Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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A playthrough of Hudson's 1994 license-based platformer for the NES, Beauty and the Beast.

Beauty and the Beast for the NES was a very late release for the NES, coming out nearly three years after the film had debuted in theaters, and it's a fairly obscure one. Despite having been given a multi-page feature and review in the August 1994 issue of Nintendo Power, the game was only ever released in PAL regions.

Loosely following the plot of the movie, as the beast, your goal is to become human again by making Belle fall in love with you. In the first three stages, you'll have to jump, climb, and roar your way through various parts of the castle, viciously mauling everything that dares get in your way. For the finale, you'll lead Gaston on a chase to the top of the castle ramparts, where you'll earn your salvation by helping him shuffle off this mortal coil.

The game was developed by Probe, and it's a simplified adaptation - a "demake" - of their Super Nintendo game (youtu.be/zmqiT2IfLGU) that debuted in July '94. It's generally slower and less fluid feeling than the SNES version, but the level layouts and controls are similar. The graphics suffer all the expected cutbacks (there's less color, the sprites are smaller and less detailed, and the animation is choppier) and there are a few head-scratching artistic choices that stand out for the wrong reasons (like the Rygar-esque blood red sky in stage two, and the hideous Belle sprite that shows up for the snowball fight), but everything is still recognizable.

The soundtrack is good, though. Instead of attempting to cut down the SNES game's music, Jeroen Tel wrote a new set of tracks that do a great job setting the tone for wandering around a creepy castle, sounding like a slightly less chaotic and dissonant take on his work in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It won't likely appeal to people who loathe the Europeggio-core chiptune aesthetic, but I liked it.

But overall, like the SNES game, I didn't care much for how Beauty and the Beast on the NES plays. The beast is slow and cumbersome, which is thematically appropriate, but not particularly conducive to fun platforming action. The beast comes to a dead stop whenever he lands from a jump, so there's no sense of forward momentum to push the action along. The game doesn't buffer your inputs as animations play out, either, so it's way too easy to fall off ledges when attempting to make consecutive jumps. I felt like I was locked in a never-ending battle to get the beast to do what I wanted, and that made for an extraordinarily frustrating game to play.

Beauty and the Beast's awkward mechanics and drab graphics aren't well-tailored to its target audience, but it's playable and mildly entertaining. If nothing else, it's heaps better than the NES Disney games that came after it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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