Did you know Neal Ronaghan spent the day at Disney World with Warren Spector one time?
The original Epic Mickey was odd for a few reasons. Firstly it was a Wii exclusive at a time where it was pretty much universally agreed that third party exclusives weren’t going to do great on Wii. Secondly, it was a 3D platformer during arguably their least popular period. It was helmed by Warren Spector, generally credited as the creator of the immersive sim genre whose background includes titles like Wing Commander, Ultima, and Deus Ex. This odd convergence has resulted in Epic Mickey becoming something of a cult classic for Nintendo fans of the era and I’m no exception. Revisiting Epic Mickey nearly fifteen years later from a post 3D platformer revival perspective, Epic Mickey shows plenty of flaws, but the inherent and weird charm is as present as ever.
You play Disney’s iconic Mickey Mouse, who has inadvertently doomed a forgotten world of abandoned characters from the past by filling it with paint thinner. This has resulted in monsters called blots being set free across this world to destroy it and generally wreak havoc. Here Mickey will also encounter Oswald the Lucky Rabbit who holds a grudge against Mickey for stealing his role as one of Disney’s early animated stars. The two will need to learn to work together to save the world and stop the blots.
Epic Mickey combines traditional collectathon 3D platformer elements with some RPG and immersive sim elements influenced by Warren Spector’s previous work. One way in which these elements play out is in the paint and thinner system. Across the world you’ll find objects that can be filled in with paint or destroyed with thinner. Enemy blots can also be affected by this. They can be killed with thinner or befriended with paint. Befriended enemies will even help you fight. This also applies to boss fights, where your choices will feed into a morality system alongside how you complete quests.
You’ll have access to a full quest log with both primary and secondary quests. Like combat, many of these have multiple solutions which will alter character’s perceptions of Mickey and may influence interactions you have available to you down the road. Completing quests will generally reward you with sparks, which serve as the prime mcguffin in Epic Mickey. Sparks allow you to fix projector screens which allow Mickey to hop between different areas of the world. The quest system will often require you to travel across multiple worlds, but the game doesn’t have a fast travel system and levels tend to be linear gauntlets rather than sandboxes. This makes returning to areas often clunky and time consuming. I’d wind up waiting to build up a list of quests that needed to be turned in at a specific location before taking the time to actually go complete them all. It feeds into what I’d say is Epic Mickey’s greatest weakness, in its extremely uneven pacing. The game feels like it grinds to a halt waiting for you to turn in quests so that you can access new areas which often require you to trudge across the entire world.
When you do escape the doldrum of grinding out quests, the moment to moment 3D platforming still feels quite good. I did initially have some concerns centered around the paintbrush controls, given that the first Epic Mickey was built specifically around the Wii remote and nunchuck. Here the controls have been adapted to have both the camera and reticle for the paintbrush be controlled by the right stick. While actively spraying paint or thinner gyro controls also become active. While it doesn’t quite offer the precision of the original controls it is largely functional and there were only a few times where I struggled to shoot paint through an oddly placed opening. It is comparable to the dual analogue controls found in Epic Mickey 2, though significantly better performance overall makes them feel much better.
The remastering effort itself generally impressed me. This is the same team behind the remaster of Spongebob Squarepants Battle for Bikini Bottom. While they’re clearly not afraid to make significant visual upgrades, they do a good job of keeping it feeling consistent with the original art. In Epic Mickey Rebrushed that generally comes down to updated materials with a full modern suite of normal and specular maps. While the original game did make use of some more complex pixel shaders (a rarity on Wii) this remaster expands it out to most materials in the game. That being said, the often subdued lighting and grim environments don’t always show off these materials, so there are areas where you may not immediately notice them. While it’s subtle, there were many areas where it felt like the remaster was delivering visually exactly what the original had intended to but was limited by the hardware. The one area where I feel the remaster lets down visually, is in the level of detail pop-in for characters. At the original resolution these were fairly hard to notice, but in HD it’s quite obvious. These LODs also persist in photo mode even if you move the camera right up to them.
As for performance specifically on the Switch, the majority of the time things run smoothly. I’d say it is generally an improvement over the original release. That being said, things aren’t perfect. Hectic combat can cause some minor, though extended frame rate drops. And every now and then when moving into a new area I would see the game stutter for a moment. These are the exception not the rule, but they can be impactful nonetheless. On the bright side, image quality is quite good in both configurations, once again highlighting the excellent art in a way the original release never really could.
At the end of the day I’m delighted to see Epic Mickey getting a second shot at life, and escaping exclusivity after all these years. This isn’t some landmark 3D platformer, but it’s a game with an incredible amount of heart put into it. While I would have loved to see this remaster do a bit more to smooth over the rough edges in game design, its respectful approach to updating the visuals is excellently done. Performance unfortunately isn’t perfect on the Switch, though it isn’t game breaking either. This is and always has been a game that will appeal to a very specific combo of 3D platforming and Disney fans, but for that audience it remains a flawed but charming trip into the forgotten past.
