So much missed potential with the Super Monkey Ball 2 story, the cutscenes were the SOUL of that mode. Now it's just a boring slideshow with dumb monkey noises.

The other mode has unlimited lives so the challenge is gone, therefore the replayability is affected heavily. There's no need to get better because you can just try again infinitely AND on top of that there's an easy cheat mode. Casuals really ruined gaming. I wouldn't mind if there was an easy cheat mode AND lives, but they really went and made it as easy as can be.

On top of that, a bunch of returning minigames are downgraded by a lot, most notably Monkey Target being just unplayable and unfun.

I'm only glad they finally listened and gave Monkey Ball fans what they wanted, even though it could have been so much better

I love the cast of characters, the story was great- but this was easily the weakest game of the three main games. Coming back to this game after Mask of Truth, the combat feels similar but somehow so much worse, it's missing a lot of effects that made the other be so good. Understandable, but hard to come back to for this.

The UI between events is pretty bad too, but I get it, this is even older than Prelude to the Fallen (the remake).

Story is pretty good though, that's what it has going for it. The problem is... it feels both long and short at the same time, long as in I feel there's a little too much fluff in some of the events, like I was losing patience with some of them because they just kept going on and on with nothing significant happening. And short because, it is also the shortest of all the games. The ending caught me off guard because I couldn't believe that was it. Thankfully the next game makes up for all the shortcomings in this one

In conclusion, still a fantastic game story-wise and everything else it has going for it, but personally I don't think it holds up that well on its own merits when compared to the other two. I have mixed feelings but they're more positive than anything because Haku