The original Epic Mickey was odd for a few reasons. First, it was a Wii exclusive at a time when it was generally agreed that third-party exclusives wouldn’t sell well on the Wii. Second, it was a 3D platformer during arguably its least popular era. It was directed by Warren Spector, widely credited with creating the immersive simulation genre that includes titles like Wing Commander, Ultima, and Deus Ex. This odd convergence has led to Epic Mickey becoming something of a cult classic for Nintendo fans of the era, and I’m no exception. Revisiting Epic Mickey nearly fifteen years later from the perspective of the 3D platformer revival shows many flaws, but its inherent and odd charm is as present as ever.

You play as Disney’s iconic Mickey Mouse, who has inadvertently doomed a forgotten world of abandoned characters from the past by filling it with paint thinner. This has resulted in monsters called Blots being released into this world to destroy it and generally cause havoc. It is also here that Mickey meets Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, who bears a grudge against Mickey for stealing his role as one of Disney’s first animated stars. The two must learn to work together to save the world and stop the Blots.

Epic Mickey combines traditional collectathon 3D platforming elements with some RPG and immersive simulation elements influenced by Warren Spector’s previous work. One way these elements come into play is through the paint and thinner system. Throughout the world, you’ll find objects that can be filled with paint or destroyed with thinner. Enemy patches can also be affected. They can be killed with thinner or befriended with paint. Friendly enemies can even help you in battle. This also applies to boss battles, where your decisions factor into a morality system alongside how you complete quests.

You have access to a full quest log with both main and side quests. Like fights, many of these have multiple solutions that can change the character’s perception of Mickey and affect the interactions available to you later on. Completing quests generally rewards you with Sparks, which serve as the main McGuffin in Epic Mickey. Sparks allow you to repair projection screens that allow Mickey to jump between different areas of the world. The quest system often requires you to travel through multiple worlds, but the game doesn’t have a fast travel system and the levels are linear gauntlets rather than sandboxes. This often makes returning to areas cumbersome and time-consuming. I found myself having to wait until I had made a list of quests that needed to be turned in at a specific location before taking the time to actually complete them all. This leads to what I would call Epic Mickey’s biggest weakness: its extremely uneven pacing. The game feels like it grinds to a halt while you wait to turn in quests to access new areas, which often require trudging across the world.

Once you escape the doldrums of tediously completing quests, the 3D platformer still feels pretty good moment to moment. I did have some concerns about the brush controls at first, as the first Epic Mickey was designed specifically for the Wii Remote and Nunchuck. Here, the controls have been tweaked so that both the camera and crosshair for the brush are controlled with the right stick. When spraying paint or thinner paint powder, the gyro controls also come into play. While this doesn’t quite offer the precision of the original controls, it’s largely functional, and there were only a couple of times when I had issues shooting paint through an oddly placed opening. It’s comparable to the dual analog controls in Epic Mickey 2, although they feel much better due to the significantly better performance overall.

The remastering work itself generally impressed me. This is the same team behind the Spongebob Squarepants Battle for Bikini Bottom remastering, and while they’re clearly not afraid to make significant visual improvements, they do a good job of maintaining a sense of consistency with the original graphics. In Epic Mickey Rebrushed, that generally boils down to updated materials with a full modern suite of normal and specular maps. While the original game used some more complex pixel shaders (a rarity on the Wii), this remaster extends that to most of the materials in the game. However, the often dim lighting and gloomy environments don’t always bring out these materials, so there are areas where you might not immediately notice them. While it’s subtle, there were many areas where it felt like the remastering visually delivered exactly what the original intended, but was limited by the hardware. The only area where the remastering fails visually in my opinion is the level of detail in the pop-ins for characters. In the original resolution these were quite hard to see, but in HD it’s quite obvious. These LODs persist even in photo mode, even if you move the camera directly towards them.

As for performance specifically on the Switch, it runs smoothly most of the time. I’d say it’s generally an improvement over the original version. Still, not everything is perfect. Hectic fights can result in some minor but prolonged drops in frame rate. And every now and then, when I go into a new area, I’ll see the game stutter for a moment. That’s the exception, not the rule, but it can still have an impact. On the plus side, image quality is pretty good on both configurations, once again highlighting the excellent art in a way the original version never really could.

Ultimately, I’m glad to see Epic Mickey get a second chance and escape from exclusivity after all these years. This isn’t a groundbreaking 3D platformer, but it’s a game that has had an incredible amount of heart put into it. While I would have liked this remaster to smooth out the rough edges of the game’s design a bit more, its respectful approach to updating the visuals is excellently done. Performance isn’t perfect on Switch, unfortunately, but it’s not game-breaking either. This is, and always has been, a game that will appeal to a very specific combination of 3D platforming and Disney fans, but for that audience, it remains a flawed but charming trip down memory lane.