Game #980: Disney Epic Mickey - Power of Illusion

  Illusory length,

 Epic Mickey on the Wii was pretty good, it was a bit lacking in certain aspects, but I see how a franchise could be born out of its foundation. Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion brings the saga into the 3DS, being a sort of side game to Epic Mickey 2, which I'll be tackling shortly.

 While Wii's Epic Mickey focused on old and forgotten characters, Power of Illusion is more focused on the more modern, 90's and later, heroes and villains. Aladdin, Hook, Peter Pan, Rapunzel, Ariel, The Beast and a few others make their debuts either as bosses or characters to be rescued. While not a bad set-up, I gotta say I found having old and forgotten Disney stars more charming, even if I didn't know them. The game is absolutely beautiful, it's a 2-D platformer, it uses very bright colors and the sprite depictions of the many heroes and villains are spot-on. But the animations, they are so smooth. TO be fair, most of the characters you rescue don't get proper animations, but hey, what actually is animated looks gorgeous.

 Mickey has a fair amount of tools at his disposal to deal with the incoming challenges. He can jump, but jumping onto an enemy will hurt Mickey, you must bounce on top of them by pressing the Jump button again. While you can press Jump at any moment, pressing Jump RIGHT before touching the enemy will produce a higher bounce, which is usually required to access secrets. If you wanna play it safe, as many enemies can attack upwards, you get a melee spin attack, and you can also shoot either paint or thinner. Unlike the original game both substances behave the same in combat, so just use whichever you don't mind wasting. You can collect money as you play through the levels which you can then spend on upgrades for Mickey.

 The original game was built around Paint and Thinner, so the mechanics had to make the jump into this little handheld somehow, and somehow they did. If you pay attention to the lower screen you'll sometimes find highlighted outlines or objects that you can then paint or thin. That's fine, on paper but both actions trigger a touch-pad minigame in which you must either trace a figure or use thinner all over it. Both Paint and Thinner can run out, and if you make mistakes or take your time they'll run out faster. Can't say I'm much of a fan of these.... as these mini-games bring the game to a halt and they are necessary to progress most of the time. I hated having to have the stylus at the ready while I enjoyed the much superior platforming mechanics. This is the 3DS, tacked-on touchpad minigames should've been a thing of the past.

 The game is fairly short, the first two world have about 5 stages each, and the last one only has 3. It took me almost five hours to finish the game, but the reason is two-fold: A) Some, if not most, optional quests you can accept from the NPCs you rescue will have you backtracking to previously cleared levels. Eventually I started ignoring them if I had to replay an old stage. And reason B) the last stages get pretty flippin' hard. I lost lives, there are infinite lives thankfully, more times than I'd care to admit.

 So this is the skinny regarding Disney Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion, the core platforming mechanics are great. The game looks absolutely stunning. But... but the tacked-on touch-screen mini-games are annoying at worst and boring at best. It's also extremely short and they padded it out by having you replay stages, which is not very good. Sadly, the bad kinda outweighs the good which turns what could have been a very solid, if brief, endeavor into a decent but forgettable title.

5.5