Every Lucasarts Adventure Game: Ranked Worst To Best

Monkey Island 2 does not have the best puzzles in an adventure game: that accolade rests with Day of the Tentacle. Nor, merely building on its predecessor, does it have the best setting: who can argue against Grim Fandango's Land of the Dead? Is it particularly original, then? Not especially; unlike LOOM, it sticks rigidly to the SCUMM stylings of its forebears.

Yet it's Lucasarts' best point 'n' click, and - cries of exponents of The Longest Journey and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers be damned - the best adventure game of all time. You see, though you can point to other titles as exceeding LéChuck's Revenge in individual aspects, none are greater than the sum of their parts quite like Ron Gilbert's swashbuckling sequel.

Everything that made Monkey Island great is here, but so very very. The locations more expansive, more exotic, more open. The humour, in the first dryer than a salted cracker, is now as parched as Robyn Davidson. Guybrush, flush from his last LéChuck-busting adventure, is no longer naively wide-eyed, but trenchant to the max. The puzzles themselves have the same ingenuity as Day of the Tentacle's, but manifest as extensions of the world rather than Rube Goldberg brainteasers. There's also a song! And dancing monkeys!

There is, of course, one major sore spot in Monkey Island 2: the absolute ball-kick of an ending. What makes it worse is that we'll probably never know how Ron Gilbert wanted to end things, or indeed, what the 'secret' of Monkey Island actually is.

There's some hope: the IP lies dormant, and Gilbert has repeatedly expressed his wish to produce a 'canonical' Monkey Island 3 in the style of the originals. But in an age of immediacy, there's a sort of lucidity in this unanswered question; not knowing adds to game's mystique, whereas a conclusion couldn't possibly satisfy everybody, perhaps anybody.

Besides, would it improve Monkey Island 2? Not really: it's already pirate perfection.