Super Monkey Ball Adventure

Put your monkey to the ultimate test.

EU release: 14th July 2006
NA release: 1st August 2006
JP release: N/A
Developer: Traveller’s Tales
Publisher: Sega
NGC Magazine Score: 68%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Despite a mixed reception, I was looking forward to trying this out, as the gameplay of Super Monkey Ball being utilised for a more traditional 3D platformer sounds like a great idea for me. Now I’ve played Super Money Ball Adventure, I’m convinced that this idea could still work, but this is really now how it works.

At the start of the game, I was quite perplexed about what I was supposed to do, as the game doesn’t really explain things very well. The King tasks you with finding the prince and princess of two rival nations, who are hiding in this area, but you don’t actually take place in this search, it’s just to drive the story along.

What you actually need to do is complete random missions for different monkeys, and making them happy will move the plot along. The lack of a MagGuffin or reward for completing these makes them feel like optional side activities, but you need to complete them until the game tells you to move along.

The levels themselves also don’t feel like levels from a platformer, more like a small “open world” (split into small sections with large loading times) game where you just head to a new mission and perform the mission. It’s really not what I expected, or what I wanted, as these missions are often frustrating or don’t explain what you’re supposed to do very well.

Another baffling decision is how you use your powers. You need to perform a chant. The D pad is assigned the sounds Woo, Poo, Ei and Yay, and you need to remember the combination of each move, which inevitably means checking the menu every time for the combination. The powers last until you choose to cancel them, so this system is just annoying, rotating with the shoulder buttons (or using a weapon wheel) would have been so much better.

It does follow one traditional Super Money Ball trend, and that’s with party games. Monkey Race and Monkey Fight are very similar to before, just with new levels and the like. Monkey Target, however, is very different, being more like a long distance flight through canyons. This flight gameplay is also used in the main game for some really difficult (in a bad way) missions. There are three more party games

Monkey Bounce

Your monkey automatically jumps up and down and your goal is to flip as many tiles to your colour as possible by landing on them. Similar to the game Go, if you get your colour in two ends of an opponent’s, they will all swap to your colour. Frantic and fun.

Monkey Canon

Like a multiplayer, 3D Angry Birds (which is now a Sega franchise). Everyone has a tower of bricks to make a fort and you have to smash it apart to get their flag to the ground. You can’t really tell how your tower is doing, so it ends up feeling a bit random.

Monkey Tag

Zoom around a tiny planet collecting balloons, firing bananas and bombs everywhere. It’s absolute chaos, and something that I imagine will be a lot of fun with others. Overall, it’s a decent party mode, but there’s also a challenge mode.

This challenge mode is essentially a new short Super Monkey Ball, with 49 new stages. It does feel like they’ve using the game engine from Super Monkey Ball 2, although the physics don’t feel quite as good. In the story mode, you’ll need to complete a bunch of these to open gates (one at a time with infinite lives), but this puts them into a more traditional lives-based structure.

As a mini Super Monkey Ball, it’s a fun little bonus on top of the previous games but the main event – the adventure – just doesn’t work due to some really strange choices. One focused more on platforming would work so much better.

Fine

Super Monkey Ball Adventure does have the best intentions, and there are some nice ideas tucked away in there – it’s just unfortunate that you’ll have to explore the frontiers of your patience if you’re ever going to have the will to find them.
Geraint Evans, NGamer Magazine #1

Remake or remaster?

The traditional levels and party games would be a good DLC for Banana Mania (with the PSP extras as well), but the main idea just needs to be tried again

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Super Monkey Ball Adventure