I've made mention of Warren Spector in the last few weeks because I genuinely do find the man to be a shining example of the sorts of personalities I wish we had more of in mainstream game development. He's a man who is unafraid to push boundaries, to make the player's involvement integral and interesting, and to deliver uncompromising scenarios and design. Beyond that, though, he seems like a very good-natured, intelligent and thoughtful man, friendly and courteous in every interview I've ever seen him in. And you can't deny that he becomes very passionate about whatever he's working on.
That passion is what drives the player through Disney Epic Mickey, but this is perhaps the most painful thing to say: Epic Mickey is kind of a dud.
In the lead-up to the release of this game, I couldn't help but be extremely excited. Here was one of my idols, back after several years away from directing videogames, working on a passion project that appeared to take an interesting approach to classic animation. He was saying all the right things, too, about how "play style matters," how non-linear and interactive the entire experience was going to be. All of this, wrapped up in a gorgeous art style and Zelda-meets-Mario quality.
The main problem with Epic Mickey is that Spector said all of these things and delivered something else. The game is merely good – but not nearly the game changer that he was promising. Epic Mickey is less Zelda, more Banjo-Kazooie.
By now, if you've been paying attention at all, you probably know what Epic Mickey is all about. Basically, it's an effort to bring Mickey back to prominence as an actual character instead of merely a brand. The game opens with a cinematic explaining the game world. Yen Sid (the alter ego of Walt Disney seen in Fantasia) has been working on a new world where all of his creations that didn't reach the fame of, say, Mickey Mouse or Goofy, can live, ominously calling it "The Wasteland." As he's putting the finishing touches on it, Mickey shows up and, while Yen Sid is looking away, begins to mess around with his paint. The paint has magical qualities, allowing him to paint things into existence. But then he accidentally knocks over a bottle of thinner, essentially destroying large areas of The Wasteland, and bringing into existence the thinner-based enemies known as The Blot.
Several months pass by. Mickey wakes up and finds, in his room, a giant Blotling that sucks him into The Wasteland. It's here that the game starts, and the player has to figure out how to get out of the Wasteland (while either saving it or destroying it in the process).
There are problems with this setup. Well, actually, not with the setup necessarily, but with the ways that Junction Point have decided to try to tackle this frankly awesome introduction. Spector is one of the few videogame directors that one can attempt to apply auteur theory to, but in this game, it feels as though he was given free reigns to design the world of the game, and had many of the gameplay ideas gutted for much more simplistic ones.
The idea of being able to paint items into existence or destroy them potentially could set up an interesting thematic dynamic – does Mickey play into this idea of the infamous character netherworld, or does he look out for himself (as the history of his character would suggest that he does)? Unfortunately, a number of issues crop up that destroy this dynamic. Namely, this ends up being an incredibly arbitrary, traditionally videogame-y, binary morality system. Shooting paint at enemies is always going to be the "good" option, and shooting thinner is the "bad" one. It's perhaps indicative of Disney's ideology, but in videogame terms it's frustrating, because all of these "decisions" that you're making end up being less about personal choice and more about, "what kind of ending am I going to get?"
This does extend replay value, I guess, but artificially. And the idea that you can either play into this world by painting in its missing parts, or destroy it, becomes downright superficial – leave an area, and any changes you make disappear. This is never explained, and makes any impact you make on the world of the game not meaningful in the slightest. Though it's improper to criticize a game for things that perhaps you only wished for, the paint idea isn't taken nearly far enough – you can only create what used to exist, and therefore, you don't really get to create at all. Perhaps a jab at the creative process of Disney? (though I doubt it, what with Spector's reverence for the brand)
Oddly enough, I'd say that Epic Mickey is more of a boon for an appreciator of cinema's history than it is for gamers. I've never been the biggest Disney fan, but it's intellectually dishonest to ignore the cultural and social impact of what has arguably (until the last few years, at least) been the biggest film studio in the world. The game gives players the opportunity not only to play through 3D environments based largely on twisted versions of classic Disneyland, but 2D platforming versions of classic Disney cartoons as well (both Mickey's adventures and the game's antagonist, and Mickey's precursor, Oswald the Rabbit).
Some of the 3D environments are delightfully twisted, especially Mickeyjunk Mountain (which, as its name would suggest, is a giant pile of forgotten Mickey Mouse memorabilia), but for the most part, they're unforgivably drab and dour. I mentioned Banjo-Kazooie earlier, and it's not just because this game plays like a late-90s platformer – in terms of the actual artistic direction, much of the time it looks like one too. Too often, the game's version of "epic" comes out as garish green-orange-brown levels that are aesthetically displeasing and way out of line with the Disney ethos. This is a company that has made its name making colourful, bright cartoons, and Epic Mickey's attempts to be "edgy" in this area fail fairly spectacularly, for me at least.
Much more successful are the 2D platforming sections. Although they're not very interesting for platforming veterans, offering little in the way of good level design, they are amazing to look at through the eyes of the film enthusiast. Bringing to life classic Disney cartoons as actual, interactive things, and doing it with an almost scary attention to detail, is pretty damned impressive.
For every good in this game, though, there's a bad as well – for all of its Zelda-ripping affectations, Epic Mickey isn't nearly as successful at creating a cohesive world. Each area (beyond that awful colour palette) feels unconnected to another area. They're broken up too much as "levels," when the whole concept of The Wasteland begs for interconnectedness, wholeness. I realize that this was the only way to shoehorn in those 2D segments – which are easily some of the most enjoyable parts of the game – but it was probably to the detriment of the game as a whole.
What these segments do, though, is highlight Epic Mickey's identity crisis. Who is this game made for? Well, it's clearly made for Warren Spector, a man who has always wanted to do something with his passion for classic cinema, but it's difficult to ascertain who this game would appeal to primarily. It's far too videogame-y for the Disney collector; far too unpolished and unrefined for someone looking for that Mario or Zelda experience; far too esoteric for children; and far too facile for the "serious" gamer.
It's perhaps that last point that's most frustrating about Epic Mickey. This is a game that was supposed to bring that Spector magic of delivering incredibly sophisticated and involving gameplay scenarios that he more or less perfected in games like Deus Ex and Thief to the Wii masses. But instead, the game's "RPG" elements that have been so highly touted, more or less come back to those Banjo-Kazooie situations: to progress forward, you're going to need some NPC's help, and they're going to want something in return, something usually completely arbitrary and unrelated to the plot of the game, meaning that you're going to be sent off on a bland fetch quest. Finding three gears spread around an environment, or finding another gremlin's wrench that he's misplaced, or painting in four missing switchboxes, isn't interesting or good game design. In fact, it's kind of hopelessly lazy. It's the sort of thing that might, might be considered merely OK in the late-90s. But now, it's just embarrassingly antiquated.
It's funny to me, reading about this game on the internet (I'm not going to hide it, I am the type to read other reviewers' reviews, though I almost never take them into account when I'm reviewing a game myself) – all of this stuff didn't really seem to bother reviewers. Rather, as seems the case with every third-party game on the Wii, whether it deserves it or not, the issues always come down to: camera and controls. And honestly, neither particularly bothered me, though neither are particularly amazing either. People clearly wanted a "smart" camera system a la Super Mario Galaxy 2, and that probably wasn't going to be flexible enough for the variety of tasks in Epic Mickey (and probably couldn't be performed on the absolutely rickety Gamebryo engine) – instead, we get the old-school Ocarina of Time solution, wherein you press the C button to centre the camera behind Mickey. It works fine, but perhaps more control would be nice. As an old-school gamer, though, it's something I got used to pretty quickly. As for the controls, they're essentially what you'd expect – A to jump, B to shoot paint, Z to shoot thinner, IR aiming, and flicks of the Wii remote to do spin attacks. The range of motions from Mickey are somewhat limited (you can do a double jump, at least!), but nothing's broken or anything, and he jumps relatively precisely.
No, my problem is with Epic Mickey as an execution of its design document. If this game would have turned out as promised, it probably would have been frankly amazing. I don't know if it was Disney's executives who were too afraid to turn off younger gamers (ostensibly who they're trying to draw in with this game), but this game is far too gunshy about actually pushing the envelope, and ends up being an interesting, failed experiment. I enjoyed myself the most when I was able to relive cinema's past, exploring as in a museum the curios of decades long gone, and one gets the feeling that this is exactly what drew Spector to the project. His passion is evident, but his game design prowess is not. That makes Epic Mickey, ultimately, a good game, but one that at every moment, you're going to be wishing was a great game.