In the single-player game, the player controls Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice through various side-scrolling levels in an attempt to collect musical notes that somehow went missing whilst he was asleep. Each of the four levels were based on amalgamations of the segments of Fantasia, each one around the elements: water (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dance of the Reed Flutes and Arabian Dance), earth (The Rite of Spring), air (Russian Dance, Pastoral Symphony and Dance of the Hours) and fire (Night on Bald Mountain, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor). The player defeats various enemies by jumping on them or by collecting magical bubbles that could be used to shoot at enemies as projectiles. In each level, the player collects a certain number of hidden magical notes in order for the song to play once again.
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Cleared on June 19th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 16/160)
What in Bald Mountain did I get myself into? When I looked at the game in a compilation of Sega Genesis games, I thought "hey, a video game based one of the most visually stunning movies of all time." A compilation of animation that synchronizes with orchestrated classical music and for the 40s, they were legendary and it still is to this very day. With all of the visual set pieces, making a video game based on the movie is a no-brainer. Hell, it would a total home run, a masterpiece. But oh my god, this game actually manages to be worse than Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusions for the Genesis.
I'll give this game credit for one thing, it actually looks like a 16 bit adaptation of the movie itself. Obviously it's never going to top the masterpiece, but it was serviceable and even made me want to play the game without any regards to how bad it truly is.
Some of the music is... ok I guess. Sorcerer's Apprentice would've been fine if the looping didn't sound as forced as it was. Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (The Opening Theme and one of The Final Level themes) is not that unbearable, but it feels like it belongs in an 8-bit game. But everything else is... uhh... not that good and that's probably putting it generously. Some of the songs has this grating pitch that sounds even worse than an 8-bit game. Try suffering through the Greek Temple or Prehistoric Jungle. Night on Bald Mountain, more like Night on Fart Mountain! I know the Sega Genesis sound chip is worse than what the Super Nintendo would offer, but like, I've seen some amazing songs on the system including Sonic the Hedgehog games, Contra Hard Corps, and even in Mickey Mouse's case, Castle of Illusion sounded really good. And believe it or not, Earthworm Jim did their own take on Night on Bald Mountain and it sounds even better even if it was for only 28 seconds, so what the heck happened here?
Well, I'll fill you in on the details later, but right now, let's address how the game actually plays. The controls are wonky. At points it might not seem so bad when you are making proactive decisions, but reactive decisions, however, it will not always register on time. What's even more questionable is how the jump is handled. At first I thought you can't hurt the enemies by jumping on them like you could in Castle of Illusions and the only way to do so is through spells which are rather limited. It turns out you could hit them by jumping on them, but you need to press down while doing so. I might not have liked how Castle of Illusions did it where you press the jump button again while in the air to hit them, but to give it credit, they show you how to do it in the opening cutscene. I couldn't even figure out Fantasia's jump attack until I looked at one of the reviews down below.
So even if you manage to get used to the controls, you have to deal with a multitude of enemies and poor level design with jumps that can be very difficult to pull off and enemies positioned to almost ensure that they will hit you, and the ones that move can sometimes have unpredictable patterns. I had to use Save States in order to actually stand a chance.
So why give it a 1.5 stars out of 5? Referring to my ranking system, this should go in the garbage. Well, it came close, but actually, there was some fun that I had with this game and it's not in the way the developer may have intended. See, once you get past the first level, there is a fairy underneath the cave where a dinosaur foot is stomping the ground. It leads to an optional area where you can go through it to collect three notes with each of them giving you three health points, and 2 spellbooks which give you 3 spell ammo each. The developers may have intended for it to be an optional area that you visit once and even if you could visit it multiple times, the spellbook and the notes wouldn't respawn... except they do. The thing is, to proceed with the game, you need enough notes (20000 points) with the number varying by the difficulty you choose. If you complete the level and you don't have enough notes, you are sent back to the beginning of the level. If that sounds messed up, then just endure the first level and spam the caverns. It's bad level design, some of the worst in the game, but once you get it down, you can just farm spells and lives. That way, with a barrage of spells, the rest of the game becomes less frustrating.
I think the most interesting thing about this game is the lore behind the game's creation process. So Castle of Illusion was a success for Sega, and reportedly, they wanted to make another game before their license expired, but for some dumb reason, they put six developers who are ill-equipped to tackle a property as big as Mickey Mouse. Apparently they accidentally allowed Sega to adapt the movie, and when Disney's nephew Roy found out, he was pissed since he did not want it adapted as a promise to his uncle, and to find out that the game was this bad, he demanded a recall.
The fact that Sega had the Fantasia rights at one point, and instead of proving that a video game adaptation would've been amazing, decided to be lazy by assigning the wrong team, only to get royally screwed by the nephew of Walt Disney himself when the game hit the market is a combination of bizarre, tragic, and just hilarious. If there's a silver lining in this, Kingdom Hearts has represented Fantasia in incredible ways with Chernabog being the best boss fight in Kingdom Hearts 1 and Symphony of Sorcery being the best world in Dream Drop Distance.
What in Bald Mountain did I get myself into? When I looked at the game in a compilation of Sega Genesis games, I thought "hey, a video game based one of the most visually stunning movies of all time." A compilation of animation that synchronizes with orchestrated classical music and for the 40s, they were legendary and it still is to this very day. With all of the visual set pieces, making a video game based on the movie is a no-brainer. Hell, it would a total home run, a masterpiece. But oh my god, this game actually manages to be worse than Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusions for the Genesis.
I'll give this game credit for one thing, it actually looks like a 16 bit adaptation of the movie itself. Obviously it's never going to top the masterpiece, but it was serviceable and even made me want to play the game without any regards to how bad it truly is.
Some of the music is... ok I guess. Sorcerer's Apprentice would've been fine if the looping didn't sound as forced as it was. Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (The Opening Theme and one of The Final Level themes) is not that unbearable, but it feels like it belongs in an 8-bit game. But everything else is... uhh... not that good and that's probably putting it generously. Some of the songs has this grating pitch that sounds even worse than an 8-bit game. Try suffering through the Greek Temple or Prehistoric Jungle. Night on Bald Mountain, more like Night on Fart Mountain! I know the Sega Genesis sound chip is worse than what the Super Nintendo would offer, but like, I've seen some amazing songs on the system including Sonic the Hedgehog games, Contra Hard Corps, and even in Mickey Mouse's case, Castle of Illusion sounded really good. And believe it or not, Earthworm Jim did their own take on Night on Bald Mountain and it sounds even better even if it was for only 28 seconds, so what the heck happened here?
Well, I'll fill you in on the details later, but right now, let's address how the game actually plays. The controls are wonky. At points it might not seem so bad when you are making proactive decisions, but reactive decisions, however, it will not always register on time. What's even more questionable is how the jump is handled. At first I thought you can't hurt the enemies by jumping on them like you could in Castle of Illusions and the only way to do so is through spells which are rather limited. It turns out you could hit them by jumping on them, but you need to press down while doing so. I might not have liked how Castle of Illusions did it where you press the jump button again while in the air to hit them, but to give it credit, they show you how to do it in the opening cutscene. I couldn't even figure out Fantasia's jump attack until I looked at one of the reviews down below.
So even if you manage to get used to the controls, you have to deal with a multitude of enemies and poor level design with jumps that can be very difficult to pull off and enemies positioned to almost ensure that they will hit you, and the ones that move can sometimes have unpredictable patterns. I had to use Save States in order to actually stand a chance.
So why give it a 1.5 stars out of 5? Referring to my ranking system, this should go in the garbage. Well, it came close, but actually, there was some fun that I had with this game and it's not in the way the developer may have intended. See, once you get past the first level, there is a fairy underneath the cave where a dinosaur foot is stomping the ground. It leads to an optional area where you can go through it to collect three notes with each of them giving you three health points, and 2 spellbooks which give you 3 spell ammo each. The developers may have intended for it to be an optional area that you visit once and even if you could visit it multiple times, the spellbook and the notes wouldn't respawn... except they do. The thing is, to proceed with the game, you need enough notes (20000 points) with the number varying by the difficulty you choose. If you complete the level and you don't have enough notes, you are sent back to the beginning of the level. If that sounds messed up, then just endure the first level and spam the caverns. It's bad level design, some of the worst in the game, but once you get it down, you can just farm spells and lives. That way, with a barrage of spells, the rest of the game becomes less frustrating.
I think the most interesting thing about this game is the lore behind the game's creation process. So Castle of Illusion was a success for Sega, and reportedly, they wanted to make another game before their license expired, but for some dumb reason, they put six developers who are ill-equipped to tackle a property as big as Mickey Mouse. Apparently they accidentally allowed Sega to adapt the movie, and when Disney's nephew Roy found out, he was pissed since he did not want it adapted as a promise to his uncle, and to find out that the game was this bad, he demanded a recall.
The fact that Sega had the Fantasia rights at one point, and instead of proving that a video game adaptation would've been amazing, decided to be lazy by assigning the wrong team, only to get royally screwed by the nephew of Walt Disney himself when the game hit the market is a combination of bizarre, tragic, and just hilarious. If there's a silver lining in this, Kingdom Hearts has represented Fantasia in incredible ways with Chernabog being the best boss fight in Kingdom Hearts 1 and Symphony of Sorcery being the best world in Dream Drop Distance.
i hope that whoever composed this song has a wonderful day in their mental institution 😄
The movie: a beautiful homage to classical tunes with wonderfully directed and staged high quality animation and background work.
The game: the worst butchering of classical tunes ever made with level design consisting of inconsistently staged enemy positions and movements with high quality animation and backgrounds but cringe-induncing animation loops. Aladdin, also for the Genesis would top this the following year.
The game: the worst butchering of classical tunes ever made with level design consisting of inconsistently staged enemy positions and movements with high quality animation and backgrounds but cringe-induncing animation loops. Aladdin, also for the Genesis would top this the following year.
I will not die until I complete this game fuck you Fantasia you will not win
bad bad bad bad bad
This was one of my childhood games and I never made it past the first level; I always wondered if I was just playing it wrong. After dabbling with it again on and off over the past couple months I've come to the conclusion that my kid self had the right idea. Below is a by-no-means-exhaustive list of what's wrong with it:
The controls are laggy, unresponsive, and unintuitive (I still have the manual from before, but if I didn't it's conceivable I could have played for hours without knowing you can jump on enemies to defeat them thanks to needing to hold down while jumping on them). It's nearly impossible to tell what you can jump/walk on and what's part of the scenery, and just as impossible to know what is a hazard and what isn't. Enemy movement patterns are completely inconsistent, making each moment a test of memorization because it's impossible to know what any enemy is going to do even if you've seen it before. But perhaps the worst part of the game is that it's a collectathon with completely arbitrary and illogical conditions to find the collectibles, which means having to replay the stages over and over in order to either find all the items or rack up a high enough score to advance - seriously, every normal longplay of this game on YouTube looks more like a speedrun because of the sheer amount of "what the heck did the player just do there and how did they even think to do that?!"
For the final addition of insult to injury, the soundtrack features some of the worst rearrangements of classical tunes ever - in most cases the voicing is so bad that the main melody is completely inaudible over the accompanying line. And any soundtrack that turns https://youtu.be/bcDCHnAd8N4?t=209 into https://youtu.be/cawAz_xNzE8?t=55 is worth a half-star rating all by itself. I barely made it halfway through the game but life's too short to spend any more time on this - brb, gonna listen to Claudio Abbado's Rite of Spring to detox (I highly recommend it, by the way).
The controls are laggy, unresponsive, and unintuitive (I still have the manual from before, but if I didn't it's conceivable I could have played for hours without knowing you can jump on enemies to defeat them thanks to needing to hold down while jumping on them). It's nearly impossible to tell what you can jump/walk on and what's part of the scenery, and just as impossible to know what is a hazard and what isn't. Enemy movement patterns are completely inconsistent, making each moment a test of memorization because it's impossible to know what any enemy is going to do even if you've seen it before. But perhaps the worst part of the game is that it's a collectathon with completely arbitrary and illogical conditions to find the collectibles, which means having to replay the stages over and over in order to either find all the items or rack up a high enough score to advance - seriously, every normal longplay of this game on YouTube looks more like a speedrun because of the sheer amount of "what the heck did the player just do there and how did they even think to do that?!"
For the final addition of insult to injury, the soundtrack features some of the worst rearrangements of classical tunes ever - in most cases the voicing is so bad that the main melody is completely inaudible over the accompanying line. And any soundtrack that turns https://youtu.be/bcDCHnAd8N4?t=209 into https://youtu.be/cawAz_xNzE8?t=55 is worth a half-star rating all by itself. I barely made it halfway through the game but life's too short to spend any more time on this - brb, gonna listen to Claudio Abbado's Rite of Spring to detox (I highly recommend it, by the way).