[WorldMaker]

If you ignore the awful controls and equally awful minigames, I think Escape is still a fun pirate tale with a lot of things to love about it. I think the plot's overall is pretty inspired about the gentrification of the pirate islands, and it's the natural progression from Curse's exploration of the same themes (which in turn those themes going all the back to things like Secret's used boat sales lot). A lot of Escape is extremely funny, too. It just has that huge grind in the middle made worse by awful controls and environments that were both too big and too densely packed with sight gags and too empty all at once.

"Somewhat bad", sure, given those qualifications of pretend the controls and their grind don't exist. But also, more inspired than many give it credit for and still "worst Monkey Island" is a relatively high bar compared to other franchises we could mention.

[seba_dos1]

To me, Escape felt a lot like a fan fiction story. A pretty good one, sure, but it still hatched onto the themes that you mention (which used to be more or less background gags in previous installments without much relevance to the actual story) the way fans usually do when writing their own stories. So you got bombarded with callbacks to previous games, characters you already knew, jokes you already heard, and stories that didn't really feel like natural progression of the lore but more like "what if?" scenarios. Ozzie, Herman, your old crew, LeChuck's role in the whole conspiracy, Giant Monkey Head, Planet Threepwood... compare that to Curse, which genuinely moved the series forward into a new and fresh adventure. It also called back to previous games - it even started with Wally right in the first scene who didn't really need to be there - but it always felt like an addition to the game's story, or a glue that makes a Monkey Island game a Monkey Island game, rather than something it relies on to be funny or interesting (after all, we meet Murray right after meeting Wally in Curse, and I don't think any character introduced in Escape is even close to how strong Murray is as a character).

Escape would be a great spin-off - it's still a genuinely fun and engaging adventure game if you can look past its shortcomings. However, as an entry in the main series, it feels a bit wrong, and definitely the weakest. It's not "a pirate tale with good share of silliness" anymore, but rather "a silly tale with good share of pirates". I bet that most of the stuff in the new game that will end up contradicting older games' canon will be stuff that goes at odds with Escape in particular, mostly thanks to its plot twists for the sake of plot twists and taking previous games' gags way too seriously :P

[technovader]

I don't disagree.

I actually played through and finished EMI. I think its tonnes of fun and arguable better than CMI.

But I won't say the tank controls didn't ruin an otherwise great game

[WorldMaker]

I know Schafer wasn't involved in EMI and so had no direct interest in doing it but with the huge underlying similarities in the engine it would have been nice to get an EMI remaster side-by-side the Grim Fandango remaster with similar controls improvements.

One of these days maybe SCUMMVM will finally get around to gifting us the right controls for EMI to make it truly fun to experience.