Author Topic: Disney Magical World 2: Enchanted Edition (Switch) Review  (Read 1228 times)

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Disney Magical World 2: Enchanted Edition (Switch) Review
« on: May 06, 2022, 11:04:33 AM »

Mildly enchanted.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/60362/disney-magical-world-2-enchanted-edition-switch-review

I was a big fan of the original Disney Magical World. It was a cozy blend of Disney characters and life sims like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. Whatever the case, I had never played the sequel when it came out on 3DS in 2016. As such, this new, remastered, “enchanted” version of it was welcome. Unfortunately, Disney Magical World 2 did not hit me in the same way. That’s a strange thing to reckon with – and it’s hard to know exactly why it didn’t click – but we’ll get to that later.

Disney Magical World 2 places you in a hub world known as Castleton. After you customize your character and arrive, you meet Disney mainstays like Mickey and Goofy and are shown around town. Here’s your house, here’s how quests work, here’s how you make furniture and clothes, et cetera. You’re also exposed to the game’s sticker system, which has you collect stickers via various tasks, Mario 64-style, to unlock new areas and quests in the game.

It can be a little overwhelming at first because there are a lot of different little aspects to it and a fresh player won’t fully understand what the game is until they’ve played a 2-3 hour tutorial (it is brutal) and then play the game themselves for another few hours.

In essence, it is a life sim on guardrails. You hang out with Disney characters, make furniture and clothes to customize your space and outfit, work at a cafe in a mini-game, and go to various worlds based on Disney properties to meet characters and see little stories play out. These worlds include classics old and new like Winnie the Pooh, Lilo & Stitch, and Frozen. In order to add a little action, there are action-RPG style levels where you shoot your magic wand to defeat ghosts; this gets you material drops for crafting.

All of this is simplistic, and that’s fine. It’s polished, cozy Disney vibes for a target audience that is likely younger than me. My biggest issue is that to get to these game parts, you are reading dialogue box after dialogue box of Disney characters saying nothing of substance. This wouldn’t be a problem, but there’s just so much dialogue and barely any of it is voiced. Whatever pacing the game could have had grinds to a halt.

The life sim aspects are also fairly limited, and pale in comparison to games like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. And when the gameplay doesn’t have a ton going on, I’m wondering if kids actually want to sit through so much dialogue (with so little of it being interesting) to get to the game part. It admittedly lightens up as you get deeper into the game, but I was pretty bored pretty quickly.

It’s not all bad – the vibes are as chill as I remember. Castleton feels like you’re walking through the Magic Kingdom. So much classic Disney stuff is squished together, the colors are vibrant, and the buildings have a pastelly, rounded look to them. The Switch release brings the visual fidelity up a few notches, and while no one would think this is a native Switch game, it looks nice in its own right.

What’s funny is that everything I just described is how the first game was; 2 feels more like an expanded Disney Magical World 1 than a sequel to it (this game has a lot of the characters and worlds from the first game). It could be I’m just in a different place in my life where this isn’t what I’m looking for right now. But it could be for someone else.

I think this game is perfect for a hardcore Disney fan who wants an incredibly low-stakes game with very chill vibes where you hang out with your favorite Disney characters. Having this cool, cute Disney World has a strong appeal to it, and the final result is a polished game. I came out of this a little bored by the slow pace and limited gameplay, but in his review, Daan was more, ehrm, enchanted by the title on 3DS. Your mileage may vary.