Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom (PC)

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom is part of a game genre best referred to as an activity center, these often being a collection of borderline flash games and interactive art programs packaged together under the banner of a popular franchise. With the rise of the home computer and CD-ROMs, these titles were cheap to produce and often targeted to extremely young players, and while Beauty and the Beast was almost nine years old at the time of this game’s release, it’s little surprise a Disney Princess found herself part of this brief fad.

Taking place presumably near the middle of the film, Belle has warmed up to the prince cursed to be a beast and his castle full of servants turned into household items. While at first his prisoner, her growing fondness for him leads to her being inspired to hold a surprise party in the ballroom for the Beast, recruiting his servants to help with the festivities. Characters are fully voiced and a surprising amount of the film’s voice cast is present reprising their roles, Angela Lansbury voicing the teapot Mrs. Potts, David Ogden Stiers returning as the talking clock Cogsworth, and even the lead role of Belle having Paige O’Hara present to lend the game a considerable degree of authenticity to the animated feature. From candlestick Lumiere to the Beast himself, most of the cast featured has their original voice actor present, perhaps the only point where it might not be the case being the young teacup Chip. Even the animation, limited as it is, looks decent and sometimes spot on. It’s closer to a television series than a film in quality while being rigid in a few ways to fit the game’s minigames and menus, but it no doubt impressed many a young child back in its time with the work put into it in this regard.

The faithfulness and voice actors pretty much have to carry the experience though, for most of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom is threadbare and slow. There are five areas a player can click on from the castle’s foyer, these taking players either to a minigame or a customizable activity save for the locked off West Wing. The least surprising feature would be Belle’s Writing Desk, the game containing a fairly limited art program where you can do things like make custom images or printable greeting cards. Neither option offers much freedom though, the images not giving you free reign to draw and mostly consisting of backgrounds you can place character stickers on top of. The backgrounds allow for recoloring using a fill tool, but filling a single object will cause anything else in the image of the same color to change as well, save for the animated stickers that can’t be altered in any way. Making a stained glass window is a bit more interesting despite using the same recolor rules, but the greeting card creator just looks sad. Their background colors are mostly pastel, the front containing a generic message, a sometimes recognizable Beauty and the Beast character, and an interior where you can type in names and oddly enough dates. There’s no customization to the card beyond this and they all look cheap and generic, even more so than the style of child-friendly Valentine’s cards kids give out in classrooms.

Mrs. Potts’ Teatime Table is a proper game though, albeit a simple one whose timer isn’t likely to expire. To make three stages of the meal for the surprise ball, you must drop a sequence of plateware and food down from a shelf onto four rotating serving spots.  Whether you’re working on tea time, the main meal, or dessert, you’re pretty much clicking whatever item on the shelf is required next to make it fall down towards the table, and while you need some degree of timing to make sure items land on the right spot, there is no penalty for missing a plate, putting the wrong thing on a plate, or just clicking the item until it works eventually. Some shelf items are slower to activate to curb this methodology, but others are easily brute forced, something that helps with the plates seeming to have trouble determining whether or not an object landed on them. It’s probably the best minigame in Magical Ballroom despite being pretty flawed, but it at least has the small degree of action to it and the unlikely but present threat of failure.

Technically, you can fail in Cogsworth’s Library Mystery, but it’s such a tedious game that the possibility of failure is more of an annoyance than a motivation to perform well. This minigame is essentially the board game Guess Who? adapted so the eligible characters are on the covers of books instead, the player needing to flip through their guessing book to click features and ask if the book they’re looking for has these features on the cover. The books, oddly enough, feature many faces of Disney characters from other movies and works, some pulls like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland not too strange, but then some like the dragonfly Evinrude from The Rescuers and a random Satyr from Fantasia are definitely stranger picks. The game is certainly long-winded, the book you flip through to click your question topics only going forward before looping around and Cogsworth slowly giving you a response to your chosen query in an area where his personality perhaps shines through too much. Most of the questions are things like if the character on the cover is playing an instrument or is wearing a hat, but then there are more subjective ones like about whether the character has large ears and then more boring and practical routes like asking if a certain color is the background to the character image. You have a set amount of guesses before you have to pick the book you think contains part of a key, with there being three levels to complete to get the full key, so it’s certainly the slowest and most tedious game of the bunch.

As you play through the minigames you can find pointless shortcuts to the other games, but once you’ve done them all, you’re able to get the Beast to leave the West Wing and join the ball. However, there is one last major task you must do that hasn’t been mentioned yet, and that’s customizing the ball itself. You get to pick the instruments that will play during the dance, change the look of the ballroom, choose Belle’s gown, and get to pick the steps and moves that will take place when Belle and the Beast do their dance that is essentially the game’s finale despite there being no true ending. The limitations to what you can do here make more sense than the writing desk’s rigid structure since you’re influencing detailed animations, music, and character appearances, making it feel like the most harmless form of interactivity on offer. Customizing the simple scene is flexible enough to add a personal flair and it doesn’t overcomplicate it to try to be a minigame or art program, so while it’s not too interesting to repeat, it could have been a cute feature in a better constructed activity center.

THE VERDICT: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom is an activity center lean in content and unimaginative when it comes to the activities it does offer. The art program seems afraid to let kids get too creative, the library game is slow and tedious, and the strongest game on offer, Mrs. Potts’ Teatime Table, has issues with its construction that make it hard to enjoy for what potential it had. Thankfully, most of the amusements are dull rather than awful and customizing the ball is nifty despite its simplicity. Acceptable animation and having most of the film’s voice cast reprise their roles helps with the style, but what little there is to do in the game is still too boring or rigid to enjoy.

And so, I give Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom for PC…

A BAD rating. An archetypal activity center in quite a few ways, its minimal amount of content is only meant to occupy a little tyke or delight a fan of the film for the game’s short runtime. Besides the ballroom customization, nothing in the game feels unique to the brand though. Cogsworth playing Guess Who? in the library doesn’t really tie to his film portrayal much at all, and the game with Mrs. Potts feels sloppily put together with its detection issues and exploitable designs. The characters talking over things lends an air of authenticity, but their repeated lines lose their luster in minigames that aren’t strong enough to survive independent of their weak tie to the Disney characters. The art center is particularly underwhelming due to its lack of customizability and perhaps best shows that outside of bringing back so much of the voice cast, the game wasn’t really made with much thought or creativity. It is mostly inoffensive in its dullness at least, and considering the bar of quality for this flash in the pan genre, it sits about where most of the games would be found. Dull, but an acceptable timewaster for kids who don’t know any better and like the franchise being featured.

While The Game Hoard often draws on odd picks in a sort of “pulled from the pile” approach, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Magical Ballroom might still seem like an unusual choice for a review. However, it is only the first in an unofficial review series covering most of the video game adaptations of Disney’s 1991 feature animation Beauty and the Beast. If not for their already cumbersome titles perhaps I might have labelled it an official review series, but instead, we’ll be taking a look at the games independently to see if Disney’s masterpiece found any luck in virtual form. While Magical Ballroom may not be very good itself, it does feature some of the most faithful traits of any of the Beauty and the Beast adaptations due to its work on the animation and voice cast, but we’ll soon see if more traditional game formats than the activity center fared better with the franchise.