Review for Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 29/10/2019 The version for PC came out on 31/10/2019
Among the key characters of the Sega stable there is not only Sonic: there is also AiAi, a little monkey who, together with its jungle clique, is among the protagonists of a very prolific series baptized in 2001: Super Monkey Ball, an arcade series that has earned its fan base and an odi et amo with speedrunners.
In Super Monkey Ball the fundamental answer about life, the universe and everything else is there speed. The rules of the game are very simple: you have to guide your favorite monkey through suspended levels until you reach the finish line. Where's the catch? The catch is that i levels get pretty damn difficult and you have to deal with time. Failures lead to starting over, obviously having stamped your name in the records with a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. An exquisitely arcade game with almost infernal contours, but also able to give great satisfaction.
Well, let's not say that AiAi has thrown in the towel: after hundreds and thousands of falls, with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD the company of firsts arrives at the gates of 2020 with the revisited version for PlayStation 4, PC and Nintendo Switch of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz.
Ready?
It all started in 2006: we are in the seventh generation of consoles, that of PS3 and Xbox 360, but also of Wii, considered the “family size” console of the three. Super Monkey Ball on Nintendo Wii meant, first and foremost, the adoption of the motion controller, with its almost futuristic qualities but also and above all a completely new way of conceiving one's patience.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD, this is the title chosen for the return on another console of the great N, Nintendo Switch, abandon the Wii controller to the delight of many making the monkeys return to a more canonical dimension. For this finishing operation, Sega has chosen a name that has become familiar especially in recent times, namely Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio. It's not the first development studio to pass, having worked on titles like Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and the future Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Set aside for the time being Kazuma Kiryu and the new blond protagonist, this machine churning out headlines has created a remake in HD Banana Blitz with the help of the Unity graphic engine.
With Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD the game has been rejuvenated by 10 years or more, with something more than a simple coat of paint (strictly yellow). But let's see in detail how the title on Nintendo Switch, with the exclusive news coming with the remake.
Go!
It is clear that the sun as the Nintendo hybrid has become the ideal terrain for Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD, which gets a makeover. Festive and colorful, thanks to a 1080p, 60 fps granite mechanical heart and a portable party game soul it's hard not to see this version looming as the most ideal.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD partially abandons its arcade formula - the score is always there, but it's a perfectionist's worry - in favor of an increasing difficulty that becomes luciferian only from mid-game onwards.
La plot of the game is obviously the same as 13 years ago: a mysterious pirate robs the family of monkeys of their precious bananas and the furry characters will have to jump from world to world to recover them. Clearly more a pretext than anything else, it serves to give a justification as to why AiAi and his friends lock themselves up in spheres as it was not done, for example, in the first chapter. And here, then, that you can choose between 6 characters, all different, plus one, Sonic, whose statistics must be taken literally. Although it is possible to complete the main campaign with all the characters, the choice of the monkey (or the porcupine) is important to facilitate the journey: AiAi, as protagonist, is balanced; MeeMee, his partner, jumps better but weighs less than the previous glutton; their puppy Baby is instead light as a feather, with all the consequences of the case; and so on. Changing characters depending on the scenario you are facing can greatly simplify - or on the contrary make it more difficult - the level and is a possibility to be treasured.
The main game is developed in worlds, which in turn are divided into scenarios and bosses, an absolute novelty for the series at the time. The levels are very diversified and, After the first world that serves as a great tutorial, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD will test our skills as a player by increasing in intensity until the temperatures get high. As always, the aim is to bring the monkey from one point to another in the scenario trying to collect as many bananas as possible and in the shortest possible time, but this time joy-con and the Pro Controller are preferred to the Wii motion controller.
The keys to move the spiteful mammals are only two: the analog and the jump button. Due to the importance of controls in such a game, we have thoroughly tested the control system and surprisingly also the individual joy-con have proven to be up to a gameplay that makes input lag its worst enemy. The responses are immediate and the character does exactly what we command him to do through any type of Switch controller. On this aspect Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has done a commendable job and the result has been to mitigate the frequent falls as much as possible - at least until the game starts to get serious.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD proves itself both in the uploads and in the very fluid general execution, thanks to the 60 frames per second. The title hides a 'treacherous simplicity and fluidity is not enough: the real difficulty lies not so much in completing the levels, but in earning gold medals, a task that is only possible if you complete all the levels of a world without reaching a “continue?”. Bringing home a gold medal will be virtually impossible at least in the beginning, and the game will soon show its trial and error nature; despite this, the fact remains that Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is among the most forgiving of the series, and perhaps the reason why the choice fell on the former Wii title was not to discourage users, no longer used to having the carpet removed from under their feet and starting over n times during gameplay. Losing the 3 ritual lives will therefore "only" lose the chance to get the gold medal: the game has no game over and it will always continue from where you stumbled the last time.
The scenarios and protagonists have been refined, along with a modernization of the UI and a complete localization in Spanish: Super Monkey Ball has never looked so graceful and defined, whether in TV or portable mode. Precisely in this last mode, for example, we took away several satisfactions during a journey by passing a level where we were stuck (as once) and we were able to see how the use of the battery by Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD be very forgiving.
Fallout!
As you have noticed, we are following the narrator's utterances that punctuate the game in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD. Fallout (Fall in Spanish) is a word that you will hear often, but here it is also an opportunity to spend a few lines on the points that made us turn up our noses the most.
We talked about exclusive news earlier: Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD doesn't just offer a main campaign. The team responsible for bringing Super Monkey Ball back to current-gen has introduced several new features in order to make the game even more colorful: Minigames are added to the classic story - unmissable feature of the Sega series - a mode called "race against time"As well as one online component which has a name and a surname: Decathlon.
The self-evident race against time it is nothing more than the possibility of making an amateur speedrun by completing the first world in the shortest possible time or, by pushing the difficulty pedal more and more, the more advanced ones. Another big difference with the campaign is that once you have chosen the monkey it will no longer be possible to change it. It will therefore be necessary to choose based on speed but also looking beyond the first levels; as a result of this lightning-fast test, your name will be included in an online ranking.
DecathlonInstead, it consists of playing all 10 mini-games in a row in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD against other players online and aiming for the best score. It is of course possible to play minigames with friends up to 4 players - provided you have at least two pairs of joy-con. It goes without saying, but it is fair to specify it, that Nintendo Switch Lite owners must count out the two mini controllers because they are not detachable unlike the mother console, forcing them to buy at least one external pair of joy-con to try Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD in company.
I minigames, together with a healthy creativity with the other modes present, give Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD that party game soul that we mentioned at the beginning of the review, but here too we need to make a necessary clarification: the original Wii contained as many as 50 minigames, a disproportionate number that in this edition has been scissored: of the original 50 only 10 have survived with Sega's blue scissors. It must be said that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio opted for one selection of some of the best minigames by completely overhauling the technical apparatus, having to adapt one to one of very different controllers. To be honest, many minigames were rough, and perhaps deserved to be skipped; others, however, were sacrificed at the expense of others.
The minigames that can be found in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD are: Swing Ball, Space Monkey Attack, Slingshot, Dangerous Course, Obstacle Course, Hammer Throw, Hovercraft Challenge, Monkey Snowboard, Monkey Target and Mole Hunt. To completely disappear are sports games such as Monkey Bowling or Monkey Golf, plus others that would have genuinely deserved a place in the selection, perhaps increasing the number of minigames from 10 to 20 and allowing the Decathlon to be customized. They are very fast and more or less all fun games, whose commands come explained with a quick and timely infographic. Also on this occasion - if you do not have a Pro Controller available - the individual joy-cons behave very well given their lightness and the general lack of controls, except perhaps for the ZL / ZR keys, which in a game like Corsa to Obstacles, for example, are felt.
Another element that has changed over the years is the soundtrack. Anyone who played the original will notice: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was forced to change the soundtrack for a licensing problem, composing thematic tracks from scratch or recovering some of them from previous Super Monkey Balls. The music is well made, managing to capture the atmospheres of the suspended levels now with arabesque tones in the desert scenery, now adventurers if you leap or leap you find yourself on a pirate ship.
Continue?
However faithful to its roots, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD has been carrying around since the dawn of time a "defect", if we can call it that: the camera. This can't move freely with the analog or a backbone, but it relies on the movement of the encapsulated monkey we have control over. This feature, in combo with the level which is a very sensitive platform, makes the gameplay very lively but at times immobile, rigid, in order to position itself correctly and consequently straighten the room. We are facing a fundamental condition of Super Monkey Ball, which however has generated one initial confusion in the eyes of some acquaintances who have shared part of the adventure with us, which becomes almost heavy in very narrow areas that are sadly famous in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD.
Once you embrace the game mechanics, however, you will feel less of the problem. In short, we have to get used to it, but the doubt remains: would it have been so blasphemous if the camera had been manual and not so shaky? Maybe we got the name Ouch ouch where does it come from: it is the onomatopoeia of those who complain of a camera headache ...
Goal!
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is a Kula World with much more freedom and only one type of fruit: the banana. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and Sega bring a colorful and fluid platformer to the Nintendo flagship, which soon reveals itself as a versatile pastime with increasing difficulty. This version brings new welcome modes, including controls that no longer respond to the Wii motion controller, always on time and responsive, and a very simple online but adhering to an arcade of this kind. Being in the balance between crying with joy and being furious at yet another fall of the monkeys is one of the characteristics of the title - but with practice it will always come to the finish. Surely the Sega title is the ideal starting point for newbies who have never crossed the series; pity only for the drastic cut to the minigames, which go from 50 to a dozen.
► Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is a game developed by Ryu ga Gotoku Studio and published by Sega for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 29/10/2019 The version for PC came out on 31/10/2019
