War has changed.

Quote out of the side, the intro is done and we are moving on to the meat of this post.



I specifically brought this one up when I proposed the concept of redoing my reviews. Now I was going to do one mega post, as you do, to bring up three changed opinions of mine all at once, but seeing as this one was already done and I have a long road ahead of me, I'll just focus on one at a time. Hey, the board could use a pulse. As a fresher upper since I do NOT in bold text advocate looking for that review for reference, Epic Mickey is a game on the Wii featuring, who else, Mickey, in a very unique and dark adventure for Didney’s™ standards. Essentially Mickey enters the wizard’s workshop some time before the events of Fantasia and finds a set piece for what looks to be Dusney™ Land. In reality it’s an artificial world created with magic paint to house any unused or neglected characters from DOSney’s™ properties. Mickey makes a model of himself which ends up melting into a monster, he freaks out and dumps paint thinner over the whole thing, runs, and flash forward to 2006 this monster, the Blot, reaches out from the mirror to grab Mickey and pull him into the artificial world, The Wasteland.

The game features Mickey using a magic paint brush that shoots magic paint and thinner to construct or destroy (certain) parts of the world. He also uses it to befriend or kill enemies that stand in his way. The game monitors your usage of the paint and thinner with a karma system, and usually you can find different solutions to a problem through creation or destruction. You will also meet many relics from Dizzney’s™ past, like Oswald the Lucky rabbit, the gremlins, and way too many iterations of Pete to count, and also the pirates from Peter Pan for some reason (yes, truly they are too old to remember). Many of them will have side quests for you, which you can respond to in different ways as well or straight up ignore. Yes, you can also ignore the side quests in Zelda as well for instance, they ARE side quests, but keep in mind I’ll get to something later which really makes these quests a pain.

So starting with the good, the aesthetic really appeals to me. What with most of the world being corrupted and withered beyond repair, it has a twisted Tim Burton feel which is a bit uncharacteristic of what you’d think from a Dadney™ park, but makes it rather special all the same. It’s like rummaging through a toy store after a nuclear holocaust. A lot of stuff is pretty creepy, from cyborg death machines to that goshdarn CLOCK. At the same time the characters help retain the whimsy and wonder of the world, from the quirky gremlins to the still optimistic, if not lonesome, classic characters... not including Oswald who hates Mickey’s guts with a passion. Speaking of which, rummaging through the ghosts of DeWalt’s™ past can be endearing, via the amusing platform sections within projection screens, which actually serve as a way to transport from area to area, and multiple other references to products and productions alike. You uh, get what I meant right? Meh.

Now as for the bad, let me go from bottom to top here, I really hate the level design. Everything is sort of a long corridor from points A to B, with a few minor exceptions, but because the journey can feel so droning at times you often won’t even have the motivation to look for secrets unless something valuable is immediately visible. I did say the areas are appealing, but imagine going through the same course over an hour and a half, at some point you go into auto-pilot until something notable happens. Granted you are allowed to partake in creative puzzles involving paint/thinner or sketches given to you to create items for switches, platforms, or bypassing other mechanisms, and there’s often something new introduced along the way to spice things up. This won’t be my last gripe with the levels mind you.

Next, the karma system is sorta dumb. Many games can have this issue where a karma-based system is either two-dimensional or practically non-existent, either karma is simply a badge of honor or dishonor signifying your disposition or it favors one attitude over another. This system is like that, for one it really grinds my gears when you get a benefit from either being completely good or completely bad, but not a mix of both. You actually do have a paint/thinner meter which fills out one way and decreases when used another way in order to attract guardians, little fairy things that allow you to use paint or thinner attacks, but never both at any time, or show you the way to an objective.

Now as for the whole good/paint vs bad/thinner debacle, thinner is just the best way to go most of the time withholding some puzzles. It often feels like paint is specifically marked as “hard mode”, when befriending blot-based enemies they usually only last for one wave of battle, either being damaged by their own kind until snapped back into their senses, or having to be left behind since they can’t platform, or even straight up being exiled by other characters after you finish the rest of the foes. Successfully painting the most powerful blot enemy is hardly rewarding for this reason as they have limited use against other enemies, and you would be better off erasing things all together lest the friendship wears off and you end up fighting anyways, and like I said, the game rewards strictly paint or thinner use at any given time. Also remember this is just BLOT enemies I’m talking about; animatronic enemies can only have their exoskeleton melted to expose a weak spot and paint just slows them down, meaning if you really want to be a pacifist you just have to bypass them.

Bosses are even worse, thinner usually means a straight forward path to defeating the foe, the paint path is more akin to constructing a Rube Goldberg machine in order to end a conflict with pacifism. I think the first boss (A.K.A. clocky creepface) perfectly expresses this to you, either weaken the arms until they break, or paint one to disable it for a short time while it creeps you out even more with its gross twitchy hand and if you don’t paint the other hand in time the arm you did paint will continue attacking, meaning you have to awkwardly paint each arm a bit at a time and if you decide to use thinner to break any part of the arm YOU ARE IMMEDIATELY LOCKED OUT OF THE PAINT END. If the paint and thinner solution isn’t the exact same, paint = awkward and tedious, thinner thins out the process. All that matters in the end is a pin and what cutscene you are shown at the end of the game.

Now the long levels are kind of excusable, and while the karma system needed a lot more tweaking I can forgive it, but this last issue is not only the worst part of the game, it manages to amplify the effects of every other gripe I have. When I originally did my review, I played through the whole game. Once. I was good and done, but then I decided to replay again to see everything I missed. Note the keywords here, everything I missed. In this game, you are not allowed to backtrack. Once you reach the end goal of an area you can’t re-enter it, and while some parts of the story bring you to a previously explored area, it’s just in one particular spot so you may reach a new area. Combine this with the exceedingly narrow and winding level design, you are essentially going down a vacuum tube, and if you miss something there’s no getting it back. I’d think the levels would be more enjoyable if each objective was in a sub-area connected to some kind of hub within the level, like gates opening to different sections much like the main towns, or maybe some kind of warp system that doesn’t involve walking all the way from one projection screen to another, but none of that matters when the intention was to lock you out anyways. Is Diddle Land™ actually like this?

This is especially annoying when side quests are a one chance thing. The worst example I have is the animatronic Goofy, Donald, and Daisy. The residents of the wasteland made robot versions of Mickey’s favorite pals (since Oswald has a severe superiority complex when it comes to his replacement) which were disassembled by the bad guys, leaving their heads in jars. You have to talk to them and agree to find their parts in the upcoming level, then scour every segment before you move on to the next, and if you can’t find a part on your first go, tough luck. If you want to find the thing you missed, you have to finish the rest of the freaking game, then start again and play up until you get the quest for another shot, and by then you probably don’t have the capacity to care about looking. This is also one of those games that AUTOSAVES AFTER EVERYTHING in case you were wondering. And assuming you got one ending and want to see another one play out, that also advocates, of course, another playthrough through the exact same claustrophobic levels so you can find out the procedure to paint a boss. For a cutscene and a pin.


If I had to rate it again, I’d probably give it, say, 6.8. It’s a sad case of one flaw permeating through every corner of the rest of the game. If it just let you return to areas and finish any side quests you left, and maybe if it were my birthday also add an individual hub area per level ALA Banjo Kazooie’s castle, it would be enough to shoot up into 8 territory, but as it stands, I wouldn’t want to play Epic Mickey again any time soon.

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