Ape Academy 2 (PSP)

The minigame collection Ape Escape Academy has its problems, but a sequel presents a chance to rectify those issues. Minigames that were too short or didn’t play particularly well and the bingo board presentation for them weren’t the best, but it seems almost like its sequel decided to double down on the problems leading to them being even more pronounced. Ape Academy 2 would end up skipping a U.S. release entirely, hence why it is named that way since Ape Academy was the European release’s title, and quality does seem like it might have been a factor, it only finally hitting U.S. shores officially thanks to a rerelease through the PlayStation 4 and 5’s PSP classic program.

 

Ape Academy 2 takes place in the world of Ape Escape where a special set of siren helmets have managed to elevate the intelligence of monkeys only for them to use their newfound smarts mostly for mischief. A few are about as intelligent as humans though, one of the gifted apes being a white monkey named Specter who is intent on conquering the world. While trying to cook up a new scheme for doing so, Specter realizes that people sink a lot of time and money into trading card games, and by manufacturing one himself he hopes to distract humanity enough for a full ape takeover. To motivate people to play it more, he organizes a tournament with a rare card as a prize, but the other apes are only interested once a year’s supply of bananas is thrown in as well, the player picking a monkey to represent themselves in this card tournament across a set of islands.

The card tournament is how the game will pick which minigames you play, each round of play essentially about figuring out which minigame is going to be played next since every card has an associated minigame that starts if it wins. However, there are a few factors in the card game that need to be considered if you want your minigame choices to come out on top. Ape Academy 2’s card game is based around rock-paper-scissors quite literally, every card featuring a symbol indicating which of those three options its represents. The cards are color-coded to make them easier to recognize at a glance, but most of the card play is actually about just trying to predict whether the opponent is going to play a rock card, a paper card, or a scissors card. You can see the back of the opponent’s hand so you know how many of each card type they have, and in single player, your opponents tend to heavily favor one card type, making it quite easy to construct a deck to counter them.

 

There are some other elements to consider about a card when putting it in your deck besides the symbol and the minigame associated with that card. The goal of the card game is to reduce your opponent’s life to zero, so the different cards also provide different rewards or penalties based on who wins the minigame. Much of the time, damaging the opposition is the reward, but there is also a banana resource system. While you start with four bananas, you can earn more through the minigames and thus play more valuable cards. Bananas aren’t spent either meaning you can keep playing high value cards that in turn have stronger punishments or rewards. Minigames often have an attacker and a defender though, the defender usually just avoiding any negative effects if they win which removes what could have been interesting stakes if both players could potentially get a leg up through good performance. The last major element to consider are combos, since any time players tie with cards featuring the same symbols, both cards will be discarded but their effects will still activate after the next minigame is played. Getting some deliberate ties to power up your next attack is an interesting strategy and sadly one of the few valid ones, because otherwise this card game leads to a lot of issues with how the minigames you play end up lining up.

 

One of the first things you’ll likely notice is high value cards aren’t really that much better than low value ones, even a 1 banana card able to beat an 11 value one if it has the right symbol. Secondly, the enemy health is never so high you really need the strong pushes that bigger cards provide, and they can feel like wasted slots in your 20 card deck since you need to build up to them instead of playing them right away and more quickly whittling down the opposition. Another issue is a deck’s size means you’ll end up seeing a lot of the same minigames, especially since opponents will inevitably need to use cheap cards as well so they’ll have decks with many of the same cards you’re using. What’s more, you likely won’t want to put in risky cards where you feel you could lose to random chance or a minigame you’re not particularly good at, so the game incentivizes not only choosing the less interesting and easy minigames to play, but it also makes it so you’ll constantly see them through its structure. You can play each minigame on its own from your card collection so you can actually see some that would be foolish to include in a deck, but sadly the game seems to lock a good deal of its more interesting minigames behind cards you’ll not want to play because of their minimal strategic value.

As for the actual selection of quick minigames to play, the game boasts over 100 of them but as mentioned, it’s fairly likely you won’t see a good deal of them and a good deal of the worse ones are found attached to cheap cards. Ape Escape Academy’s problem of not explaining the rules well still carries over here, few minigames bothering to explain themselves well and sometimes being all too vague on the screen that explains the controls so you might need a few plays to really get what it’s going for. There are a fair few minigames where one player is given way too high a chance of winning, like one where you shoot a spinning wheel the other player can stop for a short bit, but they can’t see you setting up your shot and only one fifth of the board is marked as a loss if they hit it. There’s a gallery shooter styled minigame where one player can cause the moving targets to switch direction, but the shooter is given a good amount of tries to hit a monkey once, meaning the game can end before the other player even had time to consider switching the direction. In fact, many of the minigames can end shockingly quickly thanks to the offense-defense set-up many take on. Rather than many being fair contests, one player is given a huge advantage and the defender seems set up for failure, something that kind of works in the context of choosing which cards to include in your deck but unfortunately making the actual minigame portion not very entertaining.

 

There are a fair few guessing games where the idea is your opponent will pick a direction or position and the other player needs to guess it right to win, these not really having any depth since there’s no way to know what the other player is up to. Other games can just be straightforward button mashing contests too, but what’s sad is Ape Academy 2 does feature some good minigame concepts amidst the pack of quick and poorly skewed rubbish. A snowball fight actually has you moving around, gives you two ways to throw balls to attack in different ways, and you need to build up replacement balls so there’s more thought to play than other games where you just need to press a button. There are a few games where you try to outscore the other monkey, such as one where you’re catching falling bananas with an extending net, and others like the race not to get caught by a UFO introduces a longer survival element where you need to make the right choices on when to run to win. Shooting at each other from pirate ships and navigating a small maze where the lights keep flickering on and off to reveal the path feel like games that could work in small doses in a well curated selection, but then you have some minigames where the idea was almost there only to be ruined by familiar problems. One of the game’s high value minigames is basically a boss battle where one monkey is the boss and does large sweeping attacks while the other fires small bullets and needs to wear down the boss, but the small player is so vulnerable they feel set up for failure and not even because the boss monkey pulled off some clever trick. Some of these games will definitely be better against a human player since the AI is sometimes far too easy to outsmart, but it doesn’t change the fact that the card game structure will funnel players towards safe and similar minigames rather than the sometimes costly but better designed ones.

THE VERDICT: There are some well designed and entertaining minigames in Ape Academy 2, but the game feels designed to shove you towards repeating the same safe few over and over with its card game design. There are few advantages to a high cost deck compared to a cheap and quick one, and the reward for playing it safe with minigames skewed in your favor is too great to risk putting in more diverse cards with more interesting games. The card game is too shallow to get invested in while it is supported by far too wide a range of shallow or bland minigames, the game’s scope too big for how little of interest it offers.

 

And so, I give Ape Academy 2 for PlayStation Portable…

A TERRIBLE rating. There are good minigames in Ape Academy 2, some that would work wonderfully in supporting an excellent minigame collection, but this package is stuffed with low quality filler and games you’ll not only want to avoid, but have the means to do so. The card game is a fairly awful way to pick which minigame is going to be played next, it outright guaranteeing repetition through its design even for basic fundamental reasons. You can’t even play higher value cards until you’ve earned enough bananas for them so you’ll play through familiar low value minigames regardless of deck shape, but even then you’re encouraged to weed out minigames that you might not win reliably, and inevitably the most entertaining minigames are the more fair ones since they aren’t a straightforward guessing game or some contest weighted too heavily towards one side. While earning new cards is a big part of the game’s single player island tournament, there’s not much of a thrill to it because a good deck is often less about powerful cards and more about cards that can be called cheap in more than one way. The ability to play any minigame from your collection screen still means you can at least try them out and see what they’re like, but Ape Academy 2 still sabotages some of their designs for the attacker-defender structure of the card game that was already a poor idea. The defending player should be able to get at least a small leg up rather than just avoiding the effects of the attacking card, and this could have even been a way to balance out the different card values with things like cheap cards being more likely to go either way while pricey ones could have favored the attacker to justify their cost.

 

Ape Academy 2 is a confused minigame collection that created a wide range of games but blocks you off from playing most of the ones worth your attention with its awful structure. Too many minigames go by quickly and don’t involve much thought to play and yet they’ll keep cropping up because Ape Academy 2 concocted an awful way to determine what will be played next. The card game is already too basic to really be interesting on its own merits, although the few concepts in place pretty much guarantee repetition. If both sides were just given a set of twenty minigames in a simple rock-paper-scissors format with no frills you could have a slightly involved presentation style but a higher chance for novelty, but Ape Academy 2 wanted deck-building and card collecting without really having the depth that necessitates interesting card selections.  It feels like every idea just leads to new poor decisions, the effort to be more than a minigame collection ending up making it worse than even the most straightforward examples of the genre.