Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen/Kid Klown in Night Mayor World (Famicom/NES Review)

Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen
aka Kid Klown in Night Mayor World
Platform: Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Kemco
First Released September 30, 1992
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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I’m pretty pissed about one specific moment in Mickey III. I’ve had a ripper of a headache ever since I fought the boss of the second world, which has the most extreme strobe effect I’ve experienced on the NES so far. The full screen violently strobes for three to five seconds per hit, and it takes several hits to get past that part. That’s shameful even by the standards of 1992. These days, thanks to the right balance of medications, it’s much, much rarer for me to have a seizure as a result of being “triggered.” Instead, I get pounding headaches, and I had a doozy of one while I waited for the Advil to kick-in following this. After just the first hit, I had to pass the controller off to Angela to beat the boss for me. Thankfully, this is the only part of the game that does that. I don’t think this factored into my final verdict, but in the interest of full disclosure, I’m kinda peeved about it.

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With that out of the way, why exactly is this a number three? Well, because this is considered part of the Crazy Castle franchise. I’ve done the first two games in that franchise here, here, and here. I don’t get why they bothered with tying this specific Mickey game to that particular franchise. Those were puzzle games. This is a platformer through and through. You practically need a flow chart to keep up with this stuff, especially since this splintered off into yet ANOTHER franchise: Kid Klown. Now Kid Klown isn’t exactly the most beloved NES game, but honestly, I didn’t think this was THAT bad. It certainly stands out from most generic NES games thanks to the way the balloons work.

They’re like Swiss Army Balloons. There’s all kinds of uses for them.

The balloons do almost everything in this game. They act as a weapon that you throw at enemies. You can even aim them up and diagonally. If you hold the attack button down, instead of throwing the balloon, you can hold onto it and use it to glide across large gaps. Or, you can drop a balloon on the ground and use it to spring up to a high platform. That’s a lot of flexibility for a single weapon over the course of one NES game. Mind you, there’s no upgrades to the balloons. Everything I just said they could do is there from the start, and you can even throw a few at a time. Sometimes the levels are actually designed around them, too. The above picture? Holding onto the balloon in that current lifts you up to the next platform. For a game with such a bad reputation, this is a lot better than I thought it would be.

The treasure chests occasionally have ?s in them that have genuinely random items. The ? could also give you a whammy in the form of reversing the movement controls for about ten seconds. So annoying.

The balloons sound too good to be true. There’s gotta be a catch, right? Yep. Mickey III came out following Sonic The Hedgehog, and I get the impression the movement physics were changed after development started because someone panicked and said “kids want games with characters that run fast! Make Mickey move fast and control like Sonic!” So, after running in a straight line for a couple seconds, you’ll suddenly pick up a lot of speed, only the controls become pretty unresponsive once you build up momentum. When that happens, jumping becomes especially laggy. In a game where the level layouts occasionally require precision jumping, that’s hugely frustrating. To Kemco’s credit, there’s a set piece or two tailored around running really fast, but they feel so tacked-on and forced (the one I’m thinking of even places the temporary invincibility item right next to the door) that it’s not exciting at all.

They used up all their original ideas with the balloons, so at one point, the designers said “screw it” and just copied the beams that fly out of the wall from Quick Man’s stage in Mega Man 2.

I had my expectations for Mickey III/Kid Klown set really low, so imagine my surprise that, whether or not I liked the game wasn’t immediately obvious. The level design isn’t phoned-in, but there’s no set pieces that made me sit up in my chair, like the Genesis and SMS versions of Castle of Illusion both managed to pull off. What they needed to do was have more of the platforming utilize the balloons. For the most part, you don’t have to use them to reach higher platforms or clear gaps. I didn’t even realize you could use them for jumping boosts until I was about halfway through the game. That tells you how often you need them. Since they’re the only unique aspect of Mickey III, that was almost certainly a mistake.

The last level is one of those “figure it out” NES mazes where, without any clues or context, you have to take the correct path to find a boss. I’m honestly not even sure how I found it, since I seemed to have been repeating the same section of the game for a good twenty minutes. Thankfully, there’s no time limit.

On the other hand, using them to fight baddies was satisfying enough. A lot of NES games don’t have diagonal projectiles. Here, there’s a couple bosses where it sure feels like they were designed with angling your attacks in mind. I just wish bosses required more finesse. If you have full life, you can spam attacks on the bosses with little to no effort. Even though your life doesn’t restore between stages, there’s plenty of health refills and a very clockable bonus game. I lost two lives the entire time and ultimately finished with over two dozen lives, beating every single boss on my first try. Mickey III feels like a game for younger children. That’s fine, by the way. Little kids need games suitable for them too. I just question whether they’ll find this exciting or not. It’s telling to me that Angela didn’t come close to dying when she took over for me after one hit against the giant fish. The bosses are too easy.

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There’s seven levels and eight boss fights, putting Mickey III at about an hour to complete. Maybe it doesn’t fit in with the Crazy Castle franchise, but really, I don’t think this was as bad as everyone made it out to be. I made it all the way to this paragraph before I rendered my final decision. Ultimately, I still was mostly bored playing Mickey III, which is why I’m leaning towards NO! If the basic enemies had been more dynamic or if the levels had made better use of the balloons, it probably would have been enough to save this. Sure, the unexpected sensory headache was annoying, but that’s not why I’m avoiding recommending Mickey III or Kid Klown or whatever the hell it wants to be called. There’s a lack of polish to the movement that I just can’t look past. Why on Earth did they do the movement the way they did? Without the strange momentum-based movement, I really think the whole balloon-based gameplay would have earned universal acclaim. Instead, Mickey III goes down in history as that weird Japanese Mickey Mouse game that was turned into a generic clown game that nobody likes.
Verdict: NO!

Minnie.. why are you bleeding from your eyes?!