I had to put the time in to memorize a list of menus and items and took a bit of a gamble jumping onto this having no idea what I was getting into but it was worth it.

This is so much more than a spin-off and it absolutely is not a party game platform fighter, this game has all the budget and depth of the main series games with tons of content and tools to mess around with, a list of playable characters that all play differently, and live action and pre-rendered cutscenes with full voice acting.

The identity, the charm, and the personality of Ape Escape is all still here, the unique twist of this time is the focus on action and combat instead of care-free platforming and exploring open levels.
That really sounds like a letdown or a downgrade especially for fans of the main games and it has entirely different appeal so fans of the main series might not appreciate this game. I don't blame anyone for assuming this is less of a game than those but they really pull it off and it's still as fun and engaging as those games in completely different ways.

The action elements and crazy sci-fi are taken to an extreme with this game, you're not just sneaking around catching monkeys.
instead of going back in time like in the first game Specter and his army have come from the future with advanced technology (at least, I think that's what's going on? I don't know JP language...), airships, tanks, and all sorts of futuristic gadgets. (sometimes you get to steal their vehicles and pilot them yourself!)
Not only that but throughout the game cutscenes and fake news reports show them taking over entire countries, the stakes and scale are much higher.

The game starts with the player fighting a monkey piloting a giant Ape mech, all the monkeys have beam swords, guns, and jet powered roller blades it's so over the top and cool at the same time, the game mixes a serious tone with the usual Ape escape humor and it all works so well.

This game takes the Ape hunting/collecting focus of the main series and fuses it with a 3rd person action where you complete missions and rack up a high score to grind for equipment, constantly getting and trying out new weapons, special moves, summons, and of course capturing rogue monkeys.

I'd compare the gameplay loop to something like Custom Robo, Gotcha Force, or maybe armored core? In that it's all about collecting and trying new gear and customizing your characters to your own liking.

Just like those games it was constantly fun trying out a better gun or movement option, or I'd try a different character to see how their version of each gadget works, there's so much variety in how the player can customize their character and there's a lot of options on what to spend resources on, you can focus on melee attacks, long range guns, rapid firing weak guns, powerful cannons, roller blades to tackle enemies, or mix and match, if you want to go into a level with 4 guns or just want to ram into everything with powerful skates the player is free to do so.

It feels great getting more powerful and completely broken by the end of the game, one touch I really liked is how game puts emphasis on this with that first mech boss, the player starts the game really weak and slow and can't defeat it, it's scripted loss.
Even when trying to go back it can't be defeated within the time limit, but the player can go back much later with endgame equipment and tear the thing apart in seconds, it makes the player feel the amount they've progressed and it's satisfying to defeat this boss that felt impossible at the beginning.

The level design is not emphasized as much, it's true the areas are much more straight forward, but they're not bad either the game isn't a bunch of flat square arenas or basic hallways with enemies in them, there's still secrets to find in most levels and though it's light there's some platforming too.
Jumping around in this game doesn't feel great, it cancels momentum and leaves the player open, so the platform mechanics are limited.

The game is consistently challenging, but I never needed to repeat levels to grind for better equipment, and the 30 missions have some nice variety some you just battle and capture regular enemies the whole time, but others have specific objectives, and there's at least 10 boss missions in the game and a lot of the designs are just as cool as everything else, there's lots of huge mechanical monstrosities to fight.

The game plays well with the framerate rarely going down and it looks good too, it's mostly in an urban city setting so there's a lot of grey city areas so it can be dull to look at sometimes it's not nearly as appealing or colorful as the other games, but that's all part of the theme and more serious tone the game is going for, whenever the game gets sci-fi and tech heavy with environments it gets a lot more interesting, I liked the cyberspace parts especially. It is very polished looking overall.
Great sound too, but it gets drowned out in the action most of the time, I found a few tracks I liked though. The soundtrack is not as consistently amazing like the first game but it's close enough. Just like everything else there's both serious and light hearted music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAX1ufweDTM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Axvy-rnAQY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skif4LwPUcE

I'm thoroughly impressed with this game and I had a great time with it, there's just a lot of trial and error with the language barrier which I won't hold against the game, but it's something to consider.

The worst thing about this game is the camera, specifically targeting can be annoying, there's no camera control besides a centering button, so no looking around and often it targets the wrong enemy or gets caught on walls, nearly every time I would try to catch a monkey I'd miss either because it would target something else or I couldn't see well to line up the swing, it's cumbersome but I gave it some time and got used to it, the player can learn to work around the camera and it's ok but feels behind what other games were doing.

There's a few boring missions, and it's true the game fundamentally is repetitive I think that's made up for with all of the characters and gadgets
I was never bored or frustrated playing this.
It's possible to waste resources on bad equipment, of course the balance is a bit off too, there's some gadgets or weapons that are never as useful as others and barely worth taking up a slot, it's not game breaking though.

You only get equipment if you make and play with a character profile, but the game just lets you play with presets that are stuck with the default weapons. I don't know why they did this, there's no reason to ever play like that, and it leads to a lot of English players picking the option by mistake and not getting the core appeal of the game.

If you haven't played this and you don't know about it be careful what sources you look for on info about this game because I saw a lot of misinformation about this all over, the language barrier causes a lot of misunderstandings, it's often described as "the sequel to Pumped and Primed" but that's only a fraction of the story, the two games are extremely different. Definitely find and use a guide or you might miss important things.

I thought I was getting a wierd low budget spinoff, what I got was something entirely different.
They took the core of Ape Escape into an entirely new direction and it was great. This game is really cool.

This is an Ape Escape game released in 2006 only in Japan, and it's one that I've been after for years. This year wasn't the first time I'd become obsessed with Ape Escape to the point where I tried hunting down as much about it as I could, and the numerous Japan-only PS2 games have always intrigued me. Last month I was FINALLY able to find a copy of Million Monkeys at the resale mall in town for the whopping price of 500 yen, and I snapped it up on the spot. The game doesn't keep playtime, so I reckon I played it for about 25 hours to beat both campaigns on normal mode as well as beat the colosseum mode.

Million Monkeys is what you get when you cross Ape Escape, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and EDF. The game opens on Japan just as a swarm of interstellar battleships start attacking the planet. Kakeru (aka "Spike" in English, the protagonist of the first Ape Escape game) and his friends are visiting Tokyo to witness the unveiling of a new virtual world system when it occurs, and they see giant gorilla mechs and drop-pods full of machinegun-toting monkeys fall from the battleships overhead. News reports show a helicopter shot of Specter surrounded by some very strange other monkeys on a platform of the ship over Tokyo, revealing to everyone just who's behind this. It just so happens that "everyone" also includes Specter himself! Lounging on an island retreat, some of the monkeys he's brought along with him drag him a TV screen to show him the news bulletin, and he storms off to find out just what's up with this fake Specter who's stolen both his authority and his entire army. That's right. Ape Escape pulls a Sonic Adventure 2 and lets you play as both the good guys AND the (kinda) bad guys XD.

The actual story in the game past the intro is pretty light, but the stages are often prefaced with some sort of cutscene (especially in the second half) is all intermixed with a series of live action cutscenes in between some stages that show an English-language broadcast about the state of the war against the monkeys. It's genuinely like a news broadcast as well, with the newscaster speaking English while a Japanese voice dubs over her (but you can still understand her just fine). It occasionally cuts away to on-site reporting of the war in places from Russia to L.A. to Hamburg to right there in Tokyo, so those parts don't all have English, but just how odd and wacky these cutscenes are is surprisingly import-friendly to English speakers. The live-action stuff is easily one of my favorite things in the game, and as soon as I saw the front line report where the reporter has a banana bomb go off in her hand and cover her and the soldier next to her in bananas and banana peels, I knew this game was gold XD

The gameplay is much more like EDF meets Ape Escape. You don't have any of the "catch X-many monkeys!" levels like the main-line AE games do, and instead you have 31 missions with specific capture targets. Though there ARE technically two campaigns to go through, this is largely a matter of what characters you can use in each. For Kakeru's Episode (as the game calls it), you can pick between the four good guys (Kakeru, Natsumi, the Professor, and even Charu, the green haired girl who gave you mission objectives in AE1). For Specter's Episode, you can pick between Specter and a monkey team. The game does have more characters than that, and the characters even have persistant stats outside of the story mode, but that's really it for the story stuff. There are a handful of CGI cutscenes that are different between the two campaigns, but only one mission out of the 31 is actually different between them.

That said, the way each character plays and the weapons they get access to really does make each playthrough feel quite different. Everyone starts with the same-ish 5 weapons: a net, a melee item, dash boots, remote bombs, and a laser gun. If you're using one of your pre-built characters instead of one of the game-assigned ones, you will get parts at the end of each stage you beat. You can then combine these parts into new weapons, super moves, and cosmetic costumes and each character gets certain weapons in different orders or even weapons that only they can get (or weapons they never CAN get). Even their base equipment operates differently, with Specter's melee weapon being tonfa that hit way faster than Kakeru's bat, and Kakeru's laser gun having a faster rate of fire but less damage than Specter's. I was expecting the second playthrough I did to be a real slog, but it ended up being a really fun challenge to see how I could fare with these new (quite frankly often worse XP) weapons that Kakeru had.

The stages are broken up into a concrete mission objective, and you usually need to fight your way to get there. Sometimes it's as simple as "beat a boss", or even some special puzzle stages in the middle of the game or an escort mission here and there, but mostly it's taking down a target. Sometimes that target is a series of monkeys (usually one group at the halfway point, and then another group at the end), and sometimes it's other enemies or even static objectives. They generally revolve around the same action gameplay of beating up the monkeys to break their armor and then catch them, but these monkeys and their non-monkey enemy allies are TOUGH. This is not a very easy game, even on normal mode. One of the biggest reasons my Specter playthrough was so much easier than my Kakeru one is that he gets the (very good) shotgun much earlier than Kakeru does, and he also has way better special moves. Getting used to how best you should jump, dash, conserve ammo, and try to get in melee attacks when you can is integral to surviving the later half of the game.

The game also curiously doesn't record EVERY monkey you catch, with only a couple dozen specific ones being recorded. Each level has a score counter based on your monkey-catching combos (how many at once in a short period of time), mission completion time, bonus coins picked up in each stage, and health at the end of a mission. I never really felt compelled to go for high scores and you don't get anything for doing them, but it's neat that it's there. There's even a curious crossover with Sony's white cat Taro mascot, and he and his friends are hidden around many stages and you can pick them up on your radar. They're REALLY hard to find, but they're also recorded in the same place that the special monkeys you catch are (even though you only scan them, and not catch them).

The problems the game really has are as equally ignorable as they are omnipresent. The comparison to a game like EDF (or even a Musou game) is very apt, in that if you don't like a silly presentation with tons of enemies to kill, you very well might find even the campy cutscenes not enough of a carrot to warrant dealing with the stick of the only mildly complex combat. The camera can be a bit finicky at times (even though buttons can now activate your weapons, you can still use the right stick to use them, so the camera is entirely operated via the shoulder buttons), but it isn't a huge problem. Aside from that, the game has some pretty significant difficulty curve issues as well as bad character balancing. Some characters like Specter or Pipotron G are WAY more powerful than others due to way more default special moves and better/earlier selections of items. This isn't necessarily a problem, especially for a game where multiplayer isn't the focus, but it's certainly a kind of issue worth mentioning.

There isn't any level grinding in the game, and you really don't ever get much more powerful than you are. There are some side-grade chips you can make for items, but they rarely make you outright more powerful in a really significant way other than making your weapon recharge a bit faster/have more max ammo. This can make the difficulty curve issues way more of a bastard, as the hardest bosses in the game are at missions 15 and 16 (especially the Specter fight on mission 15), and the final boss is a pushover compared to them. The monkeys you have to fight get way harder as you go on, but even at the midpoint, feeling frustrated with how much better the game expects you to be can be an issue. This is also especially true if you're trying to get all the monkeys and not just rush through a stage, as these stages have no checkpoints and if you get a really unlucky combo you can lose a LOT of health really fast. It never gets nearly as bad as say, Drakengard 2, as you can rush through these stages if you were really so inclined, but it can still be a real pain in the butt to lose like 15-20 minutes of progress because the last gauntlet utterly destroyed you.

The game also has a weird system of unlocking characters, as it was done entirely through entering codes you got on their website (back during the time of launch). Despite being a neat marketing gimmick back then, now it just makes it kinda odd that you get nothing at all for completing both campaigns and the arena battle mode, which is just several rounds of you fighting 3 NPCs all with similar powers. It's fun, but ultimately pretty ignorable. The only thing really cool worth mentioning about the colosseum mode is that it reveals the game this game is actually a successor to rather than Ape Escape 3. It's a successor to Ape Escape: Pumped and Primed.

The game's presentation is a mixed bag. It has the aforementioned live action cutscenes, which are incredible and I love them, but the game also entirely lacks subtitles, as I guess Sony just hated deaf people during the first decade of the 2000's with how many of their first party-published games don't have them or have damn-near useless ones. The art style is a bit sharper and lower poly than the other AE PS2 games, and while it does look nice and clean, it was no doubt done to make the game run better (as even AE3 runs terrribly). While this game does get framerate dips, it's never anything horrible. The music is also pretty forgettable, and the game has a weirdly small selection of tracks. SO many missions have the exact same music it makes it feel like the game has like, a dozen total songs in it XD

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Despite all my criticisms, I think this game's pluses heavily outweigh its minuses as far as my taste is concerned. The weird Red Alert-style cutscenes on top of the already really weird story and really solid gameplay make for a whole more than the sum of its parts. It isn't the most import-friendly game in the world (especially in regards to weapon and upgrade management), but it's also not the most impossible import in the world to fumble your way through if you don't know any Japanese at all. Either way, this is probably one of the best Japan-exclusive games I've ever played, and I'm so so happy that I was finally able to track this one down and play through it~.