Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 3 a.k.a Soreyuke!! Kid: Go! Go! Kid?!

The year is 1997—six years have passed since the birth of the ugly bastard called Crazy Castle 2. Will Kemco have learned from their mistakes? Well… yes and no. For starters, and as is almost to be expected, Crazy Castle 3 did not start out as a Bugs game, nor a “crazy” castle one. In 1997, it was released in Japan as an original grey Game Boy cart under the title Soreyuke!! Kid: Go! Go! Kid?. I never really understood why any license would be required for these kinds of puzzle platformers anyway, but hey, that’s just me.

As Kemco took this one to the US and Europe, good ol’ Bugs made a reappearance, and thus, Crazy Castle 3 was born—as a black Game Boy Color-enhanced cart, nonetheless. Too bad by then it would have been 1999, meaning both Carrot Crazy and Breakfast on the Run would predate this. Kemco better up the ante and introduce a few radical gameplay enhancements!… Which they of course did not.

So what it Crazy Castle 3 if Crazy Castle 1 was the birth of the series and Crazy Castle 2 was a big fuck-up? In essence, the third instalment is what the second one should have been, only six years too late. I presume Kemco just wanted to be there for the Game Boy Color ride. Admittedly, there’s a big generational gap between the original release and this one, meaning younger kids might never have heard of this crazy series.

The stupid friggin’ doors are back though. This time, the backdrops do change based on the “world” you’re in—the Castlevania-like part of the castle you’ll be traversing, from garden entryway all the way to the treasury. Each world comes with 15 stages, a couple of unique colour palettes, unique shapes/doorway backdrops, unique tunes, and unique enemy sprites—or should I say, Tunes? As in, Looney? Good one! Don’t be fooled though: the difficulty does not ramp up, the levels do not get significantly bigger, and the gameplay does not change at all: these changes are all purely cosmetic. I’ll take that, though: anything to break up the monotony.

The frame rate stuttering is gone and the additions from Crazy Castle 2 (power-ups, variations, better AI than the extremely dumb one in the first) remain. The few additions such as a lightning bolt that looks like Metroid’s Screw Attack icon appear at most twice throughout the whole game. It’s as if the level designers forgot to add Crazy Castle 3 sauce and instead were too focused on tightening the mess Crazy Castle 2 left behind.

Then why would you bother with the third iteration of the Kemco craziness? The first instalment sold more than a million because it was an early Game Boy release and it had has Looney Tunes smeared on. The second one is best ignored, and the third one was released six years too late. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly serviceable, even though I’d rather play Soreyuke than Bugs Bunny—and that’s coming from someone who tries out an unhealthy amount of Looney Tunes games.

Did I have fun playing through this Castle? Well, most of the time, more than a little bit, but not too much? The problem with these one-shot-kill puzzle platformers is that the challenging levels start to become irritating without save-scumming. Passwords are still a thing, which for a black Game Boy/Color game in post-Links Awakening DX feels like a cheap shot.

In the end, I compare this game with Sylvester & Tweety: Breakfast on the Run: both games misuse the Looney Tunes brand to get some extra sales, both games feel like commercial cash-grabs on a semi-new handheld release that tried prolonging the Game Boy’s life, but both games are still worth investigating if you’re a fan. I’m just glad it’s the first somewhat playable Crazy Castle entry.

That being said, unless Kemco finally introduces some much-needed new concepts, I don’t have high hopes for the next two instances.