"A bit of a disaster"

Poor Mickey Mouse, you'd think with Castle of Illusion under his belt he would be safe from the curse of bad games. Unfortunately for our favourite rodent, this isn't the case. Fantasia is just a poorly made game, plain and simple. Regardless of that though, I still have some fun with this game if only for the nostalgic factor. Nostalgia alone simply cannot hide the games flaws however, and trust me when I say there are plenty of them.

The game at its most basic level is a platformer. Mickey must travel though the levels to find music notes that have been stolen, whilst walking and jumping around for the majority of the process. It's hard to go wrong with a setup like this, right? Wrong. Here lies one of the main flaws; the controls feel like a complete mess. If you want to change direction there's about a second delay, and jumping doesn't fare much better. On top of this, to harm an enemy with a jump you have to hold down. This just feels awkward, and makes the enemies a pain to kill. You can also damage them by blasting a spell at them, but this is almost useless as it takes quite a few hits and you really do have limited ammo.

By no means are the controls the only problem. If enemies weren't hard enough to deal with already due to the controls, things are made even worse by the fact that they come in very large numbers. In every single level you are simply bombarded with enemy after enemy, and it just makes it feel like you have no escape sometimes. It doesn't help that the enemies move about in annoying, hard to dodge patterns (or sometimes seemingly without a pattern at all).Sometimes, you have to just take it like a man and get hit.

On occasion you can still get hit by an enemy even if you are holding down whilst jumping on them. An example of this occurs in the first level where the most basic enemy (a weird mushroom looking thing) is jumping abnormally high. Try to hit it and 50% of the time you loose health. What's up with that? Who knows.

Another really annoying thing is that the levels are just hard to navigate sometimes. Just in the first level, you'll find yourself looping backwards and forwards to new and old areas if you touch any of the fairies or land in this particular treasure chest. The fairies take you to these new underwater areas, though I still haven't worked out what these areas are actually for as they just seem to take you backwards. In fact I haven't worked out a lot of things about this game. I've beaten it before, yet I still get stuck sometimes when I go back to it.

You see to beat a level you need to find the musical notes, which Mickey pulls out at the end of a level to see if you've passed. The thing is, in the first level only one note is to be found. Mickey however pulls out about 10 + at the end of the level, so I have no idea where the rest come from. Maybe the blue balls you randomly come across count towards the total, or maybe the fairies and their new areas grant you some. Whatever the case the game does a poor job of letting you know what the hells going on. Luckily later levels seem easier in the whole finding notes situation, so this problem slightly dies down.

I could go on and on about the problems; about how treasure (blue balls and stars) seemingly appear randomly during levels after you do certain actions, or perhaps about how enemies re-spawn on top of your face, or maybe about how in the second level you can't even tell the foreground from the background, but I think you're starting to get the idea.

Once you battle your way through it all you'll find it isn't actually very long. There is a hard mode, but I can't imagine many people wanting to go back and bother. At the end of the day there are other side-scrolling games like this that are done a million times better, so nothing is really going to draw you in.

Having said all this, I still find the game slightly fun. Maybe it's the sadomasochist inside of be trying to burst out, but something about it is fun. It's quite a pretty looking game really, and the levels are varied location wise. I also enjoy some of the music, which can be surprisingly catchy. Still, these things simply can't save the game. You're better off playing pretty much any other Mickey Mouse game. If you're looking for something annoyingly tricky and enjoy the film; maybe you might enjoy it though.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 05/29/09

Game Release: Fantasia (EU, 1991)