In this review, we seek happiness in the GameCube game Super Monkey Ball Adventure. We find out how well this adventure game plays.
This game was released in 2006.
We have some experience in this franchise already. We first played Super Monkey Ball. That game got a fairly mediocre score. After that, we played Super Monkey Ball Jr.. That game got a decent score. So, we thought we’d try another game in the series to see how well it plays.
This game differs from previous instalments. The first is the fact that there is a big storyline behind it. Essentially, the four main characters, AiAi, MeeMee, Baby, and GonGon, are going on a big adventure across the 4 big cities bringing joy and happiness. It all started on Jungle Island where they are having a barbecue, cooking up bananas. Suddenly the alarm bells go off and you have to visit the king for some reason. So, you go off on a big adventure.
As mentioned, there are four large islands. You start on Jungle Island, but you’ll eventually visit the other cities of MoonHaven, Zootopia, and Monkitropolis.
Along the way, you’ll encounter people you can talk to. These people will give you thrilling missions like collecting balloons, picking up garbage, donating banana’s to charity, and having your picture taken. As you complete those missions, you’ll increase your overall joy. Additionally, there are bananas you can collect throughout the area. Both of these will go to your overall game completion throughout the game.
Additionally, there are also locked doors you need to unlock. Each door is locked by puzzle pads. Just roll over top of a pad and you’ll be transported to a puzzle world. Complete most (all are not necessary) and you’ll unlock the door.
The puzzle world is probably where the game will immediately become familiar to fans of the series. You have 60 seconds to reach the goal. The problem is that there are usually obstacles in the way. This includes hills, pits, jumps, narrow area’s, and a few other obstacles. One obstacle you encounter are slider obstacles. Contrary to some walkthrough information we happened to come across, the sliders are, in fact, not random. Instead, they slide based on where you tilt the world. If you tilt left, you’ll see the slider tilt left. Tilt the world right and you’ll tilt the slider right. Just slide them in a good position and let your monkey roll smoothly down the path without interruption, stopping them before falling off the ledge at the end.
Along the way, you’ll see bananas. Feel free to collect them along the way as they will help you get a higher completion and allow you to buy items in shops later on. Since this game has no free lives, there are no consequences of dying or timing out. You will have to restart the puzzle, though. Complete the puzzle to advance to the next one.
Along the way, you’ll encounter a monkey with a television for a head. This monkey will teach you various chants. Chants are required for you to beat the game. While still (and not on a movable object), you can tap “A” and execute a chant. The possible things you can add to a chant are “Woo”, “Poo”, “Ei”, and “Yay”. Each element can make up a code you can “dial” to activate a special ability. Some will allow you to warp to another city. The remaining will give you a special power up to accomplish tasks. This includes giving you a boxing glove to break up things. A wooden ball can be used to transport fire or allow you to float on water. You can even grow with one power up. All of these will be useful for completing the tasks ahead of you.
As mentioned, it is possible to buy things in a store. Each city has a monkey that sells you things. The thing is, those items that are on sale are for unlocking maps and features for multiplayer mode. So, if you are buying things, know that it’s for unlocking bonus content that doesn’t affect single player content.
In addition to the main adventure mode, there is also the challenge mode. This mode allows players to take on all the puzzle world challenges in a classic style of Super Monkey Ball. You get three lives and five continues. Run out of lives and you’ll be forced to use a continue. Use all of your continues and it’s game over. You lose a life either by falling out or timing out. Also, 100 bananas will earn you a free life. You have easy, medium, and hard challenges split into separate challenges. You only have easy challenge unlock, but if you win, you unlock the next difficulty.
Also, there are various multiplayer games which you can play as a single player if you want. There are 5 different challenges you can play. Those challenges are: Race, Target, Fight, Bounce, Cannon, and Tag.
Race has the most opponents. You race around the track with a set number of laps. You can obtain items by busting the item boxes (much like a Mario Kart game, really). These items can be used to knock out your opponents or give you an advantage.
Target challenges your flying capabilities. You roll yourself down a hill and hit a ramp. Then, you fly through a ring that permits you to take flight with the tap of “A”. From there, you guide yourself through various obstacles. Collect the bananas to increase your score. Collect the stars to receive bonuses (like 2x multiplier). After that, you simply try to land on a target at the end of the course for a large bonus. Fallout and you keep whatever score you obtained up to that point.
Fight is a very classic multiplayer mode for this franchise. You fight three other opponents. Knock your opponents out of the ring to lower their score. When the round is over, whoever has the most points wins the match.
Bounce is a lot like Reversi or Spot: The Video Game. You are constantly bouncing up and down. Land on a blank square and flip it to your own colour. Land on a spot that is a few spaces away, and every box between them will flip to your own colour. Landing on an opponent’s square will do nothing. There is, of course, items involved here. This includes an ability to freeze your opponents in place, make yourself larger, and take away your opponents ability to take over squares for a short period of time.
Cannon challenges your engineering skills in a way. There are four players involved in each round. The goal is to shoot yourself into your opponents castle. The more blocks you take out per shot, the better. You keep playing until your flag gets knocked to the ground or everyone else’s flag gets knocked down. The player that knocks down the most blocks wins. There are different tower styles to choose from, so you’ll need to figure out weaknesses in the tower to get a lot of blocks knocked out in fewer shots.
Finally, there is tag. It sounds like a rousing game of tag, but it doesn’t really have much to do with tag in a classic sense. Instead, you are challenged to run around in a tiny sphere collecting balloons. The more red balloons you collect, the more points you get. Accidentally touch a black balloon and you lose points. Have the most points by the end of the round to win.
What all of these mini-games have in common is the fact that you can change a number of elements prior to each round. You can adjust the number of rounds, laps, and handicaps. Also, you can even choose whether or not to include items. With some exceptions, each round at the end will look at your placement in the round. First place nets you 10 points. The lower your placement, the fewer the points. The player with the most points after every round wins the game.
If there is anything that immediately stands out to me about this game, it’s the fact that this game feels like the developers were attempting to push a square peg in a round hole. Already, there are plenty of players going into this game expecting the puzzle-like style simplistic gameplay from previous games. There are, of course, ways you can expand it like adding jump pads (like this game does) or other features that separates this instalment from previous games. This is not the direction the developers decided to go.
Instead, it was as if they looked at games like Super Mario 64, Spyro the Dragon, Banjo Kazooie, or Donkey Kong 64 and said, “I want this next game to be like that!”
So, that’s what the developers did. They took a game that, for some players, worked very well, and threw it in a trash can. Part of the challenge with Monkey Ball games is ball control. You have to worry about momentum, direction, and movements within the floor as you guide yourself to the goal. In an adventure game in general, you are more focused on sticking landings, running, jumping, climbing, and moving around all the while taking on enemies. So, combining the movements style of Monkey Ball in an environment that was never really meant for that kind of movement is, straight up, never going to work. It’s a bit like giving classic Tetris an in-depth storyline filled with plot twists and and an emotional roller coaster. Best case scenario, you probably got a very awkward game.
Yet, here we are with a sprawling adventure game with movements so bad, you wonder if anyone even bothered playtesting it before shoving it out the door. At first, it feels like a weird game to control. As sad as it sounds, it only gets worse as you progress as the controls just grate on you more and more until you can’t stand the idea of playing for another minute.
As cringe-worthy as it sounds, we are only just beginning here. To make matters worse, you are tasked with some of the most mundane boring tasks when you get a challenge. Think back, when you were picking up garbage, chances are, you were doing that chore because you knew the end result will make a positive difference in the world. Rarely, if ever, is picking up the garbage, in and of itself, a particularly thrilling task. Yet, the developers felt it necessary to not only feature this mission in the game, but feature it multiple times.
Of course, if picking up the garbage is not your thing, there are plenty of other missions too. This includes having your picture taken (which, again, is featured not only multiple times, but multiple times in each world), collecting balloons (again, multiple times), and donating banana’s to charity (who says banana’s can’t buy happiness?).
This is not to say every task I’m assigned is dull and boring. There are a few tasks such as rescuing children stuck in air valves, making a stealth rescue in an out of control theme park, and racing to light torches or flip switches to maintain a giant flying city. Still, not all tasks are created equal and the most boring and dull tend to be the ones you do most often.
What’s worse is that once you complete a task, your reward is to increase your “joy”. You basically have an assigned percentage of happiness. As you complete the tasks, your percentage increases. On paper, you can definitely turn this into an altruistic, unique, and interesting idea. In practice, this is actually a very limiting concept. In other adventure games, you get awarded a special power item that helps you unlock new areas. What’s more, these special items are very flexible. You can challenge players to reach them or earn them by doing favours for people. With a non-item item, you basically get a confirmation from a character which limits how you can distribute this “joy” in the first place.
To make matters worse, the implementation isn’t even that good. Instead of seeing a total on screen for a job well done, it simply updates a number in the pause menu. You have to go through two screens to find out what your overall joy level is. Amazingly, you don’t know what your goal is supposed to be in the first place. I personally didn’t see an indicator saying I need to be “X” joyful to reach a new area in the game. Instead, I’m just going through the game hoping that I have a good score in an area by the time I reach the end of it.
Then there is the movement between worlds. Normally, games give you an idea of what you need to gain access to the next world. They also often feature hub worlds like Crash Bandicoot games or many of the aforementioned adventure games above. There is a progressive ability to see not only where you needed to go, but also, you have an ability to gauge difficulty in that next world. In this game, you basically have codes to access different worlds dumped on you all at once at one point and told, “here, chart your own d**n course. We can’t really be bothered to tell you what order is ideal.”
On top of it all, codes are the only way you can travel between worlds. There is no world entrance (unless you count the very beginning of the game as an “entrance”). You really are a name away from calling it cheat codes just to move from world to world – something countless other games handle with relative ease by this stage in gaming history.
Now, let’s move on to difficulty curve. This game, for the most part, starts off as challenging and just grows harder as you move along. It gets to the point that movement between areas in a level seem impossible.
Moonhaven, for instance, looks like it has two different levels completely cut off from each other. You fall to the lower level, you aren’t coming back up. This doesn’t even account for taking on missions yet. As it turns out, there is a way to move between levels. You move yourself into a fear near the middle of the arena, then hold down “A” and move the control stick left or right. You really don’t get any forewarning that this is a feature. All you get is placing yourself in exactly the right place, waiting a second, then having an on screen message appear telling you that you can move the gear. This took way longer then it should’ve for me to figure out on my own.
Even some of the banana’s are almost completely inaccessible in the beginning of the game. I found that I had to bounce just right, get lucky and bounce into the banana before flying off into the abyss, dying to reach that one banana. I can expect something like that in later levels, but throwing this at players in the beginning is basically increasing the chances that players will feel like they’ll never beat the game before they even barely started. Not a good way to start things off.
Then there’s the often railed against camera system in the game. Allow me to be one more person that says the camera system is terrible in this game. You can “fix” the camera with the “C” control stick, but half the time, the game will insist that YOU have the camera problem and rotate it into the direction you don’t want it to turn to. It’s as if the game is telling you that it doesn’t care if the direction you want is sensible, throwing it backwards and away from where you want to look is better for you. I honestly haven’t seen a camera system this bad since Silence Hill. Only, this time, the excuse that it’s for “artistic purposes” is not even present.
With missions that you can’t wait to be over to an irritating difficulty curve to cryptic codes with a near non-existent direction, the game, on the surface, winds up being a complete disaster. There is, however, a big exception to this: the added features.
If you carve away the big smouldering pile that is the adventure aspect, what you are left with is the different side features. The first feature is the puzzles which is not only sporadically featured in the adventure mode, but is the whole challenge mode. This is where the game gets back to its core features. While a steep difficulty curve is still a problem, I honestly looked forward to those portions of the game. At the very least, I got excited for it even if I wound up being quite intimidated by some of the later challenges (those bowl challenges and the putt one made me want to strangle something after a while).
Then there are the mini-games buried in multiplayer mode. For the most part, these side features wound up being quite entertaining for the most part. Honestly, playing those features made me interested in the game. That, of course, is a sad commentary for the game as a whole when the main mode (which is probably about 80% of the game) wound up being the worst part of the game.
Of course, nothing could escape one of the other bad aspects of the game: load times. I half expect long load times for original Playstation games, but the term “load time” and “Nintendo” really didn’t seem like words that belong in the same sentence. This game somehow manages to borderline rival the painful long load times of the original Playstation to the point where I was visualizing that slow crawling loading progress bar. It really is that bad. Even when you are playing multiple rounds of the same minigame, it seems like the game simply reloads it all from scratch which is insane if you ask me.
So, generally speaking, this game flops quite hard save for the side features that ended up being quite entertaining. The difficulty curve is quite steep, controls are just plain bad, camera system is one of the worst efforts I’ve ever seen in a 3D game, mobility is a pain and borderline relies on cheat codes, super long load times, and the game is quite aimless. Meanwhile, the puzzle challenges and multiplayer mini-games are actually quite reasonable. I’m not sure it’s enough to save this game, though. At any rate, this is another instance of fixing what isn’t broken and coming up with a bad idea all around.
As for graphics, had this game been released maybe two or three years earlier, I’d call it quite a solid effort with slightly lacklustre graphics. This was released at the end of the Gamecube lifecycle. As such, you have Playstation 3, XBox 360, and Wii games already coming out on the market. While there are some interesting worlds to see, it’s really hard to look at launch titles for next generation consoles and say, “Well, sure, those games had souped up technical specs, but this game really held its own, using the system to its fullest potential”. At this point, the graphics just seem dated. A passable effort, but nothing to get excited over.
Now, apart from the interesting mini-games and puzzle challenges, there is actually something to praise this game for: audio. This comes largely from the music. Music, generally, isn’t bad at all. There are variations as you take on different in-game missions and actually make this painful experience less painful.
In fact, one track that sticks out to me is the general theme for Moonhaven. At first, I thought it just punctuated the clock theme nicely, but as I questioned my existence for playing this game, the music actually grew on me as time went on. It really helped give that monkey undercurrent themes with the brass and combined it with almost upbeat steampunk-like sounds you might expect from later Final Fantasy games. You really could swap out music from a city theme in a 3D Final Fantasy game and it would seriously fit depending on the large city you used.
As for sounds, they generally worked quite well. Probably the only thing that felt awkward was taking on a puzzle challenge with lots of narrow ledges or checker-board style challenges. At that point, I had to turn the volume down so others didn’t think I was watching something x-rated. Besides that, the audio overall worked quite well.
Overall, this really is an example of developers attempting a square peg in round hole. It’ll fit, I tell ya! Just watch me! It attempts to take a puzzle game and turn it into a sprawling adventure game – which it really isn’t. The controls are bad, the camera system is worse, difficulty curve is steep, intraworld travel is almost non-existent, the challenges often wind up being boring and mundane, reward and progression systems borders on being non-existent.
The only positive aspect of the main mode is the puzzle challenges which is what made the game good in the first place. Side mini-games outside of the main mode are quite entertaining, though. Graphics are dated, but the audio is actually quite good. So, this is a game to avoid in my view. Only the interesting side missions and audio is enough to make this game get a (barely) passing grade.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Earned a 43% completion rating before I finally had enough.
General gameplay: 11/25
Replay value: 4/10
Graphics: 6/10
Audio: 4/5
Overall rating: 50%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
