Capcom's Magical Quest 3 Starring Mickey & Donald is the sort of game the Game Boy Advance really could have used more of during its life. That's not to say it's a particularly great game; on the contrary, it's the very definition of 16-bit competence, a slightly above-average licensed platform action game whose personality would best be described as "a whimsical romp."
What makes MQ3 so unique is more a function of its history than of its mechanics. Created in 1995, it was the third chapter of Capcom's Magical Quest trilogy for Super NES -- or it would have been, had it ever come to the U.S. For whatever reason, MQ3 never made the leap from Japan's Super Famicom to America's Super NES. Instead, it languished overseas, well outside the radar of the average American gamer.
There were an awful lot of 16-bit games that never quite made it to our shores, and legions of noble hackers have dedicated countless hours of their lives whipping up amateur translations for those who care to brave the murky waters of emulation and ROM hacking. For a fan-translated game to hit the U.S. legitimately ten years later is a pleasant novelty, and a bit of a vindication for the so-called "scene."
It's just a shame that this particular game was the one to find new life on the GBA. Compared to a lot of lost Super NES gems, MQ3 hasn't aged terribly well -- it's a relic of the 16-bit era through and through, all the way down to that awful, chunky serif font that Capcom used for all their SNES games.
The conversion to a portable format hasn't been especially kind to it, either. The usual SNES-to-GBA issues are on hand; a sizable percentage of pixel information has been cropped due to the difference in resolution, and the art is a little too pastel at times to work on the small, moderately dim screen of the GBA SP; important details get lost at crucial moments. Of course, the game is playable on the DS with its brighter backlighting, but then you can't make use of the cooperative multiplayer (since the GBA link cable doesn't work with DS). Not that the multiplayer is a make-it-or-break-it feature. There are some clever cooperative skills and unique two-player features to be found, but having two big characters running around in the compressed screen space is even clunkier than just one.
Still, it's hard not to like MQ3. It's definitely dated, but that's not entirely bad; it's packed with the sort of colorful, hand-drawn graphics that you see entirely too little of these days. And if the animation seems a little weak compared to more recent creations, at least the art itself looks great.
There are also a few nice gameplay features in MQ3 -- in its time, you might even have been able to get away with calling them innovations. Players can choose to play as either Mickey or Donald, each of whom has enough different capabilities to justify a second playthrough with the other. Mickey is fairly powerful in most stages, while Donald usually requires a little more finesse.
Each character has four different skill sets, determined by his current costume. It's when these outfits are donned that their unique attributes really come into play. For instance, Knight Mickey wears a full-plate suit of armor, while Knight Donald is stuck in a barrel with a tin pot for a helmet. Mickey sinks in water, while Donald floats -- allowing each to take a different path through the same stages.
No one will mistake MQ3 for state-of-the-art. But it's a completely solid game with tight control and enough imaginative twists to remain interesting to anyone with the patience for software of such vintage. And that's no bad thing.
Besides, compared to the majority of kiddie-oriented crap that's clogging up the GBA's arteries in its advanced age, MQ3 is downright fantastic. It's a lush, cartoon-flavored flashback to a different era. Ten years ago, this would have been a great second-string title when players wore out their copies of Yoshi's Island and Chrono Trigger. Here and now it's still worth a look -- especially for Disney aficionados and 16-bit gaming buffs. "Better late than never" might be a slight overstatement in this case... but it's close enough.
