Banana Mania is Super Monkey Ball at its best - or if you easily get frustrated at games - at its worst. Having grown up with the original Monkey Ball on GameCube, a remake of these games (SMB 1, 2, and Deluxe) was a much-needed refresher to the series to bring it back to the spotlight and give it the attention it deserves. Although I would have preferred a completely new game, considering the last SMB game was also a remake, I'm glad this version allows a modern audience to experience these classics.
It's Monkey Ball, alright - the formulaic design really shines through in both a good and bad way. Firstly, the colors, graphics, and sound design are cheery, charismatic, and engaging. However, they give the game a false illusion of being a cute, cozy, feel-good kind of game, when it's actually quite the opposite. The first world or two in any mode will be a great time, as they're pretty easy. Once you get to some of the later levels, the flaws in this game really start to show themselves.
This game is really, REALLY hard. After a certain point, it hits you with levels that you'll be stuck on for hours. Or days. Or weeks. I'm not the "raging" type of gamer, so when the game got too hard for me, I simply put the controller down and took a break with something else. However, I can see this game giving many people a really hard time emotionally.
It's been well-established that circular dead zones on the console versions of this game really kill a lot of the fun, and that couldn't be more true. A lot of the time, the ball and the camera feel downright unresponsive and wonky. This is especially frustrating on levels like CATWALK and DOUBLE SPIRAL. If the dead zones are fixed in an update, I'd be more than willing to bump up my review another star.
In any case, I'm someone who adores the style and design of Monkey Ball, so it's hard for me to give Banana Mania a bad review. If you like Monkey Ball, this is worth picking up. If you've never tried it but have an interest in the series, it's also worth trying as a first SMB game. However, if you didn't like past titles, this won't be a very redeeming game for the franchise.

The controls certainly feel a whole lot more rough around the edges than they did on the GameCube eras, but it's not like I expected much else given the direction of the Super Monkey Ball games ever since. I think what's really keeping me from loving this in the same way that I did the zaniness of the first two Super Monkey Ball games just comes down to the fact that while it's definitely a lot more graphically pleasing - there's another aspect that just feels missing and perhaps it's just the fact that the way the stage tilts around only makes a chunk of the game feeling like you're controlling a rock.

And to a certain extent, that's always been the point of Super Monkey Ball. You're struggling to keep your balance like you're actually rolling around, which has always been the greatest charm of these games while they were very minimalist and inexpensive. But ever since these games got bigger, they just lost a lot of that.

Either way, I'm just a sucker for the stages that I loved playing when I was a kid so being able to revisit them as an adult felt really nice.

Want the best method to complete the stages?

1. Buy the jump button when able to

2. ...Best of luck to you

Jokes aside, it's a really good game. My only gripes are that, while I understand it's a franchise that's intentionally hard, some stages are straight up unfair and have complicated methods to complete and other stages literally made me feel nauseous (looking directly at Spiral Bridge from Story Mode World 7 and Banana Plate in SMB1 challenge mode as some of the examples). But it's still a fantastic game regardless! It's to see Super Monkey Ball back!

Had Super Monkey Ball 2 as a kid and played it all the time despite sucking at it. But I never rrally realized as a kid that I was that bad at it because of the way the story and challenge mode were set up, despite getting a game over you would always get the credits, so I thought I was a master at the game or something lol. Flash Forward to now, I havent played Monkey Ball 2 in years becuase I lost it, only played Monkey Ball 1 once at a freiends house and have never touched Deluxe. This game just makes me happy that it exists, its such a good package. You get every good Monkey Ball games stage, and the main game is remade pretty faithfully. The physics dont feel bad at all. My only gripes would be the sound design is not great (like when rolling, the sound doesn't speed up) and the art styles pretty cheap looking compared to the originals. The music also wasn't good from what I heard of it, but I very quickly bought the Classic soundtrack pack to replace it. All the new tracks sound pretty forgettable, maybe aside from the main theme. Also, the new cutscenes… I get not wanting to remake them fully and dont mind, but why do they look like something you would find on Youtube Kids? There almost kind of embarrassing if I got caught playing the game and those cut scenes came up on a train. The game makes a lot of good modern choices that make me want to go back to this game in the future as opposed to the gamecube originals, like no lives being the big one. I have never been able to get far in Advanced mode due to getting gameovers, so its nice that I can see a lot of these harder stages for the first time. An issue I see, that isnt really so much the games fault but the Switches fault is, before writing this, I beat Monkey Ball 2’s story mode, a chunk of the deluxe levels and Monkey Ball 1’s Casual and Normal Challange mode, with only getting to stage 20 in Advanced. I plan to go back to the game over time on days when I’m bored to slowly work on these levels. The problem is that when doing the Advance stages, I needed to switch to the Gamecube Controller at a certain point, because the Pro Controller or Joy Cons just weren’t cutting it for the amount of presicoion needed for those later stages, since neither of the controllers have notches like the GC controller has. So whenever I go back to do these levels, I feel like I have to do them in docked mode, because i cant imagine how hard some of them will be on Joy Cons. That and they should have added a save feature to challenge mode because doing 60 stages in one sitting can get exhausting. Overall, really amazing package overall, it doesn't completely replace the originals, but for being made in Unity, this is so nice to have on the Switch.

FWIW, i have no reference to playing any Monkey Ball games prior to this besides watching YouTube videos of it in action.

i VERY much enjoyed this and recommend it to people coming into the series for the first time as have i.

it's got da Super fuckin' Monkey, babee

A wonderful remaster of the 1, 2 and Deluxe content and a return to top form for the series reminding me of just how wonderful the classic games were.

It gets hard and frustrating, but in the good kind of hard and frustrating way that doesn't make you wanna go all crazy and throw your controller around the room. Whenever I reached a much harder level I didn't think I'd get pass, just seeing Aiai manage to make it to the goal always gets my heart pumping and leaves me satisfied.

And gee wilikers there's a lot of content in store for you including some nice QOL improvements, some special guest characters not just from Sega's library but some other franchises too, extra content and all the classic minigames returning from 1 and 2.

It isn't perfect with the physics feeling a little off than with the older games but if you're itching like a dog to get that good ol' fun Monkey Ball goodness, than Banana Mania will no doubt be a great time.