The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid for Game Boy is an action platformer from Capcom based on the animated film The Little Mermaid. Playing as Ariel, the player swims through underwater levels, dodging enemies and obstacles, collecting pearls and other items, and battling sea creatures as well as the witch Ursula herself, whose fight forms the game's climax. Besides the underwater sections, the game also offers levels set on land, where the gameplay shifts slightly, the pace slows down, and the game adapts to a different environment and different types of enemies.

At the time, Capcom was among the very best when it came to producing licensed Disney titles, and The Little Mermaid confirms this even on the Game Boy's limited hardware. The characters are well recognizable, the animation is smooth, and controlling Ariel in the underwater sections offers a different feel of movement than classic ground-based jumping, with fluid hovering in all directions and the need to navigate narrow passages between corals and shipwrecks, which sets the game apart from most platformers of its era. The music draws on the film's themes adapted for the Game Boy chip and nicely underscores the fairy-tale, underwater atmosphere of each level, including the tenser passages in Ursula's lair.

Contemporary reception was positive; the game ranked among the successful licensed titles of an era when film adaptations tended to be of sporadic quality and rushed production with little care for gameplay. To this day it is valued as one of the better Disney platformers for the Game Boy and a demonstration of how Capcom managed to maintain a high standard of level design and controls even in a licensed project, comparable to their own in-house franchises. Fans of classic Disney films and handheld platformers alike will find in it a nicely crafted piece of the genre's history from the early nineties, a time when quality licenses of this kind were rather scarce.