Banana Blitz is an unfaithful illustration of the fun gameplay found in the previous Monkey Ball games.
The monkey ball concept has found its destined home on Wii, with the tilt sensor and gyroscope technology of the Wii remote being the perfect control method. Tilt forward to see your hapless monkey roll onward, turn left, right, or go back. It may be the simplest control setup for a game, ever. New for Banana Blitz, however, pressing A will make your monkey hop. At first this doesn’t seem like a significant, game changing twist on the already brilliant design. But it is, and regrettably it’s not for the better.
Jumping adds two new layers to the majority of levels. The first of these layers is lazier design. The designers no longer need to think up as bizarre or daunting levels for players, simply replacing many obstacles with stairs, or humps and bumps to prevent your monkey ball from smoothly gliding over surfaces. The dizzying quality of speeding along tight platforms without falling off has been replaced by headache inducing screen shaking from repeated jumping. The sheer smoothness of the levels has been forsaken, in this respect, and Banana Blitz simply isn’t as dazzling because of it.
The second layer is a far greater amount of frustration ever received from previous games in the series. The level design isn’t as devious in Banana Blitz, but with the surplus of jumping obstacles, and a jumping mechanic that is far from desirable, you may find yourself swearing at the cutesy, innocent monkeys. The real downfall of jumping, however, is the lack of feasible precision. In one level, after climbing a steep tower, you’re faced with a curvy jump, and unlike the subtle touch it takes to move your monkey ball along, you’ll find no similar available mastery for jumping. Just take the leap, and hope you’re not victimized by bad positioning that you have little control over. The movement of your monkey ball, by tilting the Wii remote, is surprisingly accurate, and very responsive. For a significant amount of the single player, the feeling of moving your monkey ball around with the remote is a sort of saving grace.
The single player consists of eight worlds, each with eight movement puzzles to complete, and rounded up with a boss fight. These new boss encounters aren’t anything special or memorable, but aren’t particularly bad either. The time spent of these boss encounters would have been more wisely invested in more puzzles for the player. The single player will last you several hours, as you’ll be replaying many of the later levels, thanks to the ramped up difficulty. It also takes quite a bit of time to sift through all of the multiplayer mini-games.
Both of the previous Monkey Ball games found astonishing replayability from Monkey Target, one mini-game. This single mini-game was enough to keep you coming back to both games, long after growing tired of what else the games had to offer. Banana Blitz has over fifty mini-games, but none of them have been perfected. There are plenty of good ones, and too many not-so-good ones. But after you’ve played the worthy ones a few times, you’ll be finished with the multiplayer, and move on to other, better games on Wii. Monkey Target does make a return, but only with one lonely, simple, target. The games are fun to experiment with at first, but have zero lasting power.
Banana Blitz overlays some cel-shading onto the already playful presentation. The bright and cheerful worlds are given a particularly clean look, with sharp defined edges. The monkeys’ expressions are happier, and more frightened, than ever before. Their eyes pop wide open the closer you edge towards the bottomless pits of despair, flailing their stubby little arms in desperate attempts at keeping their balance. The Monkey Ball series is truly bizarre, and beautifully unique. The cheery nature of the often paradise-like worlds is brought an odd and noticeably demented atmosphere. It may not even be deliberate, beyond the main idea of having monkeys trapped inside bubbles in the first place.
There’s no doubt in ones mind, after playing a Monkey Ball game, that the designers must have been on something to come up with something so maddeningly happy. It’s good to see Banana Blitz define the visual flair needed for such an uncanny game. And the extremely catchy, upbeat, joyous soundtrack only adds to the frightening wackiness. The music is perfectly in line for the nature of Monkey Ball, more so than previous games in the series. Far more importantly, however, is how the tunes manage to be less irritating than you’d expect from such a cutesy game.
With a group of friends, the surplus of mini-games can be amusing for a good time simply for their fantastic variety. You’ll move from a first-person shooter, to a tight rope contest, to fencing. Banana Blitz succeeds in this way, but fails in ways it shouldn’t have. It mucks up the single player with jumping, boss fights, and genuinely less remarkable puzzles. And the multiplayer is nothing to write home about. It’s indisputably disappointing to see Monkey Ball for Wii, the perfect platform for the series, get such unfaithful treatment.