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 (Feel free to quote one of the 500 lines from Kingdom Hearts that involve the word "darkness" cuz I'm not doing it)
MODERN GAMING
Epic Mickey
Developer: Junction Point
Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Year: 2010
Genre: Platformer
System: Wii
As far as their reputation in videogames is concerned, Disney started with a very strong presence with a generally high quality of licensed games either by their own studios Disney Interactive or by other studios such as Westwood Studios making The Lion King, Sega making the Illusion series and Quackshot, as well as Capcom with Mickey's Magical Quest.
Then sometime around the Nintendo 64 era, they began to slip. They began to care less about their presence in the world of videogames except for licensed cash-ins, until of course Kingdom Hearts which also started out awesome before turning into a ratehr convoluted mess of a Mary Sue breeding ground. Now we have Epic Mickey. Is this a game that lives up to its title, and the quality of Disney back in the day? Let me tell you.
Story - Long ago, back in Mickey's early days before fame and fortune found him, he passed through a looking glass into the home of the grand sorcerer Yen Sid, currently busy at work creating a beautiful magical painted kingdom as a refuge for cartoons long abandoned in the days of black and white. Mickey, being the young mischievous rogue at the time, decided to dabble around with the creation himself, but unfortunately fucked it up bad. How bad? Eisner bad.
Mickey creates by accident a colossal ink monster known as The Phantom Blot, as well as spilling paint thinner all over the kingdom in a panic before running back to hide away in his own world. Years pass, his fame and fortune coming to him to become the most recognisable cartoon character in history. Then one day, the Phantom Blot tears through his mirror and drags him to the bowels of a hellish ink-ridden abyss, known only as The Wasteland.
 (One of the most scenic areas of the Wasteland, and not a Deathclaw in sight)
Trapped within a dark once-magical kingdom where ancient friends and acquaintances of his from a world without colour, Mickey must endeavour to find his way home, as well as dealing with the various stronger denizens of the land, including the self-appointed ruler, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the first and oldest of them all. Whether Mickey will cure or destroy the land further within his wake towards escape is entirely up to you.
The story itself is absolutely loaded with nostalgic whimsical beauty, the cast entirely composed of characters from the cartoons of Walt Disney in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, from Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy, to Mickey and the Beanstalk.
Those of you who are well-read on Disney lore, will be absolutely bright-eyed and childlike with glee at the beautiful world within. Those who aren't, will enjoy it just as much within a land that's quite literally Disneyland itself replicated by Oswald as a new home for toons forgotten like him.
Gameplay - So how does one go about exploring an ink-blotted darkened version of The Magic Kingdom itself from the Small World boat ride warped to become the home of the Gremlins, to Mean Street itself complete with an ice cream parlour? Well firstly let's go over the controls before anything else. The controls in themselves are incredibly simplistic, almost emblematic of a purely E-rated game but don't let that dissuade you.
Mickey is armed with the paintbrush that started the whole mess, where he can shoot out two kinds of liquids as well as doing a spin attack to destroy objects and stun enemies. The controls themselves are very standard platforming affair. Long-range attacks, one short-range attack, double jump, and of course, the disagreeable camera. I'm going to be honest with you. The camera is a bit of a dick.
Sometimes it will fix itself in areas you do not want to fix it in, especially if you try to go BACK the way along an area of platforms to see where to go next, but of course you won't always get to have the chance to manually move it around or just immediately center it behind Mickey in order to do so, which can in all honesty lead to some rather frustrating moments that anyone who's played Nintendo consoles for the past six years will know well, and I do not mean the Mario games.
 (I AM THE GOD OF INK, AND I BRING YOU....PAINT!)
Moving onto the more original ideas, we have Mickey able to wield two elements across the land. Paint and Thinner.
Paint is the blue stuff that has two purposes. Creating and befriending. Bridges, houses, trees, cars, fire hydrants, crates, gears, levers, walls, all of them can be brought back into existence with the power of paint.
Whatever is missing with a noticeable absence in the wall or the middle of a street, it can be painted in with good old splat. Most enemies and bosses can be befriended by completely coating them in paint, making them your ally to fight other monsters, and they remain such until you leave the area.
Thinner is the green stuff which has only one purpose. Erasing. Anything that can be created with paint, can also be destroyed with thinner, which can also include the inhabitants of the Wasteland themselves by spraying enough thinner to reduce them to a pile of goo. Yes, you literally wield The Dip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
You can kill baby shoes, adult shoes and the people who wear them before you paint them back in again to "revive" them. Also, all enemies and bosses can be killed permanently by using thinner. But whether you use Paint or Thinner more in the course of the game will affect Mickey's appearance, as well as how he is viewed by others.
The influence of the Phantom Blot has tainted itself upon him, and as such will change his appearance depending on how he acts. The more sweet-hearted and kindly he is by helping people and not killing enemies, the more normal Mickey will look, sweetly po-faced with not a scrap of ink upon him.
However, the more mischievous and mean-minded he is, the more ink you see slowly dripping off of his body, until you become full-blown renegade where Mickey actually looks like he's dissolving, like a cartoon Alex Mercer from Prototype, ink running off of his body in sickening black trails. Holy shit, for Disney to see their mascot character getting corrupted like Shepard in Mass Effect 2, that is dark as Grimm.
 (I AM THE GOD OF INK, AND I TAKE AWAY....YOUR CUPS!)
The other larger part of the game is the amount of choices that are involved. Coming from Warren Spector, creator of such masterpieces as System Shock and Deus Ex, this is something he knows how to do very well without coming off as clichéd and insulting, like some other games tend to do with moral "choices" that involve either saving an entire orphanage or burning it down to the ground.
Instead of trying to describe it, let me give you an example. While in the 2nd hour of gameplay, I was passing through a village of gremlins (not the fluffy ones that turn after midnight, these are little green men that love to fuck around with planes in old WWII cartoons) when I was given a choice to help someone prove their innocence where I could either prove his innocence, or just heading onwards through the level disregarding it.
Managing to climb up to a secret area within the village, I managed to skip AN ENTIRE AREA without any hassle to make it towards an arena. Naturally my gamer senses tingled at the large circular area that made me know I would have to fight someone. But right before the boss was ready to kick my ass, he decided not to. Because I had managed to prove he was not guilty of an earlier incident, he was less willing to fight me and decided "you know what, fuck it, you're a nice guy, go right on through".
This is just a teaser of the choices that are yet to come in the game. Quests can be finished in ways you may not even imagine, it all relies on your own perception and they remain that way throughout the entire game, to the point where the absence of a character you killed off will be felt by the community.
These are especially prominent within the hub areas, all of which are connected to each other by projector screens. Inside you'll find side-scrolling levels that play out like LittleBigPlanet recreations of classic Disney cartoons, all of which are awesome.
 (Or for those of you who remember the SNES/Genesis days, levels that play out like Mickey Mania)
Admittedly, having to go through one single cartoon level back and forth when dealing with a quest CAN be irritating for some after a while, but they are at least very short and barely take 2 minutes to go through. Speaking of which the loading times are surprisingly able in this game, to the point that I have never had to wait more than 10 seconds to jump back into the action.
Other things to note are the E-tickets which are the currency of the game and can be found pretty much everywhere, as well as in the cartoon levels which respawn them regularly.
The game also has a large slant on collecting things, from Power Sparks which allow you to open later areas of the game, to miscellaneous crap during side quests, which become strangely reminiscent of Jak & Daxter in how this is presented, but in a good way (and considering I hated Jak & Daxter, that's saying something).
The last thing to cover of Epic Mickey's gameplay, is the fact that annoyingly some levels are one-time only to visit whereas others can be regularly revisited constantly. Completionists beware, if it's not a hub area where there are many characters, you will not want to leave until you have done EVERYTHING but stolen the kitchen sink. The game also never really tells you if you can be able to return to that area or not, except by the fact that the projector screen you just came out of is blank and is therefore permanently closed.
Graphics - As far as the Wii goes on the lower-end of graphical prowess, the game comes off looking rather excellent in its design style. Let's be clear about one thing. 2D Disney characters rarely ever look well done in 3D. Look at any of the recent 3D cartoons, of course they look okay but there's still a bit of...handwaving shall we say. This is not the case with Epic Mickey where each and every character looks as if they jumped off the sketching pad like the Animaniacs, fully recognised in three colourful dimensions.
 ("IIIIIIIIIICE CREEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAM!!!")
Of course this even counts for those like Oswald who never even got to hear the phrase 3D when they disappeared back in the early 20th century, and have been lovingly restored in all their toonish splendour, no doubt much to the tear-streaked smile of Walt Disney's spirit himself.
No character has been left untouched, all of them having appeared SOMEWHERE in early Disney animation. The amount of detail to recreate them faithfully is almost obsessive on a level that is unseen outside of sci-fi fanfiction. Warren Spector REALLY fucking loves Disney.
Mean Street is a glorious little promenade that can be painted or thinned out to your pleasure, VentureLand has all the oppressiveness of your typical pirate island, OsTown is half Americana, half sludge-infested sewer drain. Every world has its own levels of pleasures and problems to make them feel separate enough, as well as their own prominent characters whom you will always want to say hi to whenever returning to the hub areas. This will especially become a double feature of love for those of you who have actually gone to Disneyland.
There are also the 2D animated cutscenes that play during special parts of the game. While they do not have the effortless smoothness of classic Disney, they have a beautiful style on their own, almost like that of a foreign animated film, the good European kind that actually makes your eyes go wide in delight at seeing quality. Whether they pop up too often or not for you to appreciate them fully and instead get annoyed by them is up to you, but they are however all skippable.
 (This guy, is the greatest motherfucking cartoon to have never become famous)
Music/Sound - One part of this game that truly is Epic, is the music itself. The soundtrack is magnificently empathic of every area from the Small World ride sounding completely broken down, to the busy world-weary Mean Street, to the somewhat melancholy small-town feeling Ostown. Every world has a character about it thanks to the music, and even the hubs have various themes, changing moods like a character would.
Then there are the cartoon side-scrolling levels, which have in my opinion the best music of the game.
Each and every cartoon has been given a lovingly perfect re-rendition of the main pieces from each cartoon, from the gloriously iconic Turkey In The Straw rendition on Steamboat Willie that Mickey himself once whistled while steering Willie itself, to the hokey-cokey working-day feel of Mickey's Steamroller, to the curious-then-dangerous atmosphere of Thru The Mirror. It's one thing to make appropriate themes for each cartoon level but to reproduce the exact themes from them? That is some goddamn straight-up fanboy love right there.
The only true complaint anyone may have of the audio is the fact that there is no voice acting in the game, beyond mere utterances for initiating dialogue. The game features only one full voice acting part, and it's from master Yen Sid at the intro of the game, gloriously voiced by Corey Burton who reprises his role of such from the Kingdom Hearts games.
To some however, this may be an annoyance, especially during animated cutscenes where you pretty much have to read the subtitles, and it becomes something of a mystery as to why the characters weren't fully voiced. A small but frustrating point that could have added a higher chip towards perfection for this game.
So we come to the end of this review, and I had to ask myself when playing it. Is this game truly epic? Yes. It so fucking is. I am a big Disney fan, I watched a lot of the shorts all my life, I recognised 90% of every goddamn cartoon and old character in the game, and I am absolutely blown away, despite the frustrating little points of a not-so-cooperative camera, really simple controls and the lack of voice acting. I love this game. I have waited for this game for two years. And I love it so much.
Everything that Warren Spector said he would put in this game, he has literally delivered. If you love Disney, then you want this game.
Fun and Innovation - 5
Replayability - 4
Gameplay - 4
Presentation - 5"Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto  Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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Hmm, if there were one Wii game that you would buy this year, what would it be? I am torn between this and Kirby's Epic Yarn. I love me some Kirby games.  Quote:Razor: As hard as one might try no one will ever be able to pull one over on Super Penguin. Backpack of Win
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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Super Penguin wrote:Hmm, if there were one Wii game that you would buy this year, what would it be? I am torn between this and Kirby's Epic Yarn. I love me some Kirby games. People seem to be loving Epic Yarn a lot more, but it won't be out in Europe until next year. I guess there's no shame in picking Epic Yarn over Epic Mickey. After all....both appear to be EPIC ;D "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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You lost me at Wii. If it's not a party game or arcadish game like Smash Brothers, I just can't stand to play it on the Wii.
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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Blahooligan wrote:this is all very nice and all but...
WHERE IS MY VIDEO. Wow, you really want that back? Wellllll......okay then, I can't keep making double reviews, so how about just the video alone? - Epic Mickey - Scots Version"Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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FinalGamer wrote:Wow, you really want that back? Wellllll......okay then, I can't keep making double reviews, so how about just the video alone? - Epic Mickey - Scots Version glee! i vote this be the format for reviews from now on! Bah Weep Granah Weep Ninny Bong
This is the Narwhal.
Denne er narkval
Hvor er narkval?
Where is the narwhal?
Lykkkelig liten narkval!
Happy Little narwal!
This has been Conversational Norwegian with Freakazoid.
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Rank: Penguin Editor in Chief
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Blahooligan wrote:glee! i vote this be the format for reviews from now on! Super Penguin wrote:Yes. Scottish accent for the win. Awww you guys <3 sure, okay, from now on I will make a video review on Youtube for every review in future, to accompany the normal-written English review. "Videogames are bad for you? That's what they said about rock 'n' roll." - Shigeru Miyamoto Hail Slither, The Eternal Champion!
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