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Mickey Mouse III Gameplay

Gameplay

Mickey Mouse III: Balloon Dreams (☀ミッキーマウスIII 夢ふうせん Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fūsen) is a 1992 action video game released by Kemco for the Nintendo Famicom in Japan. It is the third game in Kemco's series of video games starring Mickey Mouse, though in addition to being the only game in the series not released on the Game Boy, it is also not of the same genre as the other four games in the series.

Due to Capcom holding the rights to make Disney video games on Nintendo systems in the U.S. at the time, when the game was to be released in the U.S., Kemco changed the game to feature new characters and renamed it Kid Klown in Night Mayor World.

A prototype translated version of this game to English (titled Mickey Mouse Dream Balloon) was planned, but due to Kemco of U.S.A. not holding the rights to Disney games at the time, it was scrapped (Article). The game featured broken Engrish words. However, aside from cutscenes, there is relatively little text in the game, so it can easily be played without knowing the language.

Story[]

Mickey is selling balloons to buy Minnie a birthday present, when Pluto tells him (according to Mickey) that Minnie won't wake up, so Mickey visits Minnie's house and along with Donald tries to wake her up, when nothing works Mickey decides he will enter her dreams. At the end, Minnie wakes up and thanks Mickey for defeating her five nightmares, but then the Horned King, who was responsible for the nightmares dares Mickey to come to his castle, saying that he don't believe in courage and love. After Mickey defeats him, he understands the true meaning of courage and tells Mickey to always protect Minnie, and Mickey and Minnie go to watch fireworks as the credits roll.

Gameplay[]

The game is a sidescroller in which Mickey can move left and right, jump, and throw balloons in any of 8 directions. The balloons will bounce upon colliding with a floor or wall, and bounce differently depending on whether Mickey is in the air. If Mickey is ducking, he can place a balloon on the ground in front of him; he can then jump on the balloon and bounce higher than a regular jump. Additionally, if Mickey walks in one direction for long enough, he will begin running quickly.

Mickey has up to 4 hearts of life, which are usually lost in 1/5 amounts amounts (though some enemies, mainly bosses, do more damage at once). If he runs out of hearts or falls in a pit, he will lose a life and need to restart from the last continue point. Additionally, Mickey can collect strawberries called "Chips" to gain chances in a minigame at the end of each level, where Mickey fires balloons in a semi-3D view to one of six areas to hit power-ups as they move from side to side.

Mickey can find various powerups in treasure chests scattered throughout the levels; these include chips, health, 1-ups, temporary invincibility, or temporarily reversed directional controls.

Most areas of the game are left-to-right free scrolling; however, some are vertical, and sometimes involve one-way scrolling upward as the stage falls beneath Mickey as he moves to keep up in time. Each stage is relatively long, usually with multiple sections, and a short display screen of the different stages appears in between each one, with "It's A Small World" playing in the background (which is also used as the end credits song). The Mickey Mouse Club March song is used on the title screen; both songs were changed for the Kid Klown US version.

Mickey must first travel through a grassy introduction level concluding in a fight with a hedgehog, then a similar grassy stage 1 where the boss is a large bird resembling Zippy from the Jungle Book; a toybox-based stage 2 with giant toy soldiers and monkeys clanging cymbals, which ends in a battle with an underwater Angler fish; stage 3 is a tall beanstalk with a few separate doors for alternate paths (mostly involving a shortcut), ending in a fight with a Giant; stage 4 is a frozen ice land where Mickey slips on the frozen ground and must traverse mid-air moving platforms, and the boss is a green aquatic dinosaur; stage 5 is a giant birthday cake with candy platforms and gelatin hazards that Mickey cannot easily jump out of, and the boss is a green caterpillar vaguely resembling the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland; stage 6 is the Horned King's castle, which is a maze with numerous doors, some of which lead to optional re-matches with the bosses of previous levels, where Mickey must fight a dragon and then a multi-stage battle with the Horned King himself.

The game includes an introduction cutscene with Pluto, a cut scene between the introduction stage and stage 1 with Donald and Minnie, another scene with Minnie and the Horned King after stage 5, and an ending scene. These scenes feature larger drawn artwork of Mickey and friends.

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