A best friend of mine visited me earlier this month before he headed back to America (this was before the pandemic got very serious around here), and he gave me his Japanese PS2. Now with the ability to finally play PS1 and PS2 games, I hurried to the resale shop near me that I knew had this game and picked it up, since I've been wanting to play it for months. I'd never played the Japanese version of the game before, but it's a game I've 100%'d at least twice in English many years ago, so this was very much a trip down memory lane. It took me about 7 or 8 hours to capture all the monkeys and beat every stage (the English localization uses "ape" and "monkey" interchangeably, despite them clearly being apes, so I'm gonna do that as well here :b).
Ape Escape 2 is the second main-line game in the Sony-published and produced platformer franchise. It's a 3D action platformer collectathon that has two main gimmicks: monkeys and the dual-shock joysticks. Gimmick #1 is that the "star" equivalents are the monkeys themselves, whom you need to hit with your net to capture them. As you go through the game, they have ever more sophisticated methods of both hiding and then defending themselves, and if you collect enough of them in a stage, you'll complete it and be teleported out. The game has a sorta Mario Odyssey feel to it, to compare it to something more recent, in that there's a kind of linear path (or two) through each stage, but only once you get enough of the collectible do you actually leave it. You don't need to restart it each time. There are even some extra monkeys that repopulate levels once you beat the game as an incentive to go back and get other monkeys you missed, also a bit like Mario Odyssey (although nowhere near as many new things in old levels as that game), and getting all of those unlocks the true final boss.
Gimmick #2 is the dual shock, as this was a game series born on the PS1 more or less to show off the new DS1 controllers. You move with the left joystick, but the face buttons don't do anything but change your weapon. Actual attacking is done with the right stick (swinging in a particular direction, rotating it to spin up a propellor, etc.), and then you jump with R1. It can take some getting used to, and it honestly sometimes feels more like a contrived gimmick than a genuinely needed element for a few weapons, but it's gives the games a unique play style that is more good/novel than it is bad/frustrating.
The plot is as silly as the nature of the adventure describes. Due to a mislabeled shipment of monkey pants getting mixed in monkey helmets at the monkey park, the evil supergenius monkey Specter is able to once again get back his super intelligence, give all his mischievous buddies better smarts as well, and escape from the monkey park. You as Hikaru, whose fault this more or less is, are tasked with going out there to the various places and times the monkeys have run off to to re-capture them. It's all a very light-hearted and silly affair that doesn't take itself too seriously. While I do certainly have a soft spot for the English voice acting (I don't really like how Specter sounds like a kid in Japanese), the Japanese VA is also very fun, especially the Monkey Force Five who are all similarly campy and fun in their own ways in both English and Japanese.
As far as regional differences go, between my memory and the very small page for it on tcrf, there's very little differences between the English and Japanese aside from the VA and a nature around of the monkey's pun names. The only noteable ones are the English version technically having more monkeys out of the box, as 3 special event monkeys in the Japanese version are just wrapped into the main game seamlessly in English and don't require any special action on the part of the player to go and catch. Granted, that's 3 monkeys out of a total of 300, so it isn't exactly a mind-blowing amount of extra content, but the English version does technically have more to do. Then the weird thing I cannot imagine the reason for the English version lacking is the faster ability to change weapons by double tapping that face button to cycle through them. I mean it isn't a perfect system, as you have 14 of the things so going past the one you want can suck, but it's far faster and more fluid than going into the pause menu to change them every time like the English version forces you to. Perhaps they thought it was just a bit too fiddly to impose upon the international release of the game.
The presentation of the game is very Japanese without being explicitly so, and I think that speaks to just how little of the game was changed for the localization. It's very upbeat, very colorful, and has good music (although not anything particularly MP3-player-worthy, in my opinion), but it's all still grounded within its own logic. It's still fairly 'anime' in its style, but it's no Stretch Panic or Incredible Crisis.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is one of my favorite games on the PS2, and one of my favorite franchises of Sony's. I love the presentation, the characters, the gameplay, and the level design. If you like action/platformer games, this is absolutely a game worth checking out.
Ape Escape 2 is the second main-line game in the Sony-published and produced platformer franchise. It's a 3D action platformer collectathon that has two main gimmicks: monkeys and the dual-shock joysticks. Gimmick #1 is that the "star" equivalents are the monkeys themselves, whom you need to hit with your net to capture them. As you go through the game, they have ever more sophisticated methods of both hiding and then defending themselves, and if you collect enough of them in a stage, you'll complete it and be teleported out. The game has a sorta Mario Odyssey feel to it, to compare it to something more recent, in that there's a kind of linear path (or two) through each stage, but only once you get enough of the collectible do you actually leave it. You don't need to restart it each time. There are even some extra monkeys that repopulate levels once you beat the game as an incentive to go back and get other monkeys you missed, also a bit like Mario Odyssey (although nowhere near as many new things in old levels as that game), and getting all of those unlocks the true final boss.
Gimmick #2 is the dual shock, as this was a game series born on the PS1 more or less to show off the new DS1 controllers. You move with the left joystick, but the face buttons don't do anything but change your weapon. Actual attacking is done with the right stick (swinging in a particular direction, rotating it to spin up a propellor, etc.), and then you jump with R1. It can take some getting used to, and it honestly sometimes feels more like a contrived gimmick than a genuinely needed element for a few weapons, but it's gives the games a unique play style that is more good/novel than it is bad/frustrating.
The plot is as silly as the nature of the adventure describes. Due to a mislabeled shipment of monkey pants getting mixed in monkey helmets at the monkey park, the evil supergenius monkey Specter is able to once again get back his super intelligence, give all his mischievous buddies better smarts as well, and escape from the monkey park. You as Hikaru, whose fault this more or less is, are tasked with going out there to the various places and times the monkeys have run off to to re-capture them. It's all a very light-hearted and silly affair that doesn't take itself too seriously. While I do certainly have a soft spot for the English voice acting (I don't really like how Specter sounds like a kid in Japanese), the Japanese VA is also very fun, especially the Monkey Force Five who are all similarly campy and fun in their own ways in both English and Japanese.
As far as regional differences go, between my memory and the very small page for it on tcrf, there's very little differences between the English and Japanese aside from the VA and a nature around of the monkey's pun names. The only noteable ones are the English version technically having more monkeys out of the box, as 3 special event monkeys in the Japanese version are just wrapped into the main game seamlessly in English and don't require any special action on the part of the player to go and catch. Granted, that's 3 monkeys out of a total of 300, so it isn't exactly a mind-blowing amount of extra content, but the English version does technically have more to do. Then the weird thing I cannot imagine the reason for the English version lacking is the faster ability to change weapons by double tapping that face button to cycle through them. I mean it isn't a perfect system, as you have 14 of the things so going past the one you want can suck, but it's far faster and more fluid than going into the pause menu to change them every time like the English version forces you to. Perhaps they thought it was just a bit too fiddly to impose upon the international release of the game.
The presentation of the game is very Japanese without being explicitly so, and I think that speaks to just how little of the game was changed for the localization. It's very upbeat, very colorful, and has good music (although not anything particularly MP3-player-worthy, in my opinion), but it's all still grounded within its own logic. It's still fairly 'anime' in its style, but it's no Stretch Panic or Incredible Crisis.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is one of my favorite games on the PS2, and one of my favorite franchises of Sony's. I love the presentation, the characters, the gameplay, and the level design. If you like action/platformer games, this is absolutely a game worth checking out.