REVIEW - Disney's Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald (1995)

GENRE(S): Platform
RELEASED: December 1995
AVAILABLE ON: GBA, SNES
DEVELOPER(S): Klein Computer Entertainment (GBA), Capcom (SNES)
PUBLISHER(S): Capcom
PLAYERS: 1-2

Western civilization hardly knew of a third Magical Quest game's existence before the year 2003, when this very obscure game was finally re-released outside Japan on the Game Boy Advance as a part of the Magical Quest remake series. Disney's Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald, as good as that title alone sounds, is most definitely the weakest link of the trilogy, and if this is indeed what the game was like back in 1995, they could've easily left it to its obscurity. I wouldn't have minded.

The magic is gone

Huey, Dewey and Louie get in Donald's face so bad that Donald sends them to the attic. The boys find a mysterious storybook and get pulled into its world by the evil King Pete. Guided by the queen of the Storybook Land, Mickey and Donald enter the book in order to save the boys from the clutches of the tyrannical king.

I was very intrigued by this game. After two games that starred either Mickey or Minnie Mouse and only teased us with cutscenes featuring Donald Duck, finally I could actually play as my favourite classic cartoon character of all time. Donald hasn't been a fully playable character in many games, so I was more pumped about this game than I ever was about the whole Magical Quest series. Well, as it turns out, some of it's the same old crap in a different package, it's less imaginative than the previous two games combined, and it's simply not fun to even try to control. Once again, challenge is a wholly different thing than frankly being unable to enjoy a game.

God, this level sucks.

This is more of a straight port of the Super Famicom game than the previous Game Boy Advance games, and judging by this, they really didn't even try to make the game look any better than the first two Magical Quests. It's a run-of-the-mill 16-bit platformer, still on a straight line with the first game that was made three years prior - not ugly, but not special in any way. The music's irrelevant, leftover stuff from the shelf. Everything about this game screams out the death of enthusiasm. You can almost smell that Capcom's time with Disney was coming to an end when this game was originally made for the Super Famicom.

The basic gameplay's a bit too similar to the previous games. This time, though, both playable characters have distinct changes to what they can do with their outfits. That's pretty much the game's only true difference to its predecessors besides the save feature. This Game Boy Advance version adds in some minigames to be accessed within the levels.

Take that, you evil flower, you.

The one feature that destroys the game is the costume changing system. It's still as awkward as always, for starters, but the clumsiness of the new costumes takes the cake. First off, we've got a warrior costume, which is quite all right for the most part, you can do some pretty heavy damage on all enemies, regardless whether you're playing as Mickey or Donald. Then, comes the dreaded woodcutter outfit, which comes with a rope that you can use to climb trees. It's overtly difficult to use as it occasionally fails to latch on, and in the forest level where you first gain this outfit, you need to use it all the time, fight a sub-boss while jumping from tree to tree over a bottomless pit, and get this, you have automatic side-scrolling to worry about. Oh, that's not all, the boss also spits these basically unavoidable spores at you which slow you down and weaken your jumps. Very consumer-friendly "difficulty". Last, we have another magician outfit - the usefulness of this one varies, between characters and even between the enemies you use magic on. It very often does jackshit to enemies from an offensive standpoint, and it has got a very weird, selective range.

The whole design of the game is very unappealing, it looks like such a cheap sequel and one can't even begin to compare the boss fights in this game to those in the first one - hell, even the second one had some much more impressive cheeses. Here they're just as much of leftovers as everything else in this game - a snake hiding in the desert sand, a huge, angry-looking flower etc.... not very original. Disney's Magical Quest 3 is a highly standard platformer, there are no positive changes to the Magical Quest formula at all, even Donald doesn't make it any more comfortable to play... the game might not be the worst one around, but it's an awful disappointment.

GRAPHICS : 7.8
SOUND : 6.2
PLAYABILITY : 6.0
LIFESPAN : 5.5
CONCLUSION : 5.8

TRIVIA

a.k.a. Mickey to Donald no Magical Quest 3 (JAP), The Magical Quest 3

GameRankings: 65.56%