TV Companion
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (2013) is an ambitious platform mascot remake of a 1990 Sega Genesis release by the same name. In principle, this sort of title should be absolutely unlikable for me. You play as an over confidant and commercially monolithic protagonist who has too much corporate mascot baggage to be relatable. You have this constant narration saying ultimately redundant things. You have the dissonance between the bosses being a touch too difficult and the platforming being a touch too easy, making it feel less satisfying for its supposed target audience, kids. An admittedly sexist dowry mission motivation where you have to save the damsel in distress Minnie from an evil witch trying to steal her beauty. On top of all of that, its also a remake, and as a bit of an art purist I tend to find these fanfiction reanimations of the original work to be disappointing. Yet, as I've grown older I've learned that this automatic repulsion of licensed games and simple narratives is not doing anybody any favors.
There is unquestionably a lot here to like. Each of the 5 levels are creative and constantly have you moving between 3D micromanagement platforming, and satisfyingly 2D jump sections. Each of the levels are totally unique. You have the enchanted forest of confusion, the library with books and letters coming alive, and an absolutely gorgeous candy world. Making it feel like the famous Thru the Mirror (1936) episode come to life. The game overall is short enough you could beat over an hours cup of tea but has a teaming amount of variety for how you interact with each level that it never feels monotnous. In my minds eye I was thinking of games like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000) and Klonoa (1997) where the world is 3D and you have to often deal with attacks coming in from the background, there is some of that here with the Library section where you have to avoid the books protruding in from the background and the general variety for how the boss engagements are all attacking from different angles.1 However this is one order of magnitude even more impressive as it seamlessly moves the entire gameplay to 3D as well. If you remember those pipe sections from Super Mario Odyssey (2017) imagine if those were longer and not actually segmented via pipes, imagine instead that you just got to a point in the stage and the camera switch to you allowing to walk away. This is most felt at the beginning of the game when you walk into the castle and during a boss fight against a candy dragon where you have to jump between platforms.
The reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I feel like by admitting that this game is fun and has a lot of variety I'm betraying something by admitting for instance that I'd much rather replay this over something like Cuphead. The lack of monotonous play is something that I believe this game successfully taps into, and admittedly something that the early Fantasia (1940) era cartoons tapped into as well. You'd never know if when you put an early disney cartoon on if it was going to be a tornado storm like The Little Whirlwind (1941) or a car breaking down like in Tire Trouble (1943) but you knew that when you watched it you were never going to be bored due to the fact you were watching honed in and unique animations in action. That's what Castle taps into, and as a game the trust of the experience works better in terms of this variety power fantasy for making me want to improve. By allowing for the game to be ultimately quite short, it builds into itself a much firmer desire to improve and replay the experience which works far better for Mickey because his whole deal is just barely avoiding being hit. I much prefer this to the high octane performance expectations of a difficult SHMUP or Cuphead. This is the design approach that I believe you can find in kirby games, where the power fantasy is being able to experience the dream again with better immunity. The point of Sakurai's early Kirby titles like Kirby's Dream Land (1992) is that the world is constantly changing yet keeping the game is short enough that you can try to play it through taking less damage. The cartoon approach to game creation. Unfortunately later Kirby games would bloat with powerups that trivialize the boss encounters and mandatorially long play times to satisfying the player, which is why I think its important not to just throw this game away out of hand. If you were to ask me I think this creative flavour is nessecary in order to keep a platformer to feel satisfying, and I think that how short is it is a strength and rather than a weakness.
There's actually only a few nuanced spots where I think Castle drops the ball. The main one is the narrator. They did a great job of making sure the narrators vocal intrusions are not annnoying by making the voice actor yawn out the lines like a lion, but especially after you beat a boss you can actually cut his delivery off. Outside of that, the score meter in this game has a problem, for one I don't think it needed to be there at all to begin with since my ideal way of scoring better is by being hit less times and losing less lives, but even aside from that its a mandatory inclusion at the center top of the screen with an extra couple digits added to the scoreboard so that you will always see zeros next to whatever your score is, implicitly telling the player they are not doing well enough. My ideal way to do this would be to hide those extra digits until you hit that next numbers place entirely (ie going from 000099990 -> 000100000 being worse than 99990 -> 100000), as I think push everything towards 'scoreboards' is why we've ended up now with the rather unfortunate situation of 'ranking' the players performance by in game metrics rather than letting those metrics speak for themselves like in DOOM or even allowing the player to even count them themselves like personally tallying how many times you fell off the stage in Spyro. I feel like suppressing and reorienting the players urges like this is similar to bolding, all capsing, or highlighting words in a post. I hope you've noticed that I try to do italicizations and these other various touch ups very rarely in my posts because I think it just calls too much attention to itself and creates a sense of artifice that commands too much the takeaway to the player. Just as repeating your statements too much in an essay comes off as redundant and insecure, I think there's an argument to be made that we could view stuff like score upon a similar formal line.
Regardless of that Castle is similar to early Kirby or my recent post on Bowser's Fury in the sense that this focus on the shortness of the length allows the player to feel more satisfied than a compulsorily large amount of content. It's the power fantasy I seek for in a platformer. This title excellently hones in on the feeling of constant spectacle and variation in those early cartoons. If I want to feel powerful and cool and a drive to get even better while being refreshed by the initial experience, this is the type of platformer I prefer. It's a shame that the sexist narrative and the occasional blip in the performance prevents it from standing out, but I think this is the basepoint for what I expect and want from a platformer, all aspects accounted for.
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (2013) is an ambitious platform mascot remake of a 1990 Sega Genesis release by the same name. In principle, this sort of title should be absolutely unlikable for me. You play as an over confidant and commercially monolithic protagonist who has too much corporate mascot baggage to be relatable. You have this constant narration saying ultimately redundant things. You have the dissonance between the bosses being a touch too difficult and the platforming being a touch too easy, making it feel less satisfying for its supposed target audience, kids. An admittedly sexist dowry mission motivation where you have to save the damsel in distress Minnie from an evil witch trying to steal her beauty. On top of all of that, its also a remake, and as a bit of an art purist I tend to find these fanfiction reanimations of the original work to be disappointing. Yet, as I've grown older I've learned that this automatic repulsion of licensed games and simple narratives is not doing anybody any favors.
There is unquestionably a lot here to like. Each of the 5 levels are creative and constantly have you moving between 3D micromanagement platforming, and satisfyingly 2D jump sections. Each of the levels are totally unique. You have the enchanted forest of confusion, the library with books and letters coming alive, and an absolutely gorgeous candy world. Making it feel like the famous Thru the Mirror (1936) episode come to life. The game overall is short enough you could beat over an hours cup of tea but has a teaming amount of variety for how you interact with each level that it never feels monotnous. In my minds eye I was thinking of games like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (2000) and Klonoa (1997) where the world is 3D and you have to often deal with attacks coming in from the background, there is some of that here with the Library section where you have to avoid the books protruding in from the background and the general variety for how the boss engagements are all attacking from different angles.1 However this is one order of magnitude even more impressive as it seamlessly moves the entire gameplay to 3D as well. If you remember those pipe sections from Super Mario Odyssey (2017) imagine if those were longer and not actually segmented via pipes, imagine instead that you just got to a point in the stage and the camera switch to you allowing to walk away. This is most felt at the beginning of the game when you walk into the castle and during a boss fight against a candy dragon where you have to jump between platforms.
The reason I feel compelled to talk about this is that I feel like by admitting that this game is fun and has a lot of variety I'm betraying something by admitting for instance that I'd much rather replay this over something like Cuphead. The lack of monotonous play is something that I believe this game successfully taps into, and admittedly something that the early Fantasia (1940) era cartoons tapped into as well. You'd never know if when you put an early disney cartoon on if it was going to be a tornado storm like The Little Whirlwind (1941) or a car breaking down like in Tire Trouble (1943) but you knew that when you watched it you were never going to be bored due to the fact you were watching honed in and unique animations in action. That's what Castle taps into, and as a game the trust of the experience works better in terms of this variety power fantasy for making me want to improve. By allowing for the game to be ultimately quite short, it builds into itself a much firmer desire to improve and replay the experience which works far better for Mickey because his whole deal is just barely avoiding being hit. I much prefer this to the high octane performance expectations of a difficult SHMUP or Cuphead. This is the design approach that I believe you can find in kirby games, where the power fantasy is being able to experience the dream again with better immunity. The point of Sakurai's early Kirby titles like Kirby's Dream Land (1992) is that the world is constantly changing yet keeping the game is short enough that you can try to play it through taking less damage. The cartoon approach to game creation. Unfortunately later Kirby games would bloat with powerups that trivialize the boss encounters and mandatorially long play times to satisfying the player, which is why I think its important not to just throw this game away out of hand. If you were to ask me I think this creative flavour is nessecary in order to keep a platformer to feel satisfying, and I think that how short is it is a strength and rather than a weakness.
There's actually only a few nuanced spots where I think Castle drops the ball. The main one is the narrator. They did a great job of making sure the narrators vocal intrusions are not annnoying by making the voice actor yawn out the lines like a lion, but especially after you beat a boss you can actually cut his delivery off. Outside of that, the score meter in this game has a problem, for one I don't think it needed to be there at all to begin with since my ideal way of scoring better is by being hit less times and losing less lives, but even aside from that its a mandatory inclusion at the center top of the screen with an extra couple digits added to the scoreboard so that you will always see zeros next to whatever your score is, implicitly telling the player they are not doing well enough. My ideal way to do this would be to hide those extra digits until you hit that next numbers place entirely (ie going from 000099990 -> 000100000 being worse than 99990 -> 100000), as I think push everything towards 'scoreboards' is why we've ended up now with the rather unfortunate situation of 'ranking' the players performance by in game metrics rather than letting those metrics speak for themselves like in DOOM or even allowing the player to even count them themselves like personally tallying how many times you fell off the stage in Spyro. I feel like suppressing and reorienting the players urges like this is similar to bolding, all capsing, or highlighting words in a post. I hope you've noticed that I try to do italicizations and these other various touch ups very rarely in my posts because I think it just calls too much attention to itself and creates a sense of artifice that commands too much the takeaway to the player. Just as repeating your statements too much in an essay comes off as redundant and insecure, I think there's an argument to be made that we could view stuff like score upon a similar formal line.
Regardless of that Castle is similar to early Kirby or my recent post on Bowser's Fury in the sense that this focus on the shortness of the length allows the player to feel more satisfied than a compulsorily large amount of content. It's the power fantasy I seek for in a platformer. This title excellently hones in on the feeling of constant spectacle and variation in those early cartoons. If I want to feel powerful and cool and a drive to get even better while being refreshed by the initial experience, this is the type of platformer I prefer. It's a shame that the sexist narrative and the occasional blip in the performance prevents it from standing out, but I think this is the basepoint for what I expect and want from a platformer, all aspects accounted for.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago