Another Stroll Down Mean Street! (Epic Mickey: Rebrushed in Review)

 Hey friends! Last year, we got the remake of a little Wii game that delved into the history of Disney animation, theme parks, and even merchandise. I'm of course referring to Epic Mickey, which was redone in last year's Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. I got the game pretty much right away, but I've been pretty busy recently, so I didn't have a chance to play through it again until pretty recently. It's still just as great as I remember it, and I'm excited to be able to write about it, and especially in a way that may actually be better than the original experience! I'll go over that a bit today as we travel to the world of the Wasteland to help a certain Lucky Rabbit, and redeem a beloved character lost to time.

First, Time For a History Lesson...

    Walt Disney didn't start right away with Mickey Mouse and his own company, his career as an animator began with Universal, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Walt and Ub Iwerks worked together on the concept for Oswald and made quite a few cartoons for Universal back in the day, beginning with "Trolley Troubles," which came out in 1927. As the story goes, Walt went in to his bosses at Universal for more money so they could make better cartoons, but his boss fired him and took away the character, which the company owned. Walt was understandably devastated, but in his hour of despair, he decided to start his own animation company with his brother, Roy, and he came up with Mickey Mouse after some time. That may be an overly romanticized version of the actual historical events, but the point is that Walt's first character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who was taken from him, and Mickey Mouse only came about because he wasn't able to make more Oswald cartoons. Fortunately in the year 2006, the Disney company got Oswald back when Disney-owned ABC Sports traded Al Michaels's Contract to NBC Sports for the bunny, which has to be one of the funniest trades in sports history. Even though the company had the Lucky Rabbit back in their corner, however, they wouldn't do anything with him until 2010, which is when this game comes in.

    Warren Spector, the legendary creator of such games as Deus Ex and System Shock, came in for a meeting with Disney and was asked about the possibility of him bringing Mickey Mouse back to the "hero" status that he had back in the Sega Genesis days, with games like Castle of Illusion. Along with this idea, the company was hoping to also reintroduce the character of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to the masses, after spending decades on the shelf. Spector, being a huge Disney fan, and growing up with a lot of Disney inspiration, jumped at the idea, and was overjoyed to bring this old character back into popular culture. The interesting thing about Mr. Spector's games is that they're known for having a morality system to them. They were among the first games that allowed you to play the way you wanted to. You could go through Deus Ex by decimating every enemy in your path, or you could play a more stealth oriented game, which would take a lot longer, but you would focus more on technical skills for unlocking doors or something perhaps. This led to this game, which could have been a simple fun platformer, being something a lot more interesting.

Now to get to the game...

    Epic Mickey begins with Mickey Mouse discovering that a mirror in his bedroom is somehow connected to Sorcerer Yen Sid's workshop (Yen Sid is the sorcerer from the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence in Fantasia). He sees the sorcerer as he's going through the process of creating a world for characters that have been forgotten by the world (which looks a lot like Disneyland) before putting down his brush and going to bed. Mickey sees this magic brush and can't hold back his curiousity, he picks it up and creates a little creature that looks a bit like himself, but then becomes fairly monstrous and attacks Mickey. Mickey tries to get rid of this creature by grabbing the thinner and trying to erase it. He hears Yen Sid coming back to investigate the noise, then panics and runs away, accidentally spilling the bottle of thinner on the little world and turning it into a wasteland in the process. Mickey escapes back to his room, Yen Sid being unaware of how this had happened for many years. We then see Mickey becoming the beloved character that we all know, the years pass and Mickey becomes more and more popular until one day, when an inky monster shows up in his room, grabs him and pulls him through the mirror and down into the world that he had destroyed so many years before, but with the sorcerer's magic brush in tow. Believe it or not, this all happens before you even get to the main menu.

    When Mickey lands in the Wasteland, he realizes that he's somehow absorbed some of the inky monster (called The Blot)'s essence, and it allows him to use Paint and Thinner through the magic brush as he pleases, as the world is made of paint, but was left in ruin when the thinner was spilled all over it. As you play through the game, you have the choice to paint the world and make it better, or thin things out, which could be helpful for you, but will make the inhabitants of this world more sad as it continues to break down this world more and more. Your enemies are dealt with in a similar way, they can either be defeated with paint, which will make them your allies, or with thinner, which will just kill them. That goes for boss fights too, with the best illustration being the first boss, the Small World Clock Tower. You can either paint his arms, which open his face up to being painted so that he becomes friendly to you and all of the Gremlins that live in Gremlin Village, or you can thin his arms out and then thin his face, making it permanently broken. I also just have to take a second to applaud the idea of making the creepy clock tower a boss. It's such a perfect idea, and you even battle it while a distorted version of "It's A Small World" plays in the background.

A Tale of Two Brothers...

    Honestly I could talk about this game forever, it's really one of the games that I followed the closest out of any that I've ever been invested in. It wasn't a perfect game, but as a huge fan of Disney, I thought they really knocked it out of the park. It pays tribute to so many elements of Disney's legacy while also giving a beautiful and tragic story for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Oswald was the original golden child, and then in his mind, Mickey just came in and replaced him, making him pretty bitter. Nothing says that more than the statue in the middle of Mean Street's hub (of course, a play on Main Street U.S.A., the entryway to Disneyland and Magic Kingdom in Florida). If you're familiar with the layout of the Disney Parks, there's a statue there of Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey. On Mean Street, it's a statue of Walt holding hands with Oswald. There's a moment when Mickey first sees the statue that he's really happy when he sees Walt, and then he notices that Oswald is the one holding his hand in the statue, and he looks sad. Oswald actually made animatronic versions of Donald, Goofy, and Daisy, because he was alone at first before more and more characters were forgotten at first. Mickey doesn't understand what the deal is with Oswald, and Oswald completely hates him just because he should be the famous one. As you go through the game and Oswald gets to know Mickey better and vis versa, they get to understand each other a lot better, and even work together to make the wasteland a better place. I don't want to give anything away, but I just want to put it out there, Epic Mickey has maybe one of the strongest endings out of anything I've played in a long time. There is ultimately one ending that is always the same, but depending on your choices throughout the game, the characters that you helped and those you harmed will be different in the end based on what you decided. Sometimes the Clock Tower will be singing and playing with the Gremlins, and sometimes the Gremlins will be sad while the Clock Tower sits in ruin. It's incredible how much charm this game has in it, and the remaster has helped make it even better than the original form.

    When this game came out in 2010, it was only for Wii, which wasn't the prettiest hardware around. It definitely wasn't up to par with the Xbox 360 or PS3, its contemporaries at the time, and as such, the game wasn't stunning to look at, but it had a great style that definitely worked well for it. The controls at the time were criticized heavily because it was hard to aim the camera, which was a problem for many Wii games, as it was a console that lacked a right analog stick. The jumps were a little too floaty and the slope detection wasn't as good as it should have been, according to many publications. I'm happy to report that the remastered version that came out last year, some 14 years after the original release, fixed almost everything that I was hoping they would. The game looks a lot better on modern consoles than it did, plus Mickey has some new moves that gives some quality of life improvements, like a ground pound, a run button (that I didn't really use at all), on top of just a lot of glitches being fixed. I remember when I first played the game, there were a lot of sidequests that I couldn't ever figure out, partially because the game glitched out and a character wasn't where they were supposed to be. It could possibly be that I'm 14 years older than I was back then and I can just understand things a bit better now, but I feel like there were a lot of things that worked much better in this version. It's still not a perfect game, and it's not going to appeal to everyone, of course, but on top of being a really good game for Disney nostalgia, it's also a really solid 3D platformer, somehow combined with some RPG mechanics with the morality system.

    When this game wrapped up, I was so excited for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to show up in other things, and I really wish that he could be a big character like Mickey, because he deserves it. A few years ago, for the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney company, they put out a new Oswald short to celebrate for the first time in 95 years or so, as well as him being featured in "Once Upon a Studio," another short created to celebrate the 100th anniversary. Epic Mickey didn't have as wide of a reach as the company was hoping, but I'm so glad that we got it, and I hope that this remaster will allow a lot more people to play it, since I still love it just as much as I remembered.

    Thanks so much for reading this post, friends. I love this game, it's honestly one of the games that I'm most nostalgic about nowadays, even though I was already in high school when it came out. As I'm writing this, it's weird to think that it came out 15 years ago, so I guess that was when I was exactly half of my age that I am now. I hope you're all doing alright this week, friends, and I'm praying for your safety and health especially now. I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed Disney and video game expert, and I'll talk to you again real soon!