The Lion King (NES)

The Lion King (NES)
Original SNES version: Long live the king! [pushes the NES port off a cliff]
Protagonist(s): Simba Genre(s): Action Platform Release Date: May 25, 1995 Developer(s): Dark Technologies Publisher(s): Virgin Interactive Series: The Lion King

The Lion King is a video game based on the 1994 animated film of the same name, released in 1994 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and then ported to the Amiga, MS-DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Master System, and Nintendo Entertainment System. This page will only cover the NES version, which was released exclusively in Europe on May 25, 1995, and was the last licensed game released for the system.

Why It Will Fall Off The Cliff

1. For a late NES game, the graphics are terrible, and look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint. They are pretty similar to the graphics from the NES version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, but they look no better at all, no matter how they try to be at least decent. Not to mention, the sprites are too small like Doraemon Kart on Game Boy.
2. Very poor grasp of the source material. You only get to play as baby Simba, not the adult one, and you don't even get to fight Scar, the final boss of the game. And because of the lack of adult Simba, you never play as the titular Lion King.
3. This port is watered down because it is ported from the Game Boy version and is extremely short. It only contains 6 levels, rather than having all of the levels from the other versions. It's as if the other levels were scared to appear in this port, so they escaped from it, making this port only have 6 levels.
   • Speaking of which, the Elephant Graveyard level is still mostly in black and white, so they didn't even try to colorize that level.
   • On the subject of the level count, it's quite baffling because Super Mario Bros., a launch title for this system, had 32 levels, and that was in 1985.
4. False advertising: The back of the box claims the game to have over 10 levels, but in the game, there are only 6 levels, as mentioned before, and not 10.
5. Horrible and unresponsive controls. Trying to climb can be very frustrating, jumping or long-jumping doesn't work sometimes and Simba somehow falls a bit faster than he does in the other versions.
6. Depending on the difficulty, the game increases or decreases the number of levels. The game doesn't know if it wants to be easy, medium, or hard, so it just decides to have random difficulty, by increasing/decreasing the number of levels.
7. Bad soundtrack compared to the other versions.
8. Poor ending. All it shows is a 37-second image that says, "Everything the light touches is your kingdom", and after that, it goes directly to the credits. That's it. There's nothing else after the ending image, just credits.
9. Even worse: This was the last ever licensed NES game. This essentially means that Nintendo went through 12 years of video games... only to end with this mess that Dark Technologies decided to make. Now the ending has just been made much worse than it already was.

Reception

The NES version of The Lion King received negative reviews. It has a 2.66/5 star rating on GameFAQs from 53 users.

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