Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Quest (Genesis/Mega Drive)

While the Super Nintendo adaptation of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was content to go with the typical action platformer style of the times, Sunsoft decided to get experimental with the Sega Genesis equivalent. Believing the animated movie appealed to both boys and girls, Sunsoft developed two separate but similar games that would try to emphasize what the two different target demographics seemed to prefer. Roar of the Beast was fairly traditional in its design and intended for the male audience, but Belle’s Quest was the well-intentioned attempt to give young girls something that would appeal to them.

One element that was believed to be more appreciated by a female gaming audiences was the story of a title, and Belle’s Quest does a pretty good job converting the plot of Disney’s animated film into a more condensed and digestible story. The game starts where the film does and ends at the same point as well, the tale of the intelligent farm girl Belle meeting the prince cursed to be a beast unfolding through scenes where stills from the feature film have been converted pretty well into the game’s art style. While it is a bit of a flat retelling, it does follow all the necessary story beats even though some story moments seem out of the blue due to trimming things down for a game that can take less than an hour to complete. It does its job well enough though and even has a little extra effort put into it with the translated movie images.

Belle’s Quest integrates some character interaction into the gameplay as well, perhaps in an attempt to be slightly like an adventure game, but this feature is very shallow and quickly abandoned. Besides getting very small useless snippets of dialogue from villagers, the player only really encounters any conversation in the game’s first area, the village feeling like they started making an adventure game before falling back on a comfort zone of minigames and platform elements. One of the early problems encountered in the game is a rock blocking a river Belle needs to cross, the player needing to convince Belle’s bullheaded and unwanted suitor Gaston to move it through picking the right dialogue options before this feature is completely dropped. Before you finish this stage though you will be forced to talk with a random pumpkin farmer though, mainly because he approaches you to completely explain how the upcoming maze-like forest works in order to ensure that particular level is either not challenging at all because you remembered what he said or a bunch of bumbling around lost because you didn’t remember his guiding words.

While the paltry offerings when it comes to character interaction make its inclusion almost laughable, the angle would have been more interesting if pursued, especially since it would replace the slow and boring platforming the game mostly relies on instead. Belle is not a capable heroine when it comes to avoiding the enemies she’ll face, these oddly enough mostly being passing birds, bats, and rats that all head towards her at incredible speed. Belle is a slow walker so you usually have a bit of reaction time to either jump or duck to avoid getting hurt, that is unless multiple enemies are coming towards you at once. Belle can take a few hits so some errors can be made, but outside of two areas where she needs to deftly hop over instant death drops with her weak jump, most of her “platforming” is really just jumping and ducking to avoid damage. There is a section where you ride a horse and it plays differently, the running automatic and the player needing to space its jumps properly to clear gaps, but so much of the game is Belle casually strolling about and needing to react to the incredibly aggressive wildlife that’s coming for her blood.

The levels where Belle is walking about feature some objective beyond simply finding the end of the stage. The village’s quest to move a rock was previously mentioned, but there is also a long trek through the Beast’s castle in search of a multitude of keys needed to navigate its labyrinthine halls. Coupled with the forest where you either know how to escape already or didn’t pay attention, and these objectives are often very dry and just an excuse to keep you in a level so the angry animals can have some time to whittle you down. The village does feature an unobtrusive obstacle in the form of Gaston’s partner Lefou calling him to stop your forward progress, Belle only needing to dip into a business doorway to avoid his attempts to distract you with conversation, but this is definitely more just a thing that happens rather than something that changes up the gameplay in an interesting way, the player even able to just accept Gaston will chat with them a few times and continue pushing towards the river without any true negative consequences for allowing it to happen.

The platforming segments are definitely uninteresting and poorly conceived, but the few minigames that crop up along the way are at least tolerable despite being far too permissive in design. Whether its catching falling books in the book store, dancing with the Beast and collecting rose petals in the castle, or avoiding the dancing cutlery in the kitchen, the minigames are about doing the best you can with the game moving on afterwards regardless of your performance. The kitchen minigame where you need to dodge dancing silverware and dishes is probably the only moment the jumping and ducking feels like it’s properly challenged rather than a way to react to annoying fast foes, but like the other minigames it’s fairly short and feels somewhat unsatisfying due to the frivolity of it. You get points as your only real reward for doing well at these, and considering some aspects like the dancing minigame deliberately being designed to be completed through repeating the same movement loop, these don’t really offer any interesting gameplay or room for skillful action. They’re time filler essentially, but considering the alternative would be more ducking and jumping while completing bland objectives, the minigames at least provide a brief diversion into something tolerable despite the uninspired designs.

THE VERDICT: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Quest takes the odd approach of trying to appeal to a female audience by making its main character so incapable she can be killed by passing birds. The reliance on only a weak jump, slow walk, and a duck to respond to the hazards she faces already makes Belle’s Quest excruciating to play at times, but with dull level objectives on top of it, her adventure becomes quite the pain to play. There are some brief flirtations with adventure game design and minigames that are ill-supported but tolerable for being simple and inoffensive, but more of this short game is spent with its awful animal dodging. An admirable attempt was made to adapt some of the animated film’s plot and images into this game, but its intended players would probably enjoy a book more then this flawed attempt to make Belle’s part in the story interactive.

And so, I give Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Quest for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A TERRIBLE rating. While the platforming elements were likely included since it seems this and Roar of the Beast were built off the same groundwork, Belle’s Quest would have been better served completely ditching them to pursue a new gameplay approach entirely. It could have gone all in on the minigames perhaps, or better embraced the character interactions that only matter in the first stage. It could have made more hazards like avoiding Lefou instead of almost all the game’s action being about ducking bats and jumping over rats, and objectives that were actual puzzles instead of just finding every key across a huge castle could have made for a game that was more intellectually stimulating. Instead, Sunsoft had its developers create a tedious game that can only really appeal to its target demographic with the effort it put into the story retelling and its look. The minigames are too basic to really help or hurt the design, so the weight of the experience falls on its worst part, that being a play experience that doesn’t seem to have any well executed design ideas.

I do commend the attempt to cater to a different audience with Belle’s Quest, but it’s clear here that it was either a noncommittal attempt or an oblivious one. Young girls would no doubt enjoy a typical platformer more than one where the platforming play is limited and annoying, and the few extra elements added like character interaction come and go before they can even engage the player much. While so-called “girl games” often don’t give their players enough credit when it comes to their design, Belle’s Quest just seems lost, unsure of what it should be and with no pumpkin farmer in sight to tell it exactly what it needs to do. Funnily enough, Belle’s Quest is responsible for this small unofficial review series on Disney’s Beauty and the Beast adaptations, as a I remembered my brother telling me we once rented a game based on the film and swiftly returned it. He said the game had featured too much reading, but ironically enough, having played it now, I’d say it would have benefited from a lot more reading because at least then it would have committed to an identity.