Like many of Sega’s “not Sonic the Hedgehog” game series, Super Monkey Ball is a unique experience that hooks just as many people as it alienates. The puzzle-action franchise developed enough of a following to receive nearly two dozen games on more than a dozen platforms, including an HD remake of a Nintendo Wii game released on the Nintendo Switch just two years ago (Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD).
Straight remakes aren’t as impressive as putting together a new, compelling package, though, and that’s what Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania does. This newest Super Monkey Ball game pulls together hundreds of stages from the first three main titles, which is triple Banana Blitz HD’s number. Plus, Banana Mania throws in a few extra party games and several classic Sega characters to play as, for good measure. It’s an entertaining and varied experience that’s well worth the modest $39.99 price.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is available on Nintendo Switch, as well as PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. We tested the Nintendo Switch version.
Slow Your Roll
Super Monkey Ball’s concept is deceptively simple: Roll a monkey in a ball through a course by tilting the world around it to reach a goal. You can collect bananas along the way for more points, but ultimately it’s just about getting from point A to point B, with various obstacles in between.
The controls are just as uncomplicated: Use the left analog stick to tilt the level, and the right analog stick to move the camera. You can also tilt the level by using motion controls if your platform supports it (Switch, PS5), but that’s turned off by default. That control scheme demands an incredibly steady hand for it to offer the same precision as the stick. That’s it.
Don’t mistake conceptual simplicity for design simplicity, though. Courses quickly become complex, with a startlingly wide variety of contours, shapes, and active obstacles to make reaching the goal incredibly difficult. The course layouts vary wildly and show incredible creativity, with slopes, ramps, curves, and incredibly narrow paths of all shapes. There are also moving platforms, moving blocks, switches that can activate those moving elements or change their speed or direction, warps that take you to different parts of the level, mines that knock you off-course, and other elements that add to the challenge. These combine into more than 300 different courses pulled in from Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2, and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. None of the tracks feel similar.
With creativity comes brutality, and Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania’s difficulty curves up as sharply as any half-pipe. The first stage is a simple green square that you tilt forward to guide the monkey through the goal. Several dozen levels later, I’ve rolled through a shifting labyrinth, carefully plummeted off a high platform, ping-ponged into a goal mounted on a wall, timed my movements to pass through a goal as it fell through a crack in the floor, and used a piston’s inertia to launch me up a tower. That’s on top of many, many narrow and sloping paths I had to precisely adjust my speed and direction to roll over. Each of these courses must be completed in a minute or less.
If you fall off of the course, you must start over. You can retry as many times as you want, and levels quickly load, but that won’t lessen the frustration you feel when you’ve fallen off a stage for the tenth time within inches of the goal. Fortunately, you have access to a Helper Mode that doubles the amount of time you have to complete the stage, provides glowing arrows to indicate the best route you can take, and lets you slow the game by holding the R button to get past particularly difficult levels. You can use the mode to beat stages, but your clear time won’t be recorded as it would be if you completed them without the assistance.
Even with slow motion activated, some of the harder courses are nearly impossible to complete. At times, the game demands near-superhuman timing and precision; several later stages felt like they asked for inputs so exact I’m not sure I could physically do them. This is a game where, if your hands shake in the slightest or if you aren’t good at making the most minute thumb movements, you’ll run into brick walls of progression.
Many Modes and Maps
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania features many game modes, mostly broken up between “Main Game” and “Party Games” sections. Main Game is where you’ll find all the modes featuring classic Super Monkey Ball action. Party Games is a dozen surprisingly varied alternate game modes based around different fun activities, with the option for multiplayer action.
Under Main Game, Story Mode presents the closest experience Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania has to a single-player campaign. It features dozens upon dozens of courses from three separate Super Monkey Ball games, arranged into sets of 10. They also have different visual and mechanical themes. The narrative part of Story Mode is little more than textless, nearly motionless vignettes of the series’ various characters, such as mascot AiAi and villain Dr. Bad-boon, vexing each other with different antics. These scenes vaguely set the stage for each set of courses, but calling it anything close to a story is wildly generous.
You can also play Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2’s Challenge Mode, which sends you through playlists of different courses specifically from the chosen game. Each Challenge Mode has five different playlists of drastically increasing difficulty. Just be aware that you can’t back out of a playlist and pick up where you left off; these are marathon modes, though they still let you pause or put your Switch to sleep if you need a break. A Practice Mode for these games also lets you play any individual level available to you (Story Mode shares this option, as well).
If that isn’t enough monkey-rolling for you, there are also five Special Modes with their own selections of tweaked courses. Reverse Mode sends you through stages backwards, Dark Banana mode forces you to avoid bananas instead of collect them, Golden Banana Mode requires you to collect every banana in a course, and Original Stage and DX Modes make you play tweaked courses from Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, respectively.
Party Time
That’s a lot of obstacle courses to blaze through, but Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania doesn’t stop there. Party Games is a collection of 12 additional game modes you can play on your own or with up to three other people. These cover a wide range of activities, most of which replace the usual ball-rolling with different controls and action.
Monkey Race is the closest to the original game mode, letting you roll around a track, competing against other monkeys in balls and even using Mario Kart-like items to get an edge. There’s also Monkey Target, a Pilotwings-like activity where you fly off a ramp and try to glide onto a platform; Monkey Billiards, where you use your monkey as a cue ball in a game of pool; Monkey Bowling, where your monkey is a bowling ball; Monkey Golf, where your monkey is (you get the idea now); Monkey Shot, a rail shooter; and six more.
Each party game has numerous settings and often multiple courses: Monkey Race has 11 tracks; Monkey Billiards lets you choose between American 9-ball, Japanese 9-ball, 8-ball, or even play a single-player tournament; Monkey Golf has standard golf and mini-golf modes; and so on. There’s a lot of variety and replayability here, on top of the 300-odd Super Monkey Ball-style courses.
Playing games, collecting bananas, and fulfilling in-game achievements adds to a total number of banana points that you can spend in the Points Store. The Points Store is filled with aesthetic changes you can make to your monkey, including dozens of costume pieces, entire skins for each monkey, and different ball colors and patterns. You can also unlock entirely different characters to play as in the Main Game mode, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Beat from Jet Set Radio, and Kazuma Kiryu from Yakuza (all of which have their own unique pickup items, replacing the bananas littering the courses with rings, spray cans, and energy drinks, respectively). The Points Shop is also where you unlock the previously mentioned Special Modes, and even visual filters that you can use while playing.
Banana Mania’s Performance
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is basically an updated remix of three games released between 2001 and 2005, so you shouldn’t expect to be amazed by its graphics. It looks as nice as you’d assume an HD remake of a GameCube-era game would look, and that’s not a bad thing. There’s only so much detail you can pack into rolling a ball and relatively simple objects, after all.
We tested the game on Nintendo Switch, while the Steam version has some very modest recommended specs, including an Intel Core i3-540 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 GPU. But even if you play on these low-powered machines, you probably won’t see much, if any, more detail in the PS5 or Xbox Series X versions. Performance is generally strong on the Nintendo Switch, though it doesn’t seem to hit the coveted 60 frames per second. The game appears to run at a solid and smooth 30fps, and I didn’t notice any choppiness or hiccups.
Super Monkey Ball’s Greatest Hits
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is a massive best-of collection of the first few games in the Super Monkey Ball series. Instead of simply presenting each game individually in a collection, it packs hundreds of courses from Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2, and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe into a single campaign with several additional modes, and adds a dozen fun and occasionally deep party games. The series’ concept is fundamentally an acquired taste, but if you like the idea of rolling through obstacle courses to test your precision and patience, this is the game for you.
