An all-new kind of Disney game, unlike DDR Disney Mix.
After about three years in development, Harmonix and Disney finally had a product they could show at this year's E3. Fantasia: Music Evolved for Xbox 360 and Xbox One (the only Kinect 2.0-capable game shown on the E3 floor) puts players in the role of Yen Sid's newest apprentice, and in order to create new music from the tracks contained, you'll need to wave your hands like Mickey does during his wizard training to manipulate the environment… and the music itself.
The music selection is varied in the roughly 25 starting tracks (with more coming through DLC), hidden through open portals in each stage, covering everything from classical music to Bruno Mars and "Fun" (the number one misnamed band on the planet, by the way). Each song contains extra riffs and samples that can be played over to make the song unique to your playthrough.
When playing through a song, it's timing-based, but instead of expected dance moves like Dance Central or Just Dance, the camera records both your swipes at the screen in various ways and thrusting your hands toward the screen. Become the sorcerer. Be the music. All that jazz.
There are two different main areas of the game that were shown: "The Shoal" and "The Press." In the Shoal, after the song is over, players can take some parts of the song they just played into the open space they found the song in. Not only that, they manipulate the environment to play them in the background, adding to them through finding new instruments littered around the landscape. The sample that was given was a coral reef that was filled with clams, mussels, and fish, many of which contained a tone unique to them that could be brought about by running a hand over them.
"The Press," on the other hand, is more of a puzzle-based affair. The only example I was given was needing to spin a wheel so that the right color was lit up, and things went sparkly for a second, and — Ka-ching! — it was fixed, and music came softly from it. Over time, like the Shoal, the world of the Press (a printing press because, like the Harmonix demonstrator said, "newspapers are still around") turns into another world of drum lines and dancing notes. There wasn't anything beyond a few riffs in the demo that implied at all that the game has the Disney logo, which is strange, but there will hopefully be some classic animated film music in there somewhere.
The game is scheduled to come out some time in 2014, but a reminder: It's already been in development stages over three years already. Hopefully, it will come out sooner rather than later… it can be a great experience for the public, so the sooner, the better! Fantasia: Music Evolved will launch for Xbox 360 and Xbox One,
