 |
| I do not get why they needed to smack "Disney" so prominent onto the title screens. |
Dear Internet,
I spent
the majority of yesterday talking about the story and art direction of
"Epic Mickey." It would do
well to talk about the gameplay lest I forget the most important thing about what
distinguishes the video game from other media.
"Epic
Mickey" at its core is a platformer.
You control Mickey from a third person perspective, running around,
bopping enemies on the head, and leaping over gaps. The game is as close to the definition of a platformer
that a game can get. On top of all that,
there are collectables, fetch quests, and many levels hidden corners with nooks
and crannies. Everything is there to
make a by the book platformer. But every
platformer must have at least one gimmick to make it stand out from the many
other games I the genre. Merely having
Mickey Mouse as the protagonist may have been enough at one point, but
thankfully, this game tries to do something unique. Beyond an all purpose spin-kick, Mickey has a
magic brush that dispenses paint thinner and paint. It is this one mechanic that a majority of the
game's challenges and puzzles are solved.
There are also disposable sketches, but the game definitely stresses the
paint/thinner mechanic.
The
game is made up of two different types of materials. There is the permanent material that is not affected
by the paint/thinner, and then there is the "toon" material. The toon material is noticeably more
saturated and colorful when compared to the non-toon material. Using the paint and thinner, Mickey can make
the toon material materialize or disappear.
When thinner is used, the object becomes nearly invisible short of a ghostly
white shadow. The object then cannot be
interacted with unless the paint is used to bring it back. This created a number of possible abilities
which can be built upon. See an enemy
coming near you? Make the bridge it is
standing on disappear, causing the creature to fall into the river of
turpentine. Need a platform to just up
to the next level? Materialize the hidden
ledge to get yourself up. This mechanic
also creates a lot of hidden locations because of the beginning state of each
level.
When
the player enters each location, some objects are materialized and some are
not. The player can go ahead and make
everything possible disappear to determine if there are any hidden crevices,
but this will come as a backlash. It
will make the non-toon objects as the only things remaining. Besides making the landscape devoid of any color
or life, the residents will look unfavorably upon Mickey, since all he will be
doing is making their already decaying world ruin quicker. If the player decides to make all the invisible
toon objects appear, then they will seal off possible routes that can be
traversed. There exists a certain
balance that has to be done to traverse the landscape efficiently. Although, the player will find themselves
drifting either towards the paint or the thinner. This has got more to do with the choices that
the player has to make to push forward the story.
The
player is often given the choice as how to solve each location's puzzles. Sometimes they are tasked with turning on a
series of switches that would cause a mechanism to begin moving. Alternatively, they can explore the level
until they find a hidden character that is trapped. Freeing the character will allow that
character to fix the problem directly.
This is a choice mad by the player that is sometimes unconsciously. You can happen upon the trapped character
without knowing he is there or that he will solve your problem for you. Opposite of that are the times when the
player is given a choice between two known ways of reaching the goal. Take for example the detective side-quests. The player can either follow the toon
footprints, filling them in to prove that they lead directly to the suspect,
proving the character's guilt, or the player can pay off the thief using
collected tickets. This objective can be
reached through different means which had different levels of difficulty. Trying to paint all the footprints can be
frustrating because of their small size.
Paying off the thief can be easy sometimes, depending on the amount of
tickets the character wants. The correct
moral choice then comes into play. This
is made even more prominent in a side-quest where the player had to help a man
find a gift for a woman that he wanted to impress. The player could either get an ice-cream cone
or a bouquet of flowers. Either choice
would get the man to do what the character wanted eventually, but only one item
would be enjoyed by the woman. The
flowers is much more difficult to obtain because the player has to travel much
farther to get it and has to then find the hidden flowers before delivering it
back to the man. The ice-cream can be
bought, but the woman will scorn the man.
The player then has to buy the object that they were trying to get from
the man.
 |
| I am a sucker for a happy ending. |
"Epic
Mickey" has often got many either/or ways of solving the puzzles and challenges. The game usually refrains from straightforwardly
referring to them as good and bad choices, but the player can infer such things
on their own. Defeating bosses usually
requires only one specific method as compared to using both the paint and
thinner in conjunction. This is because
after defeating a boss, the player is rewarded with an upgrade to the capacity
of wither their paint supply or their thinner supply depending on which was
used to defeat the boss. The game goes
one step further in distinguishing the differences between using either paint or
thinner. The choice of manner in defeating
a boss determines if the boss is destroyed or made friendly, as with the lower
minions. This may have longer lasting
effects upon the game, but I will have to address this when I finish the
game. For the most part, I cannot tell if
my actions have had long reaching effects.
Other than a few lines of dialog taking note of my actions, I cannot see
my actions taking a noticeable effect.
I
should probably close on a bad note, lest you think that I find no faults so
far. One annoyance is that when the
player revisits an area like the central hub of Mean Street, the game does not
remember what the player had materialized or made invisible though the use of
paint or thinner. This is a big letdown
for me because I had carefully materialized everything that I could because I
wanted the town to become alive and vivid of color. Seeing that all of that effort was just going
to be forgotten and resettled completely altered how I was exploring the
game. Then there are the inter-level
corridors. In between levels, the player
has to go through a straightforward 2D mini-level that is in the style of some
old iconic cartoon shorts. There is
hidden in each mini-level a roll of film to collect. It acts as a nice break from the vast size of
the main worlds, but these smaller worlds wear out their welcome very
quickly. Even after having collected the
hidden film reel, the player cannot fast-travel between worlds. It makes these repeated 2D levels annoying
and tedious, only creating filler time since after the third time the player
has mastered the minute and a half corridor.
They begin to make traveling between levels a chore, which may be the
point considering that some of the quests' difficulties are directly tied to
how much time it would take to make the right choice rather than the easy one.
 |
| The less exposure the player has to each inter-level, the better it resounds in the mind. |
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
No comments:
Post a Comment