Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse

Mickey has wandered into a magical mirror. Enjoy an adventure with Mickey!

JP release: 9th August 2002
NA release: 13th August 2002
EU release: 13th September 2002
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Nintendo
NGC Magazine Score: 26%
Mods Used: None

With a name invoking Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, and with both Capcom and Nintendo at the helm (and produced by the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto), you would expect a fun 3D platformer. It’s also worth noting that Nintendo’s exclusivity deal – with Magical Mirror being the main game – also meant that Square could not use Mickey in a more prominent way for Kingdom Hearts. Was all this worth it? In a word: No.

Magical Mirror is a downright strange point and click adventure with a horror theme. A ghost has trapped Mickey inside a mirror, with the other side of the mirror being a mansion with set camera angles. You’d think with Capcom involved, they’d be able to design this in a certain way, but quite often important objects (like doors) are out of sight or difficulty to see. To make matters worse, you can’t move Mickey at will – you have to click on objects to make him walk towards them, and if you’re lucky the camera angle will change to reveal what you need.

The main puzzle mechanic is also really strange. While there are “use object y on x” puzzles, the main way to progress is the “trick system”. Interacting with certain objects will trigger a “trick”. While this is happening, you have to very quickly move the cursor around the screen to find a star symbol. This will trigger something happening which is usually the ghost torturing Mickey, who will then avoid the attack on his own or another “trick” appears somewhere on the screen that you need to quickly react to. Most of the time, Mickey will accidentally do something to progress the game, although a few tricks don’t do anything at all.

These tricks cost “stars” to perform. Early on in the game, you have a very limited number so the multi-part tricks you’ll start off and fail and will have to come back to them, then later on you collect more star containers and you’ll never have an issue. Filling your stars is also obtuse as stars will randomly spawn in rooms with no set pattern. Obtuse is probably the best way to describe the whole game. As almost every interaction in the game is unpredictable, there’s no flow to the puzzles, so it’s just randomly clicking on everything, which should be the last resort in a point and click adventure, not the main way to paly.

There are a few minigames to play throughout, which are all functional. A few are necessary, and others are just for fun. Guitar Master is probably the most fun as it’s the most hectic, and there’s also a minigame where Mickey Performs uppercuts and Hadokens on barrels. They add something much needed to the monotony.

Quite possibly the strangest thing of the whole thing is the big unnerving vibe the game has. The entire game is about torturing Mickey Mouse until he accidentally stumbles on the right solution. But then, even Mickey Mouse is horrifying due to some very disturbing animations, and he comes across as rather odd due to some random bullet time cutscenes, and some odd bounts of him enjoying the violence, including one part of him using kung-fu moves to threaten a fish.

The strangeness is really all the game has going on for it, though. It’s both dull and frustrating to play and obtuse in all the wrong ways, especially for a kids game. Kids games don’t need to be basic, and you can even look at another Nintendo-published kids horror game to see how it can be done right: Luigi’s Mansion. Instead of something fun, you just click on random things and watch overly long cutscenes.

Poor

Okay, so what if it’s intended as a kid’s game? There’s a difference between aiming a title at younger gamers and just making a rubbish game – Nintendo games are famous for their accessibility and universality, so why on earth should pre- and primary schoolers have to endure this kind of patronising rubbish?
Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #73

Remake or remaster?

There’s nothing worth revisiting here.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Magical Mirror starring Mickey Mouse.