Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse (GameCube)

Mickey Mouse has starred in his fair share of video games over the years, and all have been pretty covered in the spotlight. You've got Magical Quest and Castle of Illusion back in the retro days, and then you have Epic Mickey and Kingdom Hearts in more recent years. However, Magical Mirror was one that slipped through the cracks, at least for me. I'd never heard of this until someone in a Facebook group had posted about picking it up, and I decided it to add it to my collection and see how this compares to his other starring roles.

The Story

Sound asleep one night, Mickey is taunted in his dreams by a ghostly figure. The ghost lures Mickey through his subconscious into traveling through the mirror that is mounted across from his bed. He is confused at first upon entering, and even more so when he opens a door and a clone of himself appears before him. He gives chase to the clone only to have it get away. The ghost reappears to taunt Mickey some more when he finds the mirror, but as he attempts to jump back through, the mirror is shattered into twelve pieces. Mickey tries to pick one up and they are all shrunk by a magic spell and scattered across the alternate reality. Now, Mickey must locate the pieces of the mirror and put it back together if he is to return to his own world. 

The Controls

 (For future reference, this section is now where I'll be listing what style of game it is, as it's proven to be increasingly difficult to remain tight lipped on the style of game while describing the controls). 

Magical Mirror comes with an extremely simple scheme of controls, as the game is a point-and-click puzzle adventure. In all honesty, the majority of the controller never gets used unless you choose to click random buttons, as most of them don't do anything at all. The joystick acts as your "mouse" for this game, and is how you guide the cursor around the screen. The A button lets you click the cursor to either move Mickey or activate and pick up certain objects in the world. B will cancel the path that he is walking down. Lastly, the L and R buttons perform the same function, activating or deactivating the portion of the Heads-Up Display where you can access the save feature or your item bag. 

The Gameplay

With this title being a P&C game, the gameplay element gets severely limited. There are set camera views in every area that you enter (much like Resident Evil style). From the getgo, your objective is simple : find the pieces of the mirror so you can get back to your rightful side of the mirror. The cool thing though is that this game is completely open, allowing you to locate the different pieces in whichever order you prefer.

In this game, you'll be clicking your way through every area of the game which seems to take place inside a house that appears to me just an alternate reality version of Mickey's own house. Each area you explore is connected by a series of doors, some of which are opened for you, but there are others that need keys to be collected first.

Along with the keys, you'll also be collecting stars and star containers, useful items, and collectible items that will appear in Mickey's room at the end of the game. While the items are used to solve specific puzzles, the stars are used for the games central technique of pulling tricks.

Every so often in the game, you can trigger some event that requires the use of stars, and pull tricks. Some of these are used on your onscreen "enemies", while others are just directed at a specific object in the game. For instance, one trick is used to stop the ghost from sneaking up on you after you light a candle, while another is done so you can poke your head through a hole in the wall without getting stuck.

Pulling off the tricks requires nothing more than the amount of stars needed which is displayed on the screen. The trick itself happens entirely in a quick cutscene. However, these are required throughout the entire game as they reward you with either a key, a mirror piece, or a star container, all of which you need to complete the game. Once you pull off a trick, you will lose the amount of stars that were needed to do it, although you still get to keep the star container. All of the containers can be filled by picking up star pieces in all the different rooms. A gold star will completely fill one container, while a silver or bronze star will refill only a portion, but finding a new container will refill all of them for you.

In the end, this one is a simple and sweet title, but let's see how difficult this one is.

The Challenge (or lack thereof?) 

For this game, there are a few different areas, but when talking about the difficulty of them it's simpler to bundle them together, as they all tie in with each other throughout Magical Mirror. I'm speaking of the puzzles, the items, and the tricks. Specifically, these things are easy to collect or do, because you can either just pick them up, or if it's an action, it's all done with the single push of a button and then a cutscene does the rest. However, getting to these things can be pretty frustrating and offer at the least, a moderate challenge to you. There isn't a single spot of dialogue in this game, so whenever you find one of the items, you don't get a cue from Mickey speculating on what the item might do, leaving you to either be a super sleuth, or look it up online. Furthermore, some things can only be discovered by clicking the same object a bunch of times in a row. There's even a trick in the kitchen where you are in a silverware cabinet, and to trigger the trick's starting point (not even the trick itself) you have to get all six sets of silverware moving at the same time.

But, before I ramble anymore about that, let's see what's good and bad about this game before we slap a decision on it.

PROS

- Point and Click. By the time GameCube came around, Nintendo was in it's 2nd generation of consoles with full exploration in it's games. So point-and-click games were a thing of the past, mostly found in lower budget PC games. Seeing it here is not only unexpected, but also sort of refreshing. Everyone's played the point-and-click games at some point or another, but seeing one that looks this good (at least as far as the graphics were at the time) gives this game a sort of retro feel to it.
- Open Pathways. This is by far my personal favorite part of this game. None of the mirror pieces act as a prerequisite for finding another piece. All you need for each piece is the keys to get through any locked doors you might come across, and the stars needed to pull off any tricks. It's a great feature because you know what you're supposed to do, and you only have so many options to find the items you need, so the how you do it is completely up to you. It really makes you feel like you have complete control over every single thing that happens instead of needing to jump through hoops along the way.

CONS

- Left To Drown. I alluded to this (a bit heavily maybe...) in the challenge section, that the game doesn't offer you any help at all after the first cutscene when the mirror shatters. Once the spell is cast that scatters the pieces, you get to see where a lot of them end up. After that you're all on your own. You'll pick up random items such as a flashlight and a single flower, and your only clue to where they will go is if you walk into the necessary area and see something that sparks the thought of "maybe this goes here". For such a simple game, it can leave you feeling completely lost at some points.

Final Verdict

While this game gives you a not-so-common style of experience, you might just be better off point-and-clicking your way past this one. It's intended for a younger audience, evident by the Kids difficulty option from the main menu (this mode literally does everything for you). Still, though this one might be unique, it doesn't strike as unique enough to go rushing for it. It's exclusive to the GameCube, and both loose and CIB copies are only going to cost you less than $10. Magical Mirror is enjoyable at times, and confusing at others, but if you enjoy solving puzzles then you might enjoy wrapping your head around this one.

Did I Finish It? 
This is another new section I'm going to add to the reviews from now on. As I've stated before, a lot of my reviews are written without completing the games, as my goal with the reviews is to give you an idea of if the specific title might be worth picking up. Once in the game, my reasons for wanting to beat it might be different from yours. So in this new section, I'll either discuss if I finished the game and what I liked about it or what drove me to the end, or I'll discuss why I didn't finish it. 

For Magical Mirror, as of right now I haven't finished this one, but I fully intend to. I'm at one of those gaming standstill moments where I feel like I've explored everything available to me and can't find the next piece I need to continue. I personally hate looking up guides online until I've given everything my best shot so I'll be letting this one sit for a little while before I go peeking on Google for answers.