Super Monkey Ball Jr. (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
209A playthrough of THQ's 2002 3D action-puzzle game for the Game Boy Advance, Super Monkey Ball Jr.
This video shows all of the difficulty levels played, including the bonus stages, as well as the unlockable minigames:
Normal mode:
Beginner 0:41
Advanced 11:09
Expert 29:08
The Konami code? 56:32
Beginner for bonus points 56:53
Master 1:03:38
Mini-games:
Monkey Fight 1:09:04
Monkey Bowling 1:13:28
Monkey Golf 1:19:30
Super Monkey Ball Jr. was a game that really impressed me back in the day. I picked it up when I saw it on the new releases shelf at Software Etc. I hadn't played the GameCube game yet, but I was looking for something new for my GBA, and the screen shots on the box impressed me, so I went for it. I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of it, truth be told. I didn't put much stock in the promise of a fluid 3D experience on a handheld in 2002. It seemed totally absurd.
But this was one of those moments where I was *very* happy to be proven wrong.
Super Monkey Ball Jr. is essentially a remixed conversion of Sega's arcade and GameCube game Super Monkey Ball. It's not a typical GBA-style adaptation of a console IP, though. Remember all of those isometric 2D platformers with prerendered sprites? Yeah, not this game.
This shoots for recreating the same fun 3D gameplay that made the console version such a hit, and it does an amazing job of it. It obviously makes concessions for the platform, but in 2002, this was mindblowing stuff. The GBA was only a year old when this came out. After twelve years of 8-bit Game Boy games, this made an impression.
If you haven't played a Monkey Ball game before, here are the basics: You have to roll the monkey in the ball (hence the name) through the goal tape within the time limit to complete each stage.
The twist that separates it from the likes of Marble Madness is that you don't get to directly man-handle your monkey. (...ikr?) You guide the ball by tilting the stage on its axes in 3D space, and since the GBA doesn't have any analog buttons, you adjust the strength of the tilt with the A and B buttons.
The stages start off simple, but you'll need a *lot* of practice and patience to get through them all and to unlock the bonus stages. You'll fall off the stage over, and over. And over. It's all quite infuriating, but usually it's in a good way. It'll keep you coming back for just one more try - I played it pretty regularly for a couple of years and never got bored with it. Fair warning, though: the controls are not ideal and the camera sucks (and you can't control it, argh!), and the game is much harder than the GameCube version because of those things. I couldn't even make a guess as to how many times I attempted each of the courses before I finally managed to clear them without game overs. This video took an absurd amount of time to record.
Of course, this is not the best way to play Monkey Ball in 2021 - it's little more than a novelty at this point, but it delivers a legit PS1-caliber 3D game on a handheld machine designed for 2D graphics. The framerate is comparable to what you'd see in many N64 and PS1 games, and there's even a code that you can use to lower the resolution to make it run more smoothly. I enable it for a few of the level sets in this video - the improved fluidity tightens the controls up quite a bit. The audio is great, too. Most of it is sampled directly from the original game and the sound quality far better than you'll find in most GBA games. The voices are clear and the music is as maddeningly catchy as ever.
If you are the type of gamer that can appreciate something that's both incredibly impressive and entirely obsolete, I recommend giving this one a look. If nothing else, it makes for one helluva cool time capsule.
*Recorded using a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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