For all the marketing blather, Epic Mickey 2 isn't a musical game in any meaningful sense. Those songs are the first signs of a creeping timidity. Even the villainous mad doctor's turned angelic (or has he?) with a nutty plan to save the Wasteland, and a new habit of speaking in song.
Nobody's bitter about being forgotten, and nobody's about to undergo a premature autopsy, as Mickey almost did at the start of the first adventure.
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Oswald's a cheerful goody from the off and the Wasteland, while suffering from a series of mysterious earthquakes, is a far brighter, less claustrophobic, less interesting world to explore. has drained away a little, leaving behind the shell of a rather pretty children's game (albeit one that will seriously annoy most children over the long run) without much to sustain it.Īnd so Epic Mickey 2 is a far simpler adventure, leaning less on Disney's mysterious, richly fascinating history and more on basic 3D platforming dressed up with the odd puzzle and the occasional famous cameo. Those mechanics have changed a bit for the sequel, but they haven't really become that much more satisfying. It was ambitious in tone, and let down by its mechanics. The original Epic Mickey was a bold game hampered by awkward implementation. Many sequences have a slight LittleBigPlanet vibe to them. The echoes of clever, imaginative fun grow distant, while the compromises - and the odd failure of design nerve - begin to really pile up. Worse yet, this sequel sees Epic Mickey's strange promise slipping further away. Two games in, and there's a great experience hidden somewhere inside Disney's jumbled series, but it refuses to emerge in full. Mickey's second Wasteland adventure is a tragedy because it's a missed opportunity. That's not to say it's a buggy wall-to-wall botch: it's certainly wonky and annoying to play at times, but its worst flaws are textural. Ultimately, however, the finished product's more of a tragedy. During previews, Junction Point's sequel often sold itself as a musical. It was a game with plenty of problems, but from the vantage point of Epic Mickey 2, it's hard to look back on with anything but wistful nostalgia.
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He'd deal with morality, with all its choices and consequences! He'd wield a magical paintbrush that would allow him to create or destroy huge chunks of the environment using blasts of paint and thinner! He'd battle an enemy, in the shape of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who was a spurned Disney headline act yanked from the archives! He'd navigate an adventure that was as much about an unusually clear-eyed deconstruction of a historical license and an examination of the tattered human craft that goes into creating fantastical confections - and of the casualties that litter the path to success - as it was jumping, fighting, and collecting things! Comfortable in the lavish, pleasantly straightforward 16-bit classics from the 1990s, Disney's mascot was suddenly thrust into an intricate 3D landscape, and delivered into the hands of a design team who were encouraged to think big. Plenty of those sorts of growing pains were apparent in 2010's Epic Mickey. He was a 2D doodle struggling to cope in an increasingly complex world. Barely a mouse in any meaningful sense by this stage, the studio's star was having trouble transitioning from the primitive, scribbled energy of the early short films into something a little more elaborate. It looked awkward, in fact, and it made Mickey look awkward, too.
It was a concession to shifts in animation styles and the increased fidelity that could be brought to contemporary cartoons, most probably, but it looked weird. For a period in the 1940s, Mickey Mouse was given ears that worked properly in perspective.
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