That's the issue. Just about every game looks different, but not until this one do people "care".

It literally has no real basis to base its look off of.

> however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected.

This here seems to be you talking about consistency. Saying that it doesn't match the older games. Well, which older game should it match? If anything, it not matching any of the older games would be more stylistically appropriate than matching any of the older games.

> Well, which older game should it match?

I already explained that I agree with you that this is the exact problem they faced when coming up with a look for the game. if they had picked any of the different styles, there would have been fans and detractors both. arguably, if they wanted to minimize backlash at the expense of everything else (such as broad marketability), they would have painstakingly recreated the art style of the first two games, with its weird disconnect between the cartoonish character sprites and full-screen realistic-looking closeup shots intact. so they did the almost certainly right thing and figured out a new style. but just because they chose the correct course of action doesn't mean that it wasn't going to frustrate just about everyone who looks at it and says to themselves, "well Monkey Island looks like many different things to be but it doesn't look like that." as a comparative example, see the reaction to the art style of the remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I haven't played it but I think it looks great—much like the Return to Monkey Island art style, it found a way to split the difference in making a new graphical style that still retains some of the "vagueness" of the old, hardware-limited style, while looking unique and good. as you can imagine, even though the Zelda franchise has had its fair share of totally different art styles over the years, there were many people who felt like this particular style doesn't jive with their franchise preconceptions. (I'm kind of at a loss for why I'm fully explaining all of this... this all seems pretty self-evident, for self-evident reasons.)

But why? They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.

You also keep positing alternatives they could have done and claiming that those alternatives would have been better. But it's all based off of your conjecture. You claim it's self-evident, but it's only self-evident in the way that is evident to yourself.

The backlash seems out of proportion to what was done.

I think what you might be missing is that "they" has been a different group of people each time since the original two games—this is the first Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game since LeChuck's Revenge. I believe Gilbert has also said that he's disregarding everything in Monkey Island "lore" that he wasn't around for the writing of. because of all of this, the franchise has a general identity problem, including a visual identity problem. most people who are excited to play Return to Monkey Island are not coming from a place of "well most of the rest of the games looked different from one another, let's see something new!" I think most people expected the franchise to either maintain its new "Remastered" look, or look closer to the original two games. personally I'm glad they chose neither!

the backlash only seems disproportionate due to reporting on it. "New Game In Franchise Looks Different From Old Games In Franchise, Many Anonymous Internet Users Vocally Upset About This, Like Everything Else, As Per Usual" doesn't really have the same emotional galvanization effect, see?

but again I agree that the new style is actually a neat compromise between the old cartoony pixel art character sprites and something totally different, without going down the full-cartoon-whismy route that the later titles and Remastered games took. part of the charm of the first game is how expressive the characters without being too over-the-top cartoony like DoTT or Sam & Max. the new style looks like it should be able to recapture this feeling quite well!

again, the complaints are stupid, but should have been very easy to expect, because pleasing everyone—especially when it comes to nostalgia—is basically impossible.