Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved Review

Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved is not a movie tie-in game that's about three-quarters of a century late. Rather, it's a game inspired by the idea behind the Disney classic - an artistic visualization of music. The game takes care of the artistic visualization for you, but leaves the music to you. Your role will require you to be one part conductor and one part mix master DJ, and will leave you feeling more a part of the music than in just about any other music game to come before it.

In some ways Music Evolved could be described as "Conductor Hero", a game that does for aspiring symphony conductors what Guitar Hero did for wannabe rock guitarists, although it will no more prepare you to lead a symphony orchestra than Guitar Hero helped gamers land gigs at the Whisky A Go Go. The goal is to time various arm sweeps and punches to hit on-screen cues in time with the music. Succeed and you're awarded points and the next phrase of the song continues. Miss your cue and the next bit of music is muffled, you miss out on any points, and you break your current score streak. Unlike the previously mentioned Guitar Hero games, you can't "fail" a song here. Miss every cue and the song will still play through to the end, although you won't score any points or earn any stars on the post-song five star performance rating scale. In the story mode, each song will have a goal that needs to be completed in order to progress - reach a certain score, perform a certain move a minimum number of times, etc. - but the bar is always set low enough that even younger gamers shouldn't have too much trouble meeting the requirements to advance.

Music Evolved requires a Kinect to play, a peripheral no longer guaranteed to be owned by every Xbox One owner. This is a "hard" requirement in that there's no way to play the game without one. Personally, I've had such a poor experience with Kinect games in the past that I was apprehensive when I played the game for the first time. Much to my pleasant surprise, Music Evolved works quite well with the Kinect. Some of the mini games and navigation controls generate the same frustrations as Kinect games in the past, such as when you are trying to select and zoom in on an object in the environment between songs, but you can work through these with a little persistence. The most important thing is that the controls are spot-on during the music, catching every sweep, swirl, and punch you perform during a song. It all works so well that if this is the first Kinect game that you've ever played, you might wonder what all the fuss has been about.

The game features a story mode that casts you into the role of the sorcerer's apprentice. While the sorcerer Yen Sid (read it backwards) is from the original Fantasia film, you don't play that apprentice and you won't be chasing bucket-bearing brooms. In Music Evolved, Yen Sid uses the power of musical magic to watch over a collection of worlds known as the realms. After guiding you through a handful of songs so that you can earn the stars on your magical cap in what amounts to an extended tutorial, Yen Sid vanishes and the realms are threatened by an encroaching darkness known as the "Noise". You must then work with fellow apprentice Scout (although you'll be doing all of the work, she's just there to provide exposition) to free the realms from the Noise.

Each realm is a small, side-scrolling zone about three screens wide in which hot spots lead to small interactive musical mini games or one of the game's full songs. Each realm is built around a theme, such as an undersea reef, a fantasy woodland, or a space station in orbit. The primary method of removing the Noise from these realms is by playing the songs and meeting the goals for each, although the mini games in which you coax music out of interactive objects in the environment play a role as well. The realms are imaginative and the artwork is great, but there's no real story to each other than it is in danger from the Noise. The animation that accompanied the musical pieces in the Fantasia movie told stories, and each one of them were memorable. That's missing from Music Evolved, where the realms are pretty pictures but not much more than that.

The story mode feels more like something to fill the gaps between songs than it does a full interactive story, but it is the primary way for you to unlock all of the songs for free play outside of the story. There's an option to just unlock everything, but if you do you'll prevent progress through the story mode, and the achievements that come with it.

All that aside, the songs are the real attraction here and playing through them is enjoyable enough to warrant purchasing the game. And it goes beyond the feeling that your motions are a part of the music; each song includes the original track and two remixes, and each instrument class (percussion, rhythm, etc.) has its own track within each version. As you play, you will be given the opportunity to select an instrument's track, and you're free to pull them all from the same mix or create your own mix out of a combination of instrument tracks. Each mix is interesting in and of itself, but it really is music magic that everything works so well together no matter how you combine the instruments. The song list includes a variety of music from a number of genres, but the classical pieces really stand out. There's a reason they continue to feel so powerful centuries after they were written. The weak links in the music lineup come from the handful of pop tunes, some of which already feel tired if you hear them on the radio today (yes, Lady Gaga and Cee Lo Green, I mean you).

The songs can be played outside of the story mode for fun and high scores, and there will be additional tracks available for purchase and download to your library. You can also play the songs with two players standing side by side, but you'll need a fair amount of room to do so safely and to keep the Kinect happy. If you have that room, you'll have some fun with the friendly competition, especially when it comes to picking the tracks to put in the mix.

Music Evolved may be a rhythm game at its core, but it's an inventive one and is recommendable to anyone who spent a lot of time with Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or similar games. I wish there was more to the story mode and that it was more engaging, because it soon begins to feel too much like filler to extend the title's hours of gameplay. And hopefully there will be a rich library of downloadable songs made available to help offset the eventual and inevitable wearing off of the gameplay's novelty, but for now I am having a lot of fun being a part of the music.

Final Rating: 85%. For the air conductor in you.