Completion Time: 26h:40m:00s
Rating: 8/10

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Going Bananas

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Yes, finally going bananas with a pretty difficult arcade game that's been a long time coming, as I've mentioned in previous blog posts! I've dumped countless hours into the Monkey Ball franchise over the years, with most of those going towards this first entry in the series. But even now, I'm not good at the game. At all, really. It's mere perseverance, or perhaps stupidity, that has brought me to the point where I can finally write about this. So let's get rolling and look at a great game that drives me absolutely insane.

Monkeys, bananas, and terrifying heights above the void. A match made in hell

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Fall Out

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This game is hard. At least, so much more difficult than I remember it being. But I think that's because I both had more time as a child and never fully engaged with the Expert Mode of this game. There was a point in time when I was younger where I could breeze through Intermediate Mode and all it's following EX Stages without losing a single life, and I could do it pretty consistently. That unfortunately didn't carry over into adulthood, but I still had some muscle memory because it only took me about an hour or two of tries before I could mark it off my "to do" list and jump straight into Expert Mode. And yes, Expert Mode is where I spent a majority of my time this go around, and I was near pulling my hair out by the end of the whole ordeal. Especially Stage 7, I couldn't even begin to speculate how many times I failed this one.

Agh!

Aagghh!!

AAAGGGHHH!!!

My main problem here is just that, while the game IS difficult in a lot of those later stages (don't get me wrong), I think my bigger issue is that the GameCube controller isn't optimal for playing this game. I know the original Monkey Ball game was one of those arcade cabinets with a trackball, which seems much better suited to the function of the series. Some of these levels in later areas, and these Advanced gates especially, I don't see HOW you could do without a modded controller of some kind. The razor thin wires of a few of these HAVE to be impossible!

I'm fully convinced every single person better than me at Super Monkey Ball is cheating

And still, even with the trials and tribulations of the most recent playthrough, I couldn't help but have fun. It's a well constructed title with fun physics and art style, and the soundtrack is killer for sure. This whole thing exudes nostalgia for me, having spent so much time just playing the various minigames and Monkey Flight with friends and relatives, so it would be disingenuous of me to pretend there weren't some rose colored glasses being worn at times. But I think it's well warranted, the game isn't pretending to be anything more than a fleshed-out, consoled version of that original arcade title. And if I hadn't gone into this playthrough with the ultimate goal of total completion, I could've left it at that and called it a day. But that's much too simple, isn't it?

As cruel kids, we always made sure to close the ball AFTER they hit the water so that it would be full. Children are frightening

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Completing the Game

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Handful of things here that go into completion. Obviously, there are the three primary modes, and you're gonna need to make your way through all of those stages in each, which will unlock them in the Practice Mode. This also applies to the EX Mode levels, which take place after you make your way through all of the levels in the mode without dying (except in Expert Mode, in which you merely need to make it through without using a continue). Make your way through those EX levels, and you'll also unlock those in Practice Mode. They have varying levels of difficulty as you go along, of course.

The ice stages are my favorite :)

As you play, you'll unlock "Play Points", which you can use in a sort of store front to purchase mini-games to play with friends, that being Billiards, Bowling, and Golf. After purchasing all the minigames, your Play Points will then tally towards increasing the number of continues you're given until you have an infinite number of continues. Very useful if you just like playing through the game and modes, not very useful for completion, however, given the "not dying"/"not continuing" bit of it all. But once you get those infinite number of continues, you don't need to worry about those things anymore.

Of course, in this game about physics and difficult goals, strikes are incredibly easy

Finally, the big magilla, and the reason that this took so long for me to actually complete: Master Mode. So, this sucks. Bad. And for one reason premiere to all others, that being that you can't unlock it for Practice Mode or even just for selection from the main menu. So, the ONLY way to get into Master Mode period is to make it through Expert Mode AND all of the EX stages without using a continue. You can die, thankfully, but its not like you have infinite lives or anything. And Stage 7, known as "Exam-C", is a run killer for sure. I can do the first 6 flawlessly now, but still I have no good strategy for Stage 7. Just do it as best you can and hope you don't waste too many lives on it. Make it through all 50 stages (including Exam-C of course) and then all of the EX levels without getting to the "Continue?" screen, and you'll reach Master Mode. And enjoy your time here, because you can't access it any other way. And guess what? I wasn't capturing footage here when I finally made it because I DIDN'T KNOW THAT! At the very least, you can use continues now because you're already here, and you probably have the infinite continues unlocked by this point, but I 100% am NOT doing all that again, because I'm not very good at the game and I really feel like I lucked into it the first time around (not to mention spending so much time for this in the first place), so enjoy someone else's screenshot down below.

Wow, look at that! Difficult, right? That sure is an image from MY playthrough right there!

This game is one that I have a lot of admiration and nostalgia for, even after having forced myself to play it for a far longer stretch than I ever would have as a child. But just rolling around and engaging with the neat tricks and track skips you can pull off due to the physics are a enough to keep one engaged the entire time they're playing. And I didn't touch on it much since this was a solo playthrough, but I have tons of fond memories playing this with family and college friends as we would take turns seeing how quickly we could get through the Easy and Intermediate modes (Expert was never committed to in these sessions). But given the high bar for what I would consider "full completion", I dread going back to "Super Monkey Ball 2" for this little exercise, as my younger self's memories of that one are... much less pleasant.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 24/652