YMMV / Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The "E Ticket" was a Disneyland admission ticket introduced in 1959 that allowed access to the newest, most advanced, and most popular rides compared to the A, B, C and D rides, using a coupon system that was phased out in the The '70s and The '80s.
  • Certain subjects referenced in the Phatt City Library have a history overlapping with or even predating The Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1720). Animatronics, cryptography, ice cream, sociology, umbrellas, xylophones, yo-yos, zirconium and zoology were known of in ancient times, Idealism goes back to Plato, origami is from the 6th century, cartoons may have an origin in The Middle Ages, the game of shuffleboard goes back at least 500 years, toast was described in the 15th and 16th centuries, yachts were popularized in 1660, magazines were introduced around 1663-1731, Descartes' imaginary numbers and ketchup were introduced in the 17th century, Orthopedics was introduced in 1741, and Yorkshire Pudding originated from 1737-1747.
• Arc Fatigue: A huge chunk of the game is spent on doing nothing except looking for the four map pieces to Big Whoop. With the consideration in place that getting just one map piece requires a very long string of puzzles to be solved, it can really drag, especially when some of them have Missed Him by That Much moments. The rest of the game, including the succeeding puzzles, are much smaller in scope.
• Awesome Music:
  • The second game got its own intro music, which some would argue is better than the first one.
    • And its Special Edition version.
  • The Underground Tunnels, a surprisingly creepy piece for this series.
  • The Scabb Island map.
  • Stan got a new theme in this game, which was so great it became his new theme song for the rest of the series.
  • The guitar riff in this song is almost otherworldly.
  • This song is surprisingly epic too.
  • Woodtick has a cool theme with variations for each side area and seamless transitions, including a Stylistic Suck piano version for when Jojo the Monkey is playing in the bar.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The dream sequence. Okay, it is referenced later on as the solution to a puzzle but three games and decades later, we still have no idea why it happened or what the fuck it was supposed to mean.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Locking Stan up inside on of his own coffins.
• Even Better Sequel: Darker and Edgier than the original but still with many of same ingredients plus a longer story with more islands and puzzles scattered around, adding a bit of non linear gameplay. Back in the day the Gainax Ending worked as a great Sequel Hook for a trilogy-conclusion game (that incidentally would take three decades to arrive).
• Genius Bonus: The Phatt City Library catalog refers to quite a range of topics.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A pirate gloating about having a bucket of mud... isn't that a bit like a pirate gloating about having a jar of dirt?
  • "That is a nice-looking beard. One thing's for sure... I am never shaving this off."
  • Guybrush's beard in the original version of this game is probably about as much of a beard as he could ever realistically hope for. The Special Edition reduces it to wispy fuzz that barely even qualifies as a beard at all, but this leads to some Hilarious in Hindsight moments since Guybrush spends the whole game talking about how much effort it took him to grow his beard, when it's barely even noticeable (which Wally eventually calls him out on in the sequel).
  • Speaking of which, Guybrush's beard and longer hair in the original version give him an odd resemblance to Qui-Gon Jinn.
  • Towards the end of the game, LeChuck claims he has a surprise for Guybrush. One if the dialog choices for a response is "I don't suppose it's a Nintendo game..." (Changed to "LucasArts game" in the Special Edition) About a decade and a half later, Guybrush would appear on a Nintendo console.
• It Was His Sled: The infamous Gainax Ending. Monkey Island is, in reality, a pirate-themed amusement park, and Guybrush and Le Chuck are just kids swept up in their own imaginations. That said, there are strong hints that this may not be the case, and that Le Chuck has trapped Guybrush in some kind of illusion. The entire rest of the franchise has been grappling with this revelation, and the undercurrent of the amusement park theory lingers in the background of every game until Return explicitly adresses it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Until Tales was released, this was unquestionably the scariest of the series. For specific examples, see below.
  • LeChuck chasing Guybrush around with a voodoo doll in the tunnels beneath Dinky Island is terrifying. While you're desperately trying to solve the last puzzle of the game, there's this dread that at any point, LeChuck could come in and send Guybrush screaming in pain into the next room. For a little kid trying to finish the game while being forced to watch the loveable pirate being tortured, this game is an anxiety-inducing masterpiece.
  • Guybrush's parents come back in his dream, and then their skin melts off. Then the scene goes funny again when they start dancing. But the scene goes scary again when LeChuck shows up, turns into Guybrush, and then tries to kill Guybrush the same way you killed LeChuck in the first game. It's not exactly The Exorcist, but it can be pretty freaky when you're a kid.
  • The first time you enter the bolted tunnels under the waterfall. You've been enjoying the Anachronism Stew up till now, but there is something just so incredibly wrong about those tunnels. Unfortunately, this stems from having to reuse the backgrounds from the final area of the game due to the lack of disk space. It was originally going to be more elaborate and less nightmare-ish.◊
  • Dominic Armato really sells being boiled in acid in the Special Edition if you fail to solve LeChuck's Rube Goldberg Device quickly.
• Not So Crazy Anymore: During the Rube Goldberg Device sequence, one of the questions you can ask LeChuck is "Why are adventure games so expensive?", and his response is "Scanned VGA art is expensive." This is obviously alluding to the fact that when the game was originally released in 1991, scanning images into a computer was an extremely novel concept, and this was one of the earliest examples of a game using completely hand-painted backgrounds that were scanned (some digital cleanup was applied, of course; still, this was a major selling point when the game first came out). This used to be something much more time-consuming and tedious. Nowadays his comment can be a bit jarring if you're a contemporary player who's been used to the fact that scanners are now pretty much everywhere and affordable to the point that many own one the size of a standard sheet of paper in their own home.
• Parody Displacement: The books in the Phatt City Library reference some older or more obscure works. The parody titles obfuscate what is being referenced, and might be easier to identify if you were alive during The '60s.
• Porting Disaster: In contrast to the pretty well-done Amiga port of the first game (so much so, in fact, that most Amiga fans have overwhelmingly preferred it to the original DOS version, though mileage tends to vary among people less partial to the Amiga), the Amiga port of this one was pretty lackluster. Although the smooth scrolling was a nice touch and much of the detail was retained in the backgrounds despite the smaller pallette, many background animations were lost as were extra effects, and only a very small percentage of the game's music was translated (almost less than a third, leading to silence in way more areas than should be excusable). What little music survived was pretty lackluster, and seemed really hastily cobbled together, such as Jojo's piano song which barely even sounds anything like a piano. On top of that, iMuse was entirely left out of the port, probably due to the developers having trouble figuring out how to make it with with the Amiga's limited number of sound channels.^note (they did later manage a passable implementation on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis... which promptly proved their last Amiga game) Compared to the praise the original's Amiga port gets, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who will recommend this one.
• Scrappy Mechanic: LeChuck constantly using his voodoo doll to send Guybrush to some random other room or hallway while you're trying to solve the final puzzle. Sometimes he can even show up the second Guybrush gets there.
• Spoiled by the Format: In the disk-swapping versions of the game, at least, such as Amiga. LeChuck's overly complicated Death Trap can't possibly work — not just because Guybrush is still alive and telling Elaine the frame story in-universe, but also because there's a whole disk of game left over, which LeChuck himself will lampshade if Guybrush asks why he doesn't just shoot him instead.
• Squick: Seeing Governor Phatt, his grotesquely obese body lying in bed, with some ugly goo being constantly fed to him through tubes.
• That One Puzzle: The waterfall puzzle still haunts a lot of people in their sleep, and it's a two-part puzzle that tends to stump people on either part, or both. First, you need to use the banana that you find in the jail on Jojo the monkey's metronome. Then you have to transport him in a hypnotized state, and use him on the waterfall's pipes as...get ready for it...a monkey wrench. There is absolutely no hint in-game towards how to solve this puzzle whatsoever, not even a "Maybe an unusual kind of tool might help". And, as pointed out in Lost in Translation, this frequently got even more arbitrary outside of America, as the term "monkey wrench" is not widely used anywhere else, not even other English-speaking countries.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A surprisingly large amount of fans were upset that the Special Edition omitted the original version's title sequence, even though it would have been slightly redundant when you can listen to the main theme in its entirety in the main menu. The Bone Song's music was also out of sync with the lyrics. A patch released on July 29 restored both the original intro and credit sequence for the classic version, as well as addressing the issues with iMuse music and sound effects and fixing the lyrical sync with the Bone Song; interestingly, the intro is fully voiced, meaning that they had at least planned on making an HD remasterization of it.
  • Much like in the game's predecessor, the Sam & Max cameos were removed because of copyright reasons, although like in previous game, Sam and Max do still appear in the "Classic Mode" artwork, and in the updated artwork their cameo was replaced with one in the likeness of Purple Tentacle...
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Near the end of the game, the only thing that survives among a smashed up Big Whoop treasure chest is a ticket with a blue castle on it and an "E", a subtle foreshadowing to the game's ending. This is a pretty obvious nod to Disney theme parks' old ticket system, which were tiered from A to E (with E being the highest tier). These had already been retired for almost a decade when the game came out, but most of the target audience was still old enough to remember them being in common use or to have known of them through pop culture. Now that the parks have been several decades removed from having used them though, it can come as a headscratcher to a contemporary player (although the fact that the game specifically refers to it as a ticket and it has a blue castle on it can still be a pretty good indicator of what it's supposed to resemble).
  • Lines regarding the price of the game do not work as well nowadays, due to the game's price now being ten dollars, the average price of a recent, high-budget game now being sixty, and recent adventure games typically having cheaper prices.
• Values Dissonance: The jokes about crossdressing - both in Largo having a 'pearly white bra' and Guybrush having to wear a dress to go to Elaine's party - might go over the head of modern players. When the game was made, crossdressing was largely considered a fetish (and thus a cheap gag), but some in the LGBTQ culture have reappropriated it as an expression of identity.
• The Woobie: Wally. He's bullied by Largo and the game forces you to steal his monocle, making him unable to work (though you can replace it). The developers agreed, as they cut a scene where Wally would fall into shark-filled waters, feeling that the guy suffered enough.

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