The first Monkey Island game was known for the great wit in its writing and its wacky rendition of the otherwise fantastic and romantic world of fictional pirates. It was also known for peculiar puzzles with hilarious but still somewhat believable solutions.
Therefore, the Special Edition for the first game was a remake that is much welcome.
The second Monkey Island game, unfortunately, has very obtuse puzzles with next to no logical association with their solutions, and even when these are discovered, either through dogged persistence of using anything with everything or through hints obtained with ways outside of playing the game, it is unlikely that the player would be smiling in amusement but rather scratching his/her head in bewilderment at the least.
The Special Edition is a whole-sale remake with the entire second game, complete with its ridiculous puzzles, and even included commentary that implicitly admitted that the puzzles were deliberately meant to boggle the mind.
Like in the previous Special Edition game, LeChuck's Revenge: Special Edition is a graphically re-mastered version of the original, with voice-overs added in. Like the previous game too, the original low-fidelity, old-school graphic filters are bundled together with the present-day filters.
The soundtracks in LeChuck's Revenge has also been re-mastered, sounding a lot more high-definition and crisper, which would be a delight to fans of the original games who had wanted to listen to present-day takes on the original soundtracks.
The most important improvement that the second Special Edition game has over the first one is that switching to the old-school filters no longer cuts off the voice-overs. They continue playing seamlessly for as long as the on-screen characters are moving their mouths, and there is no hitch either when the player switches back to the re-mastered version.
Following a typical Monkey Island tradition, the graphically updated versions of sprites and artwork for Guybrush Threepwood and company are distinctly different from those of the previous Special Edition game. Only the signature trademarks and general body build of recurring characters are retained in their aesthetic designs, and if not for the protagonist's exclamations when meeting recurring characters, even a fan of the series would have a slightly hard time trying to recognize the latter.
Of course, this tradition is not exactly unacceptable, as the Monkey Island games are usually spaced a year or more apart in their canonical timeline, which is an understandably long enough time to have the characters update their looks and fashion sense. Also, a few characters are still too thematically unique to mistake for someone else, such as the Voodoo Lady.
This review will not elaborate much on the story, for fear of inviting spoilers and for the consideration that fans of the original games would already know what the story is.
It should suffice to say that the player takes control of Guybrush Threepwood, who is one of very few video game protagonists that is a little aware that his actions are not his own, in the fourth-wall breaking tradition of the series. The game starts with a flashback sequence, showing how Guybrush would eventually take on the quest of finding a treasure of dubious legend.
Along the way, he will reacquaint himself with some characters that had appeared in the first game and meet new ones, causing trouble for them or solving troubles that they have (and then causing new ones for them). Plenty of barbs, whimsical talk and actually important dialogue will be traded between them and the protagonist, shedding light on what has happened since the game (which is nothing much) and what the player should be doing.
Unfortunately, what the player should be doing isn't clear all the time, even though the obstacles that are in the player's and Guybrush's way are always clear.
For example, there is a puzzle involving what appears to be a large valve and which requires something to twist the valve around. Unfortunately, the solution throws logic right out of the window; in fact, the player would realize that it is a joke that also doubles as a word-playing pun; Guybrush makes a huge unapologetic and fourth-wall breaking grin at the screen when the player enacts said solution, to top off the brazenness of the nature of the solution.
The game also has solutions for puzzles that lead nowhere.
One example of this is a situation where Guybrush has to prove his manliness and self-proclaimed "great pirate" status - yet again - to an unconvinced stranger. He has to imbibe liquids of dubious concoction, or at least show the other person that he has done so. There is a solution pertaining to the latter, but it will always lead to circles with no breakthrough. The player is rewarded with some hilarious voice-over, but these will eventually end in implied statements that more than suggest that what the player is doing isn't working and another somewhat overt statement that the voice-overs are going to loop.
Perhaps some players would appreciate these hints that said solution isn't working, but others would also realize that this solution amounts to little more than a red herring, especially if the player does not care much about exploring the extensive amount of voice-overs and writing in the game.
The puzzles have Guybrush traveling back and forth between islands to obtain solutions that are seemingly poorly connected to the puzzle that they are supposed to be used on. Using the example of the aforementioned valve and its solution, the solution has to be obtained from another island away from the one with the valve, and the solution in turn has to be obtained from another island through another solution that also isn't very logical. (Of course, this may need a little elaboration: it involves tampering a mechanical device with a plant product.)
The first game has such designs that artificially lengthen the game, of course, but that the sequel has even more of these do not make them any less dubious.
The Special Edition of the second game retains all of these game designs. The only compensation for such hassles is audio commentary from the lead designers of the original game that explained away the goals and reasons for these designs, yet these won't necessarily seem compensatory to every player that is frustrated by them.
Of course, doing away with these designs may damage the gist of the original game, but options to forgo them altogether would have been welcomed by some players.
The greatest value of the previous Special Edition game is the audio commentary by the lead designers of the original games, who are Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. The second Special Edition game is no different.
These three personae are brilliantly humorous, and like in the first game, they are uproariously joyful to listen to, whenever they make commentary about various game designs, including the dubious ones.
Unfortunately, the audio commentary also clearly reveals that the developers had resorted to contrived techniques to artificially lengthen the original game (and to the same extent, its Special Edition), among other whimsical designs. They had even suggested that some puzzle solutions had been deliberately designed to be obtuse so that players would be encouraged to make charged phone calls to LucasArts' hint-lines during the time of the original game. (Of course, this can be construed as a joke, but the time that they had invested into this particular segment of the commentary was rather significant.)
Therefore, it can be disappointing to some players that they had not seen fit to discard, replace or include work-arounds for the game designs that they had considered contrived.
Despite being a remake of an old game, a few technical issues managed to get into the game as well. One of these is a significant malfunction with the mouse cursor that occurs when it moves along the edges of the screen.
While the voice-overs bring the witty writing to life, the witty writing also includes canned replies, especially from characters that Guybrush is attempting to persuade to do something. The player can have Guybrush saying a lot of things to an NPC, such as strings of the phrase "please" in ever-increasing lengths, yet the NPC would reply with a single phrase, e.g. "No" in the case of that example, over and over, regardless of the choices that the player took. Yet, annoying NPCs in this manner can be a solution, and often the only solution, so the player will have to listen to the NPC rebuking Guybrush with the same reply over and over before he/she finally relents.
As the lead designers mention in a segment of the audio commentary, the Internet is the player's best source for information on solutions. If the player is playing this game just to experience the voice-overs for the witty humour, spruced-up artwork and re-done soundtracks in this game, he/she is best off armed with a walkthrough, because the rewards for solving puzzles may not be worth the effort that would be put into figuring out the sometimes inane solutions the hard way.
In conclusion, The Special Edition is mostly meant for fans of the original games who would like to savor the hilarious writing and story again, this time with voice-overs. Less experienced players who liked the first Special Edition would find more of the same to like in the second, but they may find the obtuse puzzles off-putting.