Disaster Report: Fantasia (Genesis/Mega Drive)

No matter what you might think of the man Walt Disney, it’s hard not to respect what he tried to do with the 1940 animated film Fantasia. What began as a Silly Symphonies short to elevate Mickey Mouse back into the spotlight because once upon a time he was not an omnipresent oppressive presence in the Disney brand grew into something much more than that, Walt shifting gears to instead try and make a concert that aimed to elevate what the animation medium was capable of. Even now animation still struggles to get recognized for its potential and artistic nature, but Walt was trying to show the world its greatness as his third animated feature film ever.

It wasn’t just trying to please children or earn cash either despite its origins coming from the ballooning budget on the Mickey Mouse short. It contains plenty of slow and explanatory moments focused more on the music its adapting into animation, things like the visualized versions of musical notes on different instruments, the rather calm Ave Maria segment at the end, and the breaks to hear a live action composer introduce each piece being the kind of things a kid would fast forward through to reach Mickey Mouse and the dinosaurs. It was experimental and had a wild variety of ideas, from a battle between Greek Gods, a bunch of mushrooms dancing around, hippos doing ballet with ostriches, and a mountain sized devil unleashing the demons of Hell including harpies who, for some reason, have exposed breasts. Those monsters breasts might be one of the most telling things about the film though, its intent to be artistic rather than pleasing to kids and audiences making it stand out amidst other animated adaptations of music at the time where the focus was often on slapstick comedy and jokes.

 

Walt was very fond of Fantasia, no doubt because it was such an expressive and artistic film, so one could only imagine the horror he’d feel if he had lived to see the Sega Genesis adaptation of it. Developed not as a labor of love but as a way to earn a quick buck, Fantasia’s outing on Sega hardware butchered the music it included, seemed to have forgotten the principal rules of platform games in its design, and failed to even really adapt much of the film’s content, throwing in random segments it cooked up itself when it couldn’t be bothered to try and better match the movie’s situations. There was no artistic vision here, and while the Disney corporation has certainly turned into a monolithic money-seeking monster in the modern era, it still hurts to see the passionate work of its older days spoiled by something designed purely as a product.

 

Still, if we are going to try and attempt to see just what went wrong with this… well, calling it a transition from film to video game does a disservice to any other video game adaptation. This is more like a game built on someone remembering watching Fantasia as a kid and trying to recreate it with no new research, a few familiar images splattered on screen to try and patch over the vaguely reminiscent images we’ll encounter herein. I will try to be a bit more artistic ourselves in trying to look over this game though, structuring this review as if it was a four-part symphony itself. I might not have the musical knowledge to make it a perfect fit for the format, but to even try would be more respectful to the classics of music than what this game does with them.

 

OPENING SONATA: The Game That Should Not Exist

Far be it from me to say a game, no matter how bad, doesn’t deserve to exist. No matter how poorly the end contents play, the gaming medium is better for a more open embrace of creativity even when it fails. Even at its worst, a bad video game can still bring joy by delighting in its failures or making fun of what went wrong. I’m not saying that this game is so terrible it never should have been made. It certainly could have been made better and maybe the developers could have better spent their time on something more valuable instead like planting a tree or balancing their checkbooks, but we have it now, and… well, we really shouldn’t have it because it only exists thanks to some sloppy licensing agreements.

 

Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse was a big success for Sega, one that made them hungry to ride that train as far as it would take them. Unfortunately, their attempts to find something new for Mickey Mouse to do drew their attention to Fantasia, which would be celebrating its 50th anniversary around that time. To try and tie-in with that and produce another hit, Sega rushed to make a new game before their licenses could expire, but they went about it perhaps the absolute worst way they could. It was already doomed to be rushed so it could be out for the holiday season, and rather than putting their best teams on it to get the game out in a good state by then, they just plonked six inexperienced game developers on the project and expected them to somehow have it ready with barely any time to try and do the film justice.

 

The game would come out though… the end product a mess that hit so many platforming no-nos in its game design that it feels like the developers just found whatever solutions they could to a problem rather than trying to fix anything. The reason this game shouldn’t exist though has to do with the legal situation surrounding Fantasia. Now, the House of Mouse may be famously litigious nowadays, even suing daycares that dare put a happy smiling Donald Duck on their walls, but they were apparently not good enough back then to notice they accidentally gave Sega the rights to adapt Fantasia… a film that Roy Disney swore to his uncle would never receive any adaptations. This wouldn’t be the case forever though, because it seems as soon as Roy was dead, they went on to not only make Fantasia: Music Evolved for the Xbox 360 to give Fantasia another video game adaptation, but before the ground was really warm after Roy’s death, they’d make the Sorcerer’s Apprentice movie with Nicholas Cage in it that millions of people apparently saw but no one really talks about any more. Back in the 90s though, Fantasia was still verboten when it came to getting adapted, and Roy really wasn’t messing around. It had a short time on the market, but the absolute mess it turned out to be and the rejection of Roy’s promise lead to him demanding a recall of the product and the destruction of all recalled copies. Still, copies that were sold before then survive to this day, so we get to play a game that shouldn’t have been made and one that really isn’t justifying its existence with how it managed to slip through and briefly make it to store shelves.

The opening sonata of a piece helps establish what we’ll see going into the symphony, the first part even being called the exposition, so getting an early understanding of what the Fantasia game is like will be key here. We know why it exists now, but it’s time to get into how it takes the disparate shorts featured in the film and tries to connect them into one video game experience. Well, it all starts with Mickey Mouse falling asleep, dressed as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of course, and while he slept, his master’s suddenly important music that now exists for this game’s purposes was stolen. Now Mickey needs to collect the notes from those never-before-mentioned songs in his dreams because apparently that’s where the unknown thieves squirreled them away to. That’s it. Mickey’s having a dream and needs to find some music, although considering what we’ll see in his mindscape, it’s clear that this is actually a nightmare, especially when we come to look at the state of the music that plays during this adventure.

 

Now, the Sega Genesis hardware was never going to be able to reproduce the quality of real instruments, but the sound chip can do a pretty good job at making great music. There are plenty of memorable and enjoyable soundtracks on the system, but with six developers being rushed to try and make a whole game without really knowing how, perhaps it’s no surprise the classical music was mangled in its transition into 16-bit background music. We’ll start things simple with our first victim of this terrible conversion…

In Fantasia the movie, the dinosaur segment is an adaptation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the life and death of the dinosaurs playing out over the course of the song. In the Fantasia game, it plays over scenes of dodging dinosaur feet and the song itself has been converted into an unusual mess. What at first sounds like a melancholic oboist quickly forgetting what he’s meant to be playing and flailing his fingers in response becomes periodic gaps of silence interrupted by electronic spurts before some percussion interrupts it by going in a little too hard and with little direction. It’s nowhere near as bad as the other song for that segment of the game though…

Prehistoric Canyon doesn’t even seem to be adapting a song, and if it is, it’s only adapting at best seven or so notes of it. It’s environmental screeches punctuated by fart noises. There’s some rhythm to it so it is technically music, but before anything melodic can get going a shrill bird noise punches through and the brass instrument basically blares one note to tell everything to stop playing for a second before the swamp noises resume.

 

If you want your Sega Genesis to sound like nails on a chalkboard though, you’ll want the Greek Temple music.

Dance of the Hours has here been turned into shrill, painful assaults on your ear drums. It’s recognizable, but everything is so high pitched that the notes stab at you when they play. It’s like some playing really tiny bells right in your face while some digital brass in the background gets more and more upset about it. Don’t worry though, there are more screechy bells that join in the deeper into the song we get, so this Dance of the Hours turns into something you’ll not even want to hear for a few seconds, let alone over the course of an in-game level.

 

While we will get more tastes of this music as we continue on with looking at the rest of the game, we’ll wrap up this portion with a look at what’s become of Night on Bald Mountain.

What was once the darkest song on Fantasia’s soundtrack now is better described as someone slamming their hands down on a child’s toy keyboard over and over, and don’t worry, the song does change away from that only to get worse! 13 seconds in it takes on an almost dizzying new form before at 18 seconds in deciding to allow in what sounds like incredibly sped up audio of someone blowing on a moonshine bottle to make the music. And before we’ve even hit 30 seconds, the loop has begun in one of the hardest and longest levels in the game, so you will be utterly barraged by this constant keyboard hammering, although mercifully it does alternate to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t sound great either.

 

While no doubt this music WOULD be great if you’re a researcher who needs their test subjects to reliably have pounding headaches, this backing will turn the levels of Fantasia into discordant cacophonies, and as strange as it might sound, the Fantasia video game is one best played on mute.

 

We have spent plenty of time talking about the bad sides of it merely existing though and have yet to look at its failures as a video game, so lets continue or symphony of suffering to really get at the heart of the main failures of Mickey Mouse’s MIDI-backed journey.

 

ADAGIO: The Worst Sorcerer Ever

In the dream world of Mr. Mouse we find our Adagio, a slower but more expressive moment of the piece, and in games, the way the player expresses themselves is through the controls, and controls are one of the things at the heart of Fantasia’s incredible failure.

 

Mickey Mouse must not have a very high opinion of himself if his dream version’s abilities are so bad. The main way this magic-using mouse will seek to damage the enemies he encounter is, of course… jumping on their heads. However, while platform games had long since figured out that simply landing on an enemy’s head is good enough to kill them and it still can be challenging since you need the precision to land on them correctly, Fantasia decides that if someone is aiming to kill by crushing in a head with their feet, it has to be premeditated. When you jump towards an enemy, you must be holding down to make your jump dangerous, because otherwise Mickey will just collide with their head and suffer the damage himself. If you hold down on the directional pad though, instead he will bounce off of it, dealing some actual damage with a stomp that looks no different but is absolutely necessary for things like traversal and clearing areas of threats. Really though, there’s no reason you’d choose not to bounce, as there are obviously no benefits to instead just leaping into an enemy’s head to take damage. Funnily enough, this is a pseudo-sequel to Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse that required you to press down or the jump button again to make your jump damaging, meaning that the creators consciously recognized that there was something wrong with how you dealt damage in that game… and thought it was having an extra option for which button you press and not the fact you had to convert your jump into an attack while airborne to make it count. It doesn’t even seem to be a reliable means of killing the enemies when you are doing it due to hit detection problems, so even if this was the superior way of dealing damage with a jump in some worse version of reality, it’s still not functionally sound enough to support it.

Fantasia’s levels are absolutely packed with enemies though, many moving quickly or out of reach of your jump attacks. If this was your only means of attacking you’d be screwed, but don’t worry, you also have another incredibly unreliable means of dealing damage! Mickey does have some of the magic his Sorcerer’s Apprentice role affords him, but its so incredibly limited it’s nearly useless. A and B on the controller will cast either a small spell or big spell, but regardless of which one you use, it’s drawing on an incredibly limited pool of magic that is barely given any chance to fill up. Even if you risk you life to get every item that can fill up your magic reserves, the weaker little spell uses one point of magic and the big spell uses three points of magic. Magic doesn’t come often enough to be used as a practical tool in battle despite many enemies positioning themselves right in your path. It’s sometimes smarter to just take the damage they’ll deal and walk through them, knowing that spending any magic points drains a reserve you might need for an enemy who is literally out of range and pestering you otherwise. Getting your magic points to 10 usually means you had to endure quite a bit of pain, and while I have found videos of people getting it as high as 40, they did so by getting literally everything they could and still taking damage along the way in a run where they clearly knew everything to expect. It’s a tool that isn’t even that powerful but must be used conservatively since it is so easy to run out of it.

Health is definitely your biggest asset despite how quickly you might lose it. Survival is contingent on finding stars and other ways to replenish your health, and of course many of these will be behind many protective enemies or in bonus games where you’re shoved out if you dare to be so bold as to make contact with an enemy as they frantically move about at high speeds. You do have extra lives as well to recover from a death, and to really get a feel for the game’s levels and the surprise hazards that will take your lives or waste your magic, you’ll inevitably be losing them just to be able to pull off a successful run later.

 

Mickey’s terrible troubles with hurting his enemies certainly weigh down whatever experience awaits him, but it is the level design that is truly cruel, so now we move onto the main body of our painful performance…

 

SCHERZO: Mice Dream of Electric Shame

Scherzo is a term most often applied to shorter compositions and comes from the Italian word for joke, so there’s no better fitting word for this game’s paltry sum of four levels that, despite their rather small length, are still a complete embarrassment.

 

Before you begin to play, you’ll want to select the Easy difficulty. This is not me in any way judging your ability as a player, this is a safety measure for your own sanity’s sake. Difficulty in Fantasia is achieved in two ways that by no means improve the experience. The first is that, depending on your difficulty, you will need to do more head bounces or cast more spells to defeat enemies. On Easy, they are often reliably defeated in one, sometimes two or three if they’re meant to be tough. Magic spells can take a bit more shots to kill depending on their strength, but a three shot is usually close to a jump in strength, just to further contextualize how bad the magic is as an option most of the time. On Normal though, suddenly even simple enemies usually require two jumps, with harder foes increasing proportionally. Hard, of course, takes this even further, so rather than making enemies more difficult or changing something actually interesting to set these apart, their method is to instead make things slower and require you to test the game’s wonky hit detection multiple times to try and eliminate an enemy.

The difficulty also ties into your goal in this game. You might think, since these are linear levels, that getting to the end is the primary objective, but Fantasia is actually a game about collecting music notes hidden in the environment, the amount you need determined by the difficulty. Very few levels even contain enough music notes on the first pass to satisfy the Hard mode’s requirement, so when Mickey reaches the end of the stage and shows up to a composer to turn them in, he’ll be hurled back to the start of that stage to repeat it, artificially inflating the game’s length by making you go through the same terrible trials you had just overcome. Easy mode minimizes the chances of this happening, and with these two alterations you know exactly what you’re missing out on: a longer time spent playing a game that is held together with rubber bands and half-hearted prayers.

 

Common across many stages are a few baffling game design decisions. The music notes that you need to find are the first problem, as many of them are legitimately hidden in ways that make some of them naturally hard to come across. This is mainly a function of the game having plenty of things just appear when you just so happen to do the right thing. This is at its most egregious though with platforms, you know, those things you need to jump across to avoid dying? The things that make a game a platformer? Fantasia is teeming with platforms that won’t appear until some condition has been met, one of those sometimes being blindly jumping to where it is going to appear with no indication an invisible platform is waiting there to be found. Other times, it can be jumping onto a different platform that will suddenly make a few sprout to life, or maybe you’ll need to kill a certain enemy or grab a certain points item to make a slew of them spawn in. Points items are most often best avoided because they risk your life to grab for basically no return, but the game can keep its music notes and platforms behind you grabbing the right one that arbitrarily hides the ways you need to make progress in the game. With so many important hidden objects, you’ll have to scour many levels by jumping around and risking your life doing so.

 

Our second major concern across all stages is the enemies, who often fly in from the left at high speeds that you won’t really be able to react to if you’re in the way. Jump control is small and jumps and turning in place even are slow to start, meaning reacting to a divebombing bat or circling pterodactyl is nearly impossible. They’re rarely alone on the screen either, meaning that sometimes getting you out of a frying pan will throw you right into a different frying pan of pain. Bounce off one’s head and you might find yourself leaping into a flying enemy, one you’d still have to jump towards if you choose to not bounce to try and avoid it, and then there are enemies who have projectiles or weird movement patterns just to make sure that, as soon as you see a new part of the level, it’s bound to have something ready to hurt you even if it can’t reach you yet.

Each level has its own woes though, so let’s begin taking a closer look at them, starting with an area that mixes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’s famous walking brooms with evil versions of the cute dancing mushrooms as enemies. The area of the first level devoted to the brooms and shrooms is perhaps the easiest in the game, the enemies crowding the platforms and ground but it has no major gimmicks to its navigation. Enemies are still a nuisance, but you can get through only to find the more important segment of this level, one based on… the Disneyland castle? It takes place on a lake between two copies of the Disney castle that doesn’t seem to connect to anything from the film truly unless you get really generous with saying the fish and fairy portions are represented here despite it looking nothing like the areas the fish and fairies find in the film… although there are fish and fairies here so that must be their excuse for including this stage. Hopping across the lake on platforms that can instantly fall when jumped on to get to the safe grassy ground, you’ll need to make sure you don’t step in the water, because if you do… you take one heart of damage. There are instant death falls, but this odd bit of mercy comes into play later as well with Mickey being able to stand in lava in the last level and at first take only a single hit… but stay in water or lava for more than a split second, and your health will drain incredibly quickly. This helps make up for some of the cruel platform placement and bad controls, but it can also be hard to read if you are going to be hurt since the water damage animation can trigger when you’re on the water’s edge despite not hurting you, and then some water areas just don’t hurt you because they’re different in appearance.

The water level will include some swimming segments as well you’ll need to do to get enough music notes, filled with jellyfish, rays, and fish who move around with little concern for how you’ll move between them. As you push through the level though, bouncing off pelicans who are just inexplicably here for some reason, you’ll see a treasure chest on a little rock island that, if you jump into as you might expect is expected, you will get teleported back to an earlier segment of the level to do things over again. The rock island must be crossed to progress, is small and your jump barely able to clear the treasure chest if you jump while right next to it, and the alligator whose head is used as a spring before it will toss you into the treasure chest if you aren’t quick to react. Imagine now, on Hard mode, if you had been sent back to an earlier point with all the durable enemies respawned and the chance of accidentally triggering that teleport again means it can happen over and over, and you’ll see again why Easy is the difficulty of choice.

Moving on we find ourselves in the dinosaur level with its ugly tunes. The overabundance of pterodactyls is the primary concern as they’ll constant be flying in, even in areas where you need to time your movement to avoid stomping dinosaur feet and falling boulders, but there’s also a cave section where it can be hard to read what is background and what are viable platforms and two bonus areas that really make deviating from dinosaurs somehow more dangerous. One area, potentially based on where Mickey casts his dream magic in the movie, has invincible yellow magic balls flying about so close together that you’ll need to come to terms with the fact you’ll be injured repeatedly here and just have to hope you have full health to get through it all. A desert segment boasts of the “famous Jumping Cactus” in the manual, but what it really should be famous for is requiring multiple unreliable bounces across flying enemies to get a music note, some of the worst cases of suddenly appearing items and platforms, and a hole in the ground that is only indicated by an unassuming piece of the usually cluttered foreground that on no other case helps with the gameplay and only blocks vision of things like the music notes. In fact, the foreground decoration is a constant source of woe, hiding the oddly omnipresent mushrooms in many levels as well as other enemies or attacks that will blindside you because screen real estate found a random vine more important than visibility.

The final two levels though are a step above in awfulness, both competing to try and be the worst. The first of the two is based on the Pastoral Symphony and Dance of the Hours segments, and you can actually expect to see things from the film here that are directly taken from it, like the fauns, little pegasus babies, dancing ostriches, and dancing hippos that are blue now so they look more like the male Animaniacs hippo wearing a pair of tighty whities. The problem with this level though is it is entirely vertical, even its bonus areas sometimes vertical as well. The main area is a vertical climb filled with the player needing to find invisible cloud platforms, standing on cloud platforms that will disappear, piloting bubbles up that will pop if they touch any platform or enemy, and plenty of space so that a missed jump will send them plummeting down to an earlier portion of the level to do it all again. To try and invert the awfulness of falling down by accident though, one side area here instead invokes this design choice on purpose, the player starting at the top and needing to take constant blind drops below where they won’t be able to avoid many of the enemies, might miss the platforms with valuable notes or items, and where picking up items most often results in more enemies appearing to hassle you during your dangerous descent.

Somehow not content with these two vertical troubles, another segment of the level will now have you climbing up marble columns meant to evoke the areas the hippos and ostriches danced through in the movie. The problem is that these pillars and structures connect oddly but still maintain solidity. The lips of these structures are easy to get caught on, the game even expecting you at times to jump out of a small space to quickly turn around in the air and get on top of it, the more likely result being you get caught on the edge of the above platform and are either now stuck or falling down to an earlier area. This area also has many invisible clouds to suss out, bubbles that must be ridden but don’t appear reliably, and hippos that will fill gaps with their bodies so you either take a hit or waste magic on them.

The vertical woes could have given this the gold when it comes to the Awfulness Olympics, but the final level based on the Night on Bald Mountain portion of the film won’t be outdone so easily. Multitudes of enemies like flying fiery faces now fly about and often need to be killed to make platforms appear, a task complicated by angry bats flying at you and lava below or even instant death pits if you don’t bounce right. Falling bridges, enemies that require precise timing to get passed even when you can’t see them all when you need to start your jump, platforms that remain invisible as you walk on them but are quite often designed to try and force you to get hit by floating eye enemies… All the stops are whipped out for this long stage to both annoy you and end you. This is the last stage though, so it all culminates in the closest thing the game has to a boss battle… just a bunch of enemies spawning in in waves, the player needing to defeat the current foes to have more appear. Despite this Night on Bald Mountain featuring the monsters of the night, the big devil himself Chernabog does not make an appearance besides a few background details looking kind of like him, despite Chernabog being such a good candidate for a boss battle that the first Kingdom Hearts just jams him in near the end without explanation. Your final battle here is with fast moving enemies and ill-defined ground, and this happens to be the level that best conceals its music notes as well since there are no obvious bonus areas and a lot of appearing platforms to find.

 

But don’t worry! If you do get all the notes, you get to watch Mickey Mouse shake hands with the composer he turned them all into! So not only was your journey to reclaim the music all a dream with a weak goal, it also barely gets wrapped up in the end! Sure, it was only four full stages of suffering, although counting the side areas would send the count up since some are as long as levels themselves, but this is such a condensed package of poor concepts and control that it can sting just as much as the longer failures to play, but if you do want to make it a long game, you can always turn that difficulty up… But, with the flaws exposed, it is time to wrap things up, although if you do want a longer Disaster Report on this title, feel free to add in a few more sentences that reiterate the same information to make for a more challenging read.

 

CLOSING ALLEGRO

Allegro, to play quickly… but also brightly. I cannot deliver on half of that, but having laid out Fantasia’s problems for your consideration, it is time to combine it all into a quick and conclusive evaluation of the title as a whole, one that could have been glowing had the game just put in the effort to adapt the film well. Even if it was doomed to be despised by Roy Disney, there was still hope that the worlds of the movie could be turned into fun interactive activities. Even if it wasn’t ambitious enough to try and be more than a platformer, the heavy emphasis on environments in the segments would make for clear recognizable locations to pass through, memorable moments like the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus dueling could become a battle, and intervening in the conflict between Zeus and Bacchus could provide many unique hazards like the wine flood and the god’s thunderbolts to avoid. Instead, we got this, a game that barely bothers to look like the film at times and brings in random elements in weird ways. It’s almost a surprise the famous magic brooms are here considering that most other things are brought in in twisted forms like the blue hippos or the vague idea of dinosaurs.

 

Fantasia is a soulless adaptation that barely bothers to slap together enough elements of the original work to be recognizable only to then slap fans in the face with a game that overtaxes its awful controls, fills it levels with more enemies than necessary, hides necessary platforms and items for no reason, and takes the beautiful classic music that inspired magnificent animation and filters it into constant noise that will make your brain hurt. Despite being a short platformer unless you chose the tedious higher difficulties, pretty much every part of it fails in some way that ensures no matter how long you play it, you will be struggling to eke any enjoyment out of an idea that not only failed in its potential, but dishonored the wishes of many in its creation.

 

Not all licensed games are bad, not all rushed games are bad, and not all games made purely for profit are bad. Fantasia though, it combines all three of these common sources of game design issues, ropes in inexperienced developers, and creates a game that could serve as an excellent example of why any of these different stigmas have some validity. There is even a perfectly decent game adjacent to it in the form of Castle of Illusion that makes the many failures of this title more glaring, especially since it seems like nothing was carried over despite that being a potential way to ease the issues with developing a game so quickly. Instead, it manages to throw out many of the fundamentals you would think a new developer should have learned as part of their basics, the player not able to see many important things and not having the necessary abilities to deal with the ones they can see reliably.

 

A Fantasia game could have been a fantastic continuation of creative adaptation. It began with classic music that expressed emotion and story through sound, that music then giving birth to the animated visuals of the 1940 film… but when it hit the video game world, all that creativity and imagination was stripped away to make a platformer that is barely able to keep itself together and had no purpose besides getting Sega some quick cash for minimal effort.