Dan Geeks Out: Video Game Review #390: Mulan

Mulan

Game Boy

Nostalgia Factor:

Nostalgia is not going to fuel this review. I had never played this game growing up. I didn't own a Game Boy growing up. I've never even seen Mulan.

I only played this game because I had read that you can beat it in less than a half hour. Sometimes you just want to play and review a game that's short. What can I say? Here's my last review from the year 1997: Disney's Mulan for the Nintendo Game Boy.

Story:

From what I've gathered, this game follows the plot of the movie pretty closely. A woman named Mulan dresses as a man to fight with the Chinese army so that her beloved family members don't have to. Even someone who hasn't seen this movie like myself has a pretty good general idea of what it is about. If you don't, well, I don't know. Go watch it or something.

Gameplay:

This game has some of the worst controls I have ever encountered. The lag is absolutely terrible. Character movement is choppy. Completing the most basic tasks like attacking an enemy or jumping over a pit are WAY more difficult than they need to be. It almost needs to be played to be believed.

Mulan attacks by throwing, what - apples? at her enemies. She throws them in an arc, so unless you are lined up perfectly your attack can miss, even if your enemy is right in front of you. The very first area of the game has you knocking down these doors that have been set up in the snow with your apples. Just hitting these doors is a task in and of itself. If you don't hurry up and run past them when they are knocked down, they spring back up and you have to knock them over again before you can advance. The lag between throwing an apple and running forward is so severe, it took me at least ten attempts before I could even make it through the first segment of the game.

The jumping is even worse than the combat, if you can imagine that. If you mis-time your jump or are off on your jump by even one pixel, you'll fall and die. The sluggish controls and the unresponsive jump button do the game no favors. There are areas later in the game where you have to swing from ropes or jump across angled ledges while sliding down them. I don't like these parts of the game. In fact, I don't like anything about this game.

I have to give Mulan credit for trying to mix things up with different level types from time to time. There's a swimming level and a sledding level. Both of these levels control like absolute rubbish too, but at least they tried.

Graphics:

This game looks as bad as it plays. Ugly, plain, and generic all around. I can't even find any decent screenshots that showcase this game's hideousness. It's like the internet wants to forget this game exists.

Sound:

The game sounds like rubbish too. For some reason, the copy I was playing had no background music playing throughout the game. I thought the game simply had no music, but when I looked up videos of it on YouTube, that didn't seem to be the case. Not like I was missing anything. It sucks too.

Overall:

I don't think I've ever phoned it in this much on one of my game reviews. Mulan is just so terrible, it really isn't worthy of any more of my thought, time, or effort.

If it wasn't for Kool-Aid Man for the 2600, this might have gone down as the worst game I've played in recent memory. But looks like it can't even do that right.

Don't bother with this one, folks.

THE GRADE:

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1982 reviews:

1983:

1984: