Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, developer of the Like a Dragon games, has returned to one of Sega’s classic series with this Nintendo Switch exclusive.
There’s an arcade-themed bar near where I live in south London that has an original Monkey Ball cabinet. This classic 2001 Sega cab, which became a Nintendo GameCube launch game called Super Monkey Ball, features a single banana-shaped joystick before an angled screen. Players use the banana to guide AiAi, a monkey in a ball, to the end of tricky platforming stages. It’s goofy, minimalist, and brilliant — even 23 years ago, it felt like a time warp back to the surreal innocence of early video games.
I played the shit out of Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube; it’s one of my favorite games ever. When I spotted the old cabinet in the bar, I had to try it. I didn’t do that well — the banana joystick had seen better days and was a bit slack, with a roomy dead zone. (Also, I was a few cocktails deep into my evening by that point.) But the game itself folded the preceding two decades down to nothing. The feel of the ball physics, the routes through the stages, the shortcuts with their risky ricochets and heart-in-mouth tumbles — all of it was still there, programmed into my muscle memory, ready and waiting to be revived by an instantly recognizable blast of cheery techno music.
Monkey Ball went on to become a modest franchise for Sega, fueled in part by the GameCube game’s addition of a suite of inventive, comical party games (Monkey Target, Monkey Bowling, Monkey Golf, and more). But the perfection of the 2001 game’s original set of single-player stages turned out to be tough for the developers to follow. It’s difficult to elaborate meaningfully on something so simple and pure; every subsequent release ended up diluting it.
To make matters worse for Monkey Ball, the Sega team that made these games soon had another hit franchise on its hands, and it couldn’t have been more different: Yakuza, now called Like a Dragon. The studio that had once been called Amusement Vision, then CS1 R&D, eventually renamed itself Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio after the Japanese name for its series of sprawling gangster melodramas.
RGG Studio didn’t have much time left for AiAi and his friends, and the series fell fallow for a while in the 2010s. But after remakes of the first three games and Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz revived interest, RGG Studio decided to have another go. The result is Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble: a new release for Nintendo Switch, the first original Monkey Ball title in a decade, and a take on the series that’s simultaneously fresh and deeply nostalgic.
The basics haven’t changed: Get to the goal before the time runs out and pick up bananas on the way.
