A masterclass in game design. Pure fun and arcade goodness that's easy to pick up, but tough and satisfying to master. A fantastic test of consistency and grit that still has plenty of variety. If you're a casual you can even be satisfied with the minigames! A truly misunderstood masterpiece. The world was honestly not ready for Super Monkey Ball, and I will say that completely unironically. It's a real fucking shame Sega has consistently missed the fucking point with this series and it mostly has a legacy as a "hehe monke" game rather than the incredibly designed brutal arcade game that it was.

Man, we lost Amusement Vision way too soon.

Fucking atrocious as a remake, completely destroys the gameplay loop by attempting to cater to casuals who will play the game once and never again (Not that casuals shouldn't be allowed to play the game! But there was a FAR better way to handle this than what they did.) Super Monkey Ball is an arcade style consistency game, not a course clear game! Why does Sega not understand this? The courses are far too simple to be one and dones, they don't hold as much merit on their own terms as opposed to part of a whole. here is literally no reason to play this over the originals unless you only have access to this game.

If you do only have access to this game, and you never played the originals, then I guess it's fine on its own terms? It's hard to see it as anything other than a spoiled version of two of the greatest games of all time though. It controls worse, it's lacking maingame multiplayer, it's far less replayable and the original content is pretty negligible. If you have interest in this as a game and not just a monkey meme please consider playing the originals first/instead!

The public reception of this game fluctuates as much as a Zelda game. I personally have always loved it though. Super unique vibes, some of the more creative boss encounters in the classic games (even if some are a bit silly and pathetically easy they're still all distinct) and honestly the level design is completely fine and engaging outside of Wacky Workbench. Very fun special stages too! I may have a bit of nostalgia bias for this one to be honest but to be honest if there's one game I have to be deluded towards I'm glad it's this one.

Miyamoto looks at Donkey Kong breathing and goes "Ok Retro this needs to be a main mechanic of the game" and they just believed him

Boring game unfortunately. Short stages with way too much pace breaking shit due to the blowing mechanic. Probably a bit better if you just do an any% but going for everything is just tedious and annoying. Donkey Kong Country definitely did return but not much else more. It really doesn't feel like this game has much of a personality at all, fairly generic level archetypes without anything standout. Honestly if they were going to rehash as much as they did they may as well have brought back K Rool but ah well.

Sequel is way way better!