We’ll get to that, though what I can’t remotely fault Grim Fandango for is its imagination. I have maintained for years that Grim Fandango is 50% of a great adventure game and 50% sub- Longest Journey-tier trash, but unlike most LucasArts adventures - where they tend to have an incredibly strong opening and then a weaker back half - Grim Fandango’s location-hopping makes it more even in its unevenness, spreading out the shit bits (and god knows there’s a lot of them) so that every single chapter has at least a couple of incredibly tedious moments that make you reconsider what you’re doing with your life. The game is split into four chapters, each of which is separated by a year-long interlude where Manny alternately waits for Meche or travels onwards in search of her, and this is both the biggest strength and the greatest weakness of Grim Fandango. Manny feels like he’s being intentionally set up with bad clients, and so chapter one has him applying some adventure game logic to get the details of a good one, Meche in the process he stumbles upon a plot to deprive good souls of their express tickets on the Number Nine train and sell them to the rich and undeserving, and this kickstarts Manny’s own journey across the underworld as he attempts to track down Meche and unravel the plot. Grim Fandango is the story of Manuel Calavera, a travel agent in the Land of the Dead who “sells” 1 the freshly-deceased travel packages that will speed them on their way through the afterlife. The closest I can get is to disable as much of the remaster as I can and play through the game in 4:3 aspect ratio with tank controls.) (Why turn off all of those fancy remaster features? Well, my goal with this series is to try and experience these games as they would have been on release, but you can’t find an original version of Grim Fandango on any digital store all you can get is the remaster. But mostly it’s because I don’t think the actual experience of playing Grim Fandango in 2022 lives up to its lofty reputation - I thought the world of it back in 1998 when I first played it, but 2015’s remaster highlighted just how badly it had aged despite all of the mod-cons that Double Fine added, and playing through it again with all of those mod-cons turned off is even worse. Part of that is because, after going through 12 adventure games in a little under a year, I was all adventured out I needed a break from solving obtuse puzzles with an array of comedy items, no matter how pleasant the presentation around it might have been. To be fair, I did prevaricate for a bit over playing Grim Fandango – for about ten months, to be precise, as I booted it up just after putting up my piece on Curse of Monkey Island in October of last year and noped out of it about 15 minutes later. Oh, you thought we were done with this? Oh no.
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