Released in 1992 for the Sega Master System and 1993 for the Sega Game Gear Land of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse is the second game in the Mickey Mouse Illusion series.

One stormy night Mickey Mouse is reading book the worlds greatest fairy tales, Mickey starts feeling very drowsy and eventually falls asleep, when Mickey wakes up he is in a fairy tale land, a girl who appears to be Daisy Duck tells Mickey about an evil phantom who stole the magic crystal from her village and because of this the land which was once filled with happiness and laugher has been replaced with sadness, after hearing such a sad tale Mickey decides that he will defeat the phantom and will return the magic crystal to the village.

Land of Illusion is a platform game, the player takes control of Mickey Mouse and its their job to make sure that Mickey survives each of the 14 in game levels.

There are many enemies that Mickey must either avoid or defeat, in order to attack enemies Mickey must either pick up an item such as a block or a nut which he must then throw at the attacking enemy or Mickey can defeat enemies by jumping in the air and hitting the enemies with a ground pound.

 

Through out the game Mickey will need to defeat multiple bosses in order to rescue the other villagers who are fairytale versions of Mickeys friends such as Donald, Minnie and Goofy, after saving these characters they will often tell Mickey where he can find new items in the game which he will need in order to progress further.

 

All of these items have different uses

The Flute gives Mickey the ability to exit a level at any time while also keeping any treasures or items he picked up.

The Magic Potion gives Mickey the ability to shrink to a very small size which will allow him to enter small doors and narrow passages.

The Rope gives Mickey the ability to climb walls which makes it easier to reach high areas.

The Shoes are very light in weight and they allow Mickey to walk on top of clouds

And the Magic Beans will grow a beanstalk that Mickey can climb to get to the Phantoms Castle way up in the sky.

The controls are almost perfect and to be honest there is not much I can complain about,  the controls are tight and very responsive to the player, using different items is really easy and only requires very simple button combinations and controlling Mickey is genuinely a pleasant experience.

I do have one issue with the controls for some reason every time Mickey comes to a stop he slides in the direction he is facing, this is very slight but it does cause issues in certain parts of the game,  I would understand if this happened if you were moving fast but this happens every time you move and because of this its a small issue that can cause big problems.

The game looks fantastic considering that it can only run in 8 bit, the colours burst off of the screen and everything is animated extremely well and everything in the game moves very smoothly.

I do wish that the backgrounds of some stages were not as empty as they are, this in no way effects the game play but the levels do genuinely look quite bare and I do believe that adding more things to the backgrounds would make the game more pleasant to look at but this is an issue that only applies to some of the stages.

 

Every level has many secrets and short cuts to find,  Mickey will also need to solve many different puzzles, avoid many dangerous obstacles and defeat many bosses during his adventure.

The music is nice but that’s about it not one track in this game was memorable to me, a lot of the time the music sounds like a fun little tune on a constantly repeating loop, but even though the music is nothing amazing it is fun to listen too and its not in any way annoying.

Land of Illusion is a charming little game about everyone’s favourite mouse, I cant say that this game is a masterpiece but its a fun little side scroller with mostly great controls, fantastic graphics and animation, a fun and happy soundtrack and an innocent and easy to understand story line that anyone can enjoy.

Not an amazing game but its still loads of fun and is overall a great time 7.8/10

Thank you for reading my review of Land of Illusion for Sega Master System/ Sega Game Gear

By Padawan

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