Trying to emulate the visual style of an animated movie in limited hardware is truthfully impressive but it doesn't convey anything artistic other than mimicking what's expressed in the movie in service of a (badly designed) virtual obstacle course, not to tell anything more, just fanservice.
When retro gamers say graphics don't matter in their games, that it's just the gameplay, Aladdin; Jungle Book and Lion King are the three games that I would point to so I can tell that's bullshit.
Virgin's Lion King is notoriously unfair just to sell more copies without the people renting it, as told by the designers themselves. Typical commercial shenanigans of these costly toys for children to cash in the film.
Capcom's Aladdin doesn't have the graphical fidelity of Virgin's game but it replaces its clunky platforming and fighting (the sword in the Genesis game doesn't do much, stop overhyping it) with satisfactory parkour and a good grasp of making the game feel exciting or climactic (apart from the tiny size of the final boss, most of the time it's not on screen and you defeat it with apples in the Genesis version). Yet, in spite of its loose gameplay, Virgin's Aladdin sold more than Sonic 3 & Knuckles despite this game's massive scope and important for the medium's in-gameplay storytelling and lore building.
And Jungle Book? This SNES version at least is just a mediocre platformer, gameplay wise and presentation wise (texts crawls presenting the events of the movie unlike Lion King which at least has animation between levels to fill in without feeling like a Youtube description) if you ignore the animation and art style, but again, something which is the merit of the movie, not this game. Unlike the Aladdin game, however, the humor from the movie mostly isn't there or what's new are very bland new visual gags.
When retro gamers say graphics don't matter in their games, that it's just the gameplay, Aladdin; Jungle Book and Lion King are the three games that I would point to so I can tell that's bullshit.
Virgin's Lion King is notoriously unfair just to sell more copies without the people renting it, as told by the designers themselves. Typical commercial shenanigans of these costly toys for children to cash in the film.
Capcom's Aladdin doesn't have the graphical fidelity of Virgin's game but it replaces its clunky platforming and fighting (the sword in the Genesis game doesn't do much, stop overhyping it) with satisfactory parkour and a good grasp of making the game feel exciting or climactic (apart from the tiny size of the final boss, most of the time it's not on screen and you defeat it with apples in the Genesis version). Yet, in spite of its loose gameplay, Virgin's Aladdin sold more than Sonic 3 & Knuckles despite this game's massive scope and important for the medium's in-gameplay storytelling and lore building.
And Jungle Book? This SNES version at least is just a mediocre platformer, gameplay wise and presentation wise (texts crawls presenting the events of the movie unlike Lion King which at least has animation between levels to fill in without feeling like a Youtube description) if you ignore the animation and art style, but again, something which is the merit of the movie, not this game. Unlike the Aladdin game, however, the humor from the movie mostly isn't there or what's new are very bland new visual gags.