Oh...this game is "special" all right.
This game reeks of mediocrity.
First off, any fans of the original (of which I am) will notice straight away the "improved" graphics. Don't get caught up in any hype or excitement concerning those. It's probably one of the most unprofessional and sloppy graphic overhauls you will ever see. You know somethings wrong when the 8-bit version looks less choppy than the original. It's a mess, it offers nothing new to the original game and instead...kind of takes a dumper on some of the memories of Monkey Island that you might have had. Seriously, the graphics are that bad. Animations...also on the bottom of the barrel. People just move in such bizarre ways here. It's not even that it's a stylistic choice as some might claim, it's simply because the animators who were in charge of this slop simply aren't very good. That or they were rushed. Either way, they failed pretty horribly. Even the original game's animations are smoother. How is that even possible?
The inventory and action set up also got revamped. Again, it's a bad thing. Selecting different actions is a cumbersome mess. Push, pull, talk, walk, take, give, use, combine, poop, crap, dump.
It's a lot of fun scrolling through all those with the mouse wheel, especially when only one is shown at a time.
The voice acting is probably one of the two and only two highlights that might warrant a purchase of this game, the other being that you don't even have to bother with the special edition at all. Characters are funny, colorful and pretty well fleshed out for the most part. Just like they were in the original, the voice acting only adds to the game's charm.
Other than that, if you got suckered into actually paying for this jumbled, unprofessional pile of slop, you can at least take comfort in knowing that you can turn off the special edition entirely and just play the original game in it's entirety.
Which is probably what we all should have done in the first place. Go buy the original Monkey Island for 2-3$ and ignore this rushed, sloppy, and wholly uninspired mess of a remake.