One thing about me is that I will draw on any Aladdin story I come across for my own imaginings. Video games, spin-off stories, little Disney Princess books – everything is fair game. Well, it turns out a video game designed to teach little children how to do math actually contains one of the best, most exciting after-Aladdin stories I have ever found.
I wasn't sure what to expect from MathQuest when I first started watching this playthrough. We begin with a genie named Bizarra getting released from her lamp when a cobra rubs against it, and we can tell right away from her character design and mannerisms that this is an evil genie best left trapped and avoided. I love how we're getting some expanded worldbuilding here; Genie isn't the only genie who's been trapped in a lamp out there! Bizarra is bent on causing havoc and destruction in her wake, and so she sweeps into the Agrabah marketplace and kidnaps Aladdin, Jasmine, and Abu, trapping them all in various spells around the market. (We don't know what Bizarra's motive is other than causing havoc and destruction, but that seems to be enough.) Genie and Iago she sends to the palace dungeons, where they have to try and get out and rescue their friends. Once that's done, the gameplay continues as we have to track down all three pieces of Bizarra's lamp, which she's broken so that she can never be re-trapped.
The story was honestly good enough to be an Aladdin movie all on its own. There was some real excitement here, and some super interesting backstory between Bizarra and an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh named Veri Ankhamen (I have no idea if I spelled that right, but it should look like an ancient Egyptian name but be pronounced “very uncommon”!). When we go with Iago and Genie to rescue Abu, Jasmine, and Aladdin from the spells they are trapped in, it's clear they were all quite conscious of their plights and able to experience every second of it, so we know how bad a state they were actually in. There's no feeling of, “Oh, no, they were actually fine” or that any of them was actually in less danger than we were anticipating. Later on in the game, Genie and Iago are given a horrifying piece of information that makes them think they will have to lose Aladdin forever in order to defeat Bizarra – and I am not saying a word more about that, because I'm not giving spoilers! But watching Genie trying to talk normally to Aladdin while Aladdin's so smiling and happy and unaware of this prediction... oh, my. There was no pulling punches here!
Now, something I have always wanted to see is a battle of wits between Genie and Iago. Aladdin MathQuest didn't have exactly that, but Genie and Iago are the characters we follow through most of the story, so we do get lots of fun interactions between them – and, as I found out when the end credits rolled up, they were both voiced by their original movie actors!!! No wonder it was so good.
The game also comes up with some pretty fair reasons why Aladdin and Jasmine and Abu never stick around with Genie and Iago after they've been rescued, so that the game can keep its focus on those two, even though for them to all stick together would make the most immediate sense. Their reasons for splitting up are at least believable, which is more than I can say for that part of Nasira's Revenge where Aladdin goes off to the Ancient City to rescue the Sultan and Jasmine just hangs back like it's a given she won't come, on this mission to save her own father. (Not that I have an opinion about that or anything.) We also get to meet some really interesting merchants around the city along our quest. Many of them had fun quirks, and even though none of them felt threatening the way the merchants we see in the movie do, all of them felt like they belonged in our city of Agrabah. My favourite was probably the lady, I forget her name, who makes mosaics to sell. She comes off as strong and confident but isn't unyielding, she's willing to work out a barter if out-and-out sale isn't an option. I liked her. I want her to become a recurring figure in the marketplace. We also hear of a secret passage in the palace dungeons called “Yazoul's Number Wall”, which of course is an excuse for us to have to do math equations in order to escape the dungeons, but it's a fun excuse. It brought to my mind delightful images of an eccentric little architect building the palace many years before, delighted at the chance to create an intricate puzzle and offer people a challenge. I must say, all the games were incorporated into the storyline incredibly well. There was always a real, in-story reason why the characters would be playing these games; I don't recall any moment where I was sitting there mentally screaming at them to stop doing math and just get on with the plot already.
So what about the math games themselves? I know, I haven't talked a lot about them, the story is the part that really interests me, and in my defence, I only watched a playthrough of this game, I haven't actually played it and tried the games myself. From what I could tell, there was a nice variety of games involving simple addition, multiplication, logic puzzles, pattern recognition, things like that. The types of games never felt too repetitive to me, like by the time you reached the same type of game that you had played before, you had already gotten to play many other kinds and you wouldn't be getting bored. It seems you can choose the level of difficulty on the math puzzles – the playthrough I watched was set to the easiest level, and I don't consider myself to be the best at math but found it pretty easy to figure out all the answers before the player solved them. I'm not sure what it says about me that I found easy children's math puzzles to be at just the right level....
Of course, if this were a movie and not just a math game, I might suggest delving a little more deeply into Bizarra, what else she's trying to do after she finishes trapping all our friends, and maybe cut a few times away from Iago and Genie's storyline to Aladdin, Jasmine, and Abu keeping her busy. And of course, if this were really a movie you couldn't have the Aladdin characters constantly breaking the fourth wall to talk to you, the player, as their extremely helpful friend either! I think the only thing I would have done differently on the emotional side of things is to have Jasmine throw her arms around Aladdin every time he comes back safe. I guess the graphics didn't allow for that much movement, and honestly, the relief in her voice still worked just fine.
There is also a sister game to this, called Aladdin Reading Quest. Reading Quest had a lot going for it too – the story was just as exciting as this one, and it featured Jafar as our main villain, still alive and tormenting Aladdin and Jasmine even after Iago's defected to their side, which is like the timeline I use in my own Aladdin fanfictions (in which I do not try and pretend Aladdin and Jasmine wouldn't have gotten married right away), so naturally I loved that. It also called Aladdin "Prince Aladdin" which we love to see (even though he was wearing his rags again). And this time we got a word-based piece of backstory: a guard named Hassan used to create word puzzles for Jasmine to break when she was younger, which is such a sweet thought. And yet I didn't enjoy Reading Quest quite as much as MathQuest. I think part of the problem was just because words have always come much easier to me than numbers (that's why I'm writing a blog here, instead of doing accounting or something!), and so watching a bunch of puzzles about which letter a word started with felt so frustratingly obvious that it was painful to watch them presented as challenges. The other problem was Jasmine featured prominently on the quest in that one – which you'd think would be a huge plus, it should have been a huge plus – but her whole demeanour was way too calm and quiet and even-toned for Princess Jasmine under any circumstances, much less if Aladdin had been kidnapped. Look, I get they don't want to upset children by having her be impatient with them. But is that any excuse for breaking her character? She's a brave, fiery, emotional princess, not a kindergarten teacher!
But definitely give MathQuest a watch. That one was excellent!
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