Snow White in Happily Ever After (SNES)

Filmation’s 1989 animated movie Happily Ever After holds a warm spot in my heart with the kind of nostalgia I’m afraid to disrupt by actually rewatching it. When I was young, I remember this sequel story to Snow White catching my interest thanks to a range of fun characters and a decent song or two, but I’m sure watching it now I’d notice its flaws most of all, so I let it be a cherished memory instead. However, I was incredibly surprised this underperforming animated movie had a tie-in game on the Super Nintendo, and I was much less concerned about how I’d feel playing it. Ultimately, I didn’t even need to worry about my nostalgia influencing my opinion of this game either, since Snow White in Happily Ever After doesn’t even try to adapt the parts of the film I remember fondly and in general feels like it was created with very little knowledge of the movie at all.

Snow White in Happily Ever After is a side-scrolling platformer that, like the movie, is meant to take place after the familiar fairy tale of Snow White. While the princess and prince hoped to live in peace after escaping the curse of the evil queen, the witch had a brother named Lord Maliss who aims to get revenge on the pair by tainting their happily ever after. In the film, Maliss captures the prince and Snow White flees, seeking the help of the seven Dwarfelles, cousins to the more familiar dwarves, in attempting a rescue. Along the way she’ll also be helped by the mysterious Shadow Man while the cigar smoking owl Scowl tries to convince his pal Batso to be the perfect villainous minions of Maliss. In the video game though, you won’t ever see crucial characters like the Dwarfelles or Scowl, despite the owl even being on the box. In fact, despite the film having a fair few monster designs that could have been fun to see as regular enemies, Snow White in Happily Ever After feels like it was created with very little chance to reference the source material, the game not only rarely featuring recognizable monsters from the movie but it even spoils the most important reveal from the very end of the film right on the first page of its manual.

Snow White in Happily Ever After ends up not being the most faithful translation of film to game, but it does make an interesting choice in letting you pick to play as either Snow White or the Shadow Man. There isn’t going to be much of a difference in how they play despite the Shadow Man being smaller and feebler in the movie, but both of the heroes can feel like poor choices for this adventure based on a few elements of how they move. Levels in Snow White in Happily Ever After are often fairly wide and tall, the idea being that you need to hop around and find a certain amount of coins to open the level exit. However, movement can be annoying and unresponsive at times in this platforming adventure. If you jump without moving, you can barely get any horizontal distance, and to leap over larger gaps or reach higher with your jumps, you will need to get a run going. If you start walking, you will eventually pick up the pace whether you want to or not, but you can also hold down a button to instantly sprint. Whether you want to be sprinting is another question though, especially with Snow White in Happily Ever After being a game filled with many small and moving platforms you need to jump to with some precision. Running off to your doom accidentally or trying to clear a jump you didn’t have the speed for and falling happen with about equal regularity. What makes simple platforming even more aggravating though is that this game’s protagonist will start to teeter if they’re close to the edge. While normally this is a fun animation to show a game character in a precarious situation, in Snow White in Happily Ever After this is practically a warning. Teeter for more than a second and you’ll be magnetized towards the edge even if you weren’t really that close to it, and then your character will careen off. You can start to account for the unfortunate realities of just trying to jump from small landing point to landing point as you get more familiar with the game, but it definitely discourages the type of exploration the game is all about.

The levels in Snow White in Happily Ever After are primarily about hunting down those coins, but there are bonus fruits scattered everywhere to contribute to a high score of little importance. This is a linear adventure that technically has eight stages, but some will be split into two separate levels so the game’s own count doesn’t feel wholly truthful. Whether you are hopping around beanstalks in the clouds, a cave full of crystals, or Maliss’s castle, there will be a lot of focus on trying to search every corner for floating coins to grab, and the game does make navigation a touch easier with special teleportation points scattered around. It’s hard not to find yourself a bit curious when coming across one and if the game controlled better some of the layouts would be more inviting to explore. Enemies can’t exactly increase the interest in navigating these large levels either. To fight back against them, Snow White and the Shadow Man can throw an infinite supply of apples and even adjust their throw angle and strength to account for distance or flying foes. Sometimes though you might come across special apple types like explosives or homing apples that can help with some of the ones that are harder to hit, although jumping on a baddie is also a way to make quick work of them. They serve their role as obstacles to progress but aren’t particularly exciting, and there are a few that just add another layer of annoyance like a living tree trunk who grabs you and slowly travels down to the bottom of the screen so you’re left waiting to get back in the action for a fair bit.

Level design in Snow White in Happily Ever After can also be unusually cruel at times, some traps existing solely to mess you up in ways you couldn’t have anticipated. At first this might be ground that falls out from beneath you, although you can start trying to account for that at least in levels where this occurs. What’s more annoying is the game has invisible blocks, these usually good for finding coins or springs to help you reach higher areas. However, the game also makes traps out of these, the player about to take the standard jump expected in an area without many other options only to bonk their head and miss their landing spot because of it. It’s an unusually mean inclusion in a game that feels like it was meant for kids, but even as Snow White in Happily Ever After continues to annoy you with pitfalls and trickery, the health system makes this game not only incredibly accessible to children but actually a bit hard to lose on purpose.

Health in Snow White in Happily Ever After is represented by a collection of hearts, and many levels have a great deal of heart pick-ups to grab as you explore. Almost every source of damage in this game will deal a singular heart of damage, be it a fall down a pit or an enemy like those tree trunks, and even the final boss only manages to shear off three hearts with his attacks. You start the game with a whopping 45 and as you explore you’ll probably rack up enough that you can even go beyond the 99 hearts it can display. What’s more, you are even given a continue if you somehow lose all that health, and from the options menu you can choose to start from most any stage except for the second half of the split up levels. Snow White in Happily Ever After almost doesn’t even require you to get good at the game as you’ll probably brute force it eventually despite the obnoxious traps and hindrances to your success, and even though there are different difficulty levels, this mostly impacts how many coins need to be collected and how much damage enemies take to be defeated. The choice to make surviving and continuing on harder than actual failure doesn’t help some later levels where checkpoints are rarer, a fall down a pit setting you back quite far, and the vertical level design can make falls in certain stages irritating enough already as you have to climb your way back up. However, the game lavishing you with ways to keep moving forward prevents Snow White in Happily Ever After from being grueling, but that doesn’t make it worth actually trying to make it to the ending.

THE VERDICT: Snow White in Happily Ever After is so reticent to hurt the player that it goes from what could have been the worst platformer on the SNES to something you can push through despite the obnoxious traps and poor controls. The large levels might have been interesting to explore if movement was cleaner and they didn’t have the kind of unfair tricks that might turn away young players, but your health is so high and options for continuing abundant, so if you do want to help Snow White actually get her happily ever after, you will be able to eventually clear it, just not with much of interest to do along the way.

And so, I give Snow White in Happily Ever After for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. In the Happily Ever After film, one of the four songs featured is a minute-long rap from Scowl about how bad he is. The line “it takes total commitment to be thoroughly bad” feels like it applies pretty well to this game adaptation of the movie, although it’s certainly not something worth celebrating. Right out of the gate the game is going to be a bad time since your movement is the most important thing for success and yet brimming with flaws that don’t match the level designs well. Then those levels throw in tricks you can’t anticipate and blind jumps to boot. The health system makes this manageable in the same way you can technically sand down an unsharpened pencil to get the lead, but it also makes a lot of the game’s efforts to oppose you trivial speedbumps that are annoying rather than something you care to deal with. Those tree trunks are perhaps the worst foe you’ll face, but if they grab you, they die and you lose a single paltry heart from your abundance so something that could have been a challenging danger to overcome is just another nuisance that slows down the coin collection. It’s a game that’s easy with an asterisk; if most of its design decisions were part of a game with limited lives, they would be almost unforgivable. Here, you have to slog through them, but you’ll get to the other end eventually unless you turn the game system off first.

Perhaps it would have been a more productive use of my time to watch the film this game is based on and more deeply consider the impact of nostalgia on evaluating the quality of something from our youth. I’d have a lot more moments I’d like even if I saw their faults, but here, the game felt aimless save for when it had enough direction to place a mean invisible block or otherwise upset some already poorly designed platforming. Exploring the level layouts could have worked somewhat if they were condensed a bit and Snow White and the Shadow Man were more athletic, but instead, you’re hardly going to feel happy at all playing this sloppy and almost unfaithful adaptation of a film that already doesn’t seem to pleased many people besides innocent kids happy to see anything animated on the television screen.