Original SNES version: Long live the king! [pushes the NES port off a cliff]
For a late NES game, the graphics are terrible, and look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint. They are pretty similar to the graphics from the NES version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, but they look no better at all, no matter how they try to be at least decent. Not to mention, the sprites are too small. And the Elephant Graveyard level is still mostly in black and white, so they didn't even try to colorize that level. This port is watered down because it is ported from the Game Boy version and is extremely short. The back of the box claims the game to have over 10 levels, but in the game, there are only 6 levels and not 10. It only contains 6 levels, rather than having all of the levels from the other versions. It's like if the other levels were scared to appear in this port, so they escaped from it, making this port only have 6 levels. On that subject, it's quite baffling because Super Mario Bros., a launch title for this system, had 32 levels, and that was 1985. You only get to play as baby Simba, and not the adult one, and you don't even get to fight Scar, the final boss of the game. And because of the lack of adult Simba, you never play as the titular Lion King. Depending on the difficulty, the game increases or decreases the number of levels. The game basically doesn't know if it wants to be easy, medium or hard, so it just decides to have random difficulty, by increasing/decreasing the number of levels. Trying to climb can be very frustrating, jumping or long-jumping doesn't work sometimes and Simba somehow falls a bit faster than he does in the other versions. All the ending shows is basically a 47-second image that says, "everything the light touches is your kingdom", and after that, it goes directly to the credits. That's it. There's nothing else after the ending image, just credits. Even worse: This was the last ever licensed NES game. This essentially means that Nintendo went through 12 years of video games... only to end with this mess that Dark Technologies decided to make. Now the ending has just been made much worse than it already was.