If I hadn’t been playing playing Disney Epic Mickey for review, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have finished it. Not because it’s a bad game, but I found the first few hours boring: You know exactly where the story’s going, the choices you make on whether to play as “good” or “evil” are overly binary and simplistic, and the actual mechanics have more than a few small problems. But while it takes a while to get going, I’m glad I made it through, because I would’ve been completely wrong on two of those points.
The game, at first, seems like any other 3D platformer with the twist that, using a magical paintbrush, you can create (using Paint) or destroy (using Thinner) certain parts of the world’s environment. See, through a series of unfortunate events (which you watch in the game’s intro), you learn that Mickey accidentally unleashed a horrible evil in the form of the Shadow Blot on a model in Yen Sid’s (the wizard from Fantasia) workshop. This miniature world, which is basically laid out like a Disneyland theme park, is the home of forgotten cartoon characters — creations from Disney’s early animation days who only starred in a handful of featurettes before being usurped by the more popular canon of characters we know today.
