What? No. No way. This can’t possibly be real.
Oh dear god, it is. Well, here goes something.
Nothing says “surefire hit” more than a portable, kid-friendly game based on a direct-to-video animated film. As a tie-in to The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, Nintendo published a video game adaptation centered on pinball. Why pinball? I haven’t a clue – as far as I can tell, pinball does not come up in the film itself.
There are a couple of very important things to keep in mind when looking at a pinball video game – table design, and physics. If either of these are lackluster, you’ve almost certainly got a serious dud on your hands.
Let’s start with table design. At the start of the game, you get a choice between two different pinball tables. Two whole tables is hardly a “Pinball Frenzy,” but considering this is an adaptation of a DVD kids’ movie, this is honestly a nice surprise. The tableseach have their own theme – one is generally inspired by Ariel, and the other is based on Melody, Ariel’s daughter, who is the protagonist of the movie. Each table is pretty different and has a fair assortment of ramps, bumpers, and so forth, though the Melody one feels a bit more light on bells and whistles.
Each table also has a handful of various mini-games that can be unlocked by achieving certain milestones. Generally, each of these lasts around 60 seconds and have a similar objective – hit a bad guy with a ball, free a good guy out of something by hitting it with a ball, and so on. Others have you do whatever precedes this (I admittedly forget the details):
There are over a dozen of these mini-games in total – as before, for what you’d expect to be a shovelware game, there’s really a decent amount of content here.
So the tables are good, but what about the physics? Surely something about this game has to be a mess, right? Right?!
Wrong. The physics are honestly impressive. It feels responsive and things move the way you’d expect. It feels like pinball! It’s…dare I say…fun?
If I must have one chief complaint – and I do – I’d note that the game is very, very easy. This is a game for kids, after all, but as someone who is generally not that great at pinball I rarely had issues making cool things happen. Making cool things happen is fun, though, so this isn’t the worst problem to have. If you want to mindlessly score millions of points, there are probably worse ways to do it than this.
To my amazement, this game is considerably better than it has any right to be. It has a decent amount of variety, the physics are on point, and it looks and sounds fine. At the end of the day, this still isn’t a game that everyone’s going to want to go out and play, but honestly? This isn’t bad. At all. It’s weird. There are better and less kiddie portable pinball games out there (Pokemon Pinball comes to mind in particular), but this is honestly a bit of a hidden gem. It has left me wondering what I’m doing with my life.
Next week’s game is one that brings back some great memories of my youth, and one not so great one. It’s a classic in my book, if nothing else. See you then!