YMMV / The Secret of Monkey Island

• Awesome Music:
  • The intro theme to the original The Secret of Monkey Island, which is so iconic that it has been remixed for every game.
    • The intro theme got ramped up for the Special Edition combining the old and new, the result simply being amazing!
    • The title screen music sounds awesome no matter what sort of speaker or sound card your computer has.
    • Of course, if you think that's cool, you should hear the metal remix. Including blending the song with the original Pirates of the Caribbean theme song!
  • The music for the Mêlée Island map.
  • The SCUMM Bar theme.
  • The theme for Monkey Island itself.
  • LeChuck's theme is a fan favorite.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • During the Test of Thievery, Guybrush enters a door, and has a number of bizarre offscreen adventures, including encounters with a tremendous yak wearing wax lips, a rhinoceros, a horde of gophers, a funny little man, and a heavily armed clown. He also picks up items he could not normally pick up and performs actions that are not available to the player.
  • The game has a Running Gag phrase "Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!", and at one point, while on Monkey Island, Guybrush encounters an actual three-headed monkey. It plays no role in the plot, and is never brought up again.
• Broken Base: The Special Edition, specifically its art style. Many fans found the cartoony character designs too much of a departure from the realistic graphics employed in the original.
  • Additionally, of the original releases, which one is the best? Is it the more cartoony pushed-to-its-limits 16-color EGA version? Is it the later 256-color VGA version? Is it the CD version that leaves behind the old MIDI music and simplifies the UI? Is it the Amiga version that makes use of its sound capabilities and looks similar to the VGA version? Nobody really seems to agree which one is the best, and even more debates stem out of which sound card the game is best played with, some even arguing for something as minimalist as the PC speaker!
• Common Knowledge: An oft-misremembered fact is that Guybrush and LeChuck supposedly don't interact until the very end of the game. In fact, LeChuck interacts with Guybrush much earlier than that, namely during the sequence where Guybrush is trying to steal the idol from Elaine. However, LeChuck's disguised as Fester Shinetop during the sequence, which is likely the cause of this confusion.
• First Installment Wins: While many fans will argue that LeChuck's Revenge or Curse is the actual best game in the series, this entry is easily the most iconic, well-remembered, and influential entry in the franchise, with most of its best-known memes being from this game, and nearly all of the subsequent Monkey Island games being based at least in part on its gameplay and story structure (the major exceptions being LeChuck's Revenge, which had a more open-ended structure, and Tales, which used an episodic model).
• Good Bad Translation: The closest Spanish counterpart for the slang I am rubber, you are glue during the insult swordfighting sequence is Botellita de Jerez (todo lo que digas será al revés, everything you said will be reversed). However, it was literally translated as Yo soy cola, tú pegamento, resulting in a very funny phrase that lacks any coherence. It got very popular, becoming an icon of the game and even being preserved in the remake.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: During the production of the special edition, the team planned to alter the "Buy Loom" joke due it being dated by a good decade or so at the time of release and Loom having since gone out of print. They ultimately chose to keep it out of nostalgia...only for the joke to become current again as the special edition ended up being released at the same time Loom made its debut as a digital release on Steam.
  • George Lucas is a Troll. Could be this or Harsher in Hindsight depending on your feelings towards the man.
• Ho Yay:
  Guybrush: Oh, come on, Meathook. You're a big, strong, good-looking guy with a talking tattoo. You can swab my decks any time!
• Memetic Mutation: "Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."^Explanation A line from Guybrush used to mock the game's initial high price point, costing up to $80 at MSRP for the CD-ROM version. The quote garnered renewed attention in The New '10s as a result of escalating backlash towards the increasingly luxurious price points of triple-A video games, especially after Activision announced that the highly anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would cost $60 on both consoles and PC, leading to many more computer games costing $60 as well. Consequently, it became a popular motto for people exhausted with the runaway costs of modern gaming, with some additionally adjusting it for inflation (given that $20 in 1990 is worth more than double that amount in the 2020s).
• Misaimed Fandom: The point of the aforementioned "Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game" line was to riff on the game itself for being at least twice as expensive as that when it first launched. There however are people who take Guybrush's advice to heart (sometimes taking inflation into consideration), not helped by the fact that the line lost its original context many years ago. (Even by 1992, the EGA and Atari ST versions of the game were indeed $20.)
• Porting Disaster: The Sega CD port of the game not only has the issue of requiring the player to navigate a PC-optimized point and click interface with a controller (which goes every bit as well as you might think), it suffers from annoying amounts of Loads and Loads of Loading as it constantly stops to get conversation and sound data in the middle of the game. The graphics are also watered down and the game runs annoyingly slow in many places (the SCUMM Bar being a particularly bad offender). They also completely left out the Visible Invisibility on LeChuck's ship because the Genesis hardware can't properly handle transparency.
• Strangled by the Red String: Guybrush and Elaine. They meet once (after he's just broken into and trashed her mansion no less), have a brief conversation, then suddenly the next time they run into each other they're acting like Sickening Sweethearts and declaring undying love! Like the rest of the game, the whole thing is played very tongue-in-cheek, complete with a sappy score and the voice actors in the Special Edition giving a melodramatic performance, so most players don't mind.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The circus music has a part which sounds like the music typically used in circus settings, from Entrance of the Gladiators by Julius Fučík.
  • The love theme resembles How Could I Be Such a Fool by The Mothers of Invention.