I played through Mickey No Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken today. This is an interesting game by Tomy where you play as Mickey exploring worlds based on Tokyo Disneyland. Mickey is equipped with a device that allows him to fill balloons with either water or helium, and this is the main gimmick of the game play. The game does quite a lot with the mechanic considering it's only 6 stages long (although for a 16 bit title, the stages are also impressively long).
Filling a balloon with helium and letting it go allows it to hit enemies above you to defeeat them, but the main use is to completely fill the balloon which lets you ride it upwards until it fully deflates. Holding a direction and letting go of the button allows you to fly fast in the direction you hold until the helium runs out and this is used to get through tight corridors with spikes and more. You can also use it dagonally downwards to gain momentum into a slide to get under spikes. Finally, Mickey is pretty bad at swimming in this game, as his swimming moves him mostly horizontally - but filling a balloon with helium allows him to float up to the surface to refill his air supply.
The water balloon is your main attack, but it has some other uses too. Fully filling a balloon lets you place it on the ground, where it can then be used as a trampoline - this gives you enough momentum to break bricks above your head. You can also use it to hold switches. In a few places you can use it to create frozen platforms, or to create floating platforms on wind currents too.
The game makes good use of it's mechanics and I found it fun, but it's surprisngly tough, especially the bosses. The final levels also feature just a few too many blind drops, with the final segment of the last stage being an atrocious set of balloon dashes over bottomless pits where you can't see the floor and it is completely down to trial and error to make it through.
Despite it's flaws though, and they are significant, I believe this is a better game than Capcom's Magical Quest titles I've played. It certainly is rougher around the edges, but it's also more creative and interesting, has great music and above all is just much more memorable. In this case, I'd happily take this flawed but fun and creative title over Capcom's serviceable but kinda disappointing time. It's still not a patch on the Illusion games though.
With that, I've beat all the 8 & 16 bit Mickey games I plan to play for Together Retro. I might play a game just outside the guidelines before the month is up and finally sit down with Mickey's Speedway USA on N64 though!