One thing that stood out to me when I saw Studio MDHR show off Cuphead‘s long-awaited DLC – the Delicious Last Course – in a preview session last month was the comparisons the studio made to Fantasia.
The developer – as it showed off a soundtrack recorded with more musicians, animation done on larger paper with more frames of hand-drawn art, and bosses with more phases and backgrounds than anything we saw in the base game – compared the DLC to how Disney lead up to the launch of Fantasia with everything it learned in the 30s; bringing in all the lessons it learned from previous blockbuster releases into this new, ground-breaking project.
Yes, it’s a lofty comparison, but then Cuphead is a lofty game; I’d argue it goes beyond just ‘being a game’ and is actually one of those rare projects you’d see happily installed in museums. It’s got enough traditional art in there to make even the non-gamer types go “alright, yeah, that’s pretty impressive”. And pretty much anyone that’s consumed any media over the past 100 years can look at Cuphead and say “I see what this game is doing, cool”.
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