I always like to clear out super old members of the backlog, and of all of the games I owned for the NES as a kid, the only ones left this year for me to finish were Punch-Out!! and The Little Mermaid. My collection of NES Games wasn't that big back then (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Gyromite, Punch-Out!!, The Little Mermaid, The Legend of Zelda, Bases Loaded, Duck Hunt, Jordan vs. Bird, Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers, and Tecmo Super Bowl), so clearing out my NES backlog has been relatively simple compared to, say, completing my nightmarish PS1 backlog. I'll be working on that one for years.
So I found myself up late one night letting my wife sleep while I monitored our fussy new baby, and decided to take a spin through The Little Mermaid. I actually have quite fond memories of this game as a child involving playing through the game several times with a friend visiting from out of town. We managed to make it to the end boss battle against Ursula, but died and lost our will to carry on.
The Little Mermaid is actually set after the events of the movie. In the game, Ursula hatches another dastardly plot, necessitating Ariel to turn back into a mermaid to rescue her undersea friends from danger. Ariel is equipped with her trademark tail bubble blowing attack (seriously) and can even flop around on land if you can get up there. The genre of the game is a little weird, but it's kind of like Castlevania underwater (this is just the best I can do, I'm sure there's a better comparison), in that you can find upgrades for your attacks, and must make your way through a fairly linear stage to reach an end boss, complete it, and move on to the next stage. You can upgrade Ariel's bubbles to make them stronger and have longer range, and these upgrades are hidden in chests that require you to expose yourself to additional danger to attain them.
The graphics for the game are colorful and delightful, and it's honestly one of the better looking NES games out there. It definitely eschews the more muted and dull tones of a Castlevania in favor of a more colorful experience like that of Mega Man, which isn't surprising as the game was developed by Capcom. The boss sprites in particular are huge and very detailed, and are one of the high points of the game.
The music is really good, featuring some adaptations of music from the movie along with some original tunes that just work. Capcom basically always nailed the music of Disney games on the NES, and while it's not as good as any of the Mega Man games or DuckTales, it gets the job done and is quite nice.
The controls for the game are a bit slippery and don't quite feel right. It's difficult to get Ariel to turn on a dime, and throwing enemies and objects around to knock open chests can be an exercise in futility. Fortunately, the game's difficulty is so low that you have plenty of chances to work around the supbar controls, so it doesn't hurt as much as the clunky controls in a game like Castlevania.
The level designs are pretty dull. You basically follow a hallway to a boss, and there's very little interaction with the environment along the way. You can basically make it through the game while killing no enemies other than the bosses, which is a bit boring. The one shining part of the level design is the placement of chests, which contain upgrades to your bubble attacks. Some of the chests are fake, containing nothing, so experimenting with the use of your limited resources necessary to open the chests would give this game more replay value than your standard NES platformer/action game.
The boss battles, however, are quite fun and interactive, and it makes me wonder what could have been done had more focus been placed on combat throughout the game. The bosses are your basic pattern recognition style common in Capcom games like Mega Man and DuckTales, but are stripped down and far more simple, which is a fun change of pace for a game in a crushingly difficult era.
The difficulty of the game is delightfully perfect for a casual playthrough or for children, and this is definitely a nice entry game for kids wanting to get into retro gaming. It looks great, sounds nice, features an identifiable character, and will actually allow them to make some progress in the game. I'm definitely going to introduce this one to my daughters, and I suspect it'll be the first game one of them truly beats on her own, given her love of the movie and the ease of the game. It's nice for there to be a niche in this genre for a simple game for children, and it shouldn't be judged based on an expectation that it will be "Nintendo hard".
This game isn't perfect, and it's not an NES classic. But it is fun, and it serves a purpose that's kind of hard to find on the console. I'd definitely recommend this game as a fun, relaxing playthrough, or as a training ground for kids interested in learning more about playing retro games. I'll give it an 8.2/10.
I still haven't cleared out all of my teasers yet, so I'm going to save my next teaser until after the next review. I still have 3 games that I've completed and not reviewed yet, and I hope to have them all reviewed by the end of the week here on reTROview.
-TRO
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