Anti-Climax Boss: In the Master System and Gaem Gera versions, it is embarrassingly easy to knock down Scar from Pride Rock in barely two hits.
Goddamned Boss: Scar gets very annoying. His attacks are not hard to dodge, but getting the right moment to throw him off Pride Rock can be frustrating. If he is not panting and you try to toss him, he'll pin you to the ground and and start clawing away at you. It is possible to escape this, but the timing is extremely tight, and if your health is not full, you're pretty much screwed. Likely, you will have to drop him unsuccessfully many times.
Worth noting in the Sega Master version, Scar is laughably easy, due to him being significantly weaker, and the battle begins right at the ledge. He can be defeated in less than a minute.
Memetic Mutation: "It starts..." ExplanationWhen you start the game up, a cardboard cut-out of Timon from the movie saying this line in front of an otherwise black screen comes up. It feels quite strange without its original context (preceding "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" in the movie), and just comes out of nowhere, leading to it becoming a bit of a joke for anyone who has played the game.
Misblamed: This game is frequently erroneously associated with the Compaq Presario Christmas Day disaster of 1994 where the game was packaged with a line of Compaq computers that weren't properly tested with the game and led to bluescreens whenever the user attempted to boot it. This story actually belongs to Disney's Animated Storybook: The Lion King; while there was indeed a Windows version, it didn't come out until 1996, two years after the reported story and one year after DirectX was already out, the latter of which lends some credit of its creation to the disaster story.
Nightmare Fuel: The death animation, which fades the background to black and plays a very ominous jingle. While cub Simba's animation is at least a comical dazed faint, adult Simba just lies completely still and lifeless...
No Problem with Licensed Games: The console games, while they are tough, are still solid games. Both the Genesis and Super NES versions rated well, and were commercially successful.
Unlike the Game Boy and NES versions below, the Master System and Game Gear ports manage to be significantly better regarded for having actually functional controls, pretty graphics, and featuring all of the levels.note Although, Return to Pride Rock is reduced to a short boss battle with Scar. The only real downside is that the Master System version was only released in Europe.
A sound-specific example for the DOS port (which is otherwise the SNES version with slightly different visuals), while had its audio significantly upgraded with much clearer sound samples.
Dark Technologies' Europe-exclusive NES version, itself a port of the already awkward (but at least okay) Game Boy release that manages to be significantly worse. Beyond sluggish and delayed controls, physics are practically non-existent in this version making platforming and attacking enemies a nightmare. To make things worse, despite what the box says, there are only six of the ten levels that were present in the Game Boy game, resulting in the story abruptly halting before Simba becomes an adult. It's telling that an unlicensed port was more faithful to the other releases. Not to mention it was the very last NES game officially released (being released in May 1995); quite a Downer Ending for the console.note To give an example of how rushed this port was, as the Cutting Room Floor points out, the game stores its graphics in the Game Boy's native format and converts them for use by the NES' PPU on the fly. They couldn't even properly convert the graphics for NES.
While far more playable, the Amiga 1200 version is missing five of the levelsnote Can't Wait to be King, Hakuna Matata, Simba's Return, and the two bonus stages. due to the decision to only distribute it on four floppy discs, as well as most of the cutscenes and some graphical effects.
"Can't Wait to be King" is filled with very annoying puzzles with the monkeys and tricky ostrich rides between them (a mistake in this section can be fatal). According to the creators, this was intentional; Disney at the time had a mandate that games had to take long enough to beat that players wouldn't just rent them and beat them over the rental period, which required them to stick a very noticeable Difficulty Spike early in the game.
"Hakuna Matata" has a log-jumping puzzle with enough random elements to it to be an enormous exercise in frustration, coupled with an instant death if you mess up the jumping rhythm badly enough (which you will). If "Can't Wait to be King" didn't stonewall you, the logs here did.
While many think the Adult Simba levels are somewhat easier than the cub levels, everyone agrees that "Be Prepared" is an exercise in frustration. The level is full of Goddamned Bats... including hyenas, cheetahs and literal bats. On top of that, there are lava geysers shooting from the floor, lava dripping from the ceiling and at one point, a river of lava that you have to traverse on a tiny floating rock. Good luck not getting knocked off! Oh, and not to forget that it's the only level in the game that is obviously not based on any scene from the finished movie. (Hakuna Matata is also based on a scene that ended up cut, but without Word of God you'd never realize.)
(as opposed to those in the 90s who knew what to expect, specially from Disney titles - Aladdin a few years prior was a standout!).