This is the last Japan-exclusive (non-Eye Toy) Ape Escape game I'd yet to play, so I was pretty excited to get to it. Being a game that came out on the PS2 in 2001, I probably shouldn't've been quite so surprised that one of those pretty blue discs that indicated it was shipped on a CD instead of a DVD. Given that it also came out a scant year before Ape Escape 2, I maybe also shouldn't've been quite so surprised that the game reuses a LOT of assets from the first Ape Escape game. I ended up being quite surprised by a lot this game had to offer, but they were mostly not good surprises ^^;. It took me about 5 hours to 100% normal mode.

The story is fairly unimportant and awkwardly presented, so I had a pretty hard time following it or caring about it enough to try harder to follow it XD. After the events of the first game, Kakeru and the gang are renewing the Monkey Park and in the meanwhile have sent all the monkeys into a virtual play park while the physical one is being repaired. Unfortunately, part of the renewal is cleaning all the monkeys' pants, which they forgot to do, and Specter has the monkeys running amok in the virtual park! Now Kakeru (aka Spike) needs to get in there with his special vacuum cleaner to suck all of the pants off of the monkeys so they can be washed. It's a very light and forgettable story (even for one of these games) that's really just a delivery device for the gameplay. A lot of how forgettable it is comes down to just how thread bare the presentation is compared to the other games, as this game has virtually no cutscenes (only intro and outro with no subtitles) or voice acting (and the font is very annoyingly hard to read).

The gameplay is sorta part Ape Escape and part Luigi's Mansion (which came out a little later that same year). You run around levels with your vacuum cleaner sucking the pants off of all the monkeys before time runs out. You also get some weapons to use against them, but largely it's just you and your vacuum against the world. You get a letter grade ranking for how fast you complete the mission, and you also get marks for delivering all the pants to the goal (washing machine) at once as well as another for completing the mission within the allotted time limit. You get an extra life for both of the latter marks, but the actual target time you're aiming for for an S-rank letter grade (which are recorded and unlock silly extras) is never specified so far as I could tell.

The games mechanics and general premise are sorta solid, but ultimately it's all super rough. Not just assets, but mechanically, this game plays a LOT like Ape Escape 1 (but thankfully with a better framerate). Kakeru feels fairly slow (and you don't have any dash ring to go faster) and his double jump feels a bit stiff, but that's only the start of the issues. With how fast the monkeys move (and they move FAST), it can be really hard to get them with the vacuum, which makes it a real pain that the vacuum's range and limited auto aim are so ambiguous in how they operate. You can suck at the monkeys until you can fire them in front of you like a rocket, but those are really hard to aim and therefore aren't much use in a game about time trials.

There are also monkeys and boss battles that require fighting with the extra weapons you get, but those weapons are just a bomb, an attraction device, and some mind control thing (with the last one's operation being confusing and largely useless in my experience). You aim these by flicking the right stick back and then letting go in the direction you wanna throw it, and if that sounds like an awful way to aim and fight to you, then you have excellently guessed one of the biggest problems present in the later half of the game (and the entirety of the Expert Mode levels you unlock after beating the normal ones).

That also means that this game suffers from the same problem the normal Ape Escape games suffer from: camera control is bound only to focusing it behind you, as the right stick has a different use. This is extra weird when you consider that the face buttons aren't used for switching weapons and area actually used for jumping and activating your vacuum. Aiming these weapons is terribly awkward and is rarely accurate as a result. The camera is usually fine, but one or two stages in particular (particularly the penultimate stage's boss fight) are DREADFUL because of how the camera works. In boss fights especially, Specter moves around so fast that they change how the camera focusing works to focus on him (sorta) instead of refocusing it behind where you're standing. The boss battles are by and large pretty bad both because of how repetitive they are (it's the same boss just in different stages for all but the final boss) and due to these camera woes.

The presentation is acceptable, but nothing special. It very much looks like a last-gen game with basically every character model being recycled from Ape Escape 1 (so at the time it didn't look that bad, but Ape Escape 2, which came out the following year, blows this out of the water). The environments look quite nice and pretty, though, as they were all developed especially for this, and that makes an even harsher visual clash as you have higher polygon count environments contrasted with far lower polygon count models. The music is also really nothing special and I already can't remember any of it. The only fun thing about the presentation is that after beating each world you unlock a monkey sauna to peer into (creepy) depending on how many S-ranks you got, and you can look at the monkeys doing silly antics and read their thoughts for some silly jokes.

Verdict: Not Recommended. I was really disappointed with this game. Given the series its part of and how much I enjoyed the last spinoff of the series I played, I certain expected better, but this game is a really rough time. In the grand scheme of PS2 platformers it isn't THAT bad, but it's a frustrating enough time that I can't possibly recommend it over anything else (especially with how cheap the proper Ape Escapes are in Japan). This game feels like something the B-team made while Ape Escape 2 was entering its last stages of development, and they had to do SOMETHING with Ape Escape 1's engine to have something ready for the launch window of the PS2. They did indeed get something, sure, but I'm not sure it was worth it given the quality of the final product.

Completion Criteria: Specter's pants stolen

A weird game. As a concept it's so bizarre that it's worth noting. A game about cleaning pants by stealing them with a vacuum cleaner. These types of games have never really been the types I enjoy but maybe the titular saru's are enough to warm me up to any concept. While the game is pretty tedious sometimes, it can be kind of fun in others. Something that I will ignore that would factor into the previous thought though is the Expert Mode which unlocks when you complete the main scenario. In this mode, your vacuum is worse, the monkeys are faster and capsule placement is changed while your timer is reduced moderately. The couple of levels I tried were definitely a step into a more interesting scenario but having looked it up, there are no extras to be gleemed so I thought this was a better stopping point to move on to a new game.

Overall worth a shot just because it's bonkers. But it's easy to see this not being your cup of tea. Treat the game as it is, a bizarre side game. At least watch the intro which comes up the game nicely as some weird idea

Really boring, tbh. After doing a couple of levels, it got old and the rest of the game was just boring. How do you fuck up an Ape Escape game?

1 gadget, right stick isn't used like Ape Escape 1,2, or 3. Music is like whatever.

Feel like the only good thing I can say is that it looks fine, and it isn't boring to the point I was dreading playing it. It just felt too bland in gameplay.

Not crazy about it. Fails to utilize basic design principles from the game it's a spin-off of, and suffers as a result. Namely, there's no usage of the right stick, when aiming the vacuum independently would've been a huge help for much of the game; the PS2 even came standard with a dual stick controller, so I don't know why they didn't use it at all. The concept is decent enough, and if it just controlled better it might be fun to chase after S ranks, but as it stands, I'll leave it alone after beating the first iteration of the final level.