YMMV / Escape from Monkey Island

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: You might think Pegnose Pete is just a gag on peg-legged pirates, but prosthetic noses are a real thing, and have been for centuries; for example, 16th century nobleman and astronomy pioneer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel and wore a prosthetic made of brass.
• Awesome Music:
  • Lucre Island town music.
  • The Knuttin Attoll theme.
• Broken Base: This game is the least popular installment in the series, but opinions vary about whether it is still a decent game or not. Older fans treats this game with disdain due to the dated graphics, awkward controls, retcons and frequent bugs (in the PC version at least). But conversely a lot of people grew up with this (and possibly Curse) as the only Monkey Island games they knew and so recall it fondly.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: "Charles L. Charles" is an extremely transparent pseudonym. Honestly, were any players at all surprised at his real identity?
• Critical Dissonance: The game did positively with the critics, even outscoring the following installment. Fans, on the other hand, near-unanimously consider this the worst game in the series by no small margin, no thanks to the unorthodox control scheme, poorly aged visuals, the retcon dump, and Monkey Kombat.
• Disappointing Last Level: The player is stranded on Monkey Island for the last third (almost half) of the game to fight an annoying rock-paper-scissors style fighting minigame and have tons of exposition and retcons dumped into his/her lap. The grand finale almost makes up for it though.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Escape gets this treatment from fans who are unhappy with its quality or confusing retcons.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Voodoo Lady's store is filled with all sorts of crazy stuff as it usually is, and one of the things you can examine is a voodoo mask. If you do, Guybrush will say "Wow, cool! A 4DFX Voodoo6 6000 mask! Cutting edge voodoo technology!" This is an obvious reference to to 3DFX's old line of video cards; as luck would have it, the Voodoo5 would wind up being their very last video card, and they'd fold barely a month after the game was released. This also winds up being an Unintentional Period Piece as a result, and the reference is most likely lost on a contemporary player.
  • Charles L. Charles says at one point, "I've got hands to kiss and babies to shake". The game was released barely 3 years after the Louise Woodward "baby-shaking" murder case, in which she was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When first trying to recollect who Carla and Otis are, Guybrush has the option of asking if they're "the founding members of Keelhaul: The World's Loudest Pirate Speed Metal Band." Who'd have thought that, years later, Pirate Metal would actually be a thing?
• Improved Second Attempt: While the control scheme is still heavily criticized, it does feature two welcome additions in comparison to its spiritual predecessor Grim Fandango:
  • Rather than your only cue that you are near a point of interest being the player character looking at the object, this one adds one extra level of feedback by having context-sensitive text pop up near all points of interest. This also means it is immediately obvious that there is more than one item you can interact with, rather than forcing you to push a button to figure it out.
  • The inventory system now has every item visible at once. While you still have to rotate through items one by one, being able to see them all makes it a lot easier to recall what you do and don't have on-hand.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: This is the only game in the series not to have any of the first game's main designers — Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman — involved in any capacity at all,^note (Schafer assisted with the storyline of Curse and advised that game's design team, while Gilbert and Grossman were to varying degrees involved with the next two games) and many fans felt it showed in the game's departure from the tone of the previous games in the series, in addition to the generally less-polished design.
• Polished Port: The PS2 port has downgraded graphics and more loadings, par for the console version, but it drastically reworks Monkey Kombat: you are no longer forced to jot down the pose change combinations and the defeat flowcharts, as the game handily keeps track of them for you and provides a very easy-to-follow UI. Thus, it becomes a bit more like traditional insult fighting the series is known for where the only thing you have to worry about is completing the chart. While it certainly doesn't make the puzzle good by any stretch, it takes a lot of the sting and tedium out of solving it.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Monkey Kombat might have been tolerable if not for the fact that the game forces you to write down both the stance switching commands (of which there are about twelve) and which stand beats which, since both are randomized on each playthrough and the game provides no reference for them. On top of that, it can be a chore to learn the switching commands early on, as your opponents have a nasty habit of immediately switching into whatever stance beats the one you start off with and just staying like that for the rest of the fight, meaning that you'll be on the losing side of many Curb Stomp Battles until you've learned enough commands to actually get anywhere.
• Sequelitis: While not without its merits, this installment is widely considered to be the weakest in the series. The low points include the mediocre 3D graphics (especially coming from the high heel that was The Curse of Monkey Island), the inconsistent quality of the writing, some jokes that rubbed the series' fan in the wrong way (like turning Elaine into a nag who constantly bosses around and bullies Guybrush), and the tedious Monkey Kombat mini-game. The Retcon as to Toothrot's true identity doesn't help.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The first post-SCUMM Monkey Island. The engine change adds clumsiness and the game lacks a powerful story a la Grim Fandango to compensate for it. The general consensus among Monkey Island fans is that this one isn't quite as good as the previous games, not only thanks to a weaker script, but also thanks to control issues inherited from the Grim Fandango game engine: The game uses awkward tank-style controls for movement (in the style of Resident Evil) instead of the previous games' point-and-click interface, and using inventory items and interacting with the environment requires the player to shuffle one-by-one through a list of available options.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Carla and Otis from the first game are brought back, but do nothing of any real importance during Guybrush's missions to Lucre and Jambalaya island, and disappear entirely from the game after the latter island. Likewise, Stan and Murray re-appear, but both in such minor roles that you don't even have to talk to them in order to complete the game (Stan gives you a literal Plot Coupon, but there's an alternate way to get that particular item without speaking to him).
• Unintentional Period Piece: A number of Escape's jokes are Turn of the Millennium pop culture references that, today, come across as rather dated (for example, "Planet Threepwood" is clearly a riff on "Planet Hollywood", a theme restaurant that was hugely popular at the time). The plot, meanwhile, spoofs a lot of social issues that are far less relevant now than they were in 2000 (such as big corporations dehumanizing middle America).

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