And so ends my re-journey through the mainline Ape Escape games. This, like 2, was one I rented and played a decent bit as a kid, and didn't remember being quite as good as 2, but still being very good. While there is a fair bit in 3 that is more "different" from 2 than outright "better", there is also a lot here that is plain better. It took me around 8 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game and capture every monkey.
Ape Escape 3 is the most colorful and wacky of the mainline games, continuing the pace that 2 set down, and that extends into the story. Specter, the evil mastermind monkey from the previous two games, has escaped once again and is using the Freaky Monkey Five and his legion of monkeys (over 400 to capture this time around!) to try and take over the world. But this time, he's got an ace up his sleeve: a human accomplice! Dr. Tomouki (which is a fairly amazing pun that also is nearly a real name "tomo" being "friend" and "uki" being the sound a monkey makes in Japanese) is the delightfully camp, afro-sporting human scientist aiding Specter in his plot to turn all of humanity into hapless couch potatoes by brainwashing them with immensely inane monkey-based television programming. It's up to the series new heroes (the other ones having been couch potato'd), twins Satoru and Sayaka and their super scientist mother, to stop him!
Each level takes the form of a TV show the monkeys are filming on location somewhere, and you're capturing enough of them to shut down their broadcasts, while each member of the Freaky Monkey Five guard a transmission tower you need to beat them to destroy. This gives all sorts of opportunity (which the game takes in spades) for all sorts of pop culture parodies for the kind of shows the monkeys are making, from their horror show "Monday the 16th" to their hotspring documentary to their Star Wars parody (complete, of course, with Darth Vader monkey to fight). All of the silliness, from the main characters to Specter to the Freaky Monkey Five to the absolutely wonderful Dr. Tomouki, has been cranked up to 11, and it's all in a way I absolutely adore. Even the music is a significant improvement, and I'd go as far as to say that 3 has better music than even the first game. The only real downside is that the game hits some significant framerate problems in certain stages due to how much is going on, but that luckily doesn't affect the actual gameplay much (certainly not as badly as the first game's slowdown harms its gameplay).
The gameplay itself is very familiar from the previous two games, but has been modified in a way to further tighten up the gameplay improvements introduced in 2 as well as add a new gimmick entirely. You're still going from stage to stage, using your tools to fight and catch monkeys, but thankfully the incredible bloat of tools in the 2nd game has been massively trimmed back down to a far more manageable 8 (down from the like 14 or 15 in 2). The number of monkeys you need to catch in each stage has been pumped up a fair bit though, and their frequency within the stages (not nearly as many droughts with no monkeys to fight like 2 has in its later stages) as well as their natural ability to avoid your net have also been increased. The level design is significantly better as a result, leading to stages that are often smaller compared to its predecessor, but more content-dense and overall difficult due to just how good the monkeys are at avoiding capture. Even normal enemies are a bit more complicated this time around, as Dr. Tomouki's little robot minions all have turnkeys on them somewhere that you can aim for to do far more damage than a normal body hit.
To even the odds in your favor a bit, the game gives you its most noticeable change to the gameplay of the previous two entries: transformations! By holding down both R buttons, you can initiate a transformation into a super form that you can use for about 30 seconds (or longer if you keep getting powerups to fill your meter more). You unlock more and more transformations as you progress through the game for a grand total of 9, and while there is certainly a power curve as you go along (the 8th being the best and the 9th being a secret finding tool), they all have some kind of special ability (either combat or mobility-wise) that gives them their own sense of usefulness. Each of the two twins even has their own (admittedly predictably gendered) cosmetic version of each costume, like how Satoru has his Fantasy Knight and Sayaka has her Fantasy Witch.
This is sorta where the game hits its stumbling blocks. It can feel at times, particularly as you progress through the game, that the power difference between your normal form and the transformations is too significant. Fighting enemies, especially monkeys, is really difficult as your normal form, particularly with how good their auto-dodges are (not to mention if they hit you hard enough they can steal your tools!), but your transformations are often enough to totally wipe the floor with them. While I would say that the bosses in this game are overall a little better than the ones in 2, if you fight them with the appropriate transformation, you can really trivialize most of the fights difficulty-wise (although they're still quite fun even then).
Beyond that, there are some other presentation issues the game has that serve to harm the overall experience. The twins are effectively entirely similar with the one exception that Sayaka, the girl, is basically an easy mode the game doesn't tell you about. Certain monkeys will see her and be so struck by her that they fall in love and sit on the ground harmlessly waiting to be captured. Ignoring the fact that she's a 4th grader and that this is still a relatively small number of the overall monkeys in the game (less than 10%), it's still a handicap that Satoru doesn't receive in any form, and it's a bad way to make the game de facto easier for people who wanna play as the girl character (presumably from the perspective of the game's developers, girls :/).
Then there's also the fact of how all of the personalities are cranked up in their silliness, and that also goes for Monkey Yellow, whose queer-coded creepiness has been further worsened to make him an outright child predator with how he gives Satoru (a 4th grader) the choice of fighting him or going on a date with him before his boss fight. These are by no means a deal-breaker for me for the game, and Sony had the good sense to remove that Monkey Yellow thing from the English version at least in part (he gives Satoru the choice of fighting him or "being [his] personal chef forever and ever"), it's still something that erk'd me enough that I can't not mention it here.
The last thing I'll mention is the side games in Ape Escape 3. All 3 games have 3 unlockable fairly substantial mini-games you can unlock through the course of the game, but Ape Escape 3 has something really special: Mesal Gear Solid. It's an official crossover with Konami (as MGS3 got its own Ape Escape-based mini-game) where you play as Pipo Snake, guided on your tactical espionage mission by Solid Snake himself (all as a favor for the professor of Ape Escape from his "high school buddy" Colonel Campbell X3). It's a really solid and quite substantial (although obviously very silly) side mode that does a good job of replicating the feel of the first two MGS games but using assets and enemies from Ape Escape 3 that you unlock after beating the main game. It's a really neat historical curiosity, as well as likely the tricky licensing reason that has led to Ape Escape 3 never joining its sister games on PSN, if I had to guess (and also likely why the series never got a trilogy release on PS3 like basically every other major Sony IP did last generation).
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Warts and all, Ape Escape 3 is still the best the franchise ever got. While it's certainly a shame that the series never really continued after this, and that Ape Escape 3 is really only playable these days on this original PS2 release, it's still a platformer that has weathered the test of time really well, and is still loads of fun. If you like 3D platformers and don't mind needing to probably shell out a decent bit for the physical release of this, then this is a game that's a no-brainer to pick up and give a whirl.
Ape Escape 3 is the most colorful and wacky of the mainline games, continuing the pace that 2 set down, and that extends into the story. Specter, the evil mastermind monkey from the previous two games, has escaped once again and is using the Freaky Monkey Five and his legion of monkeys (over 400 to capture this time around!) to try and take over the world. But this time, he's got an ace up his sleeve: a human accomplice! Dr. Tomouki (which is a fairly amazing pun that also is nearly a real name "tomo" being "friend" and "uki" being the sound a monkey makes in Japanese) is the delightfully camp, afro-sporting human scientist aiding Specter in his plot to turn all of humanity into hapless couch potatoes by brainwashing them with immensely inane monkey-based television programming. It's up to the series new heroes (the other ones having been couch potato'd), twins Satoru and Sayaka and their super scientist mother, to stop him!
Each level takes the form of a TV show the monkeys are filming on location somewhere, and you're capturing enough of them to shut down their broadcasts, while each member of the Freaky Monkey Five guard a transmission tower you need to beat them to destroy. This gives all sorts of opportunity (which the game takes in spades) for all sorts of pop culture parodies for the kind of shows the monkeys are making, from their horror show "Monday the 16th" to their hotspring documentary to their Star Wars parody (complete, of course, with Darth Vader monkey to fight). All of the silliness, from the main characters to Specter to the Freaky Monkey Five to the absolutely wonderful Dr. Tomouki, has been cranked up to 11, and it's all in a way I absolutely adore. Even the music is a significant improvement, and I'd go as far as to say that 3 has better music than even the first game. The only real downside is that the game hits some significant framerate problems in certain stages due to how much is going on, but that luckily doesn't affect the actual gameplay much (certainly not as badly as the first game's slowdown harms its gameplay).
The gameplay itself is very familiar from the previous two games, but has been modified in a way to further tighten up the gameplay improvements introduced in 2 as well as add a new gimmick entirely. You're still going from stage to stage, using your tools to fight and catch monkeys, but thankfully the incredible bloat of tools in the 2nd game has been massively trimmed back down to a far more manageable 8 (down from the like 14 or 15 in 2). The number of monkeys you need to catch in each stage has been pumped up a fair bit though, and their frequency within the stages (not nearly as many droughts with no monkeys to fight like 2 has in its later stages) as well as their natural ability to avoid your net have also been increased. The level design is significantly better as a result, leading to stages that are often smaller compared to its predecessor, but more content-dense and overall difficult due to just how good the monkeys are at avoiding capture. Even normal enemies are a bit more complicated this time around, as Dr. Tomouki's little robot minions all have turnkeys on them somewhere that you can aim for to do far more damage than a normal body hit.
To even the odds in your favor a bit, the game gives you its most noticeable change to the gameplay of the previous two entries: transformations! By holding down both R buttons, you can initiate a transformation into a super form that you can use for about 30 seconds (or longer if you keep getting powerups to fill your meter more). You unlock more and more transformations as you progress through the game for a grand total of 9, and while there is certainly a power curve as you go along (the 8th being the best and the 9th being a secret finding tool), they all have some kind of special ability (either combat or mobility-wise) that gives them their own sense of usefulness. Each of the two twins even has their own (admittedly predictably gendered) cosmetic version of each costume, like how Satoru has his Fantasy Knight and Sayaka has her Fantasy Witch.
This is sorta where the game hits its stumbling blocks. It can feel at times, particularly as you progress through the game, that the power difference between your normal form and the transformations is too significant. Fighting enemies, especially monkeys, is really difficult as your normal form, particularly with how good their auto-dodges are (not to mention if they hit you hard enough they can steal your tools!), but your transformations are often enough to totally wipe the floor with them. While I would say that the bosses in this game are overall a little better than the ones in 2, if you fight them with the appropriate transformation, you can really trivialize most of the fights difficulty-wise (although they're still quite fun even then).
Beyond that, there are some other presentation issues the game has that serve to harm the overall experience. The twins are effectively entirely similar with the one exception that Sayaka, the girl, is basically an easy mode the game doesn't tell you about. Certain monkeys will see her and be so struck by her that they fall in love and sit on the ground harmlessly waiting to be captured. Ignoring the fact that she's a 4th grader and that this is still a relatively small number of the overall monkeys in the game (less than 10%), it's still a handicap that Satoru doesn't receive in any form, and it's a bad way to make the game de facto easier for people who wanna play as the girl character (presumably from the perspective of the game's developers, girls :/).
Then there's also the fact of how all of the personalities are cranked up in their silliness, and that also goes for Monkey Yellow, whose queer-coded creepiness has been further worsened to make him an outright child predator with how he gives Satoru (a 4th grader) the choice of fighting him or going on a date with him before his boss fight. These are by no means a deal-breaker for me for the game, and Sony had the good sense to remove that Monkey Yellow thing from the English version at least in part (he gives Satoru the choice of fighting him or "being [his] personal chef forever and ever"), it's still something that erk'd me enough that I can't not mention it here.
The last thing I'll mention is the side games in Ape Escape 3. All 3 games have 3 unlockable fairly substantial mini-games you can unlock through the course of the game, but Ape Escape 3 has something really special: Mesal Gear Solid. It's an official crossover with Konami (as MGS3 got its own Ape Escape-based mini-game) where you play as Pipo Snake, guided on your tactical espionage mission by Solid Snake himself (all as a favor for the professor of Ape Escape from his "high school buddy" Colonel Campbell X3). It's a really solid and quite substantial (although obviously very silly) side mode that does a good job of replicating the feel of the first two MGS games but using assets and enemies from Ape Escape 3 that you unlock after beating the main game. It's a really neat historical curiosity, as well as likely the tricky licensing reason that has led to Ape Escape 3 never joining its sister games on PSN, if I had to guess (and also likely why the series never got a trilogy release on PS3 like basically every other major Sony IP did last generation).
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Warts and all, Ape Escape 3 is still the best the franchise ever got. While it's certainly a shame that the series never really continued after this, and that Ape Escape 3 is really only playable these days on this original PS2 release, it's still a platformer that has weathered the test of time really well, and is still loads of fun. If you like 3D platformers and don't mind needing to probably shell out a decent bit for the physical release of this, then this is a game that's a no-brainer to pick up and give a whirl.