Alright, I started The Lion King for Sega Genesis and less than 24 hours later, I've beaten it!
I had the Game Gear version as a kid, so I'm mostly familiar with that. It's *mostly* the same game with stripped down graphics/sound, which gave me a bit of an advantage while playing since I remembered certain bits and ALSO made me really impressed at how much snazzier the 16-bit version is! Thankfully the biggest difference is that you can't actually get to the end the Game Gear version on Easy difficulty but you CAN on the Genesis version!
There are a lot of folks online who seem to think this game is way too hard (maybe the SNES version is worse?), but on Easy, I thought it was pretty manageable. It still has plenty of frustrating bits: my least favorite include the part of Hakuna Matata where you have to jump on logs to go up a waterfall and the final battle with Scar which all but requires you to have a six-button controller *and* know what you're supposed to do. I got a 1up from one but I don't quite get what the point of the bonus stages is and those seem way too hard. And I'm pretty sure I missed the overwhelming majority of power-ups over the game.
But overall, this is a really good game! The graphics are gorgeous, the music and sound effects are some of the best on the system, and the controls are very responsive. My favorite thing about playing it and the sign that the difficulty is good is that once you figure out how to get past a part that gives you trouble, you develop the skill to get past it easily after that. The first few stages gave me some trouble at first but then they become a breeze. When you continue and have to restart a level at the beginning, it's never that bad to get up to where you once were.
I'm confident that if I wanted to beat the game on Normal, I could. Although for now, I'm happy to have beaten it on Easy!
As far as affordable Sega Genesis games go, this one is definitely worth playing if you like the movie! It lives up to its reputation as being a 16-bit classic.