Yet another RTMI hate post (not really).
It has been a while since I played RTMI, but I never shared my thoughts on this anywhere. And something reminded me of MI lately, – I feel like I still have a question that I can’t quite answer to.
To clear the table: I kind of liked it. The game is OK, but just OK is probably not good enough.
Yes, I am one of these people who didn’t quite like the art style. But that’s OK, stylistic choice is a stylistic choice. It’s a matter of taste.
Yes, I was one of these people who didn’t like RTMI being too easy. Thimbleweed Park puzzles were much-much more satisfying. That’s less OK with me, but, I get it – people don’t have that much of the attention span anymore. And maybe an adventure game taking more time than a good book or a piece of music is a ridiculous concept overall.
I’m certainly OK with meta and all of the Secret being not true. There is a bittersweet feeling in it that Ron and team were going for.
What I’m not OK with is the inconsistency of work of art breaking my suspension of disbelief. It’s best exemplified by the Elaine character, so I’ll focus on this one below. Many people mentioned her being too motherly and enabling towards Guybrush, I had the same impression. That’s just not how people work. I don’t believe in this character for a second. At the beginning of the game Guybrush is surprised to see Elaine and he has no idea what is she up to, but then they just proceed like people who see each other every day. At some moment in the game I was sure that Guybrush is in a psychiatric ward, park bench is around his hospital, while Elaine is his nurse. “It’s going to be fun adventure” at the end is something that you might say to someone who’s still too obsessed with The Secret and needs a distraction. But nothing in the game really hints at it too hard, so I doubt it was really the intention or hidden meaning behind the game. Although I think I remember someone on the web mentioning the same.
There are a few potential points of view on this. I’ll try to show why none of these explains what happened with development, in my opinion.
1) It’s just a stupid game.
True. But previous games were more well-thought and executed in my opinion. Ron happens to have the ability to make a mythological story out of a stupid story. Not that these have any deep meaning, but they work in a way fairy tales work. As note at the end mentions, the first MI told the story of a wannabe game developer through a wannabe pirate. That’s it: take a boring idea and make something magical out of it. All of his characters are barebones, -- how many lines of text did Weird Ed have in MM? 10? 15? But it was enough to establish them as believable parts of story.
- Original version had Guybrush and Elaine going through breakup, but it was too dark.
Ron Gilbert’s games were always simultaneously dark and light-hearted. Starting from the hamster in microwave in MM, ending with genuinely heart-breaking “I blew it! I blew it!” clown ending in Thimbleweed. Thus I assume it wouldn’t be impossible for the team to do both.
- It’s unreliable narrator story told to Boybrush, the conflict was there, but left out of the story.
David Lynch is the favorite RGs director. Thus RG should know better how you do the unreliable narrator story. You show cracks in the narrative now and then. You leave things out, like abrupt dialogue end. Unreliable narrator story never adds up if you look at it carefully. I don’t think it’s in the game.
Overall, I feel like this is a failed artistic attempt about nostalgia, with some good bits and pieces. Like LeChuck team that can’t be bothered with The Secret echoing the Guybrush team in the first MI; like much more obvious wake of destruction behind Guybrush than previously and so on. But these just don’t work together and offer nothing to remember or think about. Everything is lacking taste and texture, like this all-positive fake Elaine person. It’s trying to be comfort food for everyone instead of being interesting. In one of the interviews Ron even mentioned something like “people don’t like what Elaine is, which is ridiculous to me”. Probably he is being too defensive about it – the critique is not ungrounded, IMO.
I still can’t quite understand why is it so much less consistent than (if we focus on recent titles) the Cave or Thimbleweed park? Is it the time pressure? Weight of expectations? Too many stories to reconcile? Playtesters affected the story too much? My impression is that some changes happened too abruptly during the development of the RTMI.
Having said that, Ron, Dave or a random person in the street should certainly try whatever they want to try, regardless of how unlikely is it to work.