No, I did not just play a Hello Kitty game at random. After playing Balloon Kid again I later found out online that a port was released in Japan on the Famicom with all of the characters swapped out for Sanrio ones.

It's so utterly goddamn bizarre to find out that a game you grew up with back in the day underwent an identity change and was released on other hardware, I mean you really can't blame me for not knowing until recently. It's not like it was released as "This is a Famicom Version of Balloon Kid", and I'm not generally up to date on my Sanrio shit aside from random Aggretsuko clips, so the drive to play Hello Kitty games is almost non-existent.

As far as the game itself, it's mostly the same as Balloon Kid, but I wanna say the slowdown was a bit worse here and my control was probably better due to my 8bitdo NES controller being in better shape than my DS. They also really took away the intimidation factor of the Factory level at the end by brightening it up with Lego bricks and the first stage theme. Don't get me wrong I fucking adore that theme, but I kinda miss the "welcome to hell" feel of the original Game Boy version's aesthetic.

I'm trying to think of a reverse of this situation. What if Balloon Kid was only released in Japan, then was changed for the western audience and ported to NES? What would the characters be? Garfield? The Ninja Turtles? Bart Simpson? Jerry Seinfeld? The possibilities are endless in this possible alternate timeline.