I hate saying this, but Epic Mickey kind of sucks.
I mean, it looks great, and there's plenty of Disney references (although not enough; see below) and there's some great starter ideas... but all put together, it's a jumble. I'm coalescing my thoughts for a formal review, so here's some key issues I need to vent over. There's some minor spoilers ahead, especially if you don't want to hear some of the unannounced cameo appearances.
The morality system. You know, until we get this shit right, it's probably nonsense for any developer anywhere to start the hype train by crowing about games offering morality choices. Epic Mickey has this dual system of paint vs thinner. Mickey can wield both. Using the thinner tends to destroy while the paint tends to create. The idea here is that you're supposed to choose what kind of Mickey you want to be: a mischievous eraser of fellow cartoon characters, or a benevolent artist who turns misguided enemies to friends.
Does anybody really imagine Mickey Mouse being the former? It certainly doesn't show in any of the game's cutscenes, which repeatedly show a Mickey humbled by his errors and haunted by the alterna-DisneyWorld he must explore. Why even bother making this a choice for the player? Who is out there burning with a need to turn Mickey Mouse into a slavering cartoon killer? Just use the paint vs thinner mechanic in solving the game's many environmental puzzles and have done with it.
And anyway, even if you do choose the thinner path, it just ends up erasing low-level baddies (no one cares) and slightly irritating the NPCs ("Hey, you broke the ride rather than fixing it!")
When Epic Mickey was first announced, this system went farther, actually physically transforming Mickey's form into a wilder, feral look (like his monster form from the short "Runaway Brain"), but Disney made Warren Spector take that out. So what's the point?
The camera really sucks. Everybody agrees on this point, even the people giving the game 80% scores and higher. It's the most noticeable fault, to be sure. You can breeze across the faux morality and ignore what I'm about to point out about the Disney refs, but no one can ignore the bullshit camera. It will be too close and swing through a wall to obstruct your view. It will be too slow to move and screw up the timing on your jumps. And although sometimes you can control it manually, sometimes you can't, and there is no rhyme or reason why.
It is strictly amateur work, and when a supposed AAA game arrives with the impact and expectation of Epic Mickey, we can't let amateur work go by unchallenged. Epic Mickey should not have made this holiday season. It should have been delayed and fixed. At least the basics, like the camera, should have been polished. Maybe instead of wasting all that time writing incidentally-peeved character dialogue (because Mickey erased a vital gear instead of painting it), the team should have been MAKING THE CAMERA NOT SUCK.
Speaking of dialogue, why doesn't Mickey talk? Why doesn't anybody talk? Why is a game packed with recognizable characters whose voices are as familiar as America making me read everything through subtitles? Mickey, Pete, Goofy, Daisy, Smee, Horace... these are all characters with officially assigned voice actors. It is asinine that they are struck mute in Epic Mickey.
OK, I'll give the game a pass with Oswald. I don't know if Walt ever made an Oswald cartoon that was a talkie.
Also, why does the game alternate between (what looks like) Flash-animated cutscenes and in-game-engine cutscenes? The hell? In some sequences, you get a 2D movie that actually finishes up in a cut to the normal 3D rendering.
Now, about the Disney references. Yes, you'll come across plenty of them. But I, as a big Disney fan, argue that the game does not dive deep enough into the legacy.
For example, when you get to Mean Street - the downtrodden version of DisneyWorld's Main Street - it is populated by a dozen or so NPCs THAT ALL LOOK THE SAME. They're all variations on the Horace Horsecollar / Clarabelle Cow black and white pipe cleaner limbed barn animals. Sure, there are subtle head differences that mean dog, cow, horse and goat, but they are all pretty much the same. Same height. Same clothes. Where's the fat pig from "The Band Concert"? Where's Clara Cluck? Where's the spindly rooster?
It's the same story when you get to the pirates, which I guess are supposed to be leftovers from Captain Hook's crew. There's about three basic designs that repeat across dozens of NPCs. It is unbelievably lazy, when you think about all the characters in the Disney stable. It is unforgivably blatant, when you compare that to the game's rich and varied locations and backgrounds.
Which brings up the point that really bothers me - and I'm maybe two-thirds through at this writing - this entire supposed "World of Forgotten Cartoon Characters" amounts to piss. Oswald, those Gremlins, some Depression-era barn animals, and some pirates. And I guess ghosts are heading my way soon. Not exactly a fully-stocked kingdom. It's such a great concept - imagine if Walt had not lost the rights to Oswald - that seeing it arrive half-baked is frustrating.
If you want to talk about forgotten Disney characters, sure, you can start with all the 1920s-1930s barn animals who never got the star turn (although both Horace and Clarabelle have been on "House of Mouse" and "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse," unless I'm wrong). But how about Eliot from "Pete's Dragon." Haven't seen much of him lately. Gurgi from "The Black Cauldron." Bagheera. Those two con-artists from "Pinocchio." Figment. Ranger Woodlore.
You can make a case for the "Song of the South" animals. The Three Caballeros (minus Donald). Maybe Ludwig von Drake. Rather than reminding us about movies and shows we have forgotten, Epic Mickey's Wasteland characters are primarily background toss-offs that nobody cared about back then.
Where's. Clara. Cluck.
But hey, don't overlook providing a reference to TRON, because there's totally a new movie coming out so TRON better be in this game somewhere. Jesus.
Epic Mickey does a little better in presenting a dark, corrupted vision of Disneyland. It is cool to pick your way through small world props, and uncover a version of the Nautilus. But even then, I feel like the game sort of does the minimum and then trots away.
During an hour-long series of levels through it's a small world, you hear the classic song for maybe five minutes. Excuse me? Where is all the great Disney music, in many cases as iconic as the characters themselves? You get a little bit of incidental soundtrack usage, particularly in the short segments directly inspired by classic cartoons like "Steamboat Willie"... but I just went through a massive pirate area and did not hear "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" ONCE.
There's a cameo by the Carousel of Progress, one of Walt's favorites, goddammit. But when you discover it, instead of being filled with dilapidated animatronics of scenes from a family of the past, present and future... it's empty. And the attraction's host is not a robotic father, it's another damn black and white barn animal. Are you kidding me? The best you can say about the Carousel is that it does in fact rotate.
If the camera worked properly, the game would be pretty great... since, as I said, my nitpicks about the Disney content are probably not a concern to most (although, seriously, we were promised a lot of treats for Disney fans, and I'm not feeling treated over here). But when you add a crappy camera to lackluster "morality" choices and a comparatively sparse use of Disney history, that's enough to seriously disappoint me.
I really want this one to pick itself up in the end.
And now, the final part of my thrilling look at the 
Seriously. Five notes from "Once Upon a Dream," a jangled version of "It's a Small World" and the incidental track to "Steamboat Willie" just doesn't cut it.
Last weekend we had the VGAs. Tonight is the X-Play awards. You'd be forgiven for confusing the two, as the nomination lists are nearly identical. The main difference is that X-Play nominated Epic Mickey in a whole bunch of categories. One key difference is that X-Play differentiates games by genre, not by platform, which does help to avoid 
I finished Epic Mickey last night, causing a bedtime far later than expected. Turns out, the final boss sequence goes on for two hours. I mean, you have liberal checkpoints in there (one of the things the game is good at is providing unseen save points) so you don't have to marathon it, but I felt like I was on a tear.
