As much as I love the 2nd and 3rd Ape Escape games, I couldn't remember if I'd ever played the first one, let alone beaten it. Having played through it in Japanese now, I can say quite confidently I had never played it before XD. It is simultaneously quite surprising how similar it is to Ape Escape 2 and also shocking just what an improvement the sequel is by comparison despite how little overall is changed. It took me like 8 or 9 hours in total to get all of the Specter Coins and all of the monkeys.
Story-wise, Ape Escape 1 is much more grounded than its sequels. There's a big monkey park run by The Professor, and one day their star attraction monkey gets his little hands on one of the experimental new Monkey Helmets. It corrupts his mind and gives him super smarts and telekinetic powers which he then uses to build monkey helmets for all his monkey buddies. Now dubbed Specter, he attacks the Professor's lab, and uses his time machine to go back in time and rewrite history to make monkeys in charge of the world instead of humans. It's up to our intrepid boy hero Kakeru to catch all those monkeys messing up history and stop him!
I say it's more grounded, but that's mostly in terms of the locations and the villains, as the Freaky Monkey Five are an invention of the sequel. Your main rival here is your childhood friend Hiroki, whom Specter has brainwashed into being his servant, and even then the rivalry isn't that present up until your final encounter. You could also say the story has somewhat of a point of strength not being about power (and by extension, technology), and technology itself being a potentially horribly corrupting influence, as is at least implied to be the case with Specter's relation to his original monkey helmet. Regardless, it's a 3D action platformer from late-ish in the PS1's lifespan, so the plot isn't really the most interesting thing here.
The most interesting thing is capturing those monkeys, and the game does a pretty good job of that. This is the only game I know of on the PS1 that outright requires the dualshock controller to work, and was clearly developed as a vehicle to convince people Sony's new controller was worth the upgrade. The D-pad handles camera direction and the face buttons change your weapons. Movement is handled by the left joystick and your attacking is done by the right joystick. Compared to the sequels, it takes a bit of getting used to with how you attack, as there isn't any tracking in how you swing your baton or your net. This does have the effect of making the baton a far more useful weapon, as trying to catch a feeling monkey with just the next is far harder to do with how much slower and less accurate your net is in this game.
Other than that, the overall formula of the game is really similar to how the mainline games would go on to do. You start a mission, you gotta collect so many monkeys in order to pass it. There are some slight differences such as there being hidden Specter Coins in each stage to also collect, but they're just an extra thing to collect to unlock some extra mini-games. Other than that, it's just Ape Escape on PS1.
However, being Ape Escape on PS1 DOES carry with it some unfortunately conditions. The game has a pretty poor draw distance which can make navigating some levels a bit of a pain when you're hunting for monkeys (even with your monkey radar). Even worse, some levels have really significant slowdown, and it makes the already somewhat clunky/awkward controls even worse by affecting the latency (especially for jumps). I was beginning to think my controller was broken because the button delay was so bad for jumping, but no. That's just the slowdown. That slowdown is the main reason I would say this game might be difficult to stick with for fans of the PS2 games like I was. However, it's not all bad. The game looks quite good for a PS1 game, even despite the low polygon count. The music is also good, and I'd say even better than the sequels, as well as the VA being excellent as well (at least in Japanese).
Verdict: Recommended. Somewhat clunky controls and fairly annoying slowdown aside, this is still an excellent game. Good music, good gimmick, good level design. It's all things that are improved in the later games, but they're still really solid here as well. If you're a fan of the series or a fan of 3D platformers in general, you can certainly do better than the first Ape Escape game, but you can easily do a lot worse as well.
Story-wise, Ape Escape 1 is much more grounded than its sequels. There's a big monkey park run by The Professor, and one day their star attraction monkey gets his little hands on one of the experimental new Monkey Helmets. It corrupts his mind and gives him super smarts and telekinetic powers which he then uses to build monkey helmets for all his monkey buddies. Now dubbed Specter, he attacks the Professor's lab, and uses his time machine to go back in time and rewrite history to make monkeys in charge of the world instead of humans. It's up to our intrepid boy hero Kakeru to catch all those monkeys messing up history and stop him!
I say it's more grounded, but that's mostly in terms of the locations and the villains, as the Freaky Monkey Five are an invention of the sequel. Your main rival here is your childhood friend Hiroki, whom Specter has brainwashed into being his servant, and even then the rivalry isn't that present up until your final encounter. You could also say the story has somewhat of a point of strength not being about power (and by extension, technology), and technology itself being a potentially horribly corrupting influence, as is at least implied to be the case with Specter's relation to his original monkey helmet. Regardless, it's a 3D action platformer from late-ish in the PS1's lifespan, so the plot isn't really the most interesting thing here.
The most interesting thing is capturing those monkeys, and the game does a pretty good job of that. This is the only game I know of on the PS1 that outright requires the dualshock controller to work, and was clearly developed as a vehicle to convince people Sony's new controller was worth the upgrade. The D-pad handles camera direction and the face buttons change your weapons. Movement is handled by the left joystick and your attacking is done by the right joystick. Compared to the sequels, it takes a bit of getting used to with how you attack, as there isn't any tracking in how you swing your baton or your net. This does have the effect of making the baton a far more useful weapon, as trying to catch a feeling monkey with just the next is far harder to do with how much slower and less accurate your net is in this game.
Other than that, the overall formula of the game is really similar to how the mainline games would go on to do. You start a mission, you gotta collect so many monkeys in order to pass it. There are some slight differences such as there being hidden Specter Coins in each stage to also collect, but they're just an extra thing to collect to unlock some extra mini-games. Other than that, it's just Ape Escape on PS1.
However, being Ape Escape on PS1 DOES carry with it some unfortunately conditions. The game has a pretty poor draw distance which can make navigating some levels a bit of a pain when you're hunting for monkeys (even with your monkey radar). Even worse, some levels have really significant slowdown, and it makes the already somewhat clunky/awkward controls even worse by affecting the latency (especially for jumps). I was beginning to think my controller was broken because the button delay was so bad for jumping, but no. That's just the slowdown. That slowdown is the main reason I would say this game might be difficult to stick with for fans of the PS2 games like I was. However, it's not all bad. The game looks quite good for a PS1 game, even despite the low polygon count. The music is also good, and I'd say even better than the sequels, as well as the VA being excellent as well (at least in Japanese).
Verdict: Recommended. Somewhat clunky controls and fairly annoying slowdown aside, this is still an excellent game. Good music, good gimmick, good level design. It's all things that are improved in the later games, but they're still really solid here as well. If you're a fan of the series or a fan of 3D platformers in general, you can certainly do better than the first Ape Escape game, but you can easily do a lot worse as well.