RPG designer wrestles Mickey

Remember those really fun old-school Mickey games back in the days of the NES, SNES, Genesis (or Mega Drive) and even the Apple II and DOS? Well, the game might have changed a lot since then but Disney’s staple mouse returns in a Wii exclusive title brought to you from the mind of Warren Spector, a man famous for RPG and FPS titles, such as System Shock and Deus Ex being just some of the games which he designed. To put it simply: this guy knows what he’s doing when it comes to video games.

Save the Wastelands, Mickey!

The premise of the game is quite simple and involves Mickey being suddenly woken up from his mouse-like slumber and quickly transported off to the “Cartoon Wasteland”. Cartoon Wasteland is a place where unused stories, characters and places live, according to Spector. Here, Mickey quickly saves himself before a dark “Phantom Blot” performs an animated autopsy on him with a disgruntled buzz-saw.

The aim of the game in a sense is a traditional good vs. evil tale, where Mickey will essentially be tasked with the chore of fixing the dark, green and sick-looking areas of the Cartoon Wasteland, and turning them back into colourful, happy and playful places. To do this you’ll be using both paint and paint thinner, which is where the good/evil side of the game pans out.

While the story doesn’t seem too detailed or in-depth for a game that has bits of RPG mixed into it, the quests are where dialogue and story really shine out. Discussions with old and new Disney characters and the quests they send you on obviously elaborate on the whole “Cartoon Wasteland” narrative and will take you through twists and turns until you hit the final boss.

Scrapper or Hero?

If you’ve played games like the Fallout series (more specifically the third instalment and the soon-to-be-released Fallout: New Vegas), the Mass Effect series, or any other open-ended RPG lately, you’ll have probably noticed that your actions will affect how the story pans out and how other characters will perceive you. Similarly in Epic Mickey, you can choose to be helpful and friendly by using “paint” to colour the lands of the Wasteland and help other Disney characters in side quests. This will affect your status and make you a “Hero Mickey”. On the other side, being a naughty little mousey will in turn make other NPCs not generally like you and will make you a negative “Scrapper Mickey”. Finally, if you’re more of a gamer who likes to rough the game over and finish it, there’s also a “Neutral Mickey”. Disney however, doesn’t like to think of this system as a good or evil choice, but a “heroic” choice (hence Hero Mickey) versus a “mischievous” choice (hence Scrapper Mickey).

An example of this system is where Goofy might need five particular items. You could go out and collect or purchase these five items and then give them to Goofy, and thus become a Heroic Mickey, but where’s the fun in that? You can then be a naughty little mouse and give him one of the items he requires, whereupon he’ll place it into his storage house. Then you can go into his storage and take that one item, and give it to Goofy again, making him believe he now has two. Rinse and repeat three more times, and you’ve given Goofy an item five times! Yay for mischievousness!

Platformer mechanics for the Wii

Epic Mickey plays mostly like any other standard third-person platformer does, but in a way that makes sense with the RPG-esque and paint/thin mechanics. The game also has a store system, which means that hub worlds and quest areas are completely filled with shops with items that Mickey may need to purchase on his journey to cleanse the Cartoon Wasteland of dreariness. You can then go into action areas where you can defeat enemies and complete quests that you received in the aforementioned area. If you encounter a boss along the way, you don’t even have to fight them if you wish to avoid violence. Depending on your Mickey status and dialogue choices, you can do quests to help out the boss and thus not have to fight him.

Control-wise, it’s no wonder that Spector and the team at Disney wanted to create Epic Mickey as a Wii-exclusive titles. The use of the Wii Remote to throw out paint and thinner is a mechanic that works only on the Wii and conventional controllers would require a completely different mechanic. Not only that, but because the game is designed for the ground-up for the Wii, you get a sense that everything fits and that the controls just feel right - unlike ports of games originally built for the PC or consoles, where everything just feels wrong and as if all the controls are tacked on.

The same goes for the graphics – because the game has been envisioned and designed with the Wii in mind, the graphics look just right so that the game retains its cartoony and colourful vibe without being overpowering. This also impacts the gameplay, and should give you a smooth gameplay.

Mickeytastic!

Overall, Epic Mickey is shaping up to be a fantastic Mickey title, and definitely one that I wouldn’t have imagined on the basis of those old-school Mickey titles. The mechanics just feel right and the addition of a “karma”-like system is something that will mix up the game and hopefully give it a lot of replay value. I cannot wait and will be thrilled to play it when it is released!