Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD (Xbox One)
In 2006, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz released on the Wii, and it’s not too hard to understand why the series was drawn to the system. Already the game focuses so much on guiding your ball through obstacle courses based on smart movement and momentum, so motion controls could be a new avenue for exploring that system. What happens though when you take the motion controls out of a game designed for them? Will the levels still hold up without the layer of difficulty that came from trying to match your movements to the ball on-screen? Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is a remake that transitioned that gameplay entirely to buttons and control sticks, and while you can see at times where the motion controls impacted some design decisions, there are other stages where you’ll wonder how anyone even managed it without traditional controls.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD has 100 stages arranged into blocks of ten, each block representing a world with a theme that mostly informs the music and background design but can influence other elements like the presence of trees for the jungle area and specific enemies like moles in the desert or some octopus foes patrolling the pirate ship world. Your goal in most stages is to help your monkey roll to the level goal, the player able to pick from a few characters who have different impacts on how well the transparent ball they’re inside rolls. Baby’s sphere is small and very light so he can slip through tight spaces better than the large and heavy GonGon, but GonGon’s weight makes him less likely to bounce out of the level after he falls down platforms. There are less extreme variations between more normal monkeys like AiAi and YanYan if you want to tackle the courses with something that won’t possibly lead to some extra difficulty, but the funny thing about the Super Monkey Ball series is you control the level more than you do the monkey.
Stages in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD are a mix between obstacles courses, platforming challenges, and tight rope styled careful rolls, and to build up speed and maneuver around these stages, you actually control how the stage tips rather than how the monkey moves. This means you’ll need to manage momentum carefully, not wanting to go so quickly you fly off a level to your doom but also needing to gain speed to sometimes cling to halfpipes properly or clear a gap. You do have one ability that involves the monkey directly taking action though, a jump giving you a nice little hop that can help you with something as simple as leaping up a ledge or as powerful as springing off the stage to make for an incredible shortcut. Early levels in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD are fairly easy though, meant as introductions to the style of play to the point many have guard rails so you won’t roll off and you can likely clear them in seconds if you don’t care for collecting bananas at all. Bananas help you earn extra lives should you collect 20 of them, and so long as you don’t turn your system off, you’ll be able to build up a pretty good reserve of lives if you do devote some time in stages to gathering some fruit. Each of the 10 worlds will grant you a bonus medal should you beat them without running out of lives, there even bonus levels where the entire point is that you’re thrown into a space full of bananas to grab for the purpose of building up your life stock.
In the first six worlds of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD, getting those gold medals feels like a pretty feasible feat once you have a handle on how to control your monkey in a ball. Not every stage is a pushover, but they often have pretty clear paths with some hazards like bumpers that try to bounce you out of the level, some fairly leisurely enemies who might shove you off the stage, or things like crushers and swinging platforms so you need to get timing right on top of movement speed. Every level is timed to make gathering bananas is a matter of cost analysis so you don’t accidentally lose a life while trying to earn an extra one. Once you reach World 7 though, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD really cranks up the difficulty to the point you might spend tens of lives trying to just understand the type of movement needed to handle the more difficult gimmicks and tighter time limits. Not every stage will be grueling and some just need some element to click in your head to be cleared, but you also start to see the more complicated levels where you can make more interesting choices on how you want to tackle them. A level with rotating platforms can be cleared in one mad dash if you time your jumps right or you can try and tackle each leap carefully, a level where you gradually work your way down through drop after drop also allows you to take a huge leap to try and snag the goal, and one that involves crossing a sequence of spinning cylinders includes a shortcut where you can skip a few if you launch yourself from a ramp at the right time.
You’re allowed to continue as many times as it takes to clear a stage so even the toughest stage can end up more a matter of persistence, and that makes some of the more demanding levels like a sequence of very precise jumps easier to swallow. At the same time, the camera in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD isn’t always helping you despite being such a crucial part of your success. You have no control over the angle on the action you’re given save that it tries to position itself behind your ball as you build up speed, but some later levels can have you trying to manage your movement in a small space that leads to the camera putting necessary information out of view. This can add some undue irritation to some stages that can possibly make you want to pull your hair out, but including such tough stages also gives you more room for that satisfaction of clearing something difficult since the adventure before world 7 can sometimes feel a little too easy.
To try and spice up the worlds, each area in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD caps off with a boss battle, this technically tying into what little story the game offers. The adventure kicks off with a pirate primate named Captain Crabuchin swooping in and stealing some Golden Bananas from AiAi and his pals, each world’s boss holding onto one of the golden bananas until you defeat them. These fights are mostly unfortunately basic at best and weak waiting games where you are at risk of instantly losing at worst. Some can be cleared quickly with the same kind of creative thinking and momentum management that makes finding level shortcuts feel so sweet, but others you need to wait for the boss to complete a cycle of attacks until you can hit them once and then wait things out again, a death leading to a full fight repeat that can cause some of the encounters to drag on. They are definitely a net negative addition to the game, although at least the boss of the desert is designed more like a level with a few small goals to overcome in a way that could have made other boss fights feel closer to the game’s usual design and emphases.
Outside of the main adventure, there are a few extra modes, and one nearly hit on a good idea only to drop the ball with its format. Time Attack sees you trying to set your best time not for individual levels, but for weird selections of full worlds. World 1 does feel like it works in this context, it might take you two minutes to clear its levels when you aren’t focused on bananas after all, but then there’s a challenge where need to clear worlds 1-5 and then the full selection of 1-10. While not bad to offer for people with a lot of time and confidence, it is a shame individual level scores don’t exist, Time Attack as it exists here more an endurance challenge rather than trying to find the optimal route in each stage no matter the risk.
There are 10 minigames on offer as well for single-player and multiplayer play, and this is probably the part of the game where you can most see its legacy as a game that once relied on motion controls. Playing its version of Whack-a-Mole is cumbersome compared to if you could just point a Wii Remote at the screen to aim, Slingshot similarly was likely better with aiming controls so it wasn’t so dependent on holding a button just the right amount of time, and Seesaw Ball is about tipping tilting platforms in a way that feels like rather unexciting pachinko without the extra controller interaction motion controls would allow. However, there are still some decent or fun games to be had. Dangerous Route has you navigate large multi-faceted mazes from a top down perspective, the controls for moving a monkey ball shifted to pulling it in different directions to manage the roll. Monkey Target is an enjoyable score-based challenge about trying to glide just right to grab floating bananas and land on ring targets, players even able to push balls out of place to mess up each other’s scoring as in shuffleboard. Some games like Hammer Throw and Hurdle Race are a bit basic since there’s hardly any input involved but then others like a little space shooter are fine enough, but the Decathlon strings all 10 together and gives you a total score based on your performance across them. This can make the easier and plainer ones a touch more interesting since it’s about performing well in a string of contests, but only ones like Monkey Target might see you coming back after you’ve seen the other simple offerings since they don’t have as much depth.
THE VERDICT: Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD mostly hides its motion control legacy well, a few minigames feeling weaker without it but its main stages often able to offer a decent mix of easy stages to help you learn the game and brutally tough ones to test your speed and handling to an incredible degree. The fairly bad boss battles are an unfortunate interruption though and the camera can sometimes impact your ability to appreciate the challenge poised by the games more difficult stages, so while it’s definitely going to give you some triumphant moments where you uncover a strong shortcut or conquer a stage with a tight time limit, it also will sometimes add unnecessary frustration or spend time puttering around with basic design ideas.
And so, I give Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD starts off with some more approachable levels that probably feel more fitting for a bright and cute game about monkeys backed by lively music, and even before World 7 starts to demand a great deal more skill than before, you have some tougher stages to prevent the early game from being too basic to enjoy. The boss fights feel fairly weak throughout, often involving long wait times despite packing attacks that can instantly kill you, which means not only are 10 of the game’s levels bonus stages without much substance, 10 of the 100 levels are pretty poor boss battles before you start figuring out if you’re fine with quick and easy stages or ones you’ll spend thirty or more lives just trying to figure out the exact right jump needed or speed to hit. The minigames are a nice way to relieve stress though, Monkey Target able to hit similar marks on rewarding good understanding of movement while not being inaccessible without such knowledge, and ideas like tackling World 1 in Time Attack or Decathlon were a good start that should have been carried further either with individual level scores to compare online or more interesting minigames to mix together. Mostly, it feels like Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD could have benefited from a gentler ramping up, the stark leap in World 7 when it comes to difficulty meaning you don’t get much time to train up or quite as many levels where things are tough but not “die over and over in the first few seconds” tough.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD did mark an effort to revive the Super Monkey Ball brand after mostly languishing in mobile games for years, so while it’s an odd choice to remake a game defined by its motion controls by removing them, it’s also almost a good starting point for what might become a new wave of Monkey Ball fans. It’s the first one I’ve played to completion and it makes me more interested in looking at better entries I’ve either barely played or never touched, although it still feels like it needs to even out its level design approach to better structure a linear adventure rather than likely scaring off casual fans with the quick increase in difficulty or make ones looking for the challenge leery after so many early stages that aren’t putting up too much of a fight comparatively. Much like the game itself, balance is a big factor in the Super Monkey Ball experience, and while it averages out alright here, it would have been nice to see this entry build itself up at a better pace.