The Curse of Monkey Island is a point-and-click adventure game made by LucasArts. It is the continuation of the ‘Monkey Island’ series and follows the zany antics of a pirate who is trying to save the woman he loves.
Full Review
The Curse of Monkey Island Review
By, Nimish Dubey
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
(Giggle)…er…tee hee…er…ahem…(giggle) ah! Right! Now that I have suppressed my giggling fit, I guess I can proceed with reviewing what I must confess has been one of the funniest games I have ever come across. Well, to be honest, it is the first game I have played that attempts to lay as much stress on the laughs as on the action. And it does not half succeed! As you might have noticed, I have barely stopped laughing.
But I am getting ahead of myself. To begin at the beginning, The Curse of Monkey Island is the third in the Monkey Island series from Lucas Arts (aye, the same lads who showed us the joys of the light-sabre in the Star Wars movies and games). It comes on two CDs and installed without a hitch on my PC (Compaq 3311 AP, Athlon XP 1.4 Ghz, Windows XP, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB nVidia GeForce 420 MX AGP, 40 GB HDD). No restarts were requested and barring once (when it crashed and took Windows along with it), the game played smoothly.
The story of the game revolves around the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood, a swashbuckling pirate. Mind you, he is the only one who thinks that description is accurate. To most people, he comes across as a rather nice and thoroughly error-prone lad with not too much upstairs, if you don’t count the Rod Stewart-inspired hairstyle. While on his journeys in quest of a great treasure called Big Whoop, he meets and falls in love with the beautiful and brave Elaine Marley. Of course, his courtship is anything but smooth sailing, with competition coming in the form of undead captain LeChuck.
The game gets underway with Threepwood lost at sea, out of food and water, and way too busy to notice all the eatables and drinks floating by – because he is busy updating his captain’s log. Fortunately for him, land is not too far away. Unfortunately for him, he lands smack in the middle of a gun battle between Elaine and LeChuck and ends up getting captured by the latter. What follows is sheer mayhem, with ribs and brain being tickled in equal measure.
The Curse of Monkey Island is primarily an adventure game. The aim is to help Threepwood get out of his troubles by wandering around, talking to people, picking up stuff and then putting it all together to make sense. There are four different islands to explore, each with its own mix of eccentric characters and handy objects. And there is even a trip to a creepy graveyard crypt as Threepwood dies (!!) and chats up the odd ghost or two! You progress through the game by basically solving a series of puzzles. These vary from the utterly simple to the amazingly ridiculous. Here’s a sample – Threepwood’s attempts to recruit a crew for a ship involve defeating potential crewmembers in log-throwing and musical contests. Mind you, he does not always play fair and whenever possible cheats his way through. A word of advice – talk to as many people as possible and pick up whatever you can. You never know when something might come in handy! At one stage, I was saved by the only legible page of a soggy encyclopaedia.
What separates The Curse of Monkey Island from the typical ‘wander around, talk and collect stuff’ type of adventure game is its vast quantities of humour. The conversations are laced with liberal doses of irreverent wit and one finds oneself talking to people even after accomplishing an objective just to listen to their reactions. There is very little violence in the game itself, barring a few naval battles and of course, the amazing sword fights. While the naval stuff is more action oriented, the sword fights are anything but. In fact, the only way you can defeat your opponent is by insulting him thoroughly. So even as swords are crossed, you have to decide which is the right insult to inflict. For instance, “You are more loathsome than a monkey in a negligee” can be effectively blunted by “Do I remind you so much of your fiancée?” He who insults the most wins!
The graphics are pretty good, considering that this is a 1997 game. The locales are colourful, the characters right out of a good comic book and only the supremely nitpicky might feel that the animation is a trifle jerky and repetitive. That said, even they would struggle to find fault with the voice acting, which is simply outstanding. There are accents galore but never at the cost of clarity. The background score starts off sounding nice but does tend to get a bit boring towards the end.
Like all things human, alas, the game also has its share of headaches. The biggest is the one that plagues most adventure games – that of getting stuck. There are stages when one simply does not know what to do next and is reduced to mixing and matching everything in Guybrush’s inventory and trying it out on everything and every one in hope of getting a solution. And some of the solutions do need seriously lateral thinking – there is one about obtaining a map to Blood Island that gave me a severe headache. The linear nature of the game also means that if you do not pick up the right things, you could end up at a dead end. Mind you, the game does attempt to drop hints on what to pick up and what to dump – Guybrush helpfully refuses to pick up anything that is totally unnecessary. Still, there are going to be times when you will have no option but to resort to a walkthrough.
There are other niggles as well. Guybrush can speak to a person only from a certain position. So if you happen to ask him to converse with someone, he very elaborately walks to the right place before starting to speak. All you can do is twiddle your thumbs in the meantime- unfortunately, Mr. Threepwood cannot run! Then there is the matter of the climax. I cannot give too much away but it seemed to be a bit of a damp squib to me after all the fun that had preceded it.
But these are all mere pinpricks in what is actually a thoroughly entertaining romp. This is one of the few games that actually perks one’s spirits up when they are a bit on the lower side. I simply cannot recommend it enough.
Now, excuse me while I go off and have another giggling fit!
Final Verdict: 85%
