him to the mast.
- Sao Feng and Barbossa are old friends in the game, so he never betrays the pirates, and actually helps the Pearl's crew escape Singapore...by dropping an elephant on the EITC with a crane.
- Will never mutinies to take the Pearl for himself, and only ends up with the EITC by accident.
- Adaptational Jerkass: Norrington takes losing Elizabeth to Will less gracefully than he did in the films- he removes his hat and stomps on it.
- All Animals Are Dogs: A weird non-dog variant. If you toss a chicken drumstick down the gigantic crocodile's throat en route to Tia Dalma's shack, it claps like a sea-lion.
- Arc Welding: The Stinger of the first movie is altered to show Tia Dalma retrieving Barbossa's corpse in the immediate aftermath of the finale, something alluded to but never shown in the movies itself, which ties the events of the movies together more neatly.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Alongside his red-and-black object manipulation powers, Blackbeard's sword is capable of instantly hitting through sword-fight blocks, something otherwise needing a jump-slam to bypass, with the added bonus of performing a One-Hit Kill on any non-boss NPC
- Ascended Extra: Anamaria appears in "Dead Man's Chest" and "At World's End", when she just stopped appearing in the films after "Curse of the Black Pearl."
- Attractive Bent-Gender: Pintel and Ragetti are a lot more successful at distracting the Marines by pretending to be women than they were in the films. Despite the fact that Ragetti's moustache is still visible, and Pintel is not covering his bald head.
- Bloodless Carnage: In full effect — whilst characters are dismembered, the characters are still plastic Lego pieces.
- Bonus Level: The final, bonus mission is a replication of the original Disney Theme Parks ride itself, but with enemies.
- Bottomless Magazines: Everyone that fights with a gun never runs out of ammo nor needs to reload no matter how many times they shoot.
- Bowdlerization: Hanging is replaced with Produce Pelting.
- Brick Joke: We actually get to see Jack Sparrow riding sea turtles when he's water-skiing on the back of the Black Pearl.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The games use visual shorthand so you know what you can do. Silver objects have to be blown up with explosives, red and black ones can only be manipulated by evil characters, and so on.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Half the fun is going around beating up NPCs and destroying random objects.
- Conspicuously Light Patch: Being made of LEGO bricks is a sign that it can be destroyed or interacted with.
- Continuity Nod: The Curse of the Black Pearl levels include a few elements that weren't introduced until the next movie: Jack's compass pointing to what he's looking for (Curse implied that it always pointed to Isla de Muerta), Barbossa's body being retrieved in The Stinger, and as a nice touch, a flash of green light at sunset.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: Any scenes involving hanging are changed to being put into stocks and pelted with fruit.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: In addition to how the player dying just results in an instant respawn with some studs lost, the cursed villains have their own variants, such as Black Pearl members being killed outside moonlight just resulting in them Pulling Themselves Together, or The Flying Dutchman crewmates leaving rebuildable pieces that their allies can piece back together (whether it's you or mooks depending on the level)
- Degraded Boss: In the bonus level, "The Ride", Barbossa, Davy Jones, and Blackbeard all don't have their boss abilities when you fight them.
- Die, Chair, Die!: Destroying all (and we mean all) the level furniture is not only possible and enjoyable and but also distinctly necessary, and generally one of the game series' trademarks.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation:
- Barbossa dies from falling stones bouncing off his head after being rendered mortal, instead of being shot by Jack right as he becomes mortal.
- Instead of just running him through, as per canon, Bootstrap Bill separates Norrington's torso from his legs (bloodlessly, because they're Built with LEGO), after which Davy Jones removes his head and puts it on a fish before throwing that fish into the sea.
- Blackbeard, instead of having the skin stripped from him by a whirlwind from the Fountain of Youth, is gradually reduced to his skeleton piece-by-piece, thanks to Jack and Barbossa repeatedly dueling him, stunning him with a bottle, and then Syrena giving Angelica a drink from the Fountain to replenish her health at the cost of Blackbeard's.
- Dual Wielding: Some characters can wield dual swords.
- Even the Guys Want Him: Philip's singing makes hearts appear over guys' and girls' heads alike as they swoon. Often taken to hilarious levels with characters like Blackbeard and Davy Jones.
- Everyone Has Standards: Gibbs smells so bad, a Messy Pig sprays perfume on him.
- Feed It a Bomb: The key to hurting the Kraken. And the gigantic crocodile in Tia Dalma's swamp.
- Foe-Tossing Charge: In the opening cutscene for The Black Pearl Attacks level, Jack and Will sneak aboard the Black Pearl and rescue Elizabeth by sprinting through the ship, sending multiple pirates flying.
- Game-Breaking Bug:
- In the final level of the third movie, you fight Davy Jones, who jumps around his ship as the battle progresses. However, there is one jump where he has a good chance of simply not doing it. There is no way to get him to do it and the only solution is to exit and replay the entire level up to that point... which does not eliminate the possibility of him doing it again. Repeatedly.
- The Wii version has a frustrating pair of bugs during the Brethren Court level. One involves the Gratuitous Disco Sequence; if you land on the wrong space, the puzzle becomes glitched and cannot be completed. The other affects a puzzle wherein the player must turn a wheel to spin a maze and pull a chain to change the direction that the maze will spin; the chain can only be pulled three times before it stops working due to the bug, meaning that the player cannot afford to make a mistake, but even worse is the fact that the wheel stops working altogether after the first time you use it, rendering the puzzle (and thus the entire level) impossible to complete.
- Giant Enemy Crab: One of these defends the Dead Man's Chest on Isla Cruces. To defeat it, you need to catapult coconuts at it. Another one appears later on in the freeplay, but the "enemy" part is averted, because this Monster Is a Mommy, and will give you a minikit if you reunite her with her babies.
- Glass-Shattering Sound: A special ability possessed by mermaids and bad singers.
- Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: During the Curse of the Black Pearl section when Barbossa backs Jack and Elizabeth off the plank and they don't notice until it's too late.
- Groin Attack: Part of a Rule of Three joke — Anamaria slaps Jack, Cotton punches Jack, and because Marty is short, he aims lower.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Finding and buying the various extra characters can be very aggravating, as the characters you can find in the current screen are randomized and the character pool for hub sections isn't easy to figure out, meaning you can spend minutes wandering around looking for unbought characters. Killing characters frees up spots for new random spawns, but it's rather inefficient until you buy Blackbeard with his One-Hit Kill sword.
- Speaking of Blackbeard, he's the one character in the game who has a single set location to look for, but thanks to how things work for every other character, many players ended up complaining about what they're doing wrong with finding him. The answer is to check Tia Dalma's shack, found far to the left of the fort area.
- Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Philip Swift sings like this. Curiously, his voice is still attractive to mermaids and sea-creatures.
- Hub Level: Port Royal.
- Idle Animation: Everyone has them, and there's actually quite a bit of variation. Characters will scratch their head, point their weapon, or twirl around.
- Improbable Weapon User: The mermaids, who wield seaweed as whips.
- In a Single Bound: Davy Jones gets around the Dutchman's deck this way when Jack and Elizabeth are battling him in At World's End.
- Interface Screw:
- Getting hit by Blackbeard's projectiles will turn the target into a voodoo zombie and invert the player's controls.
- During the wheel-top fight in the "Isla Cruces" level, the first four hits on Jack will each cause the camera to do a 360 degree rotation around the wheel, but the controls will stay fixed, so trying to move will send you all over out of confusion.
- Large Ham: While he doesn't have spoken dialogue, the way Jack Sparrow runs is pretty over-the-top.
- Lazy Bum: Jack makes Will row their boat into Tortuga, and Lord Beckett makes his horse row his boat into Port Royal.
- Lost in Translation: The names of all the Trophies/Achievements are relevant quotes from the movies. However, whoever translated the Trophy/Achievement names to Swedish was presumably unaware of this and translated them as is, devoid of context. This still works in most cases, however "More what you'd call guidelines" (as in, "The rules are more what you'd call 'guidelines'") was translated as "More so called guidelines", "Savvy?" (Jack's Catchphrase, which in context roughly means "Get it?", as in "Do you understand?") was translated as "Reasonable?", and "Five lashes be owed" (As in, "Whip him five times") was translated as "He is worth five lashes".
- Magic Pants: When on land, mermaids' tails take on the form of legs colored like their tails.
- Messy Pig: Jokes involving pigs are the Running Gag.
- Mister Big: The game exaggerates Beckett's shortness, making him even more of this; while he was originally noticeably shorter than other characters in the movies, his Lego minifig is the same size as the one used for hobbits.
- Mythology Gag: The final, bonus mission is a replication of the original Disney Theme Parks ride itself, but with enemies.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: A gigantic crocodile kidnaps Jack the Monkey while you're delivering him to Tia Dalma, necessitating a boss fight. Also, normal crocodiles kill you if you travel beyond a certain boundary in inland bodies of water.
- Never My Fault: Someone sprays ink on a Jack Sparrow poster in Lord Beckett's room. We see Davy Jones and a random marine laughing together, but then the incriminated marine points at Jones.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Jack has Skintone Sclerae instead of Black Bead Eyes.
- Percussive Maintenance: When fixing something with the hammer, occasionally the character will kick whatever he's repairing.
- Product Placement: Like all the LEGO Adaptation Games, there are related LEGO building sets, although Pirates had the slight twist in that the game was announced before the sets were. Also, the game's release date was coordinated with the movie On Stranger Tides.
- Pulling Themselves Together: As a representation of their cursed immortality while still fitting into the LEGO theme, killing the named cursed members of the Black Pearl when outside moonlight will have them simply pull back together no worse for wear.
- Red and Black and Evil All Over: Red and black objects can only be manipulated by the power of Blackbeard's sword.
- Rewarding Vandalism: Smashing anything plastic-y and/or in LEGO form provides Lego studs to collect.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: A sea-turtle's reply to Jack and Elizabeth both trying to catch a ride on its back, since it can't carry both of them.
- Secret Character: There is a special version of Jack Sparrow that constantly dances to a Background Music Override of the song "A Pirate's Life for Me" which can only be unlocked by inputting a code.
- Shout-Out:
- A very subtle one. The cheat code to unlock Blackbeard (played in the film by Ian McShane) is D3DW0D.
- One of the random kill animations has a character's head lopped off. They grab at the stump like Pamela Voorhees before breaking apart.
- Spared by the Adaptation: In many cases, a character who was killed off in the original version won't have their death scene shown and simply disappear from the plot afterward. But apart from that, Pirates has Anamaria appear in Dead Man's Chest and At World's End despite her conspicuous absence from those films. More specifically, the characters who don't die here but did in the films include: Governor Swann, the Kraken, and Mercer.
- Springtime for Hitler: There is an achievement for finishing Port Royal with 0 studs. Failing to collect studs is actually harder than collecting them. Thankfully, there are plenty of enemies in the level so you can lose the studs and have a chance of succeeding at failing.
- Super-Scream: Mermaids can break glass with their screaming.
- Sword Fight: Every character that wields some form of weapon (normally swords, but smithing hammers also work) will engage in swordplay full of blocking and parrying against AI-controlled weapon-users until they break through and can properly hurt them.
- Teamwork Puzzle Game: The game operates as this.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Most of the abilities have plenty of characters that possess them, and Blackbeard is quite handy even outside his red-and-black object manipulation powers. But there are certain sections where you need specific sea-walkers due to only them having the necessary secondary ability to use underwater, including Cursed Jack with underwater compass-tracking, Jacoby with underwater explosives, and Syrena with underwater glass shattering. For most gameplay you can get the same ability in an earlier character, but doing that stuff underwater requires unlocking them specifically.
- Threatening Shark: Quite a few of them patrol beyond seaweed boundaries in certain regions. Elizabeth carries a shark over her head to get into the Isla de Muerta caves.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: A variant involving hatchets, where any character carrying one is capable of tossing it like a tomahawk with just as much precision as any gun-wielder, and just like how gun-users have Bottomless Magazines, hatchet-throwers can pull a new one out of Hammerspace.
- Title: The Adaptation: The full title is LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game.
- Tropical Island Adventure: Given the movies the game is based on, plenty of the levels involve traversing tropical islands full of trees, treasure, and trouble
- Unnecessary Combat Roll: Any male character, usually unsheathing their weapon in the process.
- Walk, Don't Swim: Drawing from all the film examples, a prominent gameplay mechanic for various puzzles is needing to walk underwater rather than swim. In story missions this involves finding a barrel to wear so the normal characters can breathe underwater (drawing from the scene in the first movie of Jack and Will using an upside-down skiff to house a bubble of air underwater) while several Free Play puzzles require using crewmates of the Black Pearl and The Flying Dutchman who have the inherent ability to walk underwater (based on scenes in the first and second movies of both crews doing so)
- War Elephants: An unconventional variant; Sao Feng drops an elephant on the EITC with a crane to help the crew escape. The Interceptor also has such an elephant, which they have to dump in order to dodge the Black Pearl.
