Fantasia: Music Evolved Review

When Walt Disney made the first Fantasia film in 1940, it is hard to imagine that he had the vision of Fantasia: Music Evolved rattling around somewhere in the back of his head. Even when Fantasia 2000 was released as part of an ever on-going experiment of music and animation, it still was hard to imagine it as any sort of stand-alone video game. Leave it to the creative minds at Harmonix to come up with something as unique as Fantasia: Music Evolved. Half Dance Central, half weird thing you would expect to find in a Japanese arcade, Music Evolved doesn’t always strike gold, but it does what so many Harmonix games do: remind us about what is so universally wonderful about music.

Music Evolved has some dancing elements to it, but for the most part it is a rhythm game. There are four different moves players will have to perform during a song in order to score points and complete the tune. The first move is the swipe, where you move your arm in the direction of the arrows on screen. The second move is the punch, where you extend your arm toward the screen. The third move is the hold, where you must hold your hand in a circle on screen. The last move is the drag, where you slowly drag your hand across the screen as directed. These moves sync up with different parts of the song; maybe it will start with the vocals, then follow the drums for bit, before changing to the guitar rhythms. These changes are indicated throughout the song.

There are a lot of different aspects to the gameplay of Fantasia to take into account since it is a Kinect-based game, but the biggest one is the room that is required. Unless you own a sizeable living room or can rearrange the space in which you play games, Music Evolved might be difficult to play. The single player doesn’t require quite as much space, that mode worked in my apartment without issue; but It took some rearranging of my living room for me to play with a friend.

Once you’ve sorted out any space issues, and moved all lamps to a secure ground location, the Kinect actually works pretty well with Fantasia. It is a very forgiving game, your timing doesn’t have to be perfect to score points, and as long as you’re gesturing in the generally correct direction it seemed to register the movement. I felt it was a bit too forgiving at first, but after seeing some other people struggle with the game, Fantasia might simply be a game which is catered to make sure anyone -- even those who are rhythmically challenged -- can hop in and have fun.

There is a five-star scale to determine the difficulty of a song, but I felt the breadth of difficulty wasn’t that wide. While my accuracy was in the mid 90’s for one-star song, I was still finishing five-star songs in mid 80’s on my first try. I never failed a song in Fantasia and my accuracy was never lower than 80. I saw some people struggle more than me, but this was mostly due to unfamiliarity with the song rather than the challenge of the game.

There are still some sticky parts to the motion controls. Cycling through the menus can be difficult and a few times my commands were misunderstood. If you have friends cycling in and out of a game you have to be patient while the Kinect tries to locate your body. But all of these issues are small annoyances and really don’t take away from the actual gameplay during the songs.

The swiping and punching is one part of Fantasia’s gameplay, but there’s another half of the equation where Fantasia really shines. Music Evolved doesn’t just want you to recreate songs like you would in Guitar Hero, or follow the dance moves of Dance Central, the game wants you to actively help remix and create songs. Part of this process is the fairly straightforward remixing of the music. You can turn Bruno Mars’ “Locked Out of Heaven” into a ska song; you can take Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite and remix it into a synth-heavy electronica tune; Fun’s “Some Nights” can be become a marching band number. It’s amazing how many songs I would play, lamenting their overplayed radio presence, only to thoroughly enjoy how I could change around a few individual instrument tracks and hear something new and exciting.

The second part of Fantasia’s creation is when the game asks you to create your own drum beats, guitar solos, and other musical entities to add to the songs you’re playing. Each song has moments when they will pause and present players with a screen where you change the pitch of notes during a solo or the rhythm of drums, and come away with a melody that is injected into the song immediately, and recalled at later points as well. These solos make each song you play feel unique and encourages more ownership than Harmonix’s other titles. There’s not a ton of skill involved in these moments as you’re mostly just waving your arms and hoping for the best, but it feels like the message Harmonix is sending isn’t about skill. Fantasia is about how anyone can make music.

While it might take up a lot of space to play Music Evolve with a friend, it does feel good to share the musical joy Fantasia inspires. When in multiplayer mode, two players share the moves in the song. The closer you follow the moves as directed the more points you score and whichever player scores the most points gets to remix the song. When it comes to the solo breaks, players split the creation portions of the song 50-50. It’s fun to share the creation process, but it’s unfortunate players who are good lose out on remixing songs.

Fantasia really plays best in Party Mode, where you can pick whatever songs you want and mix them in any way, but there is a story mode for those who are interested. Players start this mode as an apprentice of Yen Sid -- the creepy sorcerer whose hat was stolen by Mickey Mouse in the original film. After completing your apprenticeship, which takes about an hour, you are introduced to another apprentice named Scout. While playing with Scout you accidentally release The Noise which mucks up the lands of Fantasia, requiring you to travel through the realms and put things back in order by playing the songs available.

The story is weak, and not really worth remembering; I spent most of the time sitting on the couch, hardly interested. The realms themselves, however, are actually cool ideas. Not only will you find songs in the realms, but you’ll also be able to manipulate the environment to create music. This can involve playing a group of clams as drums or using a dungeon filled with suits of armor and treasure chests to create a rock opera. While the campaign itself is largely forgettable, playing around in these environments is good fun.

There’s a lot of magic and clever animation in the realms, but it is almost completely lost when playing a song. Fantasia has always been about the blend of animation and music, and Music Evolved doesn’t really have any way to preserve that goal when it comes to playing its songs. It’s understandable that Harmonix wants to keep the screen mostly bare so as not to distract you from the directions being given, but the presentation during the songs themselves is pretty bland for game which is treading on the legacy of two Disney Animated Classics.

My biggest problem with Fantasia is its music library. The track selection isn’t horribly small, but it tries to spread itself across a lot of varieties of music, spanning everything from Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On” to Mussorgky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”. Music Evolved’s attempt to include a little bit of everything means that all of the game’s genres are pretty thin. Add in a couple songs that just aren’t fun to play, and it doesn’t take long to blast through the game’s library. It would seem this is something Harmonix plans to remedy with DLC; I’ll let that sit with you as it will.

Fantasia: Music Evolved is a fun game in short bursts, especially when you have someone to share it with. With Guitar Hero seemingly on Harmonix’s back burner and the motion based dancing games being a wash, rinse, repeat, affair, Music Evolved is something wonderfully new. The Kinect works well and remixing songs makes you feel like you are not only playing the songs, but are involved in the creative process. It’s a thin library to start with, but remixing titles you are sick of actually makes them feel new again. I don’t think we’ll see Fantasia: Music Evolved explode into the sensation other Harmonix games have become, but as the holiday season approaches I’ll definitely be keeping the game on hand to play with my friends and relatives so we can all make fools of ourselves.