It's been a while since I played this game, but I have very fond memories of it from back in my childhood, and I actually played it before I even saw the movie. I specifically remember beating it right before I had to go do some shit, leaving my Wii on, and then coming back to see the The End screen there. Fun times.

Anyways, Aladdin for SNES, while admittedly not as good as it's Sega Genesis counterpart, is a really fun game. It's graphics look charming and are animated wonderfully, it's presentation is significantly better than that of the Genesis game, with actual cutscenes recreating frames from the movie instead of just text, for this replay I played with an MSU1 hack, just out of curiousity for what the technology could do, and while I was admittedly impressed by it's capabilities and it was nice to have some songs from the score playing alongside the game, most of them either didn't particularly fit well or had audio issues, and the less we speak about how they adapt the music from the actual game, the better. However I took a listen to the original OST on Youtube and I can confirm that it's still pretty great, although the One Jump Ahead version is weird as hell.

Gameplay is definitely where this game shines the most however, with Aladdin's moveset being simple but endeering, and unlike that of most platformers, which fits with his unorthodox style of escaping in the movie. It feels a lot more like your controlling Aladdin the character than the Genesis game. The stage design is really creative and the gimmicks introduced never feel truly forced or like they go on for longer than they need to, constantly bombarding you with new ideas and keeping things from getting stale.

A severely underrated gem that's worth being part of any SNES collection.

Reviewed on Oct 31, 2023


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