An engaging adventure, but some techincal issues keep it from true greatness.
The story goes that Mickey Mouse wanders through his mirror into a wizard's workshop. The Wizard was creating a world for forgotten Disney cartoon characters similar to Disneyland. Mickey in his old school mischeif making nature, messes around with stuff on the table, spills some thinner on the model world and inadvertantly creates a monsterous ink blot monsters. Mickey, runs back through his mirror and tries to forget about the incident.
Many many years pass simulating Mickey's rise to stardom as global icon. One morning he is awakened by the Phantom Blot he created and drug through the mirror into the wizards wasteland.
First off I am not one to go on about a game's story but this is a prime example of great game storytelling. Instead of being force fed hours upon hours of cutscenes, the game is told through short storyboard like scenes but more told through the NPCs and atmosphere you encounter. Are you paying attention to this Square Enix? You don't need 20 hours of cutscenes to tell a good video game story!!
Mickey finds himself in the clutches of the Mad Doctor but rescued by his estranged brother, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and helped by a charming little fellow named Gus the Gremlin. Mickey encounters various interesting folks from old cartoons such as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar but the dynamic between Mickey and Oswald is what will really stand out. Oswald was Walt Disney's first creation but left behind when Walt left Universal and Oswald to found his own studio and make Mickey. I won't spoil any more of the story.
Gameplay is very Banjo Kazooie-esque. Platforming, light combat and a lot of fetch quests. Mickey is armed with a magic paintbrush that can either paint in objects or erase them with thinner. Also paint can turn some enemies into allies and thiner just destroys them. Mickey eventually gains some other useful items like stopwatches to slow time, anvils to hold down switches or crush foes and TVs to power devices and distract enemies. Combat, however is somewhat sloppy. Taking down a foe with paint takes a bit too long. A flick of the Wiimote will knock them back, but tougher foes or non-friendable enemies like the beetleworx machines can take ages to defeat and it's easier to just run away.
I will say that the execution of some of these elements is hamped by a twitchy camera. I've played enough terrible 3D Sonics to get used to this but this really needed fleshed out more especially when you're taking hits from foes you can't see because the camera was looking at a wall. Though I still don't think it's nearly as bad as reviews made it out to be. And honestly can you think of a 3D platformer that doesn't have camera issues? (yes even Mario suffers from it) I think critics just got too used to looking through a first person perspective thanks to a market flooded with FPSes.
Also the game, while not as heavily focused on the moral choice system, has a lot in terms of gameplay choice. Sometimes you'll encounter a perplexing puzzle but there are shortcuts around it. First of all, if you free a gremlin from a prison cell, sometimes he'll save you some tedium like the Haunted Mansion where there is this overly complicated painting puzzle that I couldn't figure out. Definitely help the gremlins. This also encourges multiple playthroughs to see different scenes at the end.
The game itself does feel a bit on the short side. It seems like just as I was getting imersed in this world and the characters, the game was over. There are a lot of sidequests and extra goodies to find, it's just a shame we couldn't visit more forgotten realms and characters.
Epic Mickey for me, is one of those games where I was able to overlook the technical issues, spotty combat and missions made up of fetch quests because the story and characters and atmosphere were so engaging and I like Mickey like this. Nowadays Mickey is so boring if you ever saw "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" this is the old, fun loving, adventurous Mickey some have forgotten and for me I see this as a spiritual successor to the old Mickey games like "Castle of Illusion" or "Magical Quest." If they had just worked out a few more technical issues, it could've been really amazing.