Disney LongBox Reviews : Disney Magical World 2 Review
This year, we have seen the downfall of Disney Interactive and internal game development from the Mouse House with the closures of Disney Infinity , Marvel Avengers Alliance and other Disney products on mobile devices. With the delay of Kingdom Hearts 2.8 HD to January of next year, we have had an unusual lack of Disney video games this year, in terms of Marvel and Star Wars however, we have only had Lego titles for both IPs this year , as for the Disney brand itself, only two have been released this year, both 3DS titles, earlier we had Disney Art Academy and the subject of this review, Disney Magical World 2.
Originally released last year in Japan, Disney Magical World 2 finally comes to American and European audiences this month after much anticipation courtesy of Nintendo who handles publishing duties from Bandai Namco. The game has brought with it a lot of improvements and new goodies to warrant your purchase. Let’s dive in shall we ?
STORY
You are the newest citizen of Castleton as you arrive via hot air balloon with the help of Letta, the talking floating letter . You are welcomed by Mickey and his friends in this hybrid of Tokyo Disneyland and a small Fantasyland village with unlimited possibilities. You are then welcomed into your very own house right next to Mickey’s as the kingdom give you multiple tasks to handle. From running your very own cafe, collecting stickers, fishing, cooking, helping people in need plus fending off evil ghosts in five different worlds based around famous Disney movies, there is much to do in this small town.
Each of these worlds have their own little plots that loosely follows its original story or provides a continuation of the adventures of those characters. Each world has 8 to 18 episodes to clear as some are action dungeon focused like Frozen and Alice in Wonderland while some like Winnie the Pooh and Snow White serve as a tutorial for gardening , mining and item hunting.
Lilo and Stitch, the game’s first word, involves the duo getting ready for a luau competition as a mysterious stranger ( You) shows up in Hawaii. They decide to give him or her a tour of the islands until ghosts cause havoc around the island as blame is then pinned onto Stitch due to his previous badness level. Jumba decides to help you take care of the ghosts by providing you with new wands and suits to better handle the situation as the episodes proceeds.
Winnie the Pooh follows basic abridged versions of the classic shorts with the iconic Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit’s home scene and Tigger’s tree fiasco being re-created for the game. But one interesting aspect is that it explains what happens when Kanga and Roo move into the Hundred Acre Wood. Something not explored in other media.
Frozen explores a unique story about a prophecy that the kingdom of Arendelle has where an event occurs every thousand years where evil spirits come to haunt the Northern Mountain and a powerful magician has to defeat them all. There is also a side plot of Elsa preparing for Anna’s birthday but work gets in the way so her plans to spend time with Anna beforehand end up not working. Anna decides to hold a Snowman festival to cheer everyone up in the meantime.
Snow White is essentially the filler world of the game, you do not fight ghosts and there is barely a plot. You pretty much just befriend the dwarfs one at a time to unlock their individual mines for Dream Stone harvesting until you unlock the Rainbow Cavern at end game.
The Litte Mermaid takes place between Ariel’s Beginning and the first movie, the plot resolves around Sebatian losing most of his musician friends due to the interference of the ghosts. You must go around the ocean to rescue them all so that Sebastian’s concert may go on. Ariel tags along since she loves humans and asks us about many of our junk that are thrown in the ocean. Sorry, Scuttle, you’re out of a job.
Finally in terms of worlds in this game,Alice in Wonderland has you helping out the Queen of Hearts with her bidding until an imposter takes your form and wreaks havoc in Wonderland ruining tea parties and court sessions. Don’t bother asking Cheshire Cat for help, he’ll just make it worse for you. Lots of ghost fighting in this one as the maze levels return from the first game.
GAMEPLAY
Disney Magical World 2 is part of a video game genre called Life Simulation, its essentially a reproduction of real life that you can play in a virtual setting so it can range from fishing, cooking to running a hotel. But in this case, it is very close to another Nintendo product called Animal Crossing where you live in a town full of beloved citizens and do mundane tasks to repay the rent set by Tom Nook. But in Magical World 2, you stay in your house for free and only do the tasks to run your restaurant, make new clothes or unlock dream mini games based on floats from the Main Street Electrical Parade at the Disney Parks.
You will be spending the majority of the game helping out the citizens of Castleton and various Disney characters. The game boasts a total of 120 Disney characters that you may encounter. The characters not attached to a story level are randomized every 6 hours throughout the town. These characters are unlocked after you do a themed dinner at your restaurant. There are over 20 different parties that you may partake in. Some of these characters range from popular ones such as Aladdin, Wreck it Ralph, Jack Skellington to the more obscure and rare Disney characters such as the Three Caballeros, Hercules, Marie from the Aristocats and the Three Little Pigs.
You will get a lot of items from helping out these characters but you may also find items by fishing, some of these include flowers and seeds that you may use at the Winnie the Pooh world to make ingredients for food. The garden alone will provide lots of game time since there are more than 130 seeds to find in the game.
One last thing before we move on to the dungeons, you may have noticed all the screenshots used for this review. All of these were taken in-game thanks to a new function introduced in Magical World 2 where by holding the L Button and pressing the R button, you can snap a picture at any time in the game.
DUNGEONS
Now to the other main meat of the game, the dungeons. These will vary from 4 to 8 rooms depending on the difficulty of the dungeon. They may have different themes, but they are essentially the same. There are rooms where it is straight up fights , rooms with some fishing holes and some rooms with a gimmick. These may range from destroying a certain amount of barrels in 45 seconds. Destroying a certain amount of ghosts in a time limit or only one of a kind of ghosts in a time limit. With that one, you need to ignore the other ghosts and focus on the ones with a red aura. The more time you take with these challenges, the more magic stones you lose. These are used to unlock a huge chest at the end of the dungeon full of rare goodies you may need in town.
At the end of each of these dungeons, you will encounter a boss or a World Boss Ghost. These are tougher variants of the ghosts you have been facing in this game. They have predictable patterns but their ghost friends will make things harder for you if you are under-levelled or have a wand that is ineffective against certain ghosts (You go to Yen Sid or Daisy to get higher grade wands and clothing for the dungeons). Your reward for beating these bosses is usually the next wand or clothing recipe which you can hand over to Daisy or Yen Sid.
SHOPPING
You can spend your money at two shops in Castleton. The first is McDuck’s managed by Uncle Scrooge and his great nephews.You can buy many plants, seeds, clothing and decorations for the restaurant here. There are also holiday themed items that you can spend with StreetPass coins as well.
The other shop is Daisy’s boutique where you can make over 300 clothes, 200 accessories and many other items. This is no easy task since this will require lots of grinding in the dungeons for those rarer ingredients, so prepare for lots of visits to Arandelle and Wonderland.
DANCING
One major new component of Disney Magical World 2 is dancing. This could be seen as a tribute of the various stage shows at the Disney Parks. The first dancing sections are in the restaurant during the character parties. When you attend a Silver or Gold rank party, speaking to one of the characters ( Usually the one in the centre) You unlock a musical note on the stage. You walk to that note to initiate a dancing cutscene. You can change angles to focus on you or the characters. The more you switch, the higher the Pose meter goes. When it is full, you can take a special photo with one of the characters. There are over 5 different songs used in these dance numbers. 2 of them were written specially for this game.
The second dancing mini game is unlocked after you set up a character party featuring any of the Disney princesses except Ariel for obvious reasons (Rapunzel, Belle, Anna and Elsa, Jasmine, Snow White, Aurora, Cinderella). These are not simple cutscenes however, these are a full fledged rythym game. Each princess has two stages ( Easy and Difficult) to unlock special prizes exclusive to these balls.
DREAM FLOATS
These are special mini-games that are unlocked by taking pictures with the characters at the parties you attend. To enter these dream stages, you must collect puzzle pieces through character interactions or Twinkle Stones earned from the Dwarf mines. Once a photo frame and its pieces are unlocked, you may enter the dream world by going to your room at your house. Once you lie down on the bed, the music from Tokyo Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade kicks in as you are transported to a huge float with your favourite friends on them.
You can talk to each of these characters to do a special action to earn Nice Points. Nice Points are used to unlock items that aren’t available at the two shops, they are mainly items from the first game. Once you do all the actions, you may leave the stage or if you connect two or more dreams to the first one, you may move on to one of those other dreams. These are loads of fun and perfect for taking photos.
One of my highlights is the Frozen Dream Float, there are many cinematic moments as well as the ability to change the music to May J’s cover of Let It Go. She also sings the theme song to this game called Sparkle.
Doing these Dream Floats will also unlock special items such as clothing or items for a Sparkle themed character party. There are 20 Dream Floats to enjoy overall.
STICKERS
All of these goodies aren’t available from the start, you need to earn them through collecting Stickers, essentially achievements. The 3 hour long tutorial alone gives you over 15 stickers. You unlock your house at 2, the shops at 5,6 and 7 and finally your restaurant at 10 stickers. From then on, you unlock a world every 10 stickers when an event happens at the castle. Some examples are Stitch vandalizing the castle floors, a baloon from Pooh’s world hovering at the castle centre or Olaf showing up out of nowhere at the beach relaxing.
The rest of the stickers are mainly used to unlock new items at Daisy’s or Chip n Dale’s Workshop. These are unlocked every 5 stickers. Once you reach the big 100, you need to head to the Castle to unlock a ending cutscene and the credits. You have beaten the game but you can still return to unlock the rest of the items in the game. There are also 15 harder stickers unlocked so have fun getting those.
FINAL THOUGHTS
While this was a blast to play through ,this is not a game for every Disney fan out there. The game requires long hours of sessions to properly enjoy the game. You may want to play in bursts of 15 to 30 minutes but you may miss events that happen at certain times of the day. I played over 24 hours of this game since I bought it and I have enjoyed every minute of it but I know down the line I will play less and less of the game when I have gained every item.
I will come back to this game once DLC and holiday events start to happen since those tend to be a lot of fun. At the time I am writing this review, the Halloween event is happening and lots of decorations and costumes are around and plenty of Halloween items to unlock.
This is the perfect Disney game to keep yourself or your kids busy until the holiday season. The game is gorgeous for a 3DS title but the lack of some Disney characters including Merida and Tiana just left me baffled. The movies were out before the first one was made. Maybe they will pop up in Disney Magical World 3 along with the Zootopia characters.
I give this game a 8.5 out of 10. This is Mat from DISKingdom and hope you enjoyed my review of Disney Magical World 2 for the Nintendo 3DS
PROS:
-Visuals, Songs including Sparkle invoke Disney magic, Gameplay, Tons of Content worth the Price, Dream Worlds, Dancing Mini-Games, 120 Disney characters to interact with, Stickers are not too hard to obtain, tons of replay ability
CONS
-Lack of Voice Acting apart from Mickey and the Gang, Growing certain crops can be too long ( 2 Hours and over), lack of variety in the dungeon layouts, missing recent Disney characters. May not appeal to all Disney fans