[quote name='milesbeyond']Dang. Should I pick this up? I just bought a Wii and although I don't have a ton of free time to play, it's pretty damn cheap. And with a $30 TIV...dangit.
I've heard mixed reviews, is it worth the $30? I feel stupid for not picking up Kirby's Epic Yarn for $30...feel like this could be the same dealio.[/QUOTE]
As a game, the best way I can describe it is that it feels like a product of PS1-era game design. Whether you think that amounts to being hopelessly outdated or nostalgically charming is up in the air. Nearly everything about the gameplay has a certain unpolished/unadvanced feel to me that makes it seem like a blast from the past of say, 15 years ago.
There's undoubtedly an awkwardness to the camera, as many here and in reviews have voiced. You'll run across problems quite often, though few of them are totally insurmountable. The manual control for the camera is simply too slow, and sometimes disallowed, which feels like a crime in this day. Most of the problems come from trying to backtrack through alternate paths that weren't intended to be run in that direction, which is a fault that lies entirely with the developers and not the player who cannot know how a level was intended to be experienced.
As a text, I think Epic Mickey is brilliant. It functions effectively as a work of catharsis for Disney (and Mickey) in its struggle to reintegrate Oswald into a canon which has long ago replaced him. The narrative can feel a bit scattershot (like many PS1-era games), but I think it's befitting the process of discovery and reconciliation at the heart of this text, complete with all the strangeness, angst, and postmodern self-awareness that may entail.