Disney Epic Mickey: Not quite Disney World

For a while before it’s announcement legendary game designer Warren Spector – who has worked on classic hits such as the Ultima series, Thief, and Deus Ex – was rumored to be working on a new franchise with a new team.  That game turned out being Disney Epic Mickey for the Wii. For a licensed game with a big name behind it there has been a lot of high hopes that this would add to the list of great exclusive 2010 releases for the console. Unfortunately, after spending quite a bit of time with Mickey and his long forgotten Disney friends it belongs on a different list as one of the most disappointing games of the year.

At the beginning of the game you’re thrown into a world of the Disney left behind. Long forgotten Disney characters where Oswald the rabbit is the “Mickey”, and Gremlin Gus is your close companion. Designed as an alternate Disney theme park, each area has a theme and often set pieces you’d find in one such as rides akin to the Disney famed teacups and small world boat ride; but in this world everything is a little off. For example, ‘Mean Street’ is to Epic Mickey as ‘Main Street’ is to Magic Kingdom, and because of that it also acts as a bit of a hub world – a jumping off point to get into the other themed worlds.

Controlling Mickey is done using the nunchuck for movement while the Wiimote controls your spin move, jump, and paintbrush. Using the triggers, the paintbrush has the ability to spray either paint or thinner. This gives you the option to rebuild or breakdown particular pieces of the environments, while also acting as a good (paint) and bad (thinner) scale when deciding how to tackle the various foes and objectives. Your spin move mostly acts as a stun while you decide if you want to paint a bad guy, turning them good, or thin them out, in which case they completely disappear, or die. But even starting from the controls and the way Mickey interacts in the environment, the game starts to fall apart.

The camera-system is, bar none, one of the worst cameras I have ever experienced in a videogame. Even while babysitting it with the directional pad it’ll get caught behind environments, disorient you, often take the control out of your hand, and will be the cause of your many deaths and frustration. You also have the ability to go into first-person and look around while standing still, but it felt like every time I was in a position where I wanted to do that the game wouldn’t let me.

There is also the issue of where you are aiming with your Wiimote is not necessarily where your paint or thinner will be shooting. Because ultimately you are controlling Mickey, the relation of where Mickey’s paintbrush is in the environment will affect what you are hitting regardless of where your reticule is on screen. Due to this the paintbrush mechanic can often be exasperating and because the only way to defeat enemies is with using the paintbrush in some way, fighting enemies tend to feel like an annoyance rather than an enjoyable aspect of gameplay.

The heart of the game is a stackable quest system where you approach AI and they’ll give you a task to perform, with no limit on the amount of quests you can have active at one time. This is usually a mixture of having to maneuver through platforming sections, talking to other AI characters, or retrieving items. Sadly each type of quest has some issue associated with it, and the game suffers from a lack of direction and clarity in what exactly it is you’re supposed to do. Over the course of the game I’m not exaggerating when I say that I spent at least half my time running around the environments aimlessly trying to figure out what it is exactly I should be doing.

One cause of this issue is the hierarchical structure of the way you receive and complete quests. A quest might have you receiving a particular item from a character and then having to give that item to a different character to complete it. Except when you go to give that item to that character, instead of resolving the current quest the AI character will give you another quest, then end the conversation forcing you to initiate another conversation sequence in which you receive a second quest, then once again end the conversation forcing you to initiate a third conversation sequence in which finally you are congratulated for finishing the initial quest you went to talk to them for.  The same issue stands if you’ve already completed a quest before you’ve gotten it, which can be the case in quests where you have to retrieve an item.

This poses the issue of making the player feel like they’ve talked to the wrong person, only to at some point find out that if they had initiated conversation a few more times then their quest would have been completed. More than a few times I’ve run around environments not knowing where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do because the AI character had not mentioned my completion of the quest in our initial conversation, so I had assumed I went to the wrong character.

There is also the issue of the AI not giving you enough information on what exactly it is you’re supposed to be doing. One quest has you collecting hopping bunnies that once found, jump around you. But the problem is the game doesn’t tell you where to go with them once you have them rounded up. I had to go back and talk to the AI character three more times before he finally told me that I had to bring them to “the pipe” which, after searching a good 5 minutes for this pipe, finally found it practically camouflaged between two buildings. This is an issue that could have easily been resolved with more information given in the initial conversation.

The problems with quests aren’t just exclusive to uninformative AI, there are also some odd AI placement choices. In one area an AI standing near a factory gave me a quest. He tells you to ‘thin out’ the building. The problem is he was standing right behind a hopping mailbox that you had to jump on to get on top of the building, and the jump button is also the button to initiate conversation with AI. So you can imagine my frustration as I frequently tried jumping on to the mailbox only to inadvertently initiate conversation with the AI character. Its ridiculous instances like this that has me wondering if the game was play tested at all.

But the fetch quests have to be the most annoying of all. In one quest I was forced to trek back and forth between two areas to gather flowers, return them so that they could be placed into a bouquet, and then bring that bouquet into a different world. This wouldn’t be such an issue if you weren’t forced to play through the same side-scrolling platformer level every single time you wanted to move between worlds.

Initially the 3D/2D side-scrolling platforming levels were a welcome distraction from the 3D worlds. Controlling Mickey you experience some classic Disney films from the perspective of a 2D platformer and with the graphical flare of watching an old animated piece; they’re simple yet fun. But after playing through each one once you’ve seen it all; yet for some reason the design team at Junction Point thought it was a good idea to make you re-play them every time you need to hop between worlds. And with the amount of different quests that cause you to go back and forth between the different worlds, the constant re-playing of the side-scrolling platforming levels end up feeling like an obstacle and a waste of time. Closer to the end of the game this starts to become less of a problem, but it’s an incredible barrier that could have been solved with a simple fast-travel system.

While so far it may appear like there is nothing about this game I enjoyed, that’s not true. When you have a clear idea of your objective, especially in open environments where the camera and controls are less of an issue, Epic Mickey can be an enjoyable, although simplistic, platformer. In one world designed around a beach with pirates, I was tasked to maneuver the environment searching for three anchors to thin out so I could raise a sunken pirate ship to sail it and find robotic Hook. Interesting scenery and my thirst for exploration made this an enjoyable task, but taken purely as a platformer Epic Mickey feels dated. Especially when put up against other platforming games on the Wii this year including Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and Donkey Kong Country Returns; Epic Mickey doesn’t do enough right to make it worth playing.

Disney Epic Mickey doesn’t even nail the Disney factor that well. The total lack of voice acting in a Disney licensed game feels like a complete oversight. Mickey and the other characters do make their signature sounds to at least create some sort of identification, and the whimsical Disney music and some smart cues are also present. But in an odd design flaw, the game assumes you know a lot about old Disney, giving no real context to many of the environments and characters. There is the occasional time you’ll meet a character and they’ll reminisce about the old films they were in, but it’s an element of story telling that I wish would have been utilized a lot more. It’s odd that the PS2 game Kingdom Hearts tackles the Disney world more successfully than a game with ‘Disney’ and ‘Mickey’ in the title.

Visually the game suffers from flat textures, simplistic level design, muddy colours, and just overall dullness. Technically it runs well, I experienced some minor slowdown but it’s very rare, and your ability to morph the environment with your paintbrush is an interesting design element. But I couldn’t help but want more from what I was seeing, and it’s not something that would be fixed if the game were on an HD console. The game is just visually plain, it either needed to tackle 3D visuals well (such as Super Mario Galaxy) or have some sort of visual hook (such as Kirby’s Epic Yarn) but the game manages to do neither. Mickey himself is well animated and apart from the cutscenes, really the only visual treat that I experienced. Though simplistically animated, visually the cutscenes have an interesting style, a style I wish the entire game could have adopted.

On paper Disney Epic Mickey has a lot of promise. The talented Warren Spector and team taking the often-ignored Mickey license and exploring Disney’s forgotten past. But just like in many classic Disney films, not all is what it appears to be. Epic Mickey is a jumble of lackluster level design, a bad camera, imperfect mechanics, monotony, occasional bugs, and dated gameplay. There are some good ideas and fun to be had here but with the amount of frustration you’ll have to experience to get to it I cannot recommend this game.