Video Game Review: Disney Releases Excellent ‘Epic Mickey,’ Lackluster ‘Tangled’

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CHICAGO – Disney has released two Nintendo Wii games in the hope of stealing a bit of Christmas cash this holiday season and one proves that family-oriented titles can still be creatively vibrant while the other proves the dictum that movie tie-ins usually are not. While the tie-in for “Tangled” is certainly better than a lot of lackluster movie games, “Epic Mickey” is the one to include in your letter to Santa.

“Epic Mickey”

Video Game Rating: 4.0/5.0

“Epic Mickey” is far from perfect. There are unacceptable camera issues, repetitive collector missions, and some serious targeting issues. But the game is so conceptually interesting and often stunning to look at that it can become entrancing for its target audience — those who love the world of Disney and Mickey Mouse. With a very clever story and visually-captivating environments — two things almost always missing from Nintendo Wii family games — it becomes much easier to overlook the flaws of “Epic Mickey.”

Epic Mickey
Photo credit: Disney

The story of “Epic Mickey” uses the early days of Walt Disney as inspiration. Naturally, you play as arguably the most legendary animated character of all time, but the game provides a bit of a history lesson for fans unfamiliar with the early days of animation by using Mickey’s predecessor, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit as a major character. In fact, the game features several ancient Disney characters and almost serves as a commentary on the way the childhood icons can be put away and forgotten for decades. As Mickey encounters the ghosts of the Disney-verse, the writers of “Epic Mickey” brilliantly weave the old and the new. A 2010 game featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is brilliant purely on a conceptual level.

Epic Mickey Photo credit: Disney

In the opening scene of “Epic Mickey,” Mickey spills paint and paint thinner on a model in his creator’s study. He is eventually pulled into the model and finds that it’s a whole world that has been taken over by his half-brother Oswald and has now been under attack by the Shadow Blot. The Wasteland that Mickey helped equally create and destroy serves as the dynamic background for an adventure to save its residents and defeat the Shadow Blot.

The artistic drive of “Epic Mickey” is to make a game that’s essentially about the mindspace of an artist in that they’re constantly creating and then discarding or destroying their creations to move on to another. Throughout the adventure of “Epic Mickey,” you have two “weapons” — a paintbrush and a thinner spray. With the former, you can paint in elements of the environment that you need to get from one area to another or turn enemies friendly. With the latter, you can remove structures impeding your progress or knock out the bad guys headed your way. They are not really that different as weapons but your choice does end up playing a role in the way the game plays out in a “moral” way that, believe it or not, is not unlike the structure of “Fable” or even “Mass Effect 2.”

Who thought there would be a Disney game comparable to “Fable III”? Not this critic. The family/kids game genre has felt permanently broken lately with little creativity or ambition. “Epic Mickey” has both creativity and ambition. Sadly, the execution does not quite live up to the concept and it feels like there could have been an even-stronger and darker version of “Epic Mickey” for non-Wii consoles. At times, it feels like the developers were torn between their intelligent concept and a clear directive to make a game kids can play. Some of the quests are ridiculously simple — “Go over there. Quest Completed!” And the game approaches a breaking point in repetitive collector missions that feel designed more to lengthen the game than deepen it.

There also ridiculous camera issues in “Epic Mickey” that display the limits of the Nintendo Wii in a title like this. A button can be pushed to center the camera and sometimes you need to switch to FPS to target your paint in the right direction, but one shouldn’t have to wrestle with those issues as much in a game like “Epic Mickey.” It takes the player out of the atmosphere created by the world of the game.

“Epic Mickey” is a good game that could have been great. On a conceptual level, it IS great, it’s just the execution that drags it down a bit. But it would be a much better gaming world if more developers approached family titles with the same intellectual ambition. Disney has led the way in so many areas of entertainment. Maybe they can do it gaming as well.

“Tangled”

Tangled
Photo credit: Nintendo

Video Game Rating: 3.0/5.0

Sadly, the same ambition is not on display in “Tangled,” the Nintendo Wii tie-in game to the blockbuster movie. There’s not much to say about this simple adventure that uses the lead characters from the movie in a fantasy world of collector missions and odd quests. Jumping from “Epic Mickey” to “Tangled” can be downright jarring in a way not unlike jumping from a PS3 game to one on the Nintendo DS (a great machine but not exactly a graphics juggernaut). For everyone over ten, “Tangled” falls flat.

There’s really not much to review with “Tangled.” It’s a straightforward movie tie-in for kids who want to gobble up everything related to their favorite movie. It falls somewhere in the middle of the movie tie-in trajectory — nowhere near as creatively bankrupt as some of its genre peers but also not as ambitious a title as “Toy Story 3.” Most of the game is built around collecting things as Rapunzel spins her hair to find hidden items and Flynn fights for her safety. Those lucky kids who aren’t only children will love to play two-player as one can take Flynn and the other Rapunzel.

For the most part, “Tangled” is breezy, light, and relatively well-made. It looks okay and plays without many glitches or graphical anomalies. It is a game that was designed for young fans of the movie and they’ll be satisfied.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com