Epic Mickey’s Animatronic Donald Gives Me The Creeps

Game Informer’s keeping a steady stream of Epic Mickey articles coming between its November 2009 reveal issue and its online supplements. This article takes a look at character design and art.

We’ve already been told that this Wii exclusive game will be all about Mickey painting in parts of his environment to get through levels (a la Okami, perhaps). But something I hadn’t heard until today was that how you problem-solve your way through the game directly affects how your Mickey looks.

“How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem. Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the girl,” Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game.

“But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What missions you hear about or not is up to you.”

Each version of Mickey has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.

Each of the Mickeys and all of their movements, though, are drawn directly from classic Mickey inspiration. Get a look at the render videos in Game Informer’s piece and see if you can recognise motions from old school Mickey Mouse cartoons, like The Brave Little Taylor.

Inside the Game: Epic Mickey [Game Informer]