Castle of Illusion (Sega Genesis) Quick Review

Who doesn't love Mickey Mouse? He's a part of just about everyone's lives at this point in some way, and he's made his fair share of appearances in the gaming area as well. This one also kicked off the Illusion series of games exclusive to the Sega family of consoles. One of my earlier reviews, Quackshot, is also a tie in to this series (which I honestly discovered while playing and researching this one). So while this one earned itself a remake on the PS3 generation of consoles, I'm going back to the original source to see if this one is worth it's playtime.

In Castle of Illusion, Mickey sets out to rescue Minnie from the clutches of the evil with, Mizrabel who has captured Minnie to steal her youth. Mickey must rescue Minnie by battling Mizrabel's henchmen and collecting seven rainbow gems that, together, will build a rainbow bridge to the tower where Minnie is being held.

The Good
- Practice Makes Perfect. A lot of older games come with varying difficulty levels that you can select before starting the main game. Typically these are easy, normal, and hard. Instead, Castle of Illusion offers you normal, hard, and practice. Practice mode is essentially a cliff-note version of the game. You only play three levels, minimal encounters with enemies, and no boss fights at all. It's a really cool and unique way to get to experience the game itself and familiarize yourself with the controls before diving into the main feature.
- Entertaining Boss Fights. When you do make it to the main game, reaching the bosses is actually a treat. They're all different and require different methods to defeat them. It's worth mentioning because in the older retro games, bosses more often than not are just carbon copies of each other if they even exist at all. In this game you get all different bosses and they're all relevant to the stage they're in as well. One requires you to hit it with projectiles, while the next you have to bounce off his head to deal damage.

On The Fence
- Limited Continues. The fact that they exist it all is very nice. However, you only get three. On top of that, you have a limited health bar (only five hits), minimal ways to gain health, and even less ways to gain additional lives. Another high point in this is that when you lose a life you restart at the beginning of the same level, even if it was your last life and you have to dip into one of your continues. So with all that said, this one really does belong in the middle ground, because while the continues and same-level restarts are helpful, the limited resources for health and extra lives is a bit of a hindrance.

The Bad
- Sluggish Controls. There's really only two button commands because A and B both are your shooting buttons, and C is your jump attack button. These can sometimes feel like they lag before doing anything, and especially with the jump attack move, it sometimes just feels like it doesn't even work. Mickey's movement also seems slow at times. This stands out mostly in boss fight areas when you seem to not be able to jump fast enough to avoid attacks, or Mickey takes to land coming back down from his jump and ends up directly in the bosses path.

Is it Worth it?
While at first glance this one might seem like a Disney knock off of a Mario game, it has enough of it's own flavor to justify giving this one a play. It can be a bit infuriating with the slow controls having to start all the way back at the start of the game when you lose all your continues (no passwords in this one either, but that's not a surprise considering there are only five levels in this one), but the environments themselves are colorful and gorgeous, the music is catchy, and Mickey himself looks great in action. You can find just the cartridge for this one around $10, and collectors can find a CIB copy for closer to $30. As a $10 game, this one most definitely gives you your money's worth while playing it. I mentioned in the introduction that there was a PS3-Gen remaster of this game made, and I tried checking for a price on it on the PS Store, but can no longer find a current listing *insert sad face emoticon here*. So unless you nabbed it while it was available, for now this one has gone poof. Either way, the original cartridge is definitely worth a little hunt to add to your collection.

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