Super Monkey Ball is one of my favorite Sega franchises, and like many Sega franchises, it's been horribly mismanaged over the year. Under Amusement Vision, Super Monkey Ball just had this cool aura to it, with tight controls, tough as nails difficulty, ridiculously inventive level design, and a distinctly early 2000s aesthetic. And the best encapsulation of the Super Monkey Ball series at its peak was the incredible sequel.
Super Monkey Ball is a simple game where you need to tilt the world to lead a ball through an obstacle course and into a goal. It's as simple a video game concept as it gets, but the focus on physics gives this series a remarkable amount of depth, at least in the earlier games. You could just carefully follow the path to the goal, but a particularly skilled player could bounce the ball off the ground and hop over gaps or up a ledge, skipping parts of or even the entirety of a level. Maybe a stage requires you to carefully work your way down to a goal underearth you, you could just follow the standard route or you could take a leap of faith to get to the end faster. There is a lot of freedom in how the player can tackle each stage, and it's that freedom of expression that makes the Monkey Ball games so great. Super Monkey Ball 2 doesn't really change anything from its predecessor in terms of raw gameplay, you still simply roll around using the joystick, but that's not really a bad thing when the first game already controlled perfectly.
What Super Monkey Ball 2 brings to the table is vastly more interesting and inventive level design. This game has some of the most creative levels I've seen in any game, straight up. Each and every stage brings something new to the table, and the game is filled to the brim with memorable one-off gimmicks. From portals to launchers, from switches to giant bubbles, from spinning floor tiles to invisible floor tiles, from wacky structures that must be climbed to exhilarating slides, from giant spiders to straight-up basketball, SMB2's creativity doesn't let up even for a second. It's hard to really understand just how special Super Monkey Ball 2's level design is unless you've played any of the mainline games that came after it. From Banana Blitz afterwards, all the experimentation that you'd find in an Amusement Vision game pretty much vanishes, with most of the levels just feeling like your average marble mazes. Don't get me wrong, those games can be fun to navigate through as well, but they just don't hit the same.
My favorite thing about Super Monkey Ball 2 has to be the addition of a proper Story Mode. Super Monkey Ball always felt like an early rage game in the same vein as stuff like Super Meat Boy and Celeste, with brisk but brutally difficult levels and lightning fast respawns, but being an arcade port, that first entry lacked a lot of the concessions Super Meat Boy game had. As much as I love the first Super Monkey Ball, having to beat 50 levels back-to-back with a limited amount of lives is exhausting to say the least. Super Monkey Ball 2 introduces a Story Mode where you can run through 100 of the game's levels with unlimited lives, which both makes the game more accessible and makes it so that the developers could make the levels even harder and more experimental, which also adding a whole bunch of lovable ridiculous cutscenes for good measure (pretty par for the course for Amusement Vision). And for those who preferred the original game's structure, there is a Challenge Mode exactly like that of the original game, complete with even more exclusive levels for those willing to push through it. With the addition of the Story Mode, Super Monkey Ball 2 allows for any type of player to see the bulk of what the game has to offer and I find that really cool.
But of course, that's still not it in terms of content. Super Monkey Ball 2 also has a whopping twelve minigames you can unlock, half of which are ripped straight out of the previous game. The minigames in the Monkey Ball series have always been incredible because of just how feature rich they are, many of the ones in Super Monkey Ball 2 in particular can feel like full-on games in their own right. Out of all of them, my favorites have to be Monkey Race where you roll through six increasingly twisty tracks, the hyper competition arena battler Monkey Fight, the iconic Monkey Target, the damn solid and surprisingly packed bowling game Monkey Bowling, the addictive Monkey Shop, and the really solid Monkey Tennis. These minigames are all super polished and replayable, and help Super Monkey Ball 2 work just as well as a multiplayer party game as it does as a singleplayer puzzle platformer.
In terms of its presentation, Super Monkey Ball 2 and its predecessor have a really unique vibe that none of the games have been able to replicate. While the later entries feel more colorful and populated, I actually prefer the more muted and isolated floating islands that the Amusement Vision games had. It really epitomizes the Gamecube's distinctly surrealist aesthetic that often blended realistic textures and environments with cartoony characters and settings, and I absolutely love it. Aiding in this vibe is Hidenori Shoji's incredible jungle/drum'n'bass soundtrack. All the Amusement Vision games had jungle music and it complements the art direction so well, combined they give these games this futuristic vibe that just screams Y2K. Pretty much every major area theme in Monkey Ball 2 is incredible, but my personal favorites have to be Volcano, Inside The Ocean, Clock Tower, and Space Colony.
Overall, Super Monkey Ball 2 is fantastic, and even more, it's just plain cool. The original game was already great, but this entry perfects the formula with some incredible levels, way more content, and the very welcome addition of the Story Mode. When I think back to the Gamecube, Super Monkey Ball 2 is always the first game that comes to mind, it encapsulates all of the unique quirks and traits that made that console so incredible.
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