Is WarioWare Hiding an Homage to a Forgotten Nintendo Heroine?
Who is the first female lead character in a Nintendo game in which her gender is stated explicitly, right from the start? As opposed to a situation where you have to infer her gender or where that information is withheld from you until you beat the game, who is the first main character in a Nintendo title where you know from the moment you start the game — from the moment you first gaze upon the box art, even — that she is unmistakably female?
I’m asking this question because as previous posts have shown, the early female protagonists in Nintendo games tend to be rather… complicated, let’s say, in that their games don’t usually tell you up front that you’re controlling a woman.
I’ve written about how Bubbles, the main controllable character in the 1984 game Clu Clu Land, is Nintendo’s first female hero — but only outside Japan, because the original Japanese version of the game doesn’t gender her. Next, we’ve got Mach Rider. Released in 1984, this game got an arcade sequel in 1985 that implies that the title character might be female, though it’s never confirmed one way or the other. Its end-of-game reveal of a beautiful woman in a bikini precedes a similar one in 1986’s Metroid, the ending of which tells you in a much more concrete manner that yes, the character you’ve been playing as, the person in the space armor, has actually been a woman this whole time.
And that brings us all the way to October 1990, when Nintendo released a surprise sequel to an NES title that even back then might have seemed forgotten. I speak of Balloon Kid, the Game Boy title that is more or less a sequel to Balloon Fight. Whereas the first game has you controlling a nameless dude suspended by two balloons, this game has you play as Alice, a little girl suspended by two balloons. And instead of clearing enemies one screen after another, Joust-style, Alice flits across the dangerous, pointy landscape of Pencilvania in an effort to rescue her little brother, Jim, who floated away suspended from *several* balloons. (It’s a parable about balloon safety.)
The game also offers a two-player mode that works a bit more like the main mode of Balloon Fight, where Alice is pitted against the player-two character, Samm, who’s a boy, but importantly Alice is always the player one character. You can’t play as Samm in the main mode even if you wanted to.
Alice is unmistakably girly, it should be said. Like, she is literally a girl — a female child in a dress a girl would wear, and even when rendered on a Game Boy, you can’t mistake her for anything else. That puts her in a different class than Samus, Bubbles and Mach Rider just because there’s no way to miss that the protagonist of this game is female. Of course, one major segment of the game-playing population did miss that, specifically because Balloon Kid was not released in Japan despite being developed by Nintendo’s R&D1.
Alice: cute as a button, clearly a girl. (Via The Gay Gamer.)
In March 1992, Balloon Kid was reskinned as Hello Kitty World and released in Japan for the Famicom. Hello Kitty herself subs in for Alice, and Hello Kitty’s identical twin sister Mimmy, who I just found out existed, subs in for Samm.
For the life of me, I can’t find any explanation for why this game wasn’t released in Japan. Apparently an October 1990 issue of Weekly Famitsu indicates that it was planned to be. I’m fairly sure that it wasn’t a matter of Nintendo sitting on a Japanese release because they knew back in 1990 that this Hello Kitty revamp would be coming out years later. It’s also not as if Nintendo was embarrassed by the product, because on July 31, 2000, Japan finally met Alice in Balloon Fight GB, released for the Game Boy Color.
This release meant the release of this glorious box art showing off Alice. I’d imagine it probably did exist somewhere at Nintendo, from back when the game was intended for the Japanese market. I love this art so much.
It’s light years better than the American box art, and I have trouble imagining a time when the Japanese art would have been a turn-off for American gamers. Even back in the day, I think the Japanese version of Alice would have caught my eye before this grinning, Campbell’s Soup-looking monstrosity would have.
I should be happy that Alice finally got her big moment in Japan, but this was more or less the last we ever saw of her, in Japan, in the U.S. or anywhere else. She might be one of the few Nintendo protagonists not to get represented in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and even Muddy Mole got that much. Maybe as close as you can get to Alice popping up anywhere in the Smash series is the Animal Crossing villager using the Balloon Trip special move, but the crash helmet they wear during this move is a dead giveaway that this is coming from Balloon Fight, not Balloon Kid. Truly, this would seem to be the end of the line for poor Alice.
Unless… a character who looks just like her is supposed to be a callback to her??
Released in 2018, WarioWare Gold introduces a new character to the pack of weirdos that Wario pals around with: Lulu, a young girl pursuing Wario because he’s stolen what he thinks is a prized golden pot from her hometown. The object turns out to be her town’s shared chamber pot, however, and despite disliking Wario, Lulu shows up in subsequent WarioWare titles. She happens to look a lot Alice, but then again so does Onnanoko, a playable character in a game released twenty years previous: Wrecking Crew ’98, the roster of which features Mario regulars such as Luigi, Bowser and Peach, but also Foreman Spike and also some normie randos like Onnanoko, Oyazi and a living ball of rice. Onnanoko never appears in a video game again after this.
Left to right: Lulu, Alice and Onnanoko.
So what gives? Why do these three characters look so much alike?
I’m always cautious to jump to the conclusion of “this thing looks just like this other thing, so it must be an intentional reference!” Sometimes what seems like a direct callback to another thing is actually just those two things riffing on something else — maybe an older reference or maybe something that’s quite commonplace in a culture that’s not yours. Confronted with these three little Nintendo girls who do, in fact, look a bit alike, I asked Fatimah, a translator who lives in Japan, what she thought. She identified all three girls’ dresses as types of suspender skirts that you still see young girls in Japan wearing now, though they were more popular in the late twentieth century. She also pointed out that you can see girl characters wearing near identical dresses in popular anime such as Chibi Maruko-chan and Sazae-san.
Left: Chibi Maruko-chan. Right: Wakame in Sazae-san.
Which means that maybe Alice, Lulu and Onnanoko are all wearing similar-looking outfits because a lot of real little girls were at one point wearing red suspender dresses, because that’s how little girls dressed and to an extent still do. Onnanoko’s name literally just means “little girl,” so there’s not much to this character beyond that. But I’m willing to bet there might be more to Alice and Lulu.
First off, Nintendo’s official character trailer for Lulu has her traveling all around Diamond City suspended from a single balloon. As this nice person pointed out after this posted went live, at one point, Lulu even takes out one of the enemies from the original Balloon Fight.
Then, toward the end of WarioWare Gold, Lulu gets a balloon motif in-game as well. Specifically, she shoots down a bushel of balloons that Wario is attempting to escape with and then she takes one of them to return home, floating from it along with her town’s communal toilet. When she’s doing this, she looks a lot like Alice… just, you know, carrying a toilet with her.
What’s more, when Lulu returns for WarioWare: Get It Together!, where all the series cast are controllable, playable characters, she moves around the screen a lot like Alice in Balloon Kid. She’s not using a balloon to do it — she’s flitting about using her oversized bow instead — but the motion through the air seems too spot-on to be coincidental.
Though she doesn’t move around using balloons when you’re controlling here, there is in-game art of her floating around on a bushel of balloons.
There’s even a nod to this connection in the newest WarioWare game, where Lulu appears as a supporting character in Mona’s sequence. The very first thing you see in the cutscene introduction animation is Lulu tormenting a big, red fish with her water gun. I’m pretty sure that this fish is supposed to be a nod to the ones in the NES Balloon Fight that would leap up out of the water and eat you if you got too close.
Notably, this fish tries to eat her later. Callback / fish justice. The same fish also appears on the box art for the Japanese release of Balloon Fight, but colored incorrectly compared to how it looks in the game.
With all these callbacks in every appearance she’s made so far, I’m saying that they’re doing it on purpose; Alice is, in a sense, living on in the form of Lulu. If Lulu wasn’t designed from the get-go to be a callback to Alice — that is, if both were designed to fit the mold of “cute little girl” and the resemblance was initially coincidental — then the WarioWare team realized shortly into the production of WarioWare Gold that Lulu looked like Alice, and they started squeezing in little ways to reference Balloon Kid.
But what’s the connection? Why would the folks who make WarioWare be interested in Alice from Balloon Kid?
I suspect the answer may lie in Yoshio Sakamoto, who is probably best known as the co-creator of the Metroid series but who also worked as a designer on such Nintendo titles as Kid Icarus, Wrecking Crew and Balloon Fight. Though his first directing credit is the Nintendo dating sim Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School, his next is 1990’s Balloon Kid. He did not have any involvement with Wrecking Crew ’98, making a link between Alice and Onnonoko seem less likely, but he did serve as supervisor or producer on several WarioWare sequels — although not WarioWario Gold. In fact, his last WarioWare credit is the previous game in the series, 2013’s Game & Wario. I suppose it would be a lot more convincing if Sakamoto supervised the game Lulu actually debuted in, but then again he is still at Nintendo, so it’s not inconceivable that he would keep up on the progress on a new entry in a franchise he played a big part in, to the point that he could shoehorn in a reference to a Nintendo project for which he had a special fondness. After all, as the director of Balloon Kid, Sakamoto, he has some claim to being Alice’s creator. It would make sense for him to take pride in this original character he helped usher into existence so many years ago.
But let’s say it’s not Sakamoto. That’s even better, honestly, because it means someone else at Nintendo remembers Alice and thought she meant enough to show up again, even if Balloon Kid is more or less forgotten today. As I said at the beginning of this post, Nintendo has a checkered history when it comes to female protagonists, with a lot of the early ones being minimized or obscured in one way or another. Because Balloon Kid didn’t originally come out in Japan, Alice definitely falls into this camp, but she clearly has some fans in Kyoto nonetheless.
Float on, balloon girl, in whatever form you can.
Miscellaneous Notes
In chronological order, we’ve got Bubbles, Mach Rider, Samus and now Alice. Who’s next, as far as female Nintendo protagonists go? In 1992, NIntendo released Metroid II: The Return of Samus, and at that point, more or less everyone had learned that Samus was female, but as far as original characters, I think the next one would be Wanda, the controllable character in Mario & Wario. She’s more or less an animated cursor, and the game was only ever released in Japan, but her design has enough charm that she could have gotten more beyond this one title. In the miscellaneous notes section on this post about Toad’s gender, I talk about how she deserved a spot in the Mario canon, but perhaps because she was designed by this title’s developer, Game Freak of Pokémon fame, before this game became a Mario game, Wanda lost out. Then I think the next one is Panel de Pon, the main character of which is Lip, a flower fairy and one of the girliest-looking characters Nintendo has ever produced. Of course, Lip didn’t get to appear in the English localization of her game; she and her fairy pals got replaced with characters from Yoshi’s Island in what was eventually redubbed Tetris Attack.
So… when does a female protagonist whose gender is apparent right from the moment you start the game actually get to star in a game that’s released in all regions? I actually think it’s Dixie Kong, who in 1996 was the main protagonist of Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble. Like Alice and Lip, she’s unmistakably feminine from the moment you start up the game — and even before that, since she introduced as the secondary protagonist in Donkey Kong Country 2. But if 1996 seems late for Nintendo to finally have a clearly female protagonist in a game released in all regions… yeah, you’re right. It really is.
Regarding this timeline of female Nintendo protagonists, it’s probably appropriate to point toward Shin Onigashima, which was released in 1987 for the Famicom Disk System. It’s a text-based adventure game inspired by Japanese folklore. The two protagonists, Donbe and Hikari, both shoulder the role of protagonist throughout, and while the player technically encounters Hikari, the girl, first, it’s pretty clear that Donbe, the boy, is the one Nintendo chose to emphasize in the box art. And that makes me think that Hikari doesn’t get to claim top honors here, even if she ended up showing up in Captain Rainbow years later without Donbe.
It is, unfortunately, “Donbe and Hikari,” not “Hikari and Donbe.”
I’d been aware of Onnanoko for a while as being a random little girl who’s playable in Wrecking Crew ’98, but it was only doing research for this post that I found out that she’s also dead? Like, when you beat her in the game’s story mode, she becomes transparent and then gets angel wings and a halo. I guess… going to heaven? Real dark, Nintendo.
Translation of Onnanoko’s dialogue: I'm always here all alone. Whenever I ask people to play with me, they disappear. Now, there's no one left... Hey mister, will you play with me? Thanks for destroying the building. Now, I can go to where everyone else is.
There’s actually a way the newest WarioWare game ties back into Yoshio Sakamoto’s work, and it’s a particularly interesting one. Kat and Ana’s sequence in Move It! has them squaring off against a nasty carnivorous plant called Cractus, but we’ve seen Cractus before: as a boss in Wario Land Advance, for which Sakamoto served as a producer. I’m not saying that this for sure means that he is responsible for this character returning, as I’m sure a lot of people on the WarioWare: Move It! team would be familiar with Wario Land 4, but it does seem notable that Cractus is the first character from the Wario Land games to appear in WarioWare games — in an canonical way, and not just in the minigames associated with 9-Volt, which all feature Nintendo characters.
Technically speaking, the Japanese version of WarioWare: Move It! makes a slight distinction between the version of Cractus appearing in Wario Land 4 (フラワナ or Furawana, a combination of furawā, a borrowing of the English flower, and wana meaning “trap”) and this more recent version (フラワニ or Furawani, with wani meaning “crocodile” or “alligator”). But it seems like a nod either way.
Left: Cractus in Wario Land 4. Right: Cractus in WarioWare: Move It!
It really does seem like the Wario from WarioWare is a separate entity from the one that originated in the Mario games and starred in the Wario Land adventures. That said, the Mario Kart Arcade GP games feature Diamond City as a track, and it’s a weird combo of elements from the WarioWare games — Club Sugar and Dribble and Spitz’s taxi company show up — and the mainline games, because all versions of Wario are wearing the classic costume and also there’s a bunch of references to E. Gadd, even though he doesn’t have anything to do with either series.
Another instance of Sakamoto’s work referencing his previous work would be the fact that the forest theme from Balloon Kid is a reworking of a composition used in Gumshoe, the 1986 title on which he served as a designer. Hirokazu Tanaka served as composer for both games.
The title screen to Hello Kitty World indicates that the game is the joint copyright of Sanrio, which makes sense, and the mysterious Mario Co., LTD, which seems like a weird stand-in for Nintendo.
It seems Mario Co. LTD was jointly owned by Nintendo and Dentsu, another Japanese company whose claims to fame are Kaettekita Mario Bros. and Snoopy Concert, a Super Famicom title developed by Nintendo but published by the advertising/public relations company Dentsu and yet another Japanese company, Mitsui Fudosan, which is primarily a real estate company? Mario Co. LTD only released one other title, Sanrio Carnival 2, but it’s Snoopy Concert, this Japan-only, Nintendo-developed game using the Peanuts characters that I find bizarrely fascinating.
In between the NES/Famicom version of Balloon Fight, first released in 1985, and Balloon Kid in 1990, there was a Game & Watch version that plays a little differently. There’s a boss character who shows up periodically, and he’s the captain of league of sky pirates who looks more or less like an anthropomorphized iguana in a wrestling singlet. His name? Oiram Repus.
And if you’re reading that name and being all “I know that is an anagram or a code or something,” you’re right: It’s “Super Mario” backwards, but for no reason I can fathom. But this is, for the record, the most obscure Nintendo character I’ve read about in a long, long time.
Regarding the evolution of the Balloon Fight franchise beyond Balloon Kid, because the Legend of Zelda character Tingle also travels using balloons, the next reinvention of Ballon Fight starred him. Released in Japan in 2007, Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS is essentially just a 16-bit-looking remake of the NES title with Tingle as the lead character, plus a handful of other changes. It never made it outside Japan, and I wonder why these franchise is so regionally challenged.
Aside from the Balloon Trip Breeze attraction in 2012’s Nintendo Land, that’s it for the franchise so far. It remains to be seen how it might turn up again, aside from the small vestiges we can see in Lulu in WarioWare.
Finally, in reading a lot about Balloon Fight the past few weeks, I’ve become curious about an aspect of these games that I’ve not encountered an explanation for. In the original titles Balloon Trip mode and in the main mode of Balloon Kid, which I’d argue is based on Balloon Trip, why does the game scroll right to left? Basically every other game ever scrolls left to right. I suppose it’s a case of this franchise just being different, but I’m wondering if there’s an explanation somewhere, in a developer interview or in some cultural aspect I’m not understanding, for why Balloon Fight games do this one thing differently from all the rest. Anyone?