RegularPat
1 review liked by RegularPat
I feel like me and my fellow 90's gamers all owe The Lion King an apology because we all let this game completely squeak under the radar when it feels way more actively spiteful towards its target audience than The Lion King ever did. This game's first level with its spike traps, time limits, and relentless enemy placement definitely made small children cry. At one point they place a spider directly above some collectibles purely to fuck with you.
Disney's Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful testament to just how bad a level's design can get while still being something that you can look at and go "Yeah, I GUESS this is a finished product that can be beaten". Every level is a labyrinthine trial of slow platforming and even slower combat with terrible hit detection. The second level - the second level of the game! - is an autoscrolling "race the spikes to the top" level where there's these timed fire traps in his own castle and the spikes rubberband worse than a Mario Kart AI. The Beast can roar and freeze enemies in place, which seems like a harmless addition to his moveset until it's also worked into the platforming somehow. Sometimes you have to roar to make floating platforms move (because magic...?) and there is a very terrible section in this game where The Beast has to roar at these tiny "barely-can-see-the-pixels-on-a-CRT-TV" sized bats that are flying around in his castle so that they freeze in place, just so he can platform on the tiny bats to get to the next area. The tiny bats also fall the moment you step on them. This game hates you.
The Beast can also wall climb, which is cool until you take damage from tiny enemies because you can't dodge very well while wall climbing. Read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again for emphasis.
Also, seriously, why did every game developer in the 90's look at this movie and decide that The Beast was a slow-moving block of wet tissue paper who throws slow punches and gets his shit rocked by rats, spiders, and frogs? The Beast feels like a character that would've been a slam dunk for a fun 2D platformer like Aladdin was, but instead I have to watch this giant dog/boar monster laboriously plod around his environments until a small animal ruins his day. It's hard to even say which Beauty and the Beast game is worse - the SNES game or the two Sunsoft Genesis games - because they're all uniquely terrible in their own magical ways.
Game at least gets an extra half star for the level where Belle and The Beast have a snowball fight and The Beast just dies if he misses three snowballs. Perfect.
Disney's Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful testament to just how bad a level's design can get while still being something that you can look at and go "Yeah, I GUESS this is a finished product that can be beaten". Every level is a labyrinthine trial of slow platforming and even slower combat with terrible hit detection. The second level - the second level of the game! - is an autoscrolling "race the spikes to the top" level where there's these timed fire traps in his own castle and the spikes rubberband worse than a Mario Kart AI. The Beast can roar and freeze enemies in place, which seems like a harmless addition to his moveset until it's also worked into the platforming somehow. Sometimes you have to roar to make floating platforms move (because magic...?) and there is a very terrible section in this game where The Beast has to roar at these tiny "barely-can-see-the-pixels-on-a-CRT-TV" sized bats that are flying around in his castle so that they freeze in place, just so he can platform on the tiny bats to get to the next area. The tiny bats also fall the moment you step on them. This game hates you.
The Beast can also wall climb, which is cool until you take damage from tiny enemies because you can't dodge very well while wall climbing. Read the last sentence of the previous paragraph again for emphasis.
Also, seriously, why did every game developer in the 90's look at this movie and decide that The Beast was a slow-moving block of wet tissue paper who throws slow punches and gets his shit rocked by rats, spiders, and frogs? The Beast feels like a character that would've been a slam dunk for a fun 2D platformer like Aladdin was, but instead I have to watch this giant dog/boar monster laboriously plod around his environments until a small animal ruins his day. It's hard to even say which Beauty and the Beast game is worse - the SNES game or the two Sunsoft Genesis games - because they're all uniquely terrible in their own magical ways.
Game at least gets an extra half star for the level where Belle and The Beast have a snowball fight and The Beast just dies if he misses three snowballs. Perfect.
