Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania
"okay, it's not just the fall guys stuff, there's actually monkey ball in it"
me, to myself watching the trailer
i'll be the first to admit that i don't really pay attention to new games or trailers for games that come out. i didn't even play many games last year that came out last year, i think 6 out of 50 total games played or so? i'm sort of the person that just hears about things from word of mouth, which doesn't help things when i don't talk to that many people, (especially not about new games), and whatever my youtube algorithm shows me because it's the only website i still use that has one.
i forgot where i first heard that a new monkey ball was being made, maybe reading about an old nintendo direct or something, and i sort of forgot about it after that. jump cut to almost two weeks before launch, and my Crazy Taxi-infected youtube algorithm delivers "The Goods" to me:
be still my beating heart, sega really is digging crazy taxi out of the grave if they're committing to putting the ~~second~~ most iconic character ~~after B.D. Joe~~ as a $25 season pass DLC character in the new monkey ball game to be added several months after launch!
wait, what?
that's genuinely what my first memory of seeing the game in promos was like. i'm not gonna review the game in bad faith and only talk about the post-transaction upsells, but it's gonna be part of the conversation... eventually. i'll get there, just, let's actually talk about the monkey ball first.
so, real quick, i'm not a fan of 2021's banana mania, which is weird cause i like the originals! to not get too far off track, something's up with the physics engine compared to the gamecube originals they're porting, i don't quite get why but i don't like it. i also don't like the missions that were tacked on, it's textbook "we have replay value, look at all these boxes with no checkmark that you didn't do yet!". at least it's not the whole gameplay loop (re: pokemon legends arceus), but i was almost never interested in engaging with them.
and more seriously, the complete lack of local multiplayer options for the main monkey ball game is awful. just minigames only! and kinda iffy ones, at that. even the gamecube originals had golf-style "everyone takes their turn" multiplayer of the main game, so i'm left wondering what banana mania has to offer to someone that knows the originals exist on top of all the modded level packs that exist, FOR FREE if you want even more. maybe for those weirdo "no emulation purists"? it'd be a losing fight, but they're free to do so, i guess?
BUT ANYWAY. BANANA RUMBLE. after clearing all 200 stages, and doing some online multiplayer, i'm glad to say that banana rumble is a welcome improvement from banana mania! wow!
rolling start
to establish full context, i played the entirety of the adventure mode in split screen two player local co-op, and it works really well with no discernable performance drops!
how multiplayer in the main game works is that each player plays the same stage at the same time, all bananas collected go to one pot, and as long as one person clears the stage, all players move on simultaneously as soon as everyone else finishes or falls out, unlike SMB1 where it is strictly a race where the last player left racing is immediately disqualified as everyone moves on. the game keeps track of who finishes in what order, how many bananas each player collects. once the set of 10 stages is over, you can view a ranking on who pulled their weight. it's a fun little addition that strikes a good balance between cooperative and competitive co-op, and the toggle to make players able to overlap each other or not is a cool option if you want to upset this balance on purpose. i could imagine a group of friends getting drunk and fucking each other over by bouncing themselves off the stage while racing to the goal would be a good time.
i do have some small gripes about the multiplayer, like how even in local play, you can't view the stage from the pause menu and all helper functions are disabled. i never needed the helper functions to complete all 200 stages (although viewing the stage would have been nice), but if a group of new players wanted to do their first playthrough together (like i did), it might be somewhat frustrating if they get stuck on a particular stage.
there are also a small handful of stages that have unexpected interactions in multiplayer, even when player collision is turned off, due to things like elevators triggered by a switch that can leave slower players behind and unable to go forward, or seesaws that account for all players on them at once that can make them lean the wrong way for what everyone is expecting by themselves. neither of these are anywhere near game breaking issues and the latter probably is intended behavior, though, and it's few and far between this happens.
speaking of, how is the stage design and overall flow? to me, it was okay to pretty good! there are more stages that are kind of plain point A to point B than i'd prefer, but the good stages are good! the gamecube originals have a difficulty curve like a fucking roller coaster that can go up and down at any time, and you sort of just get used to seeing one of the most difficult floors in the entire series show up as the 7th stage of 50 in SMB1's hard mode equivalent or at the end of world 4 of 10 in SMB2's story mode, so banana rumble's difficulty curve being a gentler slope was pretty surprising. i imagine making the stages simpler was to keep this smooth curve, which... i'm okay with, i guess. with helper options and a smoother difficulty curve, this is probably the most approachable super monkey ball has ever been, and probably the best one for a new player to experience. for old heads that've played the original, they could most likely take it or leave it.
and trust me when i say the difficulty is reasonable. i'm no monkey ball master or anything, i only got to master extra in SMB2 once i got to 99 lives, and completing maps like tram and the aforementioned exam-c and 48 other floors on only two extra lives to get to expert extra and master in SMB1, yeah good luck.
the individual stage design is a more complicated beast to talk about, but real quick, i can think of only one level that i would want to quantify as a "dud", which is world 10-05, if you must know. it honestly never got "pull my hair out" frustrating, at least until the very very end where it started giving stages like world EX 8-10 that gives me arthropod flashbacks, which isn't a negative in my onion, and i mean this with Full Sincerity, because it's not a monkey ball game without some absolute raw back-breaking bullshit in there somewhere!
in terms of aesthetics, the world designs fit more or less right in line with the abstractness that i've come to expect from floating mazes in the sky. pretty aesthetically pleasing to look at, but not really interfering too much. however, the music is rather... standard? boring? it's not bad, but it uses a lot of drum fills that i can only describe as timid, while the rest of the instrumentation seems kinda generic to the world theming. i may just be in the camp of "you can take monkey ball out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of monkey ball", so consider it a non-factor towards overall enjoyment.
also, for those more intimately familiar with the stage design and differences between SMB1 and 2, i'd say that banana rumble leans more into the design school of 2. there are plenty of large, open floors that have set pieces that need to be navigated in / on / around, lots of moving platforms that you need to stay on, moving objects that you need to avoid, floors that are "puzzles" in that you need to figure out what the stage designer had in mind from the visual design and / or stage name. less switches and wormholes than 2, but they're still somewhat common, along with panels that instantly give you speed, or launch you upward.
there are some SMB1 style less complex stages that are simple shapes and slopes snapped together, or extremely narrow ledges that require fine motor control, but they're not as common as the former. i also don't mean to disparage SMB1 level design by calling it "less complex" either, i have days where i prefer 1's philosophy over 2, but it is obvious to me where the inspiration comes from. there's also the matter of the new mechanic added to banana rumble that can completely trivialize the SMB1 style stages, too.
a dash of something
the new mechanic for this game is the spin dash, where holding B charges a dash that you can use to gain anywhere from a little to a lot of speed from a stand-still. this is where you conjure an image of sonic the hedgehog, because sega and spin dashing. got it out of your system? cool, moving on. this thing is CRACKED in the right hands. the absolutely wild shit i've done, and seen other people do to open stages up for quick completions, and save themselves from what should have been a certain death is really surprising.
what's even more surprising is that it doesn't really ruin the flow like jumping does in banana blitz. it's not forced upon you and i bet a "True Monkey Ball Purist" could probably beat most if not all stages without using the spin dash if you're skilled enough. however, using the spin dash correctly is a skill in and of itself, just a little bit too much charge or a miscalculated angle and it'll send you flying towards the kill plane just as quick.
it's a good addition for new players to use it as a tool to save themselves from falling off a steep slope or making sure they won't get stopped by a little indent / gap in the floor, and for veteran players to jump huge gaps or use that steep slope to skip the entire level once they know what to do. it's also a fun process discovering what you're capable of doing with the spin dash, a personal example is the floor in the previous screenshot (world EX 5-10) was a serious wall for me as i tried to traverse the entire scary bridge plank by plank over and over and over, then going back a day later and using the spin dash to jump over the entire thing and finish in about 4 seconds on my third try. quite good stuff!
everything is now and i hate it
okay, okay, maybe hate is a strong word. but it's not all perfect, i have to deliver on getting to the season pass battle pass crap eventually, and i can't really avoid it any longer without going into the weeds and losing you all. the game is pretty close to being a slam dunk, but this is 2024 sega we're talking about. it's the same sega that
- delists the purchasable ROMs of sonic 1 and 2 to make room for sonic origins, and will probably do the same with sonic generations once the new... remaster? port? game? comes out
- implements denuvo DRM despite a constantly awful track record regarding performance and "number of days it hasn't been cracked yet" never reaching double digits
- is a subsidiary of sega sammy, who could just as easily pull a konami and fuck off entirely to phone games and japanese parlor games if this new venture into revitalizing old IPs doesn't work out. also consider sega's history as SErvice GAmes, their history in gambling paraphernalia goes back even farther than konami's... yknow, it could happen! talk about a bad future! ahahahaha!!!!!!!!
despite my appreciation of sega and the impact they've had on the landscape of gaming and the way i myself interact with the medium of video games, (hello, rechost calling myself a sega shill), you can't ignore the red flags. or at least, i can't.
the season pass DLC adds sonic superstars-esque models for sonic, tails, knuckles and amy, as well at beat from jet set radio and axel from crazy taxi. sonic is available to play now, and while the axel reveal trailer says he gets added sometime in fall 2024, the switch eShop says that all the characters besides sonic have a release date of march 31st, 2025! nine months from when i'm typing this! what?!
i'm not the kinda person to often say such overreaching statements as "BRO IT'S SO EASY JUST PUT IT IN THE GAME" but like. sonic, tails, and beat were in banana mania. there's already footage of axel that looks like it's pretty much already done to me. if they're like the banana mania crossover characters, they're all gonna be mute, so what's the point of the delay if not to pull a nintendo "we promise to add more content later! be grateful!" a la mario golf super rush? i can't really think of any reason to announce these things and then launch them so far in the future other than to join the rest of the "road map" types that the heavy hitter publishers are expected to make to keep interest in the game "long-term".
and EVEN IF these new characters technically do have "additive value" because each character has unique stats and abilities now, if the game has good replay value, i'm gonna want to replay it on it's own merits anyway! and it does!!! even when i'm writing this, i wanted to (and did) put the keyboard down to hop into an online lobby and play the main game mode with randoms for a little bit! the pick-up-and-play nature of the online lobbies for adventure mode is honestly a perfect match for the switch, i can (usually) find an open lobby with whatever 10-stage set the host wants to do, jump in, have some fun, then either go right back in, or get back to doing whatever i was doing. it's great! i don't need the promise of DLC to bring me back to the game in nine months if the core is good enough!
and i know that the counter-argument is "it's just skins, you can very easily not buy them", but it's just the thought of what COULD have been the options down the line for DLC instead! what about maps packs for some extra levels? alternate main game modes akin to reverse mode or dark banana mode like in banana mania? just some food for thought, sega... wink wink nudge nudge.
and speaking of the inevitable march of time and progress giving me things that i don't like, the missions from banana mania are back. each floor has three additional goals now: complete the stage in a predetermined time limit (usually something pretty fast), gather a significant amount of bananas in the stage before hitting the goal, and collect the golden banana that's usually somewhat out of the way or requires a snazzy Gamer Maneuver to collect.
the whole checklist mission collectible is a pet peeve of mine now after seeing it often enough, even as far back as 2008's wario land shake it, and banana rumble's implementation of it is kinda... meh. i get that the removal of lives would make collecting bananas kinda "pointless" without the incentive that 100 of them gives a 1-up (that's a whole other can of worms), but this ain't it. and all a mission gives you for completion is more shop points to buy cosmetics. laaaaaame. maybe some sicko out there wants to grind out these missions (which are often mutually exclusive and can't be gotten all at once), but not me.
instead of the reward of more shop points if you can hit an arbitrary time limit, i much rather would have seen staff ghosts for each course if you get close to that target time! like how it works in f-zero or mario kart. the implementation of ghost races already exists for online leaderboards populated by players, adding staff ghosts would give a nice offline option once this game eventually goes dark, while also naturally leading more curious players to different strategies from the staff ghosts!
and that leaves la banane dorée. this one i'm actually sort of okay with. the implementation is a bit lacking, though. i'd like to see a time attack mode where, perhaps, the goal doesn't appear unless the golden banana is collected. although this might be trivial for some stages like world EX 8-9, where the golden banana is pretty much unavoidable, which sort of begs the question as to why it's like that.
i'm sorry i've never played fortnite before
even though the adventure mode is, arguably, where the real meat and potatoes of the game is, the marketing put a pretty hefty focus in the minigames / battle mode as the Main Multiplayer Focus. it's also the mode that has a battle pass, where playing online (with randoms only) earns you points towards a meter which gives you exclusive cosmetic rewards every so often. every match earns you a few hundred points or so, and you have what seems like about two weeks to earn about, as a season 1 example, 6,000 points to earn the final reward. a lot less time and a lot less effort than something like, say, splatoon 3's catalog. speaking of splatoon 3, banana rumble also has a login bonus where completing your first random online battle match per day gives you a spin of the Monkey Lottery (a gacha) for a cosmetic item.
i've already voiced my opinion on splatoon 3's "daily login" bonuses (don't like them), so nothing much is gonna change here. same borderline predatory shit to capitalize on FOMO, although i can't imagine super monkey ball having the same gravitational pull as the universally gay squid game. so that more or less leaves the quality of the minigames themselves, right?
they're so-so. meh. there's 5 minigame modes that each have a handful of unique maps to play on, which can easily be summarized as the following under various time limits:
- a race on one of five pretty large, but otherwise standard-feeling monkey ball levels
- collecting the most bananas in one of three arena-type levels
- a game of tag with bombs on one of two large maps, where players not tagged as it (e.g., holding a bomb) when time runs out are awarded points in five rounds
- a team event in one of three large downhill slopes where there are various goal rings dotted on the slope, entering a goal collects it for your team, the harder a goal is to enter the more points it's worth
- another team event in one of two arenas where you smash stationary robots to earn points
none of them are stinkers by any means, but i don't think there's a cult classic buried here like monkey target 2. when you queue up for a lobby, it picks a game at seemingly random, and it doesn't tell you what game you're playing until you're about 10 seconds away from starting it. strangely enough, i've played several online matches at different times, and at least for me it loves prioritizing putting me in the robot smashing game since i've been matched in that more than i care to count. i've only played the banana collecting game and race game once and the bomb tag mode twice, the goal-collecting mode hasn't appeared at all. maybe there's a hidden schedule i'm coincidentally hitting at the perfectly wrong time or something.
it's also worth noting that when playing any of these modes, whether it's with two players locally or 16 players online, the frame rate is cut to what feels like somewhere between 20 and 30 FPS. i'm not a frame rate snob at all (i'm used to playing minecraft at less than 20 FPS for years), but it feels weird. not unplayable by any means, but... yeah. gotta point it out, i suppose.
also, uh. it appears that the majority population of the battle mode player base might be bots? every match i'm in is overwhelmingly populated by players with keysmash names, no matter if it was on the debut weekend in the middle of the afternoon or during a weekday morning, of 16 players it seems that more than half in every match are these keysmash names. i thought they were improperly rendered japanese fonts at first, but then i saw a japanese player name properly so i have no idea what the deal is here, if it isn't bots.
frankly, i don't care if it's mostly bots, at least it fills a match and doesn't time you out if you can only gather 4 people for a 16 player match, but it's kind of jarring when you look at the likes of f-zero 99, where in the datamine for it there's a list of all fake player names and it's almost 1400 names long in several languages that aren't just english and japanese, and it's pretty convincing unless f-zero 99 became The One Game You Play Now, in my onion.
cosmetic damage
oh yeah, did i mention that with all these cosmetics and the battle pass and the daily login bonuses and shit, that you cannot use any unlockable cosmetic with 5 of the 12 base game characters, or (assumably because i can't play as them) ANY of the 6 DLC characters???
i'm baffled, honestly! like, all this effort to clone the battle pass mechanic and over half the roster can't use them??? just the six pre-existing monkeys plus one new character? i get not being able to put clothes on them if the model doesn't match, but you can't even change the ball color or add a particle effect to the other characters! i honestly wouldn't even care that much, if it wasn't for the fact that they did my dude, the GOAT (sheep) Tee dirty with this. almost unforgivable.
oh, and i like that the acts of pausing and choosing to restart a stage are both much much faster than in banana mania, only slightly slower than on gamecube, i feel. might as well throw that in there, cause i disliked that about banana mania too. and i wanted weirder stage names like there were in SMB2, like "totalitarianism", "amida lot", "postmodern", and "soft cream". right. hm. where was i?
the point
despite all my whining about passes and clothes and points and shit, remember that i spent the first half of this review basically saying "it's good! i like the it!". and i do! i like the it, mostly! the parts that are good are a pretty good translation of the monkey ball concept into a modern age, and if you have any interest in monkey ball, this is probably the one least likely to make you break your controller with a reasonable approach to difficulty, and quality of life options with controls and helper options. maybe wait for a price reduction or get it used if you're curious but not dying for a fix.
siliconera also conducted an interview with three high-ranking staff members of the game and they concluded that versions on other non-nintendo consoles aren't out of the question, so maybe keep an ear to the ground in the future if you don't have a reliable way to play switch games.
however, i can't avoid seeing the minor things that irritate me outside of the moment-to-moment gameplay that all pile up into something that gets my gears turning to write something like... all this. although i can say, when i boot up the game to get into a random adventure lobby to play some good ol fashioned monkeyed ball for a little bit, it doesn't take a lot for me to look past all of it to see a good game.
still not sure about axel, though. i guess i'll just wait until the new crazy taxi comes out to worry about that.
FINAL GRADE: 1
*grades are on a scale from 3 to -3