Mika and the Witch's Mountain Review (Switch eShop)

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a movie all about growing up. The night Kiki leaves home to complete a year of witch training, she excitedly overstuffs her bag, makes herself a broomstick that’s too small for her, and crashes into a couple of trees during her flight. She doesn’t have a speciality or skill, and upon arriving in the town of Koriko, she causes a ruckus by stopping traffic. Yet this all serves to set up Kiki’s growth, and the pain of becoming an adolescent and – eventually – an adult. She finds her place in the world, living above a bakery, delivering goods on her broomstick, and overcomes her fears to become the best version of herself.

Kiki is the heart of Studio Ghibli’s 1989 coming-of-age story, and it’s her brashness, positivity, and determination that has clearly rubbed off on Mika, the star of Chibig’s latest game, Mika and the Witch’s Mountain. There’s no greater influence here than the aforementioned movie; the premise of playing a witch delivery game with cel-shaded visuals and sprawling seas inspired by The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was enough to smash through its Kickstarter goal. Yet, two years after the potion was brewed, we’re left with a game that has flashes of the heart of the Studio Ghibli classic, but is sadly completely forgettable in almost every single respect.

Like Kiki, Mika must leave home to study under the Grand Witch and become a better witch. Yet, when she approaches her teacher, she’s pushed off of the mountain and subsequently breaks her broomstick. After getting her broom repaired, she has to take up a delivery service job to cover her expenses, thus kicking off Mika’s own coming-of-age tale.

The island of Mount Gaun is one big playground for Mika to fly around in. Armed with a basic broomstick in the beginning, progressing the story will provide you with upgrades that allow you to fly higher or ride wind currents effectively. Getting to grips with the broom takes time and the controls are a little floaty, but on the whole they’re serviceable, and the game is pretty lenient while you're delivering parcels, which is fortunate when that’s essentially the only thing you do.

Mika’s job involves bringing parcels or items from one person, or place, to another. These parcels often have prerequisites to fulfill before you have to start the delivery again – don’t get it wet, don’t damage it, deliver it in 40 seconds, etc. These conditions are incredibly easy to meet. It’s difficult to get a parcel wet as simply floating atop the seas doesn’t affect it, but diving – as in, specifically pressing a button to dip the broomstick into the water – will damage it. Crashing into walls is really the only obstacle, but you can retry every single delivery by holding down the ‘B’ button.

Characters move location between story sections, which keeps you on your toes, but you can keep track of their location by checking the in-game map. And there’s a clever little mechanic where you have to deliver ice cream, but attempt to stay in the shade to make it last longer. But the variety of challenges just isn’t there, especially when multiple delivery requests ask you to go back and forth between the same two or three people. We get it, it’s meant to be a cosy, friction-free experience, but there needs to be something of substance alongside it.

It would absolutely help spice deliveries up if the inhabitants actually felt like a tight-knit community, but almost every single character in-game is unmemorable. The writing is definitely aimed at younger audiences, but most characters lack any meaningful personality and, outside of delivery quests, you can’t even talk to the NPCs; instead, little speech bubbles reveal what they’re talking about or thinking. As far as character narratives go, most are resolved within minutes of taking on their delivery request. There’s a very brief subplot involving the mayor of the town and head of deliveries that threatens to get interesting, but by the game's halfway point, it’s seemingly all forgotten about and resolved without explanation.

At least Mount Gaun is fine to explore, and the way the island gradually gets more accessible as you progress through the story is a nice touch. Certain sections feel like their own little biomes – there’s a windy meadow full of trees and plateaus with strong gusts of winds or a mining tunnel full of crystal. That Wind Waker-style cel shading also does wonders for the waterfall that drapes itself down the cliff behind the ruins at the base of the mountain.

You’re also encouraged to explore to fulfill optional requests, which require a bit of puzzle-solving. You’ll find items dotted around the island that belong to someone you’ve met, and you have to figure out who that is. Most of these are fairly obvious, but we had to stop and think about one or two to find the right recipient. Stumbling on these made for a nice change of pace and felt more rewarding than simply fulfilling the story quests, even if we got no reward for doing them.

There are also collectible tokens and tarot cards that help push your curiosity to the forefront. The small totems can be used to buy new outfits, while the tarot cards just give you a shiny new piece of character art inspired by the 22 Major Arcana. The latter, however, can be incredibly annoying to collect early on, as you need to break a giant urn every time by dropping down from a great height. Lining these drops up often took us a couple of times to get right, meaning we had to repeatedly fly back up the path to higher ground more than once.

Visually, Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is also pretty inconsistent, at least on Switch. The bold colours do a lot of the heavy lifting. This has the potential to be a very beautiful world, and in spots it is. But frequent pop-in, flat textures, and blurry character models both docked and in handheld spoil the magic.

There are also frequent visual glitches, such as characters clipping through walls, black lines cutting through the screen during cutscenes, and text not fully rendering at the start of a new day. Cutscenes sometimes take a few seconds to load in properly, too, and oftentimes when they do, those lovely character portraits obscure part of the text box. At least it runs at a mostly smooth 30fps, save for a few jerky moments near the water or in busy areas.

We rolled credits after a brisk five hours of exploring, though we did carry on filling out all of those optional deliveries and trying to get those alternative outfits. But, as we were flying around Mount Gaun, we were reminded of a quote from Kiki’s mother in Kiki’s Delivery Service: “It’s not really important what colour your dress is. What matters is the heart inside it.” While Mika and the Witch’s Mountain may look nice and does have a heart of gold, it’s a largely forgettable experience that left us feeling like we’d missed a package.