Super Monkey Ball super stinks.
This being the first game I owned for the 3DS, I was very excited and tried to find anything good with it that I could.
Here is the good: The 3D looks cool.
That is seriously it.
The levels go from really boring to less boring, and nothing outside of that.
Instead of ever getting a sense of speed you yearn for with a monkey trapped inside a ball, almost every stage consists of a flat (usually some basic shape) rolling-ground which has a bunch of walls randomly slapped into place. Instead of your monkey zooming past obstacles as it reaches 150 mph, you will find yourself constantly below 20mph, as your 3DS speakers spit out "UGH. AH. WAH." as your monkey slams into one of the 3000 walls. The few times I found myself approaching any sort of fast speed I soon found myself careening over and off of the stage.
The bananas you are encouraged to collect baffle me. For one, the course often offers paths that do not lead to the goal, but offer you more bananas if you have time to kill to go collect them. If you collect 100, the bananas give you an extra life. If you get a game over, you start back on the same level set you were on. That's supposed to be incentive? Hardly.
The last level of the game is truly the only level I found myself enjoying, with a mixture of speed and skill. I kid you not when I say this was the only one that offered the two. Then the credits started to roll, again mocking me by having a minigame taking place where I was told to collect as many bananas as possible without smacking into the names of the developers.
The 2 minigames available are nothing more than cheap rip-offs. The racing game is a clear copy of Mario Kart, with one exception. It sucks. Instead of drifting, "powersliding" has been added to this game. Around any turn that requires you to more than nudge your dpad you will find yourself flying off of the stage, as you come not even close to completing a powerslide. You are then forced to wait an agonizing 10 seconds or so to be put back on the track as everybody else laps you. This becomes so frustrating that I found myself just braking before turns and going through them at a crawl in order to save myself the pain.
The Monkey Battle game is another clear rip-off of Super Smash Brothers. Like Super Smash Brothers? You will be extremely put off by this then. This game tries and fails to imitate the SSB style, instead coming out with clunky and non-responsive controls, unbalanced characters, and luck coming into play way more than it should. With characters that can traverse back and forth across the screen before you can blink, to characters who can make mincemeat out of you with one attack, this is a dreadful experience.
I would not recommend this title to anyone, even kids, as the levels are not so much easy as they are boring and repetitive. Save yourself the cash. Skip this one.