Entry 128: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 3 End

The single most annoying level in the game.

Dear Internet,

                "Epic Mickey" was an enjoyable game.  It made me think fondly back on many platforming games that I enjoyed when I was a kid.  At the same time, it makes me think of the morality system that many games being made today implement.  The game pulls itself from a variety of sources while making sure to be itself.  How well of a job it does this is what is up for debate.  I finished talking yesterday about a few gripes I have with the game, and I should continue with a bit of that.

                The duel morality system of the paint/thinner, while remembering not to strictly define itself into good/evil, leaves something nagging in the back of my head.  It works quite well, truth be told.  The player gets a feedback from the NPCs' behaviors reflecting the player's choices.  The epilogue shows the most noticeable reflection of the player's actions.  Depending on how the player dealt with bosses, how they chose to aid certain NPCs, and who the player helped, certain short scenes will play out to show how those choices make ripples down the lane.  If you redeemed a bad guy, the game will show them acting friendly towards others.  If you disposed of them, the game will show their remains or something equivalently depressing.  By showing the consequences of the player's actions, the game goes one step further than most by illustrating how both action and inaction can cause problems later on.  However, this is not what is scratching the back of my head.

                I cannot but help but wonder if there was even a need for a moral choice system in this game.  This is a Mickey Mouse game, which was made primarily for children.  Made to scare them, but still made for them to play.  With that in mind, the game has to stress a moral; otherwise it does not fit in line with the Disney creed.  Then again, if it is a straightforward comedy, it can ignore having to instill a moral, but "Epic Mickey" is not a comedy.  The moral of the game is your actions can have far reaching consequences and one must correct ones mistakes when possible.  Mickey accidentally unleashed the Shadow Blot years ago and caused the Thinner Disaster.  By the end of the game, he admits his guilt and works to make amends.  This is done without regard to how the player chooses to fight.  It is the central plot that cannot be changed.  The minute choices that the player makes along the way do not alter the final outcome of Mickey and the Wasteland.  They only affect the side details.

                In one way, the game does succeed in attempting to illustrate to its audience that those choices do matter.  I will give it that, but I still wonder why it was needed.  Having the player go through a game with no choices and being tasked with being the hero would have been perfectly acceptable for a Mickey Mouse game.  Did the game have to have a moral system when the ending was pretty much the same no matter the choices made?  It does spur the player to complete the game again and choose something different to see the effect.  I am not saying that the moral system is a bad mechanism or does a poor job in what it aims to do.  I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I feel that it is out of place in a game like this.  It is a sort of happy accident, if you will.

                Another thing that I have to begrudge the game is the camera.  The camera was poorly implemented and difficult to control at times.  This lead to a number of untimely deaths because I could not tell how far I had to jump or was killed because an enemy had come from out of nowhere to sucker-punch me.  One annoying circular room had me confined fighting a single difficult enemy.  Since it was not a boss, the camera was freely up to the player's control.  I spent more time trying to get the camera at a good angle to see the enemy than I did trying to fight him.  The camera leads up to another of the game's problems.  When pointing at the screen to aim the brush, a cursor appears to show where Mickey will shoot paint/thinner.  He then will shoot paint/thinner at where the cursor is pointing from his perspective.  Many times, I found him shooting straight at the camera towards the player or angled oddly so that he completely missed the curser.  Changing to a first person perspective to shoot did not always work because he shoots from the hip.  If there is a hip high ledge, the paint/thinner will stop at less than a foot away, never reaching where you want to hit.  I am reminded of "Super Mario Galaxy" which allowed the player to shoot hand-sized stars at enemies.  The difference was that the star was launched from the perspective of the third person camera instead from the player controlled character.  This maximized accuracy at the expense of immersion.  "Epic Mickey" requires an accurate aiming system, but it hiccups at moments where the player has to fight the controls.  

                My last grumbles is a lack of voice acting throughout the game instead of grunt talking, no good map, a minimal menu, many repeating character models, and a world hub that is not all that interesting beyond the first few times that the player visits it.  There is also the final boss levels (that is "levels" as in plural) that seems to last much too long to hold the dramatic tension that the game tries to create.  I just want to throw those out there before I finish.

                "Epic Mickey" is a good game with enough thrills and replay value to go through it a second time to try and find all the missable collectables and alternative decisions.  It has great atmosphere that it is able to keep for the entire duration.  The characters are complex, showing a range of emotions and desires, some of which contradict one another.  The game has a number of problems that are not big by themselves but add together to cause frustration in even some of the most patient players.  Overall, I liked the game, and it makes me all that more interested to play the sequel.   

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "Epic Mickey2: The Power of Two."

Entry 127: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 2

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

Entry 126: "Epic Mickey" Pt. 1

Should that not be "Disney's"?

Dear Internet,

                I have wanted to play "Epic Mickey" for some time now.  I had actually gotten hold of it after getting "Epic Mickey 2."  I did not play it, nor have I.  It would not make much sense to play the sequel without seeing how the original played.  The studio that developed the two games under the ownership of Disney, Junction Point Studios, has got one notable fact about them that I want to keep in mind while playing this game.  The studio is closed.  Shortly after releasing "Epic Mickey 2" to lackluster sales when compared to the original, Disney closed the studio.  It is no real secret that the sequel had gotten mediocre reviews and lackluster sales as compared to the original.  However, it is important that ratings only go so far.  If two million or more people played the original, yet there was something that halted them from scooping up the sequel right away, what was it?  Was there something so bad but hidden about the original that stopped people from wanting to play the sequel?  Or was the sequel such a step down that it pushed away any proportional sales from occurring?  I will try to find out.

                "Epic Mickey" follows the adventure of, would you guess, Mickey Mouse, the most iconic Walt Disney character created.  Mickey, however, is not the first character that Disney created.  Among those characters was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  Sadly, time has not looked favorably upon Oswald or many other characters within the Disney cast.  As Mickey and the other characters rose to fame, others fell into obscurity.  Within the narrative of the game, there exists a place made for the forgotten characters to live and be happy.  Years ago, Mickey came across the world and accidentally created the Shadow Blot, a menacing creature made of paint and paint thinner.  In his poor attempt to undo his actions, he destroys the world for the forgotten, making it a wasteland.  Years have passed, and Mickey is the popular character that he is today.  He is then suddenly captured in the middle of the night and brought to the world he had destroyed.  The Wasteland is a half decayed landscape where rivers of paint thinner run like industrial waste.  Thankfully, Mickey does have two abilities that he can use to find his way back home.  He can create with paint or destroy with thinner.  Before he can go home, he must explore this world and find the mysteries that abound.

                The game has got a pretty simplistic plot for itself.  That is how it should be.  You cannot expect a Mickey Mouse game to have as many twists and turns with double faced characters as an episode of "Law & Order" if you want kids to be able to follow it.  Mickey screws things up, runs away, and has to fix the mistake years later.  If anything, this mischievous attitude is more in line with his oldest character designs.  It is no surprise that his actions are similar if not exact to that in "Fantasia."  In both "Epic Mickey" and the musical short "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," Mickey interacts with the magic of the wizard Yen Sid until disaster takes hold.  At least in "Epic Mickey," he has to live and even undo his actions instead of only being chastised.  There are a few problems with the story so far.  It is almost too scant.  There is a mad scientist and of course the Shadow Blot.  These characters are explained to be present but their roles other than being "the bad guys" has yet to be explained.  Mickey is thrust into this other world along with the player, but they are told to keep moving further with little information to go on.  Sure, we know he is in the Wasteland but with a straightforward hour long tutorial level, the game does not do well in setting up the world from the viewer's perspective.  We are dropped too quickly.  Hopefully, the slow but steady progress through the land will unravel the complexity of the world that I hope there is.

                The world of the Wasteland is dark and foreboding.  I even sometimes have quite a lot of trouble finding my way because the game is so black.  The ground and possible gaps that I must jump over just merge together into one single dark shape.  I think this might have more to do with my display settings, so I cannot mark it off.  Going back to the screenshots of those moments proves that my display settings are calibrated incorrectly.  This does not mean that the game does not create a shadowy landscape.  The Wasteland is already one of the most depressing and gloomy environments that I have come across.  Wrecked and abandoned amusement park rides rust as they fall apart in the open air.  Bushes and hedges are missing entire segments that have been erased by turpentine with topiary of characters missing hands and heads, creating images of dismembered flora individuals.  Lakes of paint thinner sit idly by, awaiting the poor soul that should fall in, doomed to have their colors washed away like acid eating flesh.  A giant Swiss Army knife lunges at Mickey with corkscrew, scissors, a chainsaw, and a plunder that tries to pull his heart through his chest.  And all of this is just in the tutorial level.  Afterwards, the player must traverse a mountain of old Disney memorabilia that has decayed and rotted to the point that it is a landfill of one-eyed dolls and faded fan-membership badges.  It is a horror-ridden landscape that chills me to the bone.

Not all of the discarded merchandise is unrecognizable.

                The game's imagery does not stop with just the landscape.  The enemies are made of black and green paint.  They are not solid beasts with a bone structure and organs.  They are morphing sentient blobs that do not stop even when you blast them with a face full of paint thinner.  Some of these creatures do nothing but sleep until you happen to run by.  Then they explode into a giant mess, ceasing to exist.  Their only purpose is to exist as living mines, waiting for the chance adventurer to happen by so they can expand past the breaking point, taking anything nearby with them.  If that is not scary enough, take the passive and friendly characters for a turn.  At least two characters so far have been veteran characters from the early black and white era.  Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow make appearances in their black and white designs rather than their "House of Mouse" era formats.  They try to remind Mickey of their past performances, each one having a scattering of photographs of themselves from their acting days.  Some of these photos are cropped showing that their appearance in those cartoons were as background characters, sometimes not even being fully in the shot of the camera.  Mickey apologetically does not remember them.  They made such a little impression of Mickey that he cannot even tell that he had worked with them despite their importance to his own rise to fame.  The Wasteland is not some sort of retirement home for old cartoons, where they go to live out their final years in some comfortable conditions.  It is where the neglected and the outcast go.  It is a cross between a graveyard and limbo.  

I do, Horace.  I do.

                It is amazing to me that "Epic Mickey" did not get some sort of Disney censor that wanted to pull back the amount of nightmare fuel that the game has.  Most likely, the game is already pulled back from an even more terrifying version.  A search for "Epic Mickey concept art" is enough to make goose bumps form.  Then again, perhaps I am reading too much into the world of the game.  I may just be letting my imagination run off away from me.  Yet, that is precisely what a good game should do.  It should excite the imagination and let loose the wonders of the mind.  I only hope that I am not kept up all night by such dark wonders.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop