Fantasia: Music Evolved is an upcoming Kinect-based music game being developed by Rock Band masterminds Harmonix in close collaboration with Disney. The successor to the Walt Disney 1940 animated film Fantasia and its 1999 sequel, Fantasia 2000, Fantasia: Music Evolved is being developed as an interactive outlet through which players move their bodies to create their own unique musical landscapes. Today, new details and a trailer for the game have been released.
The video, titled “The Hollow,” showcases how Fantasia will work from a gameplay perspective. The level begins in a peaceful, swampy area, and the player enters a vortex which leads to a rhythm-based gameplay section. Here, the player waves her arms much like an orchestra conductor in sync with the music. At various points of this section, the game allows her to choose between various instruments to layer onto the symphony, whether it is drums, guitars or a horn section.
Having finished this section, the player is transported back to the swamp, which is now brimming with life and color. The game switches to a new game mode in which the player is free to create all kinds of sounds and musical cues by manipulating various parts of the environment.
Fantasia: Music Evolved is being designed to give the player as much creative control as possible. Unlike Harmonix’s previous games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in which the player is graded based on his or her performance, Fantasia will not fail the player under any circumstances; the emphasis will be on seeing what the player can conjure by exploring the game worlds and moving his or her body in sync with the music.
A two player mode was also announced, allowing two players to work together on the songs. The range of songs that can be played encompasses a vast spectrum of genres, such as Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” and Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven.” Today, a new batch of songs was announced: David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” Antonin Dvorak’s “Symphony No. 9 from the New World,” Lorde’s “Royals,” Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass”, and The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.”
Although only 12 tracks have been revealed so far, the game is said to contain music from over 25 artists, and each song will be accompanied by various remixes, such as an orchestral mix and an 80s metal mix for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Fantasia: Music Evolved will be available exclusively for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One Kinect sometime in 2014.