It's no secret that I don't post very much or post many reviews. In the new year, I'd like to change both of those a little. As such, I've decided to write reviews on a fairly regular basis, since they don't really take as much effort as other articles I write, and post them here, in the hopes of keeping myself inspired to keep them going. Just having them sit down at the bottom of my user page, read by hardly anyone, doesn't exactly make me feel it's worthwhile.

This may also be only the first of further regular features to boost the level of activity on my blog... but no comment on that at this time.

Anyway, without further ado...

(original review here)

A flawed love letter from Disney that is sufficiently brilliant that its shortcomings don't matter much.

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat: there is plenty not to like in Epic Mickey. Its camera is almost entirely manual, and takes a while to get used to. The combat can be pretty awkward sometimes. The side-scrolling scenes between sections get quite monotonous as the game goes on. Its cutscenes really need voice acting. The ending isn't as affected as it should be by the moral choices you make during the game. For all of those reasons, one can quite quite easily not like this game very much.

None of that mattered to me at all.

In fact, Epic Mickey is perhaps the single most definitive example of a game that is far more than the sum of its parts.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, and get back to basics before we dwell on that point any longer. Epic Mickey stars - surprise, surprise - Mickey Mouse as its main protagonist, the first game in seven years to do so, and the first game in a long, long time to do so in a respectful fashion. The prologue depicts Mickey traveling through a magic mirror to the abode of Yen Sid, the wizard from Fantasia, who is putting together his "project": a home for forgotten Disney characters, where they can live out their days together and in peace. Mickey finds him just as he is leaving the room, and wastes no time to jump up in a curious fashion. Examining, the magic paintbrush that Yen Sid had been using, he tries his hand at creating something, but it quickly gets out of hand, and in his haste to use paint thinner to undo what he had created, he ends up destroying Yen Sid's "project", leaving it a broken shell of what it had been before.

Before Yen Sid comes back, he escapes back through the mirror to his house, slowly coming to forget what had happened as time goes on. One day, however, Mickey is awoken to a rather frightening sight: a giant mass of ink has come to his house through the mirror and drags him back to Yen Sid's studio, and then into the world which he had destroyed many years ago. Now stuck in this wasteland that was once a welcoming home for forgotten characters, he must make his way through it with his accompanying partner Gus the Gremlin, helping the citizens dwelling therein if he wants, and find his way back home. Along the way, he must also confront The Shadow Blot - the malevolent mass of ink that Mickey accidentally created when in Yen Sid's studio the first time, which has since become the feared villain of the Wasteland - and come face-to-face with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the brother he once had who faded into obscurity as Mickey rose to take his place.

Although Mickey is ostensibly the star of the story, it's his long lost brother Oswald who really steals the show (to whom Disney even had to re-acquire the rights before Epic Mickey could get the green light). In the Wasteland, he once fancied himself king of the land much as Mickey is often taken to be the ruler of his domain (as in Kingdom Hearts), and by all accounts was not a bad ruler at all - just a bit, well, egocentric, as is evidenced by the massive stained glass image of him, or by the statue of Walt Disney in the middle of a fountain holding his hand, rather than Mickey's.

Throughout his initial encounters with Mickey, Oswald expresses a rather pointed resentment towards Mickey - it's *he*, he stresses, who should have been the star of it all, not Mickey. He views Mickey as something of a usurper, one who stole all of Oswald's glory for himself. Mickey is, of course, rather surprised by this - he had no intention of doing so. At the same time, however, Mickey comes to the rather uncomfortable realization that he's stolen from Oswald not once, but thrice - the second being his theft of Oswald's home when he destroyed Yen Sid's project, and the third being the theft of Oswald's beloved when she fell at the hands of The Shadow Blot, a creature for whose existence Mickey is directly responsible.

The chemistry between Mickey and Oswald is by far the best part of Epic Mickey, and it's worth playing through the game just to see it. Oswald begins as a selfish, haughty, spiteful rabbit, and to watch him slowly change as his life begins to become intertwined with and touched by Mickey is a real emotional treat. While Mickey's interactions with the other characters in the world certainly aren't bad by any stretch, they nonetheless pale in comparison to the growing bond between Mickey and Oswald.

Speaking of Mickey's interactions with the world, another highlight in this game is its highly innovative morality system. Most games that offer the player choice do so as a simple... well... choice. As in, "Kick the puppy? Y/N". The system in Epic Mickey is far more integrated than that, and is baked right into game through Mickey's two forms of ammunition for his weapon: paint and thinner. Paint creates; thinner destroys. That's about the extent of it, and this pervades the entire game. For example, painting a wall will fill it in, while thinning it will remove it. Painting an enemy will cause them to become friend, while thinning it will wipe it from existence. Solving a puzzle through paint will create something constructive, while solving a puzzle through thinner will destroy something. In addition, the "paint" solution to almost anything in the game tends to more complicated than the "thinner" solution - but one is rewarded for having accomplished it through the satisfaction of having brought something into the world, rather than destroying something in the world.

While the main plot offers a lot of content for the player, one would really miss out on a lot in the game if one ignored the rest of the game. There are a ton of side quests, and while a lot of them do certainly bear a rather strong resemblance to fetch quests - "Go over here and get item X, then bring it to position Y" - they nonetheless were quite enjoyable to me, if only for the fact that it allowed me as a player to be immersed even deeper into the world of the forgotten characters in Epic Mickey.

Every aspect of this game, in fact, is really from start to finish an absolute labor of love that pays exquisite attention to detail and stays exceptionally faithful to the world of Disney. Everything is here, even right down to parts of the Disney realm that many didn't even know existed. (I won't spoil what those are; I will only say that I had to look them up when I found them, and found a new appreciation for the loving handiwork that went into the game every time I did.) Mickey travels between realms in film projectors, in which the player is treated to a side-scrolling adventure through very, very old Disney flicks. A scene in the game involves an entire mountain of old, beaten up Mickey memorabilia. One could easily blaze through the game if one wanted to, but then one would miss the entire joy of going through the game, a big part of which is to say hello to and to acquaint oneself to Disney as it once was, and - if recent developments are to be believed - Disney as it hopes to become once again.

You may notice that it's taken me all the way to this point in the review to mention the gameplay. That's not an accident. The gameplay in this game is, in my opinion, secondary to all of the above. I've seen people criticize it for not being like Super Mario Galaxy, or for not being like Donkey Kong Country Returns. I feel that such criticism is misguided, and is expecting this game to be something it isn't. This game was never meant to be the next great platformer, and shouldn't be evaluated under the expectation that that's the way it'll be. That's not to say that its gameplay doesn't matter at *all*. If this game's controls were broken to the point of rendering the game unplayable, then obviously that would be no good. I'm happy to report that they most certainly are not. They aren't the tightest, most streamlined controls ever seen, but they're passable, and really, for a game like this, I feel that that's enough. This isn't a game to be *played* so much as it's a game to be *experienced*.

The art direction in the game is also top-notch. The visuals are excellent, and faithfully reproduce all the places that people once knew and loved from Disney games in their twisted Wasteland glory. The music is also quite inspired in many places, particularly the boss music that includes "It's a Small World" played backwards. In addition for its emotional impact, Epic Mickey is also certainly a treat for the senses, as well.

All in all, Epic Mickey overcomes its shortcomings to become one of the best games on the Wii, and a stirring comeback for Mickey after having slowly lost his way. The game is especially not to be missed by longtime Disney fans, for whom the game is overflowing with love. It's a satisfying game through and through, and it left me with a strong, solid smile once I finished it.