Review by: Michael Barnes

One of this year’s most hyped and hotly anticipated games is Disney Epic Mickey, a supposedly darker, more mature take on the studio’s classic characters, cartoons, and theme parks. Helmed by maverick designer Warren Spector and his upstart Junction Point studio, this Wii-exclusive platform adventure looked as if it were primed to challenge Nintendo’s typically excellent offerings in this genre. Early concept art and screenshots were dazzling, depicting a very steampunk-influenced look. Great story concepts such as the “Wasteland”, a world where forgotten and neglected cartoon characters go to live out their days when their fame fades, promised a sophisticated, compelling narrative. Topping it all off was Spector and co.’s reverent but revisionist idea to bring forward to a modern video gaming audience not only the mischievous Mickey of “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” and his earlier appearances, but also more obscure characters like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

The events of the game are set into motion in a pre-game cutscene that has much better and more Disney-like visuals than anything else in the game. Mickey steps through a magic mirror and into a sorcerer’s laboratory. Mickey spills paint thinner onto a model of the Wasteland. Years later (inexplicably), a shadow inkblot pulls Mickey back through the mirror and into the Wasteland. Over the course of the game, the Mouse has to not only redeem himself for the disaster he’s inflicted on this community of crestfallen has-been cartoons, but he also has to redeem Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Jealous of Mickey’s fame and fortune in our world, Oswald has styled parts of the Wasteland as an off-kilter mirror image to our world’s Disney theme parks and cartoons.

The story has genuine promise, but little is actually done with it over the course of the game. The narrative drive gets lost in a variety of quests and side quests that find Mickey performing busywork tasks to gain passage or earn key items. There isn’t even a solid sense of opposition or a concrete adversary for the first three quarters of the game. By the time it wraps up in one of a couple of endings based on Mickey’s ethical disposition, it feels like most of the game was spent in the menial doldrums of fetch quests, collections, and routine handyman jobs.

At various points in the game, Mickey has the option of choosing an easier but ethically questionable way to deal with a problem, or, conversely, a more difficult yet ethically stable route. You can repaint the pirate’s house and he’ll give you the code to a safe- or you can use Mickey’s magic paintbrush to spray thinner on the arm holding the safe over the pirate’s head, causing it fall. The Wiimote-controlled paintbrush can draw certain environmental elements into existence, very similar to Amaterasu’s power in Okami. Paint can also be sprayed on enemies to befriend them, and using paint to solve problems is considered the “good” option of the morality paradigm. Erasing or “thinning” elements is a negative effect, and over time it can affect how the denizens of the Wasteland react to Mickey as well as his appearance.

It’s interesting stuff, but I’m not really sure a Mickey Mouse game is the right vehicle for serious moral quandaries. They do not make the game feel more adult, sophisticated, or “dark”, and the net consequences are really pretty negligible. For all the talk of how playstyle matters, the outcomes are hardly all that divergent. I found myself taking the easy way out—often buying quest items in a shop using the game’s “e-ticket” currency rather than looking for them simply because I found the moral issues involved boring and frankly quite shallow.