An Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion Demo is Available Now For the 3DS and It is A Lot of Fun and Whatnot and So On and So Forth.

I muscled my way through about half of the original Epic Mickey for Wii before the terrible camera and clunky controls made me want to go out and shoot someone just like the game’s creator, Phil Spector did. So when it was announced that in addition to a straight sequel there would also be a portable followup designed in the same vein as Mickey’s 2D side-crolling adventures (The Illusion series for various Sega systems), naturally my interest leaned toward the latter. And now after having played through today’s demo I am fully prepared to cover a few shifts at work in order to be able to buy this game.

First off, you’ll be sitting through quite a few cut scenes before you get to any actual gameplay. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Jiminy Cricket go on and on giving you the lowdown about what’s happening which basically boils down to some nonsense about someone evil doing something bad and yada, yada, yada…time to beat the game. Once you actually get control, you’ll be immediately impressed with how nice the character sprites and backgrounds look but that’s nothing until you turn the 3D on. WOW. This is one of less than a handful of games that I think is significantly improved by having the effect not only turned on but all the way up. There’s a level of layering going on that makes me even more disappointed with the visuals in New Super Mario Bros. 2 and I had no idea that was possible.

Thankfully the controls are also nice and tight and your jump attack is very reminiscent of a certain web footed uncle’s NES adventure which is of course VERY GOOD NEWS. The paint and thinner brush mechanics are held over from the original game but seem to make for some much more intuitive and satisfying puzzle solving here. This being a demo, obviously the problems you come across are fairly simplistic but I can already imagine some pretty cool challenges down the road. I’ll be there waiting. At the end of the road. Waiting to play it. Or something.

Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion hits store shelves on November 18th right alongside the Wii U and coincidentally the same day I will be arrested for driving a school bus through the front door of my local Best Buy.