Epic Mickey

This review contains spoilers.

A diamond in the rough, Epic Mickey offers an ambitious blend of elements from 3D Platformers and Immersive Sims. It introduces a fascinating world that encourages exploration with a focus on choice and consequence, but lacks commitment to its design: the game seems hesitant about itself, as if it were afraid to double down on its core concepts.

The story tells that one day, Mickey Mouse was brought to a wizard’s workshop by a magical mirror in his bedroom (“I don’t know if the mirror was being mischievous or malicious,” the wizard ponders.). This character, Walt Disney’s alter ego from Fantasia, is building a maquette said to be a “land for things that have been forgotten,” but when he leaves the room, Mickey plays with his brush and ends up spilling magical thinner onto that world, ruining it. As the years go by, Mickey Mouse lives many adventures and becomes famous… until one day a monster appears in that very same mirror and grabs him, bringing Mickey to the wasteland he helped create.

After the cutscene, Mickey wakes up in a dilapidated tower. He’s trapped by the Mad Doctor – the villain of one of his early cartoons – who is trying to take out his heart while specter-like figures roam the purple-tinged sky. The presence of this particular villain in the intro is fitting, since Epic Mickey’s overall tone is similar to his cartoon: a bit dark, borrowing elements from horror stories, but also a bit goofy at the same time. Next to the Mad Doctor, for example, there’s a board with the words “Mickey’s insides” and “Heart-sucking tool.” It doesn’t take long for Mickey to meet this tool, which is shaped like a monstrous Swiss Army knife, with a giant eye and a very menacing drilling mechanical arm.

Mickey manages to escape with the help of a Gremlin named Gus – who appears out of nowhere – and they start to track down a curious rabbit who witnessed everything happen. The tower has statues of this rabbit, and an enormous stained glass at the center of the room depicting him as a king. His face adorns gates and topiaries. This is Oswald, Gus explains, the ruler of Wasteland.

Oswald was supposed to be a mascot for Disney, he’s Mickey’s precursor, having been utterly forgotten by Disney and its fans after the mouse replaced him – a fitting ruler, then, to a land of forgotten cartoons. The first objective in the game is to track Oswald down, but at first, he’s presented as an antagonistic force, even building a trap to dispatch Mickey.

It’s easy to understand Oswald’s hostility, as Mickey is everything he was meant to be. His obsession with his replacement can be spotted everywhere: he created animatronic versions of Mickey’s friends with the Mad Doctor’s help, put his name on Mickey’s first famous cartoon (it’s Oswald’s Steamboat Willie in Wasteland), and built his throne on top of a mountain littered with old Mickey merchandise. The throne itself even has an in-built television that is always displaying Mickey in Steamboat Willie. Oswald already resents Mickey without even knowing that it was the mouse who destroyed his world.

The tower in the intro, after all, was in shambles, with a shattered roof and threatening to crumble down at any moment. Eventually, Mickey reaches an amusement park full of broken rides. Towns are adorned with wrecked buildings – Gus’ home is one of them, erased by thinner – and, to add insult to injury, there are also monsters prowling most lands and parks, monsters made by the thinner Mickey spilled onto the maquette. This is a world in ruins and it’s Mickey’s fault: he gave Wasteland its name.

Mickey here is not your typical hero. As the drops of ink dripping out of his body signalize, he has an ambiguous nature in Wasteland, which is noted by several characters. “I don’t care what no one says, ya can’t be that nice, seein’ as how ya ooze just like the Blot,” one of the characters says, comparing Mickey with the monster that brought him to Wasteland. Gus functions as Mickey’s guide – teaching the game’s mechanics while introducing him to that world – but also as a conscience, judging his actions. If Mickey walks a selfish path, like choosing to grab a treasure instead of saving a fellow Gremlim, Gus will chastise him and question the mouse’s nature: “That isn’t something a hero would do. Are you one… a hero, that is?”

This ambiguity is amplified by the myriad of moral choices in the game. The first one arrives when Mickey is chasing down Oswald in the tower and comes across a Gremlim locked in a cage, which lies on top of a catapult. There’s a chest sitting on a pressure plate linked to this catapult, so we are offered a simple choice: save the Gremlim, who is desperately asking for help, or grab the reward in the treasure chest and activate the catapult.

This type of choice – where the selfish action is tied to an easy, immediate reward – is the backbone of the game’s quests. In one, Pete hires Mickey to find a journal that proves he’s innocent of a crime. After acquiring this journal, we can either use it to prove his innocence or trade it for a special pin and let Pete take the blame. Later on, Mickey comes across a safe with an important Gremlin locked inside. He can either help the pirate who owns the safe in exchange for the combination – by rebuilding the pirate’s house, which was destroyed by Mickey’s actions, in the first place – or release the safe on the pirate’s head. The released Gremlin, then, needs a wrench to open the way forward, but it was stolen by Mickey’s talking telephone. We can either fix the telephone boxes in the town and receive the wrench as a reward, or we can let the Gremlin into Mickey’s house to murder the talking telephone and grab the wrench from its cold, disassembled body.

These choices lead to different rewards and outcomes. Mickey can bring people together or ruin relationships, he can save certain characters or leave them to meet a terrible fate. Characters often react harshly to selfish actions: proving Pete’s innocence has him open a path to a treasure chest, but if we trade the journal for the special pin, Pete will become angry and try to get his revenge, locking Mickey in an arena full of enemies.

Choices, either altruistic or selfish, will often lock the player out of sidequests: depending on Mickey’s action, the pirate and the talking telephone may not be around anymore to give him tasks, after all. Characters move from one region to another depending on these choices as well, so even saving people – such as the pirates in Ventureland – may lead the player to be locked out of certain quests.

This means that, despite choices having a clear binary nature, their rewards make the system more complex. Usually, we don’t know what these rewards will be for each path – if money, a generic or special pin, an upgrade, a power spark, or more quests – so we are encouraged to act based on the choice itself and not the reward. The altruistic path, however, tends to be more laborious, but it’s not always the case: sometimes, the Gremlins Mickey saves will come back later to destroy an obstacle or damage an enemy, saving our time.

Epic Mickey doesn’t limit itself to moral choices either. The main mechanic is the ability to use Mickey’s magical brush to paint or erase elements of the scenery, such as buildings and platforms, and this leads to different ways to tackle obstacles and explore levels. We can paint a missing gear to make a door open or erase the door frame for it to fall and work as a bridge. Thinner reveals secrets, passageways, and items hidden behind walls or beneath floors, while paint creates new platforms while rebuilding the environment. There’s more than one path to each objective and, by exploring levels, we can even skip complete areas if we manage to discover a shortcut.

The same applies to enemies. We can make them friendly with paint – they fight for us – or thin them out of existence. But we can also use thinner on the floor to drop monsters into an abyss or a place where they can’t reach us, or use paint to create a wall between Mickey and the enemy. There is often more than one way to deal with everything in Epic Mickey and it’s this plethora of options that can make replaying it enticing.

The main problem with the game, however, lies in its hesitancy towards itself. Mickey can paint and erase elements of the scenery, for example, but each time he leaves an area and returns, it resets its layout. In a game that is all about player expression, about choices in how to shape the environment, to revert these choices constantly is a stark contradiction in design. We can’t return to most levels, however, so this is a problem only felt in the hub areas, such as Mean Street.

Mean Street is a twisted version of the famous Main Street area of Disney parks. Its buildings are partly destroyed, the landscape consists of erased matte paintings, its inhabitants are forgotten characters, and even the way out is broken. At the end of the street, there’s a statue of Walt Disney holding hands with Oswald instead of Mickey, which… saddens the mouse: Oswald is not the only one to be stricken by jealousy. When Mickey arrives in there, he is greeted by characters that ask him if he remembers them – they show him the adventures they shared together in old cartoons – but Mickey can’t seem to recall them.  But Mean Street is a place where these characters managed to find a new purpose in life after being forgotten: Horace, a horse from an old Mickey cartoon, is now a private detective, for example.

Mean Street makes for a great main hub, being the place where we always return to after a main quest to find new sidequests and interact with these lost characters. But the fact that its layout resets each time discourages us from using the game’s main mechanic: there’s little reason outside quests to paint Mean Street back to life or destroy what is left of it if our choice is going to be reverted by the end of a mission.

But to balance that, Epic Mickey introduces a guardian system that rewards Mickey with guardian orbs that reflect the player’s style: if we paint all the time, we get blue guardians, and if we use a lot of thinner, we get green guardians. We can use the blue ones to convert enemies to our side immediately and the green ones to destroy them with ease. But the thing about the guardians is that they change the soundtrack of each area: the music – which is composed by James Dooley and possesses that melancholic, haunting Kingdom Hearts quality to it – will get much more dissonant, macabre, and tense if we keep using thinner and receiving green guardians. So, it’s not that the game ignores the player’s expression – the whole atmosphere of the game even changes to reflect it –, but that it doesn’t fully commit to it.

Epic Mickey also has many types of collectibles, which is typical of 3D platformers, but not all of them are carefully thought out. By exploring levels and completing missions, we can find a couple of upgrades to Mickey’s health, power sparks that open new main missions, quest items, and pieces of artwork, which can be appreciated in the main menu. But the main collectibles are called pins, which come in two varieties, special and generic. Special ones serve as a built-in achievement system, marking the player’s feats with a thematic pin: after delivering a cake Clarabelle made to Horace, helping build their relationship, we receive a “Happy Birthday Pin” shaped like a birthday cake, for example.

The problem, then, lies in the generic pins that come in three forms: bronze, silver, and gold. And the problem is that they serve no purpose at all in-game. Special pins never unlock anything as well, but their unique shapes and names allow them to serve as a trophy system. Generic pins, on the other hand, blend together: we are rewarded with bronze pins by all kinds of actions, which means one bronze pin is just like another. Worse even, a bronze pin is just like a gold pin, as there’s no intrinsic value to them: they can’t be traded or sold and are all rewarded for similar actions. If they could be traded for upgrades or money it would be a different story, but unfortunately, all this means that one of the most common rewards for exploration is meaningless.

This is a pity, especially because the levels themselves are great. Wasteland is a world appropriately brimming with attention to detail. In Ortensia’s house (Oswald’s missing wife), the smoke coming out of her chimney is in the shape of a heart. If we turn on televisions at Mickeyjunk Mountain, enemies in the area will stop attacking and gather around to watch the cartoon (which also doubles as foreshadowing for a power Mickey will later acquire). Some of the enemies in each area even wear costumes to fit their theme (in Ventureland, Splatters will wear pirate outfits, for example).

One of the main areas in the game is based on Tomorrowland Park – its older, forgotten incarnations – and boasts flying saucers, cable cars, and a huge rocket. Tomorrowland was about futurism and was supposed to be a symbol of hope and optimism (it later inspired the great 2015 movie about these themes), and now it’s not only a forgotten place in Wasteland but – thanks to Mickey – it is also corroded, broken, and infested with monsters.

The only problematic area in Epic Mickey is Ventureland, as it doesn’t make much thematic sense. Skull Island and Tortuga were never really forgotten by the general media, especially Tortuga, since the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had been released just three years before the game. Its main character is Smee and not even a forgotten incarnation of Smee, just the plain, normal Smee. This is the thing about Epic Mickey: it seems afraid to fully commit to its bit. Wasteland is about forgotten characters, it’s not the place for famous cameos and easter eggs: the joyous feeling of recognizing someone or something should be anathema to its design.

Nevertheless, the narrative is carefully built throughout these levels. In Mickeyjunk Mountain, for instance, we learn about Oswald’s obsession with the protagonist, and his desire to be like him. Right before arriving at the mountain, for example, we come across an animatronic version of Goofy (his severed head, which makes the whole thing a bit creepy) that Oswald built with the Mad Doctor, so that he could have the same friends as Mickey. It’s also telling that Oswald’s throne room rests at the top of a mountain littered with objects made in Mickey’s image, such as forgotten pins, comics, t-shirts, and even NES game cartridges, which serve as platforms to cross a lake of thinner.

In the mountain, Oswald reluctantly agrees to help Mickey escape Wasteland, but only because it would rid him of his nemesis. He tells Mickey of a rocket in Tomorrowland that should be capable of getting him out, but when they arrive there, parts of the rocket are missing, so Mickey must go to Ventureland and Bog Easy to retrieve them. In Ventureland, Mickey witnesses the damage Mad Doctor is causing to the people, turning them into machines – and Mickey can choose to not destroy the turning device. In Bog Easy – an area inspired by horror stories and settings, such as the Haunted Mansion – he has his final confrontation with the villain.

The issue with the narrative is once again commitment. In Epic Mickey, Mickey destroys Oswald’s country, unleashes monsters onto his people, and causes his wife to be turned to stone. In sidequests, he can put every single one of Oswald’s kids in jail and, at any time after Oswald gets to Mean Street, he can even erase Oswald’s legs and jump on his face while he screams. But the ending disregards all of this and puts them together as close friends nonetheless.

When Oswald learns that Mickey is the cause of the thinner disaster, he gets understandably angry and hostile – but it is weird that he doesn’t know this already, as there is a huge, complex maquette depicting the event hidden beneath his throne room. In his anger, Oswald releases a monster that grabs him and Gus, but Mickey sacrifices his heart to release them both. Oswald, then, is touched by this act of selflessness and changes his stance on the mouse. The problem is that it doesn’t matter if the player’s actions were friendly or openly hostile towards Oswald throughout the game, for this cutscene plays out the same. In other words, the game doesn’t commit to Mickey’s more mischievous side, painting him as a selfless hero even though it gives the player the chance to not act as one all the time.

Finally, we have the marvelous Epic Mickey’s 2D levels. Early in the game, Mickey learns that Oswald installed projector screens on Wasteland that work as a means of travel: they are portals that can take you from one place to another after you pass through a rendition of an old, forgotten cartoon. In practice, they are 2D levels that serve as brief, but wonderfully realized interludes between the main areas.

The second one is based on the cartoon Steamboat Willy, for example. It’s fittingly in black and white, and we can see cows tied to cranes serving as moving platforms as Mickey goes through Willy’s boat with the classic tune of the cartoon playing in the background. We can’t use the brush in these 2D levels, so they are simpler in design: just brief interludes that function as a callback to forgotten cartoons, trying to emulate their feel and aesthetic. Even so, they are used brilliantly in Mickeyjunk Mountain, for to get to Oswald, Mickey needs to pass through projector screens that depict the rabbit’s adventures. So, it’s basically Oswald saying to Mickey: “To meet me, you must know me as I know you. Learn about my work.”

The only problem with the 2D levels is that to move between hub areas we must go through the same ones several times, which gets tiresome after a while even though they can be beaten in less than two minutes – the Japanese release of the game, however, doesn’t have this issue.

Now, a problem present in every version of Epic Mickey is the camera. It’s unreliable at the best of times, and openly aggressive at the worst. Sometimes, we will aim at a platform to use thinner, and then the camera will move by itself so that Mickey actually shoots at the ground, which will then be erased, possibly leading the mouse to his death. During fights against bigger enemies, it will get stuck on geometry and shake like crazy, blocking our view of the monsters. To remedy that, we can recenter the camera and use a first-person view to scan our surroundings, but these options are not always available, for there are parts in levels where the camera is positioned in such a way that it highlights the way forward or an oddity in the level that hides a secret, so we simply can’t move it in these instances: we are then left at the mercy of a merciless camera.

Epic Mickey is a complex game – maybe even the most complex and ambitious game based on a Disney property. It is as fascinating as it is flawed. In other words, there’s a gem here waiting for just a bit more polish.

May 09, 2023.