YMMV / Super Monkey Ball

• Accidental Innuendo: Monkeys spanking their butts is one thing, but Touch & Roll making you start up the game by tapping AiAi's butt on the bottom screen while he's cheerfully asking the player to, "Touch me!" was one of those things that gets more than a few people raising a brow.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Ale'wat from Super Monkey Adventure is highly disliked for being such a brat, but it's not hard to feel sorry for him when he gets carried away into the sky by his balloons with no indication of what happens to him.
• Audience-Alienating Era: It's not like the Monkey Ball games between Banana Blitz all the way to its Video Game Remake are bad, strictly speaking, and they do have their fans, but the games barely hold any resemblance to the duology that started the franchise beyond "monkeys in balls navigate courses with energetic music," and it ended up turning away virtually all of the fans that enjoyed the originals as a result. There's a reason why Banana Mania was heralded as the series revival almost entirely by Revisiting the Roots.
• Author's Saving Throw: The original duology (plus Deluxe by nature of porting them) was so Nintendo Hard in due part because of the classic arcade lives and continue system, where many players will likely not even see the toughest courses the games have to offer without cheats or seeing them online; even with 2's Story Mode nixing lives, you only saw a portion of the game's overall content and Challenge Mode still demanded perfection. Banana Mania does away with that entirely in favor of infinite lives and no continue system; while there's a Helper Function that allows for slow-motion and a guide path through the stages, and you can unlock the Banana Blitz Jump feature, the former is what locks you from Extra levels in Challenge now, while both features lock you out of leaderboards for that level/run. Now your biggest restriction boils down to whether you have the skill and patience to sit through Challenge Mode that long, as quitting or retrying still resets you to the very start.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Inside The Whale world from Super Monkey Ball 2. It does nothing to advance the story other than make room for the last 10 Advanced stages (Not like you'd care for the story anyway).
• Breather Level:
  • The unusually merciful Bonus Stages. The set task is to collect several bananas within the time limit. However, unlike every other stage, you're not penalized if you run out of time or fall out.
  • Skeleton plays a rather extreme example here, don't you agree?^note If Exam-C was just enough torture, Skeleton isn't that much of an upgrade from Slopes (Beginner 6-From 1) to make it that hard. And when you beat this comparably pathetic level, Tracks gets to torture you.
  • Surprisingly, a majority of stages from Expert 41 to Expert Extra are easier than some of the earlier levels in the difficulty. This would last until Sanctuary (Expert Extra 9) which can be comparable to the toughest stages in Expert. And following Sanctuary is Daa Loo Maa, where all the player has to do is to wait for the hammer to knock off parts of the pillar while avoiding said hammer. And this is followed by the Master stages...
  • There's always at least one very easy stage in every Story Mode Grid in 2 and Deluxe, even in the hardest worlds.
  • World 7 (Bubbly Washing Machine) in 2 (and Deluxe's) Story Mode is surprisingly easy compared to 4 (Which had Launchers and Arthropod), 5 (Which has Toggle, Melting Pot, and Mad Shuffle) and 6 (Which had Tiers and Switch Inferno). A majority of the stages actually quite fair and fun. Even it's harder stages like 8 Bracelets aren't on the same That One Level territory on some of the levels before it (unless you're playing Deluxe, in which case you have the infamous levels Exam-C, Tracks, and Invasion from the first game^note not that you actually have to play them, of course). This also applies to Expert Levels 21 - 29.
  • World 8 (Clock Tower Factory) is home to some of the most hellish stages in Story Mode (Pistons, Momentum, Entangled Path, Warp^note also Twin Attacker, Sega Logo, Twin Cross, and Spiral Hard in Deluxe), however there is a very simple stage called "Trampolines". The rules are simple, stand on the blue jump pads and transfer from platform to platform. It's very similar to a stage in the first game's advanced mode. But the best part? This stage is rated a ten-banana level. Talk about anti-climactic.
  • Ironically, Expert in Adventure is considered to be easier in general compared to Advanced, despite the former requiring the completion of the latter to be unlocked, due to a fewer amount of Marathon Levels and the levels being more simple. It certainly does not help that the game suffers from Schizophrenic Difficulty like the other games in the series.
  • From the custom level romhacks, we have Network (World 9-4) from Super Monkey Ball 651. While every other stage in World 9 is on par or even harder than all of 2's hardest stages, all this level requires you to do is cross a wireframe that gets thinner... except there's also two trap doors that occasionally come up, which makes it easy for a player rush to the goal before having to do the skinniest parts of the level.
  • From another romhack, Super Monkey Ball Gaiden, Maelstrom (World EX-2) is considered the easiest of the hack's Master levels. While every other Master floor is a checkpoint-starved Marathon Level obstacle course overstuffed with tricks and challenges, Maelstrom just consists of some moving waved disks and is the only level in the set with a 60 second time limit. While it's certainly nothing to sneeze at, it's a far cry from what the rest of Master has to offer, making this stage more befitting for Worlds 9 or 10.
• Broken Base:
  • When concerning Banana Blitz, fans either love or hate the over-reliance on motion controls. Same goes with the jumping mechanics and the inclusion of boss battles.
  • The easier Monkey Ball games (Like 3D and Step n' Roll) have gotten some flack for being "too easy", some however enjoy and appreciate them them due to the series' usual difficulty or being good overall.
  • The announcement that Banana Blitz was getting a HD remake for all current generation consoles has been met with a lot of division. On the one hand, people are happy about the news because they're happy to see Monkey Ball return to the big screen (the last Monkey Ball game to be released on a console was Step & Roll, which released all the way back in 2010) as well as seeing the franchise return to its original form (the last Monkey Ball game was Monkey Ball Bounce, which was a spin-off game that played completely differently from the mainline games and was NOT received well by the fanbase). On the other hand though, the people that are not so happy about the announcement are disappointed because they would have much preferred to see the much more well-received GameCube games get a HD remake or would have preferred a brand new game entirely. ^note  Those wishing for the GameCube games to get an HD remake had their wishes fulfilled with the announcement of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, though.
• Camera Screw: In most game, the camera follows the direction the monkey's rolling, which is great in some stages, and makes others almost impossible without very precise control over your ball.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Speedrunners tend to always pick Baby (due to him being the smallest, allowing for the most accuracy and better visibility of what's ahead).
  • For Banana Blitz, YanYan is the go-to choice because she has the best jump.
• Critical Dissonance: Super Monkey Ball Jr. received positive scores from critics for its ambitious attempt at rendering 3D graphics and putting the Monkey Ball formula onto the Game Boy Advance's limited hardware. Among fans, however, it is heavily polarizing for its low framerate and Fake Difficulty caused by the D-Pad control scheme and camera.
• Demonic Spiders: Crazy thin platforms you need to cross to finish the level, bonus points if they curve.
• Difficulty Spike: Happens in every game.
  • The first game had a giant difficulty spike between Advanced and Expert, Advanced was easy, while many people would get stuck quickly on Expert mode. The same goes for Banana Splitz and it's Expert stages (renamed Advanced).
  • In 1 and Deluxe, the game goes lightly on you with Dodecagon^note It's just some moving squares., but goes really rough on you with the very next level. The level after is much easier, but the one after that isn't.
  • Step and Roll had a giant spike between worlds 6 and 7. World 6 had a lot of easy stages that aren't too hard, but World 7 is much more challenging, although still barely hard as the Master stages in 1, 2, and Deluxe.
  • 2 ramps it up on 8 Bracelets and Pistons and decides to go nuts once you hit Expert Extra, with levels like Conical Slider.
    • The difficulty spike happens well before that. Reversible Gear, anybody? World 4 in its entirety? Conical Slider is to be expected since to get to it, you have to go through Expert mode (essentially worlds 5-9) with no continues, so it will likely be among the last levels you will ever see in the game if you continued.
    • Speaking of Reversible Gear, it's in Touch & Roll under the name Starfish. It's found in World 2.
  • Banana Splitz has the transition from Normal and Advanced (the game's equivalents to Advanced and Expert). Casual players are sure to be taken by surprise when the Step & Roll-esque difficulty curve suddenly jumps to a Nintendo Hard challenge level mirroring the GameCube games, and it becomes downright relentless past the halfway mark. Good luck getting the infinite continues.
• Early Game Hell:
  • In the first game (as well as the Deluxe version), Expert Mode has "Excursion", "Exam-C", and "Tracks" all within the first 10 stages.
  • World 4 in Super Monkey Ball 2 can be this too (out of 10 Worlds in all), as it contains both Launchers and Arthropod, two infamously difficult and unintuitive stages.
  • 2's Expert has That One Level as early as LEVEL 4. In fact, some of Expert's early levels are almost as hard as their later levels. At least the mode's honest about it's difficulty.
  • Deluxe has very difficult and aggravating stages... In BEGINNER!
  • If you buy a used copy of Touch & Roll, expect only the first three worlds to be available, all thanks to the developers's wise idea to put Reversible Gear/Starfish in World 2.
• Fan Nickname: Fans tend to refer to the worlds of 1 & 2 by their names in 2s file directory. For example the arctic world from 1 is refereed to as "Ice" while Jungle Island from 2 is referred to as "Jungle 2".
• First Installment Wins: A case where the first two installments win. You'll rarely see anyone talk about any of the games beyond them as something to note; once the original developer, Amusement Vision, was folded into the rest of Sega following attempts to severely downsize their developers to save on budgets, the series sprung for the Waggle of the Wii and the more general party markets involved with Banana Blitz, cutting back on the minigames and simplifying level design significantly to accommodate for motion controls and strongly hitting what many to be consider little more than Sequelitis territory. 1 and 2 (plus Deluxe by association, even if a bit of a Porting Disaster) are still held to this day as the only games really worth playing in the series, besides their literal Video Game Remake of Banana Mania.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Level 2-2 (also Advanced 2) from Super Monkey Ball 2 is called "Eaten Floor." What could possibly be massive enough to...
  • As pointed out by Cinemassacre, we got to see cute monkeys get tortured in various ways, they are trapped in plastic balls throughout roughly 95% of the game, they have to survive labyrinths with the most Malevolent Architecture imaginable floating hundreds of feet in the air, and when knocked into oblivion they can reach speeds to over 200 mph! And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Then again, the stages in Deluxe and 2 are Bad Boon, so this evil level design actually makes sense.
• Game-Breaker: The jump mechanic from Banana Blitz and its HD remaster made its way into Banana Mania, which turns certain stages into absolute cakewalks as the stages from the original games were not made with jumping in mind. However, it must be unlocked in the point shop and is the most expensive thing to buy in the game, thanks to how overpowered it is.
• Genius Bonus: In 2, the stage Bumpy's bumps are actually a braille message reading "Hi! This is Jamad. That's right. Braille alphabet. I respect you!!". In case you're wondering, Jamad is the nickname of the stage designer Junichi Yamada.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Sega thought that the series would be a big hit in Japan, because monkeys. But due to the GameCube's poor sales in Japan, it became a Cult Classic in the United States. To this day the American fanbase for the game is much larger than elsewhere.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the first 2 games, if you break the goal tape EXACTLY when you get a time over, when you restart the stage the game would read it as the final stage. See for yourself
  • Super Monkey Ball Jr. has a glitch in Practice Mode where if you highlight a level you have yet to unlock, exit back to the character select screen and then return, the level can be played. This was fixed in the European release.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The name of the amusement park hub in Super Monkey Ball Adventure? "Zootopia".
  • Toshihiro Nagoshi, creator and producer of Sega's Like a Dragon franchise also produced the Monkey Ball series while president of Amusement Vision. With Kazuma Kiryu confirmed as a Guest Fighter in Banana Mania, things have come full circle.
  • The song that plays during the extra stages in the first game is not present in Deluxe, as the arctic theme plays in those stages instead while the sky theme plays during the arctic stages, which can be assumed to be from legal issues with the former track. Amusingly, Banana Blitz HD, which suffered from legal issues with its music, had the space theme from the first game play in Volcanic Pools, the very same song that could not appear in Deluxe. And then a couple years later the original music tracks are available as DLC for Banana Mania, which can play in the original backgrounds.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Step and Roll and 3D. Both are really easy compared to early games of the series.
• It Was His Sled: The inclusion of the Master floors in 1 and the Master Extra floors in 2 were a genuine surprise to the fanbase when they were discovered. Come Banana Mania, the game doesn't even bother concealing their presence to veteran players: the Challenge Mode preview pictures for the two games feature Stamina Master (Master 3) and Destiny (Master Extra 10) respectively, even before each game's Master floors are unlocked.
• Memetic Mutation
  • PISS ^Explanation  In the first episode of the Polygon series Let's Go To Hell, Nick and Griffin put this word in the leaderboards after a ridiculous bout of Monkey Target. This soon spread over Tumblr like wildfire.
  • The "It goes" meme tends to be uttered whenever someone playing Guillotine from 2.
  • Sega Super Smash Bros. ^Explanation  with Banana Mania having guest characters with Sonic, Tails, Beat, Kazuma Kiryu, and Morgana, fans are joking that Banana Mania is Sega's attempt at their own Super Smash Bros style of inter-company crossover. It even adds third-party characters like Hello Kitty and Suezo into the playable roster.
  • In this brand spanking new platform adventure, Aiai may look like your everyday Super Monkey.◊ But he's got a secret weapon - his balls. ^Explanation An ad for Super Monkey Ball Adventure, which became popular online in 2021.
• Nightmare Fuel: A minor one in Junior, it's entirely possible for the announcer voice samples to deepen in pitch at random, causing the announcer to sound low and demonic It's so terrifyingly fitting for the Master Levels, which are deep in a fiery landscape.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: In 2, the story mode cutscenes are quite narmy, and you'll most likely watch them just for a good laugh. It doesn't help that the cutscenes can also be bought with play points and can be seen anytime. Seemingly aware of this, Banana Mania discarded the original cutscenes in favor of shorter ones that let you get the gameplay faster.
• Polished Port:
  • The first Super Monkey Ball game for the GameCube was a port of the arcade game Monkey Ball for the NAOMI Arcade Cabinets, with the addition of minigames and introduced Gongon as a playable character. Needless to say, it was critically acclaimed and noted as one of the best GameCube games of all time.
• Porting Disaster: Like many Sega games, the PlayStation 2 version of Deluxe suffers noticeably. The game not only runs at a slower 30 FPS, but it also has serious Loads and Loads of Loading problems, particularly with death and stage transitions in the main game mode, and a number of elements like sound design and presentation were severely parred back. The Xbox version managed to keep the smooth framerate of 2 and evade the excess loading, but kept all the rest of the problems.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Well, not necessarily a sequel but rather remakes, but Banana Mania is notably more difficult than Banana Blitz HD, as it features stages from the original games with new physics, some of which made certain stages more difficult, and features challenges such as Dark Banana mode and Original Stage mode that are not easy.
• Sequelitis: Though every game after Deluxe were debatable in their own right, it is almost universally agreed that none of them carry the same positive impact as the original Gamecube-Era games.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: You could play the games entirely as sports-simulators and minigames, only sticking your head into the main mode where absolutely necessary to unlock new games.
• Squick
  • Dr. Bad-Boon looks how many years older than Meemee? And he keeps flirting with her after shrinking her and her friends down so he can cook them and eat them.
  • There's also Bad-Boon taking a bath.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general critical consensus on Banana Blitz HD. While the remake fixed the original game's controls, it suffers from lackluster mini-games and an overall lack of content.
• Surprise Difficulty: The games, especially the earlier ones, can be very difficult; despite having a cast of cute monkeys, the game can force you to travel across shifting plates in a slippery ball and cross on an extremely small platform to a spinning square to get to the goal platform. And you gotta do it within the timeframe or you'll lose a life.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: After years of motion gimmicks, the series not being what the fans wanted it to be and Banana Blitz HD really just being a remaster of the already-mediocre motion control titles, Banana Mania is effectively a gigantic Compilation Re-release of the first two games plus Deluxe, merging all three of their levels with bonus modes galore. While the physics aren't quite super accurate, the levels have been tweaked with this in mind, and it's a clear labor of love to the games that started the series. About the biggest faults most reviewers found was a portion of the fully-returning Party minigames being incredibly lackluster in feel and design, especially the fan-favorite Monkey Target, and there not being a proper multiplayer mode of any sort for actual course play outside of leaderboards.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: A few of the new Super Monkey Ball 2 tracks in Banana Mania (particularly for the Melting Pot and Dr. Bad-Boon's Base worlds) sound similar to their original melodies.
• Tainted by the Preview: The reveal that only Aiai, Meemee, Baby, Gongon, Yanyan, and Doctor are playable in the Party Games for Banana Mania, leaving the guest characters like Beat and Kiryu to be restricted to the main game as with Sonic in Banana Blitz HD, has been poorly received by the fanbase.
• That One Achievement: Banana Splitz has 3 that stand out:
  • Banana Master: Collect every single banana on all 100 stages. Easier said than done.
  • Hide-and-seek Monkey: You need to pass through all 10 secret warp goals, most of which are easy to miss and/or a puzzle to even REACH them.
  • Super Monkey Master: Clear all 4 difficulties without using a continue. Good luck on Advanced and Master.
• That One Boss:
  • Octopocus from Stage 5 of Banana Blitz. His boss arena is incredibly small and has no safety features whatsoever, meaning it's ridiculously easy to fall of the stage. Tiny octopus minions will constantly swarm from the edges of the arena, making it easy to get bumped off by them. Then when he actually shows up, his tentacles span the entire stage and constantly move around, blocking your path from all directions and trying to knock you off the stage. His weak point has a strange hitbox and is very difficult to hit with all the tentacles showing up. His actual attacks cover a wide area and can knock you off the stage if you so much as touch them. And, he is prone to retreating into the ocean and then jumping on top of you, instantly knocking you off the map. There's a reason why most people consider him the hardest boss in the entire game.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The general opinion on Banana Blitz HD's soundtrack. Since every track besides Smooth Sherbet's theme can't be reused due to legal reasons, they ended up replaced with a mostly Recycled Soundtrack, with only 6 brand-new songs not counting variations of the main theme. This led to some rather questionable music choices such as the original GameCube game's Extra Stage theme being used in Volcanic Pools, or the credits theme from the same game playing during a boss fight. Add in the fact that this had to stand up to the original version's soundtrack, which many fans consider the best in the series, and you've got a bad case of musical Replacement Scrappy on your hands. This also begs the question why SEGA didn't decide to make a completely brand-new soundtrack for the game rather than making a small handful and taking the rest from other games.
  • Banana Mania made changes to how the original game controlled, particularly with how the camera moves, that many find don't gel with the stage designs and can make things considerably harder, even though they were likely done to have the opposite effect. More smoothed out stage tilting makes areas that need slow and careful movements a bit easier, but removes the precision needed for speedrunning strategies, and makes stages that either require getting to speed quickly or stopping quickly trickier. The camera changes have it swinging around much more in response to smaller movements, making the many stages with tightropes much more frustrating since trying to correct yourself will make it violently jerk from side to side, and falling great distances doesn't have the camera point down far enough for you to actually see what's directly below you.
  • Banana Mania also has the new soundtrack enabled by default, and you have to purchase the original soundtrack separately (or buy the Deluxe edition which has all the add-ons). The new soundtrack for the in-game levels is... not great, putting it charitably, especially compared to the original games, with a lot of inferior remixes and new tracks. There are a few gems in there, though, especially the new themes for Monkey Mall and Bubbly Washing Machine.
• Tough Act to Follow: Every Monkey Ball game past 2 has largely been stuck in 2's shadow. The level design from 2 was so solid and out there that every game's level design since has felt extremely lackluster.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Who expected Sonic the Hedgehog to be playable in Banana Blitz HD, specifically in his Classic design? In addition to his return, Banana Mania even going out of its way to add Tails into the roster.
  • Banana Mania one-ups this with the out-of-nowhere reveal that Beat of Jet Set Radio fame will be a Secret Character. Fans were excited, to say the least, and began clamoring for more representation from Sega's more obscure franchises almost immediately after the announcement.
  • Sega one-upped themselves with none other than Kazuma Kiryu joining Banana Mania, complete with bananas being replaced by Staminan-X's.
  • Given how characters like Tails, Beat, and Kiryu had been revealed for Banana Mania, some did suspect that Atlus (owned by SEGA) would get a playable guest character from Shin Megami Tensei or Persona. While some suspected Joker or Jack Frost as a character, the reveal of Morgana caught a number of people off-guard.
  • Sega would then one-up themselves the following week by announcing the next guest character would be none other than Hello Kitty herself would be available as DLC. This comes as a surprise as the other guest characters were from games made by Sega, so having an such an iconic character from a franchise not from Sega was unexpected.
  • Speaking of non-Sega franchises, the announcement of Suezo literally a day later managed to top even that. Monster Rancher isn't exactly that well-known compared to other mons series, so seeing its original mascot get announced (especially over Mochi, who supplanted it in later installments) turned quite a few heads.
  • It's safe to say that nobody expected Sega consoles (namely the Game Gear, the Sega Saturn, and the Sega Dreamcast) to be playable as well.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Normally subverted — the games appear to be honest about their age ratings (E for Everyone in the Americas), but they could invoke this trope for much different reasons.

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