A few days after the Christmas snowfall in Alabama, while we waited for the lasagna to finish cooking, we popped a copy of Epic Mickey into the Wii and I played a bit of it. I got past the first, easy battle and entered the hallway, where a cutscene began. My mother, who mostly plays Snood, wanted to know why Mickey wasn't speaking. "He's always talked," she noted, and for almost anyone alive that's true. Mickey started talking in 1929, just a year after his famous appearance in the sound-synched Steamboat Willie. Sound has been a famous part of Mickey's history, so it's alienating, especially to non-gamers, to run into an essentially silent version of the Mouse in Epic Mickey. I think the decision to eschew spoken dialogue is defensible, and even clever. However, I also feel that the way dialogue was handled didn't serve the game's aesthetic, because it replaced speech with text.
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