Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD - Review

When the Wii introduced motion controls, it was a new and fresh way to play games together. And with it along came the games that rely on motion controls, filled with party games. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz brought the beloved GameCube Super Monkey Ball series to the Wii at launch, leaning into both the motion controls and the party games to mixed results. Sega has dusted off this old game as the representative of the Monkey Ball franchise. It’s time to see if Sega are giving the series a fighting chance.

Storywise there isn’t really much to Banana Blitz. A giant ape has stolen the groups bananas and it’s up to AiAi, MeeMee, GonGon, Baby, YanYan and Doctor to take chase, getting them back off of the mysterious figure. Across 80 levels (although there’s a few more), you’ll complete a series of levels in a world which ends with a big boss to defeat. Which Monkey you choose comes down to personal choice, each has different stats and sizes. If a world proves to be too challenging, at least one of the crew can provide a change in approach.

If you’ve played any other Super Monkey Ball games you know exactly what to expect. If you’ve ever played Marble Madness it’s similar in a way. You have a Monkey encased in the ball/capsule, navigating courses that require precision, balancing and movement. Instead of controlling the ball directly, you control the 3D maze by tilting it as the ball rolls. The GameCube (and GBA) originals had you doing this through button controls, the gimmick of Banana Blitz is that it was all motion controls. Honestly, I’m glad I never played the original Wii version. I just can’t imagine playing this game with motion controls, especially with the early wiimotes.

Once you’ve completed the main game worlds, or just have some friends over, there are still some mini games to jump into. The original version had 50 of them, apparently a lot of them relied on different uses of the motion controls. Not that it matters for the HD version it’s been stripped back down to a paltry ten. None of these games require motion controls, varying from the alright to the bad. My group of friends weren’t interested in playing any game more than once. It never felt like there was much more to do once you’ve completed them once. There are also notable Monkey Ball classics absent, worse given they were present in the Wii version. It feels criminal to not include Monkey Bowling or Monkey Golf, while also including the least fun version of Monkey Target. Dangerous Route and Space Monkey Attack are some of the better games to try out, long as you have friends around. It truly is a shame that a few more of the minigames weren't included. There doesn’t seem to be any real reason why certain ones made the cut, where other non motion reliant ones didn’t. If you don’t have someone around at the time, you can also play solo. But unless you’re playing them for practice there’s not really any point.

If you want to test your Monkey Ball skills you can also do a Time Trial or a Decathlon to share your score/ranking online. The Time Trial has you trying to get through a run of a world in the quickest time, that’s all there is to it. You must have unlocked the world to do a Time Trial. The Decathlon is playing each mini game, the score from each one being tallied and ranked against other players online. You’ll be playing the Decathlon solo for these scores, quickly draining the fun out of the brief time with these mini games as most games really need more than one player.

While the original Banana Blitz was on the Wii it was hardly a bad looking game. Here the bright cartoony visuals are retained, only now more HD. As always the monkeys are all cute as hell, even though you don’t really see that much of them while you’re rolling them around. The environments aren’t very detailed, but still manage to look nice enough. I’ve been told that the original music has been changed for this release, at least the menu music. Fans of the original weren’t fond of the replacement, but with no history with the original I really didn’t mind the catchy menu theme. If anything, I wish I could go a day without that theme stuck in my head.

Super Monkey Ball runs as smoothly as you can hope. I noticed the game struggle when I was trying to speed through with some of the high speed characters. Sometimes the camera feels like the ball is moving too fast for the camera to keep up. Overall, there were no real performance issues that impacted gameplay. The gameplay is its own issue.

Playing through Banana Blitz with button controls it becomes apparent that this game was built around the motion controls. Initially, levels are just too easy. Obstacles feel like they’re built around using the wiimote, with a little extra leeway built in to account for the less precise control scheme. The addition of the jump button seemed bad enough when it was motion controls, tilting the ball around the mazes just doesn’t lend to precise jumping. It’s deeper into the worlds where I found that developers must have felt the game was too easy if you have better control over the maze, and they made some changes. Namely the railing that helped guide the ball like pinball rails is changed to thin rails that you need to balance on. When you’re balancing on these rails while also required to jump and tilt the maze, the games camera and how the levels were built just weren’t intended for this. In between some of these incredibly frustrating levels are some bizarrely easy ones that may have been harder or added some novelty with the wiimote.

One other addition Banana Blitz brought to the series was boss fights at the end of each world. This is quite bizarre given Super Monkey Ball is not about combat, outside of some mini games (none found in this package). Most of the fights have your Monkey in a small arena, trying to hit a weak point of the large boss, usually after a pattern of attacks. These fights require jumping with precision, which this game fails at time and time again. This makes the boss battles unpleasant and something to just endure. There is only one exception. One boss battle takes part on the boss itself, designed to be like a level with a series of challenges before the end weak point. Sadly this is a rarity in the game when it should’ve been how the majority of the boss battles were

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is sadly not the Monkey Ball series triumphant return. It may not have been the easiest to remaster, it definitely isn’t the game people were wanting. The addition of a jump button only serves to add another unreliable element into a physics-based game. The mini games are a meager offering considering how many games got cut and the ones with real legs seem to have been cut. If this is Sega’s attempt to gauge interest in more Monkey Ball games then they’ve done the series a great disservice by unleashing Banana Blitz HD on the public.

Review copy provided by Sega